Tag: God

May
24
2013

For those caught in the ser­vant stage of faith, they are often very seri­ous about their walk with God. They can remem­ber a dis­tinct time in which they gave their life to Christ and kept that com­mit­ment. They attend church reg­u­larly. They most likely read their Bible reg­u­larly, per­haps repeat­edly in the morn­ing or at a meal. They most likely serve in many ways and often. But with all this, some­thing just isn’t right. Are you just a ser­vant? Hon­estly delve deep and ask your­self these questions:

  • Typ­i­cally those who are caught in the ser­vant stage of faith are bro­ken peo­ple who have acknowl­edged these aspects of their lives and sought heal­ing and growth. Have you gen­uinely dealt with your bro­ken­ness? Are there per­sonal prob­lems (e.g., anger, sex­ual or emo­tional issues, over/under eat­ing, bit­ter­ness, a wounded past, con­tin­ued bro­ken rela­tion­ships, etc.) stand­ing in between you and an inti­mate rela­tion­ship with God and with oth­ers? Are there some issues in your life that you really need to face but you are afraid to do so? Let’s be hon­est, how is your life over­all? Is your life in sham­bles and you have mul­ti­tudes of secrets and sin? Does your mar­riage or per­sonal life need work, but you are too proud or afraid to get help because oth­ers think you have it all-together and they might not think so highly of you anymore?
  • Do you really believe you have it all down pat: your the­ol­ogy, doc­trine, who God is, who peo­ple are? When some­one chal­lenges you on an issue of faith, do you get defen­sive and do not gen­uinely lis­ten to them? In con­ver­sa­tions like these, do you think the other per­son is always wrong? After lis­ten­ing to a mes­sage or read­ing a book, do you first and fore­most scru­ti­nize what was said and what was wrong about it rather than humbly apply­ing what you learn to your life? Is your rela­tion­ship with God sim­ply a bunch of head knowledge?
  • You might have a lot of Chris­t­ian friends, but how close do you get? Who knows your secrets and do you let peo­ple in? If you had to write down the dark­est sins of your life, who know about them? Any­one? Not even your spouse?
  • Is the basis of your rela­tion­ship with God based on what you know, but not what you have expe­ri­enced? Be hon­est, do you have a grow­ing rela­tion­ship with God or do you just know a lot about him? Per­haps you have grown up in the church, but never made your faith your own? Do you know a lot about the Bible, but there’s not much of con­nec­tion in terms of expe­ri­ence and rela­tion­ship with him? Is your rela­tion­ship with God just based on a lot of knowl­edge? Does Jesus know you?
  • Do you feel close to God when you are obey­ing all the rules for your life, but when you break them, he feels dis­tant? Does your rela­tion­ship with God live or die by how you live day-to-day? When you feel like you live “sin-free” for a day (no one does by the way), do you feel closer to God? When you have a rough day and are con­fronted by your sin, does God then seem distant?
  • Are you a hard per­son to be with because you put a lot of do’s and don’ts on oth­ers? Does every­thing have to be con­trolled? And with that, is anger and rage always sim­mer­ing just under­neath the sur­face toward oth­ers? How easy are you to be with? Are you fun to be with or is it a chore to hang out with you? When you look back at your life and your friend­ships is there a long string of bro­ken rela­tion­ships. More often than not, do the peo­ple clos­est to you think that you are never sat­is­fied? That when they are with you, that you always have to be in con­trol and do every­thing “your way?”
  • Often are clos­est rela­tion­ships reveal the inti­macy of our rela­tion­ship with God. As Jesus said, if you can’t do earthly things how­ever would you expect to be able to do heav­enly things. (John 3:12) How close are you to your spouse in your mar­riage and how strong is that rela­tion­ship? If we asked your chil­dren (teenagers and adult) this ques­tion how would they respond: how close are you with them to the point that they want to spend time with you—that they truly enjoy your com­pany and don’t spend time with you just out of oblig­a­tion? Do you gen­uinely love them on a reg­u­lar basis or is the rela­tion­ship held up just by con­trol, manip­u­la­tion and obligation?
  • Have you become the Sav­ior for other peo­ple? Do you think that you can help every­one around you? Do you spend just as much time work­ing on your own life as you do help­ing others?
  • Really think about this next question—God might love you, but does He like you? When you pic­ture him, is he sim­ply a stern and mean father or does he gen­uinely care about you and gen­uinely likes you?
  • Those caught in the ser­vant stage of faith do not typ­i­cally have an inti­mate rela­tion­ship with God (they base their faith on what they do) and there­fore wor­ship is uncom­fort­able for them. Do you gen­uinely like to wor­ship or does it most of the time make you uncom­fort­able? Do you wor­ship when no one is watch­ing and sing on your own (on the way to work, in the shower, etc.)? Could you do with­out wor­ship dur­ing a church ser­vice? Do you really enter into the wor­ship expe­ri­ence or are you most of the time sim­ply going through the motions? Are you just singing words or truly singing and wor­ship­ping God?
  • Do you really know God’s love per­son­ally? Is Jesus your Lord, but to call him your friend would be totally alien to you? Does it seem sac­ri­le­gious to you that you would call Jesus your friend?
In: Friend to Jesus
Tags: , , , ,
May
02
2013

helpThis post is from a larger series under the cat­e­gory Friend to Jesus. It is a detailed explo­ration of the three stages of faith: the believer, the ser­vant and the friend of God. If you want to start at the begin­ning, it begins with the post How Look­ing at a Car­avag­gio Paint­ing Can Change Your Life and then con­tin­ues chronologically.

After loss of iden­tity, the most potent mod­ern ter­ror, is loss of sex­u­al­ity. Jeanette Winterson

 I had my own expe­ri­ence in which I had lived a ser­vant too long. Iron­i­cally, just as my move from believer to ser­vant began in a car ride, in a way, so did my trans­for­ma­tion to becom­ing a friend to Jesus. As I have said before, for about ten years I lived in Chicago. It is a city I deeply love with my Chicago Cubs (yes, I am a glut­ton for pun­ish­ment), the lakeshore, its unique archi­tec­ture, and deep-dish pizza. While liv­ing there a cou­ple of years after col­lege, I was now a cou­ple years in my first “offi­cial” job. I worked for a large cat­a­log com­pany as a print and paper buyer and loved my job with all of its perks. I often ate at some of the best restau­rants, got to see Michael Jor­dan play on many occa­sions, and because of my posi­tion, I was schmoozed on a reg­u­lar basis by the other com­pa­nies that I worked with on the dif­fer­ent projects I oversaw.

