Stillness

Nothing in this life is both easier or more difficult than stillness. 

Identity Defined

There is no distance or separation between you and God right now. All distance exists in our mind and perspective and those thoughts and sight are shaped and influenced by our experiences in this physical world. But the victory that overcomes the world is our faith in that which is unseen. (1John 5:4)  Now your journey is to surrender who you thought you were to simply be who your Father has always known you to be. In Christ is your authentic identity and you are the creative expression of the home that God desires to dwell in. It is in this place of peace that we are most alive. 

This is not a position that is left unchallenged. We have an enemy who seeks to steak, kill, and destroy. But we can refuse to allow that enemy to have a place of influence and define who we are. Recently my wife, Traci, was in a car accident and while she was spared serious injury it could have been a very different situation. My identity as a husband and father is able to be threatened. So while those are good roles and I do them as unto the Lord, they by themselves do not define who I am. Any identity that you have that can be threatened is temporal. You only have one identity that is eternal and that is “in Christ”. Nothing can threaten that. And it is from the foundation of that identity that the rest of life flows abundantly.

The Hidden Goodness of God

The Hidden Goodness of God

“The letter kills, but the Spirit gives life.” You know it’s a really good thing that it was Jesus who said this. We certainly wouldn’t let anyone else get away with talking about the Bible like that. Jesus knew that it’s our tendency to treat the “letter” like an instruction manual rather than a love letter revealing the heart of a good heavenly Father. So when you read the Bible now to look for plain directional formula of what to do or not to do you’re basically scratching the surface of the letter and recreating the law all over again. The Bible is an invitation to a beautiful relationship and a glorious celebration and if you discover the heart of your Father, the Spirit of the letter becomes clearer and clearer.

Take, for example, Matthew 18. For many churches, this is the handbook for excommunication. Jesus gives an example of someone caught in a fault or sin. To just look at the formula it seems clear and simple. Step one, go tell him about his fault. Step two, if he won’t hear you take another person. Step three, if he’s still not listening, tell the whole church. Step four, let him be like a gentile or tax collector. It seems simple enough as one, two, three strikes and you’re out. And if kicking someone out of your community is the goal, this seems like a good deal. Except for this one little plot twist. Matthew, who this Gospel is attributed to, is a tax collector, and later through Paul, God demonstrates His love for the gentiles. How did Jesus Himself treat tax collectors and gentiles? When He encountered Zacchaeus in Luke 19, He went to his home to spend time with him personally. When Jesus encountered the gentile woman in Mark 7 who asks for healing for her daughter, Jesus grants her the miracle and praises the greatness of her faith. Matthew 18 is a challenge to our prejudices, not Divine permission to reinforce them.

For another example look at Mark 16. Jesus has just resurrected from the dead and appeared to Mary Magdalene and two who were walking on the road to Emmaus. In a dramatic (and perhaps a little bit unfair) plot twist, Mark 16:12 says He appeared to them in a different form. Both Mary and these two from the road run to tell the disciples that Jesus Christ is risen from the dead. The disciples are the inner circle, the ones who were chosen personally. Why would He appear to anyone else first? That had to be a blow to their ego. Maybe it was the fact that they weren’t reliable sources, or maybe it was the odd fact that their accounts of His appearance were so different. Whatever it was, the disciples don’t believe them. It’s at this point that Jesus appears in the room and rebukes them for their unbelief. The very next thing you see is Him saying, “Go ye into all the world and preach the Gospel to all creation. He who has believed and has been baptized shall be saved; but he who has disbelieved shall be condemned.” Again, this seems pretty simple, and we have long used it as a clear way to tell who’s in and who’s out. The Gospel (Jesus Christ is risen) is preached and if you believe it you’re in and if you don’t you’re out. What did the disciple just hear? The Gospel message that Jesus Christ is risen. What have they just done with what they’ve heard? They didn’t believe. Do you see it? According to the letter, the disciples meet the criteria to qualify for condemnation. But Jesus reveals the love and power of the Spirit by embracing and empowering the very ones who are worthy to be condemned. It’s a sobering thought to consider that the 11 who made up the foundation of the church were actually the first unbelievers of the Gospel. This is the goodness of Jesus Christ. He empowers and validates the condemned and disqualified. The letter doesn’t force you to condemn anyone. But it does give you permission to condemn and reject them if you choose to live by the letter alone. Jesus steps beyond the letter to live by a higher law. The law of Love.

