Deep Lessons

We learn some of the deepest lessons in some of the darkest valleys. But we don't often realize what we've learned in the valley of the shadow until we have walked far enough to see the sun again. Don't stay in the valley. Keep walking. When you feel the sun, then turn and teach another what you have learned. Words forged by experience are far richer than untested notions. ~ Bill Vanderbush

What Pain Sounds Like

The Kingdom of God is righteousness, peace, and joy in the Holy Spirit! But for many their experience with Christianity as a religion is not life giving. We recently invited thousands of members of a closed study group to bare their heart and share the honest and uncensored condition of their heart from their current perspective. Sometimes people need to be heard before they want to be healed. Here are some unedited statements.

Can you relate to any of these?
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I feel like if I let go that people won't like who I really am.

I believe there is something inherently wrong with me, that I never fit in.

I have thought of myself as a failure and that God couldn't possibly love me because I fail continuously.

I often believe that I'm unlikeable, or that there's something wrong with me that I'll never fully understand.

I believe that I am the one person who is not deserving of what God has done for me.

I've often felt unforgivable for the terrible things I've done.

That I am the unwanted child, saved because God promised I would be but not wanted, adored, or loved.

I have often felt like a failure because of continually falling back into the same sin. Why would God extend grace to me if I keep breaking His heart?

I tie how I think my husband feels about me to how God feels about me.

Quite honestly I am mad and feel abandoned. I bow my head to pray and then I stop because I think what is the use - he may be listening but he doesn't care. Or is he really listening - really? Is he even there?

Is there really a God that loves and hears me?

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I feel like if I let go that people won't like who I really am.

I believe there is something inherently wrong with me, that I never fit in.

I have thought of myself as a failure and that God couldn't possibly love me because I fail continuously.

I often believe I am stuck in life, going nowhere.

I often believe that I'm unlikeable, or that there's something wrong with me that I'll never fully understand.

I believe that I am the one person who is not deserving of what God has done for me.

I've often felt unforgivable for the terrible things I've done.

I often feel like I'm a burden.

That I am the unwanted child, saved because God promised I would be but not wanted, adored, or loved.

I have often felt like a failure because of continually falling back into the same sin. Why would God extend grace to me if I keep breaking His heart?

I tie how I think my husband feels about me to how God feels about me.

Quite honestly I am mad and feel abandoned. I bow my head to pray and then I stop because I think what is the use - he may be listening but he doesn't care. Or is he really listening - really? Is he even there?

Is there really a God that loves and hears me?

What's the Point of Prayer and Fasting?

Disciplines like prayer and fasting don't make God. They make me. There's no arm twisting or begging of God in these things. They are reminders of Spirit, a focused intention tending to the roots of faith in the soil of the heart. The disciplines of of prayer and fasting kill unbelief and give rise to an awareness that we are more than mere flesh and form. We don't do these things because we are becoming something. We do these things to become aware of who we are. When you lose yourself, return to prayer. When your heart is darkened by foolishness, return to fasting. When you forget who you are, pray and listen. When you're offended at God, fast and detox. These aren't dead religious works unless they become lifeless habit. They are an infusion of Presence in purposeful acts of life-giving worship. In prayer and fasting, I awaken and align to who the Father has always known me to be from before the foundation of the world. These disciplines keep me from becoming consumed with me. The desire for things diminishes as the awareness of the Spirit is illuminated in clarity. If you have lost and let go of these disciplines in an effort to rest in a revelation of grace, I encourage you to revisit some of these disciplines that were so important to Jesus Christ. Let the Spirit draw you to them and them to you and in that drawing you will find the Spirit life and depth of soul tie with God that you longed to discover when you said your first prayer. 

God and Sin

Anything that dulls my sensitivity to or awareness of the presence of God or perpetuates the illusion of separation. But what if someone doesn't believe in God? I think it's commonly stated that without God there is no sin for it is believed that sin is purely a religious construct. But I would say that the ONLY way there is no sin is with God. Without God each person does what's right in his own eyes thereby creating their own system of conduct and rules by which we govern our interactions. It's that condition of defining right and wrong apart from God that perpetuates the distance and separation between people. Everyone has their own rules and definition, and who's to say that one is more valid than another? But Jesus lifts us beyond our own definitions, destroys sin, reconciles union, restores relationship, and speaks a word of grace that makes genuine love manifest. It is that love and grace that makes us one. It's that oneness that manifests peace.

Is God Disappointed In You?

• God is not disappointed in you. That's a statement I've made often in talking about The Forgotten Way. So a question I get often is how is it that God isn't disappointed in us? The bigger question would be is God infinite and complete? If so, then temporal expressions of loss and lack cannot take away from that which is infinite and complete. We all wrestle with the temporal vs the eternal. Both time and eternity have progression. Time moves from the beginning to the end. That which is eternal has the beginning and the end together as one. To subject God to time would be to adopt the perspective that God is enslaved by His own creation, which would make Him very weak indeed. And weak is certainly one thing that God is not. After all, in 1 Corinthians 3:21 Paul says that all things are yours, and in the list he includes time.

  
  

  So back to the issue of disappointment. The verse we're going to look at is Ephesians 4:30-32 which encourages us to avoid grieving the Holy Spirit. The Greek word here is Lupeo which means to affect with sadness or heaviness. Matter of fact in 1 Peter 1:6 the same word is translated as heaviness and the context there is that you've been made heavy with temptations. Sadness and heaviness is a temporal blindness to the manifest joy of an eternal victory. When we can't see the eternal victory, but only feel the weight of the temporal circumstance, we react and act out of a temporal perspective. We feel sad when we lose hope and we feel heavy when we lose heart. But from an eternal perspective we are forgiven and victorious. Eph 4:32 says we've already been forgiven. (Christ forgave i.e., past tense) The bitterness, wrath, anger, etc that we express is a symptom of a temporal blindness to how forgiven and free we are in Christ. So we give off expressions of a false identity. But that doesn't disappoint God. Sadness or heaviness isn't disappointment. There is a word for disappoint in GK which is kataischynō from Romans 5:5 which means to put to shame. When someone is disappointed in us it opens us up to be ashamed. We know what Christ has done with shame. He takes it from us. 

  
  

  He has injected Himself into our story and walks it with us even though He knows the end from the beginning. He feels what we feel and even in our own blindness the river of redemption never stops flowing. Consider the prodigal son story, where the Father expresses sorrow, but not disappointment. Disappointment has given up all hope and attached a label of shame and guilt to a person or situation. The Father in the story had sadness and sorrow at the sons "death" but an absolute hope that his son's identity was never beyond redemption. He says to the older brother that the younger son "was dead but is alive again". While we were dead, Christ made us alive. So He can experience sadness and sorrow at our blindness while maintaining hope in our redemption which he has already freely given. He never loses heart and never gives up hope.