How­ever, a cou­ple of neg­a­tive things were also hap­pen­ing, espe­cially in my rela­tion­ship with God and in my per­sonal life. First, I was becom­ing cal­lous in my faith and jaded. I had been a Chris­t­ian for some years, had moved into var­i­ous places of lead­er­ship and was begin­ning to like that spot­light. In my early years as a Chris­t­ian I threw myself into many endeav­ors and slowly but surely was get­ting burned out and basi­cally, becom­ing tired of being a Chris­t­ian. I was lead­ing Bible stud­ies; men­tor­ing a cou­ple of ram­bunc­tious sev­enth graders through Big Broth­ers; try­ing to get off the ground a col­lege min­istry at the school I grad­u­ated from; attend­ing not one, but three dif­fer­ent churches. You name it, I was doing it. The prob­lem was…I also try­ing to keep up appear­ances, because what once seem­ingly was a thriv­ing faith had dete­ri­o­rated. And here was the big problem—the prob­lem was that if you knew me then you would have never known that by look­ing at all that I was doing. You would have thought I was this great guy who had it all together, serv­ing God and serv­ing oth­ers. How do I know this? Because at that time so many around me told me this in not so many words. I had become a very gifted actor and was fit to be the next Robert De Niro.

And under­neath all of this, issues from my past had sur­faced and secret sins began to pile up. On the sur­face every­thing looked like it was in work­ing order, but inside I was hol­low and there were so many prob­lems in my life that I wasn’t rec­og­niz­ing. First, I was begin­ning to grow an anger within myself that seem­ingly just showed up one day. I was hard to please. I was putting high expec­ta­tions on oth­ers, but rarely myself. While up to that point in my life, anger had never really been a strug­gle or prob­lem, how­ever, now inside I was seething. I often would walk around just a bun­dle of annoy­ance and cha­grin. I almost never showed this to oth­ers, but inside anger had taken a foothold in my life. Sec­ond, I had become very arro­gant and pride­ful. I would go to church and not lis­ten to the ser­mon for self-reflection, but to cri­tique what was being spo­ken. With oth­ers, when some­one would have an opin­ion on some given issue, I often had to dis­agree. Being a Chris­t­ian had turned into for me an intel­lec­tual exer­cise and not a spir­i­tual one. That’s not how you inter­pret that pas­sage! Boy, was that ser­mon bor­ing! That’s not what Jesus meant when he said “Love your ene­mies!” Because I had been a Chris­t­ian for some years, I was slowly becom­ing a know-it-all and if some­one dis­agreed with me, I could almost in every occa­sion con­vince them oth­er­wise. At that time, I learned this—sadly, rarely do peo­ple ask tough ques­tions of their leaders.

To top this off, while I had lots of friends, I was dis­tanc­ing myself from them—I care­fully hid who I was becom­ing and where I was strug­gling. In par­tic­u­lar, there was one part of my life which was unrav­el­ing and was reveal­ing my bro­ken­ness at its deep­est levels—its roots, which were nearly twenty years old. Through var­i­ous expe­ri­ences in my child­hood that had hap­pened to me, some which we would now name as sex­ual abuse, my sex­u­al­ity had become an intri­cate and acute wounded part of me. Like so many that I have met in my prac­tice and in my role as a pas­tor, my sex­u­al­ity had been opened up way before it should have been, and with this, the dam­age that was done was com­ing to bear. Over the years, in par­tic­u­lar start­ing in my late teenage years, but espe­cially in my early twen­ties, I was slowly devel­op­ing a depen­dency on unhealthy rela­tion­ships, specif­i­cally those that turned sexual.

This bro­ken­ness orig­i­nated at some of my first mem­o­ries. I became promis­cu­ous at an early age, in part because of these child­hood expe­ri­ences that I men­tioned ear­lier. Like­wise, while in mid­dle school, the door had been abruptly slammed open with some inci­dents with a high school girl who lived down the street and who was a cou­ple of years my senior. We would sneak away to secret places dur­ing the sum­mer nights of my eighth grade year and she opened up a world to me that was intox­i­cat­ing and dan­ger­ously mys­te­ri­ous. As I have told many, pornog­ra­phy for the most part has never been a strong urge for me, pri­mar­ily because of these early expe­ri­ences. I did not yearn for vir­tual expe­ri­ences; I wanted the ones that had flesh and warmth asso­ci­ated with them. These sex­ual crav­ings took hold of me at a very early age and would fol­low for me years to come.

Toward the end of my high school years, this solid­i­fied in an even more dam­ag­ing way—in my fresh­man year in col­lege, a woman in her twen­ties who was very “expe­ri­enced,” entirely opened up that part of my life intro­duc­ing me to a world which I had not quite imag­ined. Up to that point, for all intents and pur­poses, I had been dab­bling with sex and in this rela­tion­ship I gave in full blown to my desires. And of course, by no means was I an inno­cent bystander in all of this—I was enthralled with this lifestyle and at that same time, could not see its dangers.

As I men­tioned in an ear­lier post, in my early twen­ties, I was out of con­trol and did not have the capac­ity, knowl­edge or courage to stop what I was doing. I had recently become a Chris­t­ian, but this trans­for­ma­tion had yet to invade my rela­tion­ships with women. While I might have been hav­ing lots of sex, in truth, I was begin­ning to lose my sex­u­al­ity and in some way, was los­ing my capac­ity to love a woman. I wouldn’t of course under­stand this for years to come, but the ground work had been laid. In these years, I was in many rela­tion­ships with women, most were just based on hav­ing both of our sex­ual needs met. There were a hand­ful of Sat­ur­day morn­ings that I would awaken next to a woman at my side and I would lay there in a tremen­dous amount of guilt and shame because of this dual life I was liv­ing. The wounds from my sex­ual past had finally caught up with me, but I did not know what to do.