Here’s one final example for you to consider. Do you remember when 1 John 2 says, “Love not the world or anything in the world. If anyone loves the world, the love of the Father is not in him.” But Jesus said, “For God so loved the world that He gave His only begotten Son…” So which is it? If you’re focused on the letter this will be endlessly confusing. But if you catch the wind of the Spirit, and know the heart of your Father, this makes perfect sense. The freedom to reject someone makes your acceptance of them an act of pure love, for love can’t be forced or demanded. Perhaps that itself is the greatest act of love. That when you have qualified for condemnation and bear the weight of guilt, Love steps in and overturns the sentence. When we condemn, we reflect the nature of our own blind fear. When we love, we reflect the nature of a just God. It is the justice of a good God, that the blindness of our condemnation based on the letter is healed by the compassion of the Holy Spirit and an unfailing Love Who bears, hopes, believes, and endures all things. I hope these studies prompt to rediscover the Spirit in the letter and empower you to look beyond the surface into the simple hope of the hidden goodness of God.

A question to meditate on.

"Does your Father not love you the way He asks you to love others?" Ted Dekker.

Rediscovering

The sun settles into the pocket of cloud at the edge of the horizon, ultraviolet beams bust through holes worn into the clouds by the wind causing me to squint tight my eyes. It rolls down the wall of blue and like a mood ring the color responds to it's heat. The sun must be a confused lover today because orange, pink, and purple can't seem to find out where one ends and the other begins. Embracing the blue the colors never merge, never separate, never dilute like paint into a dull gray. At 35 thousand feet it feels like I'm above it all, but 93 million miles away this molten hurricane of fire hardly resembles the beauty it's light is forming before my eyes here. The sounds of Muse breeze through my airtight earbuds and I want to roll down the window of this jet, crawl outside and on top of it, standing left foot forward, right foot dug in and ride this supersonic surfboard through banks and turns careening through the clouds like a hawk glides between the walls of a canyon. Ignoring the impossible physics of the quest, I could feel my feet leave the fuselage for a second or two wondering how far I had just passed through the air only to touch down on two feet still intact. It's delightful, at a certain age, to discover that you still have an imagination.

Suffering and Expectations

As much as we walk in victory, though saved, in this life there is still suffering. 

Jesus, though a son, learned obedience through that which He suffered. (Heb 5) 

We don't often think of suffering producing anything good but the Scripture makes a pretty strong case for this. That whatever we don't learn by observation, the experience of suffering will teach us. Often with more lasting results. Resistance builds strength. So in life you find yourself bearing the weight of some frustrations with no clear solutions. That's not an unhealthy thing.

When you're building a life not everything is going to work. If 2% of your goals get met by the time you're 40 you'll be doing unusually well. Life sucks the life out of life when you have built an altar of expectations. Goals get trashed and rebuilt and by the time they come around to getting fulfilled you often want something entirely different. When you develop the ability to exercise preference you're eating deeply of the fruit of the fall. It's ok. We all do everyday. That fruit is preference or another word for it is judgment. Everything you want to be is the preference of one thing over another and ultimately it is that very thing (preference and judgement) that leads to suffering. Think deeply about this. So then what is suffering?

Suffering is a self inflicted state of mind based upon the frustration of unmet expectations. All suffering is tied to this. I expected one thing and another happened. Now I'm in suffering.

When you're frustrated, you're never frustrated for the reason you think you're frustrated. You think it's because things aren't the way you want them to be. But it is only because you sense a powerlessness in the wanting. To have what you want requires you to chop wood and draw water, over and over again, until you realize that what you wanted you never really wanted. It is when your expectations all die that you find peace in the storm.

For example, you have a conversation that you want to go a certain way. But the other person isn't cooperating. Did they do something wrong? Only in your mind. So you suffer. (I used to have this happen all the time) Every offense is simply an unmet expectation. Sometimes we don't even know that we have them until they're exposed by a circumstance that refuses to cooperate.

We all want many things that have little to do with Jesus but are just a part of life. We want human love. We want physical affection. We want food. We want people to be kind and gracious. We want air conditioning in the summer. We want to be healthy. We want a lot of things tied to this physical world that Jesus doesn't automatically give us. We thank Jesus for these things, or not. But the lesson in all of this is that our joy is not tied to the physical world. We discover this by the suffering of unmet physical expectations while still retaining and cultivating an awareness of the presence of Jesus.

So did Jesus have unmet expectations? I'm pretty sure He wasn't controlling of the Pharisees abuse of Him. He got frustrated. He was tempted in EVERY way that we are, yet without sin (never separated from the Father). Still, temptation is suffering because it puts the soul in a headlock over unmet expectations. This is why Jesus said things like, "My soul is vexed..." That's suffering. That actually brings me tremendous comfort. To know that God is absolutely familiar with all of my suffering and is victorious within me brings peace and healing and silences all suffering.

Lifted from the dust

God's faith in you is unshakable. He's believed in you from before the foundation of the world. Don't give up on you. God hasn't. #GodIsGood