At about age twenty three, I real­ized I had to some­how try to get things in respectable order. The prob­lem was—I did all this on my own, try­ing to piece together some­thing that would bring some sem­blance of well-being. For the next cou­ple of years, I man­aged to keep things together, but only barely. It was at this point where I re-committed my life to God which I detailed in a pre­vi­ous post. I seri­ously dated a cou­ple of women and was try­ing to take my faith more seri­ously as well. With the cou­ple of com­mit­ted rela­tion­ships that I did have in those years, on the sur­face they seemed like they were healthy rela­tion­ships, but in real­ity, we were two peo­ple who had not wres­tled with the demons of our past and present. Often in these rela­tion­ships, I was the overly depen­dent one and in real­ity these rela­tion­ships were becom­ing a sub­sti­tute for my rela­tion­ship with God. I knew I had a seri­ous prob­lem when one Sun­day I was stand­ing next to my girl­friend at church and in see­ing her in wor­ship; I became jeal­ous of her love toward God. Can you imag­ine that? I was jeal­ous of God! I remem­ber feel­ing that emo­tion and think­ing he was going to strike me dead at that very instance. At that point, I knew things were really bad and that what I was try­ing to do was bring­ing very lit­tle heal­ing to my life.

It all cul­mi­nated one night at my girlfriend’s apart­ment, in which, in too many words, we had another great argu­ment about our rela­tion­ship. That evening, we both decided to mutu­ally break things off and that was the begin­ning for me in pur­su­ing my own heal­ing and relin­quish­ing my crav­ing for women to make me happy and whole. Relieved and dev­as­tated at the same time, that evening as I was dri­ving home in my car, I heard a whis­per of a voice, which to para­phrase, basi­cally said, Dude, you need to get some help. Jesus was cry­ing out for me to pur­sue heal­ing instead of rela­tion­ships, and soon I was about to finally relent. Remark­ably, Jesus was going to begin to heal me in a way that was about as strange as when he used mud and spit to make a blind man see.

Next time, I will tell you how he did that…

In: Friend to Jesus
Tags: , , , , ,
Apr
18
2013

god likeThis post is from a larger series under the cat­e­gory Friend to Jesus. It is a detailed explo­ration of the three stages of faith: the believer, the ser­vant and the friend of God. If you want to start at the begin­ning, it begins with the post How Look­ing at a Car­avag­gio Paint­ing Can Change Your Life and then con­tin­ues chrono­log­i­cally. 

I do not want to be the inher­i­tor of so many mis­for­tunes. I do not want to con­tinue as a root and as a tomb. Pablo Neruda

 As I said ear­lier in the blog, how we view God is all-important. It is the under­pin­ning of our entire life. Most often, our view of God comes from two places in our lives: 1) from how we were raised, i.e., from our par­ents and our upbring­ings; and 2) what we are taught from oth­ers either directly or indi­rectly. Again, as we look at Peter’s life, on a few dif­fer­ent occa­sions, Jesus had to cor­rect him in terms of his view of God (Matthew 16:23, John 13:3–9, Acts 10). Jesus com­pletely under­stood that if Peter did not change some of these views, every­thing else would also get bent and dis­torted in his life. Jesus clearly saw this in the reli­gious lead­ers of his time and he didn’t want these same atti­tudes and behav­iors to con­tinue in Peter.

There is one com­mon denom­i­na­tor when it comes to those who are stuck in this phase of faith of being the servant—they inevitably see God as the stern father—Someone who has expec­ta­tions that can never be met. Now, none of this is out in the open; these views are emo­tion­ally held in the sub-conscious and in the deep part of the person’s soul. This truly is how they see God—he cares very lit­tle for them. If you were to ask them to name some of God’s char­ac­ter­is­tics they would be able to per­fectly and even elo­quently share with you these:

  • God is good.
  • God is gracious.
  • God is loving.
  • God is forgiving.

But in truth, to inter­nally expe­ri­ence these real­i­ties on a daily basis, they don’t even come close. Deep inside, deep within their soul, God is not good or lov­ing or for­giv­ing. And with this, here is a sim­ple test in how you can deter­mine how a per­son gen­uinely sees God—don’t ask them how they view God—ask them how they view them­selves. Don’t let them think about the ques­tion, just ask them for the first words that come to their mind. Inevitably, the per­son caught in this stage of faith will use the major­ity of their descrip­tion with words such as these: a sin­ner, bro­ken, wicked, evil, a fallen per­son. In how they view them­selves, we begin to see a pic­ture of how they might view God. They will not use true words such as these—righteous, saved, holy, redeemed, a child—such words would not be the ones that would first come to their mind.

Those who are caught in this ser­vant stage of faith need to assess truly how they view God. They need to get beyond the sim­ple men­tal con­cep­tions that they have learned and look at who God is gen­uinely to them right now. But here is the tough part with this self-reflection—you often need some­one else in your life who knows you extremely well to help you answer these ques­tions of who God is to you. With the per­son who is stuck in this phase, as men­tioned in a pre­vi­ous chap­ter, too often this is a no-no; you do not get close to oth­ers and you def­i­nitely don’t need the help of others.

Often these deep-seated ideas of who God is began a long time ago in a land far, far away. Some­times a per­son stuck here will need to deal with issues from the past and often these issues might be dif­fi­cult to acknowl­edge or deal with because of the pain or con­fu­sion asso­ci­ated with them. Some of these dif­fi­cult issues to address might be:

  • How you were raised – espe­cially grow­ing up in home in which per­fec­tion was always required or where a par­ent was emo­tion­ally distant
  • Being phys­i­cally, emo­tion­ally or sex­u­ally abused in the past
  • Fac­ing a trau­matic event that occurred in your life
  • Hav­ing a par­ent who was extremely dom­i­neer­ing or passive
  • Grow­ing up in a home that was overly reli­gious (overly empha­siz­ing the rules of the faith over grace and forgiveness)

FACING THE WOUND OF REJECTION

There is an impor­tant con­cept from psy­chol­ogy that might help you under­stand one dynamic of this in terms of one’s up-bringing. Gre­gory Bate­son, a lin­guist and anthro­pol­o­gist, wrote in the 1950’s about the con­cept of a dou­ble bind; it is a term that is used when chil­dren grow up with incon­sis­tent and neg­a­tive parental mes­sages. Dou­ble binds usu­ally are most dam­ag­ing within the rela­tion­ship of a par­ent to a child; how­ever,  they can also occur in dif­fer­ent types of rela­tion­ships such as with sib­lings, extended fam­ily rela­tion­ships, within dat­ing or mar­riage rela­tion­ships and friend­ships. Here is the basic process of how a dou­ble bind occurs within the rela­tion­ship of a par­ent and child:

  • Stage One: Con­fu­sion. First, the child who expe­ri­ences a dou­ble bind receives con­tra­dic­tory ver­bal and emo­tional mes­sages when they are spo­ken to by their par­ent. For exam­ple, love is expressed by words, and yet dis­gust or detach­ment is exhib­ited by behav­iors by the par­ent. Like­wise, a child is encour­aged to speak freely, but then crit­i­cized or silenced when­ever they actu­ally do share their view on a given issue.
  • Stage Two: Con­trol. Often, when such con­ver­sa­tions occur, the child is not allowed to dis­en­gage from the con­ver­sa­tion which has these con­flict­ing messages.
  • Stage Three: Pun­ish­ment. Finally, if within the con­ver­sa­tion, the child fails to ful­fill the con­tra­dic­tory requests of the par­ent, they are pun­ished in some way (e.g., with­drawal of love, phys­i­cal pun­ish­ment, ver­bal attacks, etc.).

The clas­sic exam­ple given of a neg­a­tive dou­ble bind is of a mother telling her child that she loves him, while at the same time turn­ing away in dis­gust for some rea­son. In this case, the words the mother speaks are nor­mal and good, but then the body lan­guage is in con­flict with the words the mother just spoke. The child doesn’t know how to respond to the con­flict between the words and the body lan­guage and the harm­ful behav­iors of the par­ent (this can be either phys­i­cal or psy­cho­log­i­cal). Over­time, the child in this case will become either very sus­pi­cious of those who attempt to show him love or will become very depen­dent on the par­ent or others.

Often those who grow up in reli­gious homes expe­ri­ence dou­ble binds on a reg­u­lar basis. It is the image of the par­ent who says “I love you,” but in real­ity never really shows it in a phys­i­cal man­ner or often shows their repul­sion more times than not. It’s the father who says to his daugh­ter with his mouth “You are impor­tant to me,” but never expresses it in a phys­i­cal and tan­gi­ble way.

I will share an exam­ple I heard recently. A client of mine shared an expe­ri­ence of a dou­ble bind which was very dam­ag­ing and con­fus­ing to him. This man had been in an acci­dent in which some­one on a motor­cy­cle had died because of their own reck­less dri­ving. It was not this young man’s fault in any way, and he stayed at the scene of the acci­dent. Obvi­ously, it was a a very trou­bling expe­ri­ence for him. In his fam­ily, he was never allowed to express emo­tion and on dif­fer­ent occa­sions was actu­ally told to “stop cry­ing” or to keep his feel­ings in check. One after­noon, he and his mom were in the same room and she point­edly asked, “I am really sur­prised how you haven’t expressed any emo­tion about the acci­dent last week. Hasn’t it both­ered you?” At that moment, a wave of emo­tion rushed over him and he began to cry. He reached for his mom to hug her and she pushed him away. This is a per­fect pic­ture of a dou­ble bind. Step by step, this is what happened:

  1. Through­out his life, ver­bally and non-verbally, he was told not to show emotion.
  2. In this inci­dent, he ini­tially did as he was told and did not show any emo­tion about the accident.
  3. His mom requested that he show emo­tion about the accident.
  4. He was rejected and pun­ished for show­ing emotion.

If you grew up in a home like that, how do you think you would view God? You’d be very con­fused and it would make sense that how you grew up would influ­ence who God was to you. This often can be the case with the per­son who is stuck in this legal­is­tic stage of faith. Even with­out really know­ing it, they have grown up in a highly dys­func­tional home, expe­ri­enced sub­tle abuse and then trans­ferred this expe­ri­ence to their rela­tion­ship with God. In the sit­u­a­tion, with the young man above, this is how I found him when he came into coun­sel­ing. He was highly dis­trust­ful of oth­ers and he was highly dis­trust­ful of God. Now granted, he went to church each Sun­day and served in a lot of mean­ing­ful ways there, but in real­ity, he was a very bro­ken young man who really needed to get at some root issues that had hap­pened a long time ago. Not until he began to see the harm in his past was he able to begin to look at him­self and oth­ers dif­fer­ently. This heal­ing ini­tially began in that he con­fronted the truth that he was begin­ning to mimic his mother’s emo­tional dis­tance with his own fam­ily. Sec­ond, he had to reach out for help—these two things were the begin­ning of his heal­ing from a very wound­ing child­hood and upbring­ing. Those caught in this ser­vant stage of faith have a hard time doing what this young man did. Only those who are will­ing to look deeply at their past and how they are respond­ing presently because of the past are able to grow in their rela­tion­ship with God. The God who heals des­per­ately wants us to deal with our wounds and often that means we must first acknowl­edge them.

In: Friend to Jesus
Tags: , , , , , , ,
Feb
28
2013

arms lengthThis post is from a larger series under the cat­e­gory Friend to Jesus. It is a detailed explo­ration of the three stages of faith: the believer, the ser­vant and the friend of God. If you want to start at the begin­ning, it begins with the post How Look­ing at a Car­avag­gio Paint­ing Can Change Your Life and then con­tin­ues chronologically.

Every­one has three lives: a pub­lic life, a pri­vate life, and a secret life. Gabriel Gar­cia Marquez

In our soci­ety, most of us wear pro­tec­tive masks of var­i­ous kinds and for var­i­ous rea­sons. Very often the end result is that the masks grow to us, dis­plac­ing our orig­i­nal char­ac­ters with our assumed char­ac­ters. Clarence John Laughlin

As we take this topic one step fur­ther, remem­ber how ear­lier we dis­cussed the impor­tance of Jesus “know­ing” us (Matthew 7:23). As a par­al­lel, a good ques­tion to ask your­self is how many peo­ple know the real you? In one aspect for Jesus to know us means that we must also let oth­ers into our lives in vul­ner­a­ble ways. Jesus makes this remark, “I have spo­ken to you of earthly things and you do not believe; how then will you believe if I speak of heav­enly things?” (John 3:12) I think in the same way, one of the best ways that Jesus can know us is how well we let oth­ers know who we are. In tan­dem, just as we attempt to develop a rela­tion­ship with God (i.e., a heav­enly rela­tion­ship), we must also push into friend­ships with those around us (i.e., an earthly rela­tion­ship). Typ­i­cally, on this front, those caught in the ser­vant stage have a long way to go.

This is another way to find out if you might be caught in this ser­vant phase with regards to your rela­tion­ship with Jesus. If so, there’s a good chance that you limit your friend­ships to acquain­tances in your life. The ques­tion you have to ask your­self is—how deep do I go in my rela­tion­ships? How much do peo­ple know the real you? How many peo­ple know for exam­ple that you strug­gle with anx­i­ety at an extreme level, or you peri­od­i­cally slap your kids, or your mar­riage is maybe just one or two fights away from a sep­a­ra­tion? Those who keep oth­ers at bay, usu­ally keep God at bay in some man­ner as well.

And often these types of shal­low rela­tion­ships flour­ish in a church set­ting. As a metaphor, too often, going to church means we are going to the sym­phony, when in real­ity, going to church should be more like when you go to a hos­pi­tal in an emer­gency. If we were to go to the sym­phony, we would put on our best jacket or dress, blow dry our hair just per­fectly, and put our best smile on to impress. But church is not like going to an orches­tra con­cert; it should be more like going to a hospital.

Some years ago, one Decem­ber day, I was get­ting the mail and walk­ing down our dri­ve­way. I slipped on an icy patch and down I went. As I fell, I used my left arm to brace my fall and just then, I felt my elbow twist like it never had before. I laid on the ground for a sec­ond and was won­der­ing what had just hap­pened. That left arm was in excru­ci­at­ing pain. I lifted myself up and real­ized I had done some­thing very bad to my arm as I could not straighten it. It hurt like noth­ing I had ever expe­ri­enced. Julie was on her way home and I called her in painful cries. Once she got home, she imme­di­ately drove me to the hos­pi­tal. How­ever, before all this had hap­pened, I had yet to take a shower and I had yet to change from what I had slept in the night before. This is how I entered the emer­gency room that day. I was in pain. I needed help. My hair was unwashed. I did not have on my Sun­day best. The real Kelly Bonewell had entered that emer­gency room, because I needed help, and I needed it now. This was the real me for all to see. In a way, this is what going to church should be like. Not like going to the sym­phony, but more like enter­ing the emer­gency room to receive help where you are allowed to be the real you.

Too often, when we are at church we play a part, but we don’t let any­one know the real story behind our lives. Peo­ple ask us how we are doing, but we quickly reply, Oh, fine. But are we really doing fine? In fact, the truth maybe is that we’ve made a mess of our lives and only we know it. We maybe are moments from doing some­thing really stu­pid and nobody in our lives knows the truth of that.

Early in my jour­ney in being a Chris­t­ian, I had a star­tling expe­ri­ence with this aspect of going only so deep. After becom­ing a Chris­t­ian, I was des­per­ate to find a church, because I wanted to know oth­ers who also knew this Jesus per­son. I had been told you can find peo­ple like these in churches… One day, I was going to class on the train into Chicago and as I flipped open my green Gideon’s New Tes­ta­ment this red-headed guy sat next to me. He quickly asked me if I was a Chris­t­ian because he noted the book I was read­ing.  I told him I was and over the course of that twenty minute ride on the train we talked. Right before he was about to got off at his stop, he invited me to his church. I was grate­ful and excited.

Over the next year, I became highly involved in this tiny lit­tle church which met in this huge old church build­ing in Oak Park, Illi­nois. I came into my own as a Chris­t­ian and got to know the pas­tor of the church and his young fam­ily. Dur­ing this time, I had heard a mes­sage that Tony Cam­polo spoke which really impacted who I was to become as a Chris­t­ian. He main­tained in this mes­sage the vital impor­tance of account­abil­ity with oth­ers in your walk of being a Chris­t­ian. I remem­ber one line in par­tic­u­lar; as a para­phrase, he said, “Unless you become ulti­mately close with oth­ers and open up your life to them, you maybe will be sit­ting in a church pew in your old age, but you won’t be a Chris­t­ian.” I really took that to heart and asked my pas­tor and some oth­ers to join me in liv­ing this life of being account­able with one another.

I can remem­ber our first meet­ing and this is when my eyes were opened. We were a few guys at my pastor’s office, sit­ting on fur­ni­ture which had been bought at the local Sal­va­tion Army and with full cof­fee cups in hand. Because I ini­ti­ated this lit­tle group, I began first and shared what was going on—I didn’t hold back and shared the gen­uine strug­gles that were going on in my life. After that, two other guys did just as I had and shared with vul­ner­a­bil­ity the sin and strug­gles in their lives. When it came to my pas­tor, he looked us each one-by-one and said he appre­ci­ated what we shared, but at that point, he said, he really didn’t have any­thing to share. Taken aback, our time together ended.

I walked away puz­zled. He had noth­ing to share? As I spent the next cou­ple years at that church, I slowly began to real­ize that this was my pastor’s nat­ural way of operating—he never really shared what was going on in his life whether that was from the pul­pit or when we shared break­fast at our favorite diner. At the end of four years, I didn’t know him much bet­ter than the guy who lived next door, who worked third shift and who I would wave and say hello to when we would pass in the hall­way. After spend­ing those four years at the church, I moved and there­fore, had to find another church.

About six years later, we had a sort of reunion with a some who attended this church. Dur­ing our time together, I learned that my pas­tor had left his wife and four kids. He lit­er­ally packed up and moved to where no one knew where he had gone. He sim­ply van­ished. I was shocked. He lit­er­ally left his wife and fam­ily? My pas­tor? And then it dawned on me, it kind of made sense. A lot of other stuff must have been going on in his life which he was just not deal­ing with and he just never let any­one into all of the secrets in his life.

Let me make an impor­tant statement—you will never grow as a Chris­t­ian with­out the help of oth­ers. Those who think that they can live as fol­low­ers of Jesus, but not have any rela­tion­ships that mean any­thing are dead wrong. The way that God designed how we grow as a per­son is that we grow first because we have a devel­op­ing rela­tion­ship with him, but a close sec­ond, is because we enter into deep rela­tion­ships with oth­ers. This is a good ques­tion to ask yourself—how well do oth­ers know the real you? How many gen­uine friend­ships do you have and how deep do they go? And here is an impor­tant point, you might have three thou­sand friends on face­book, but how well are you known? Can you count on at least one hand how many of your friends know most of the nooks and cran­nies of your life? The inevitable truth is this, if you have very few friend­ships that are authen­tic in your life, most likely your life has a shal­low­ness to it. If you have very few deep friend­ships in your life, most likely you are not mov­ing in the right direc­tion. For some, if there are very few peo­ple in your life who can sup­port you, you prob­a­bly are a cat­a­stro­phe wait­ing to hap­pen.

In: Friend to Jesus
Tags: , , , ,
Feb
06
2013

stThis post is from a larger series under the cat­e­gory Friend to Jesus. It is a detailed explo­ration of the three stages of faith: the believer, the ser­vant and the friend of God. If you want to start at the begin­ning, it begins with the post How Look­ing at a Car­avag­gio Paint­ing Can Change Your Life and then con­tin­ues chronologically.

 

Lilies that fes­ter smell far worse than weeds. Shakespeare        

Man, when per­fected, is the best of ani­mals, but when sep­a­rated from law and jus­tice, he is the worst of all. Aristotle

Do you know the word oxy­moron? It’s a great lit­tle word. An oxy­moron sim­ply describes two aspects which seem oppo­site, but in ways, can be sim­i­lar. It’s some­thing that seems like a con­tra­dic­tion on the sur­face, but in the end, both aspects can be true. We nor­mally can find oxy­morona in phrases. Let me show you some of my favorite examples:

  • rest­less sleep
  • ran­dom order
  • new tra­di­tion
  • mod­ern history
  • cold sweat

Here’s another oxy­moron. You are an oxy­moron. You are a saint and sin­ner. That is an oxy­moron. Let me explain:

  • When you become a Chris­t­ian, you become this com­pletely unique per­son unlike any of those around you, in par­tic­u­lar, in rela­tion to those who do not offer their lives to God. You are no bet­ter than any­one else, but in God’s eyes, you are per­fect and holy. You are a saint.
  • At the same time, you are no dif­fer­ent than any­one on planet Earth. At times, you act like Mother Theresa and in oth­ers, you act in awful ways. You have a tremen­dous propen­sity toward sin and doing awful things. At a moment’s notice, you could do some of the vilest things any­one has ever done—you are imper­fect and unholy. You are a sinner.

When you get a chance, go lis­ten to some of the music of Suf­jan Stevens. He is a very gifted musi­cian who writes songs that are not overtly “Chris­t­ian,” but his music is some of the most beau­ti­ful and unique music I’ve lis­tened to that are ded­i­cated to themes of faith. On his album Illi­noise, he has a song enti­tled John Wayne Gacy, Jr. If you want to lis­ten to it, you can find it here (just be aware, it’s not the hap­pi­est of songs…).

If you don’t know the story of John Wayne Gacy—he was this seem­ingly nor­mal guy who lived in the sub­urbs of Chicago, but who also mur­dered count­less young men, bury­ing most of them in the crawl­space of his house. When he was arrested in 1978, his neigh­bors were shocked to learn who he really was —no one sus­pected him of these heinous crimes. After this hap­pened, Gacy in the public’s eye became the epit­ome of evil. I was a child at the time and can remem­ber watch­ing WGN news in Chicago each night and hear­ing of his hor­rific crimes. As a kid, there was no one scarier than John Wayne Gacy.

In the lyrics of his song about Gacy, Suf­jan Stevens recounts all of these evil things he did and early on in the song, you get the sense that the song is just going to be how wicked Gacy was as a per­son. The song is haunt­ing and I remem­ber the first time I lis­tened to it, sit­ting on the edge of my seat won­der­ing where he would take the lyrics. In the last part of the song, Sufan Stevens through his words throws you for a loop and I remem­ber being star­tled by the end­ing. This is how it ends:

And in my best behav­ior, I am really just like him;

Look beneath the floor­boards, for the secrets I have hid.

I was shaken by his final words. The song seems to imply that each of us is capa­ble of doing awful and evil things, and in real­ity, we each have a John Wayne Gacy in us. As the song ended, I was a bit aston­ished. Me? I am like John Wayne Gacy? After think­ing about it, I now tend to agree. You see, I am capa­ble of doing any­thing. You put me in the right cir­cum­stance, I would prob­a­bly do any­thing: mur­der, adul­tery, you name it. I am capa­ble of doing any­thing. And if I say I am not, I am either lying or in denial. As the famous hymn declares, “I’m a sin­ner with­out one plea.”

This is the prob­lem. The Bible states the same truth about who we can be. On the one hand, the Scrip­tures say that we are a new cre­ation (2 Corinthi­ans 5:17). You are totally dif­fer­ent than before you gave your life to God. You are a saint. You are holy. You are right­eous. But then on the other hand, you also have Paul in the New Tes­ta­ment, who for all intents and pur­poses in my eyes is the most ded­i­cated Chris­t­ian that we find in all of the Bible and he makes two remark­able com­ments about him­self. At one point, he says he desires to do what is right, but often doesn’t seem to fol­low through, is caught by sin, and often does the wrong thing (Romans 7:12–20). He essen­tially is say­ing that he knows how to sin really well and some­times he just doesn’t know how to stop. And yet, he doesn’t stop there. Paul goes on to state in another pas­sage that he is the very worst sin­ner that has ever lived. Essen­tially, he is say­ing he’s worse even than John Wayne Gacy, Jr.

Here is a trust­wor­thy say­ing that deserves full accep­tance: Christ Jesus came into the world to save sin­ners—of whom I am the worst. But for that very rea­son I was shown mercy so that in me, the worst of sin­ners, Christ Jesus might dis­play his unlim­ited patience as an exam­ple for those who would believe on him and receive eter­nal life. (I Tim­o­thy 1:15–16)

When I read this, my ini­tial thought is this—Paul is worst guy that ever lived? He’s the best of the best of sin­ners?! I don’t think so. That can’t be right. But those are Paul’s own words and not mine. Here, you have this hero of the Bible stat­ing that he is even worse than John Wayne Gacy, a man who was a ser­ial killer. On the one hand, you have a saint; on the other, a really really bad guy. This is Paul. That is a bib­li­cal exam­ple of an oxy­moron: saint and sin­ner. Both one and the same.

How­ever, often those who are caught in the ser­vant phase of being a Chris­t­ian have dif­fi­culty liv­ing in this ten­sion of being both saint and sin­ner. As the great Brazil­ian nov­el­ist Clarice Lispec­tor wrote in one of her sto­ries “Who hasn’t asked him­self, am I a mon­ster or is this what it means to be human?” Say this to your­self: no mat­ter what, You put me in the right cir­cum­stance and with­out the help from God at my side, I would do hor­ri­ble and evil things. This is a truth and unless you admit that, you will always live in this dan­ger zone. You see, this is exactly what hap­pened to Peter. Right before Jesus is to brought to be mur­dered, he tells his dis­ci­ples what is about to hap­pen and that each of them will dis­own him. Peter is the first and only to shout: Jesus, I will never betray you—these guys might, but not me. It’s just not in me. I will be good; you wait and see. How­ever, Jesus shakes his head in dis­agree­ment and sim­ply says, Oh, how wrong you are, Peter. You shall see. We all know the end to that story, don’t we? Again, when we read about Peter in the gospels, he is liv­ing just as a ser­vant and not as Jesus’ friend. As it applies to this, Bren­nan Man­ning wrote, “The temp­ta­tion of the age is to look good with­out being good.” In Peter’s time, it was no different.

If one thinks about it this way, one of the most impor­tant “rules” that Jesus put on those who fol­lowed him was that if they were to deny him before other peo­ple, this rela­tion­ship with him would be broken.

But who­ever dis­owns me before oth­ers, I will dis­own before my Father in heaven. (Matthew 10:33).

Jesus is basi­cally say­ing if you do this one thing (i.e., deny being in a rela­tion­ship with him to oth­ers), it is the Great Sin that is unpar­don­able; it is the one thing you can do to break the rela­tion­ship between him and you. In this scene, Peter is insist­ing that he will keep that bar­gain. But we all know that didn’t quite pan out for him and on some level, he betrayed Jesus no dif­fer­ent than Judas.

But that dis­cus­sion is for another day and we will flush that issue out a lit­tle bit more in an up-coming blog post…

In: Friend to Jesus
Tags: , , , , , ,
Jan
31
2013

This post is from a larger series under the cat­e­gory Friend to Jesus. It is a detailed explo­ration of the three stages of faith: the believer, the ser­vant and the friend of God. If you want to start at the begin­ning, it begins with the post How Look­ing at a Car­avag­gio Paint­ing Can Change Your Life and then con­tin­ues chronologically.

 

When we are unable to find tran­quil­ity within our­selves, it is use­less to seek it else­where. Fran­cois de La Rochefoucauld

 A per­son is, among all else, a mate­r­ial thing, eas­ily torn and not eas­ily mended. Ian McEwan 

Those caught in this ser­vant phase of faith have a basis of life which sadly often begins in self-hatred. Have you ever met some­one like Michal; some­one who is really legal­is­tic and is resolved to fol­low all rules and deco­rum, no mat­ter what the cost?  The per­fect char­ac­ter we might think of is the Church Lady that Dana Car­vey played some years ago on Sat­ur­day Night Live. Do you remem­ber her stam­mer, “Well, isn’t that spe­cial…”. Enid Strict is the uptight, smug, and pious host of her own talk show, ‘Church Chat.’ She’s bogged down by do’s and don’ts, and at the end of the day is only moti­vated by fear. She shows no joy, but only a dour, snooty, self-righteousness. In her bland and overly-patterned dresses, she is des­per­ately lost from the One she seeks to fol­low. Sadly, the real Jesus is lost to her. Her only reliance is on a myr­iad of check­lists; her only sal­va­tion is sim­ply to NOT do a bunch of things that she deems sin­ful. And if you think about it, it’s not so much what she does that makes her a Chris­t­ian; rather what she won’t do (and what you shouldn’t either). The Church Lady is a per­fect car­i­ca­ture of the per­son caught in the ser­vant stage of faith.

Bren­nan Man­ning in his many books has a thing or two to say about joy­less­ness and espe­cially, this topic, self-hatred. Lis­ten to how he pic­tures the joy­less person—I like how he states it here because he cap­tures for us what is at the core of these trou­bling issues.

Even the com­pul­sive drive for spir­i­tual per­fec­tion, born not of the Spirit of God but as the needs of this world, only adds another sce­nario to the script for self-hatred.

In this quote he seems to say that striv­ing for spir­i­tual per­fec­tion at its foun­da­tion is about self-hatred. A per­son who is bound by rules and reg­u­la­tions are really suf­fer­ing from a hatred of self. Again, on some level this per­son does not really know God’s love because if they did, they wouldn’t hate the per­son they are. But because of this self-hatred, they need to find ways in which to feel good about their lives. This is it. This is the start­ing point of what it means to be a ser­vant too long—self-hatred. Go back to the Church Lady—isn’t that what she is all about—self-hatred? She is no dif­fer­ent than the Phar­isees for whom Jesus had the harsh­est words.

But what is self-hatred and how can that man­i­fest in a per­son? Think about it this way—anyone who is dis­con­nected from God has some form of self-hatred. One can­not be dis­con­nected from their Cre­ator and at the same time, feel good about their life overall—at least not gen­uinely. Now, on the sur­face it may seem like a per­son may be happy or have it all together, but in real­ity they are mask­ing with other things that help them to feel good about their lives. All kinds of peo­ple do this all the time; they use either wealth or peo­ple or what they do to give them this buffer. And guess what, you can also use reli­gion to do this as well. When a per­son does not fully under­stand God’s love for them­selves, it is pos­si­ble that they are still liv­ing a life alien­ated from God. While they use the prac­tices of reli­gion and will tell you all about their ‘rela­tion­ship with God,’, this can be a total sham. This per­son uses reli­gion as a way in which to feel good about them­selves and to cre­ate that feel­ing of being con­nected to some­thing. Again, this can some­times be very dif­fi­cult to detect, because on the sur­face this type of per­son seems to be doing every­thing by the book (lit­er­ally). Some of these exam­ples might be:

  • They make it point to tell you that they waited until mar­riage before hav­ing sex. How­ever, they fail to men­tion they did every­thing else before get­ting married…
  • They know the Bible inside and out. They read it every day and have done so for the last ten years. The prob­lem is that they never apply what they read to their lives…
  • They faith­fully serve in the children’s min­istry at your church and have per­fect atten­dance. You don’t know it, but behind closed doors, they yell at their chil­dren in a way that would make your blood curdle…

The mark­ing point for a per­son who strug­gles with self-hatred and legal­ism is that they have yet to expe­ri­ence God’s grace. This per­son may know the con­cept of grace and its def­i­n­i­tion, but they have yet to expe­ri­ence it for them­selves. Again, this goes back to the idea that some­one can know some­thing in their head, but not in their heart. St. Silouan has a won­der­ful quote here that fits per­fectly. He states, “He who does not love his ene­mies has not yet known God’s grace.” This is where every­thing hangs in the bal­ance, because for the per­son who strug­gles with legal­ism, essen­tially, they them­selves are the enemy and they have never learned how to love that per­son. This then becomes the start­ing and end­ing point. Until this per­son faces the real­ity that God gen­uinely loves them and they can’t do any­thing to earn that, they will con­tinue to work the cycle of “being a good per­son:” 1) self-hatred, 2) the habit of secret sins, 3) guilt and con­dem­na­tion, 4) cov­er­ing these sins with the appear­ance of “right” liv­ing instead of being open about where they strug­gle. Sadly, on and on the cycle continues.

In: Friend to Jesus
Tags: , , , , ,
Jan
10
2013

David Dancing before the Ark, Francesco Salviati (1552-54)

David Danc­ing before the Ark, Francesco Salviati (1552–54)

This post is from a larger series under the cat­e­gory Friend to Jesus. It is a detailed explo­ration of the three stages of faith: the believer, the ser­vant and the friend of God. If you want to start at the begin­ning, it begins with the post How Look­ing at a Car­avag­gio Paint­ing Can Change Your Life and then con­tin­ues chronologically.

Do not use a hatchet to remove a fly from your friend’s fore­head. Chi­nese proverb

Always do right. This will grat­ify some peo­ple and aston­ish the rest. Mark Twain

 

Let’s take another tac­tic and look at the oppo­site of joy. From what we’ve learned about joy, look­ing at the oppo­site, some­one who might be joy­less would be:

  • Some­one who sees the glass as half-empty.
  • Some­one who can­not be themselves.
  • Some­one who is stingy with their love, laugh­ter and life.
  • Some­one who does not have emo­tional sensitivity.
  • Some­one who doesn’t know how to have fun.
  • Some­one who has not expe­ri­enced grace and freedom.
  • And then finally, some­one who tries to put all of that stuff above on other people.

For now were going to call the oppo­site of joy a term you may have heard of—for now, we’ll call it legal­ism. Sim­ply put: only liv­ing by the law can be the oppo­site of joy. When we think of legal­ism, we might think of some­one who puts a lot of rules on them­selves and on oth­ers. But what is at the core of all of those rules? Why do peo­ple become legal­is­tic? One def­i­n­i­tion explains that legal­ism is “strict adher­ence to the law, espe­cially the stress­ing of the let­ter of the law rather than its spirit .” Ray Sted­man puts it in another way:

Do you see how sub­tle [legal­ism] can be? The actual behav­ior can be exactly the same in the case of a legal­ist or of one behav­ing as an authen­tic Christian…It is what is going on inside that is the issue in ques­tion. It is a mat­ter of inner reliance…Legality on the other hand “is a mechan­i­cal and exter­nal behav­ior grow­ing of our reliance on self, because of a desire to gain a rep­u­ta­tion, dis­play a skill, or sat­isfy an urge to per­sonal power.… It is reli­gious per­for­mance, scrupu­lous and metic­u­lous in its out­ward form, but inwardly, as Jesus described it, ‘filled with dead men’s bones.

 I love that final line: legal­ism is “reli­gious per­for­mance, scrupu­lous and metic­u­lous.” When we talk about legal­ism, it’s very hard to catch, because of that very word—per­for­mance. Let me explain. As one exam­ple, there are some actors who are almost too good at what they do. If you speak with some famous char­ac­ter actors who reg­u­larly play vil­lains on tele­vi­sion, they often say that peo­ple will come up to them on the street and say very unkind things to them. This is because these folks can’t dif­fer­en­ti­ate between the actor and the per­son; that’s how good they are at act­ing!  This is pre­cisely the legal­is­tic per­son; they are very good at act­ing like a Christian.

And here is where prob­lems can arise—it is dif­fi­cult not only for the inno­cent bystander, but also for the “legal­is­tic” per­son to rec­og­nize their own legal­ism.  Because a person’s actions are the basis for what it means to be a Chris­t­ian, every­one involved can be clue­less. Sin is not eas­ily quan­ti­fied or seen, and it can be easy to miss in any per­son. When you look on the out­side of most peo­ple, it may look like they are per­fect and with­out any faults. Let’s get one more quote in here to get a clear pic­ture. I like what Mor­timer Adler had to say about the issue:

Sin is not only man­i­fested in cer­tain acts that are for­bid­den by divine com­mand. Sin also appears in atti­tudes and dis­po­si­tions and feel­ings. Lust and hate are sins as well as adul­tery and mur­der. And, in the tra­di­tional Chris­t­ian view, despair and chronic boredom—unaccompanied by any vicious act—are seri­ous sins.

Again, it can be very easy to act like a Chris­t­ian. Remem­ber ear­lier when we said you could play a part or role? We are now going back to the check­list prin­ci­ple of deter­min­ing who is a Chris­t­ian and who is not. How­ever, Jesus said that that is really hard to do, because you never really know what is going on inside of a per­son (Matt 23:25–28). Legal­ism is sim­ply a check­list sal­va­tion, and since you have enough good deeds marked off, you are good to go and there­fore, you must be right with God. If all the out­ward signs are vis­i­ble then every­thing must be okay, right?

There are many exam­ples of those who were legal­is­tic in the Bible. Let me give you a scene from the Old Tes­ta­ment that exem­pli­fies some­one enter­ing into joy and some­one who is being held back. This exchange is a per­fect exam­ple of the joy­ful and the joy­less per­son, the one who has an authen­tic rela­tion­ship with God and the other one who does not. This exchange is between David and Michal which we find in the Old Tes­ta­ment (II Samuel 6).

Let me set the story. David has been recently made king and he is now bring­ing back the Ark of the Covenant to Jerusalem. It’s a really good day. It’s time to cel­e­brate. It’s time to boogey-down. God is about to lit­er­ally make his home in Jerusalem. The Scrip­tures detail an impor­tant scene from the day:

Wear­ing a linen ephod, David was danc­ing before the Lord with all his might, while he and the entire house of Israel were bring­ing up the ark of the Lord with shouts and the sound of trum­pets. As the ark of the Lord was enter­ing the City of David, Michal, daugh­ter of Saul, watched from a win­dow. And when she saw King David leap­ing and danc­ing before the Lord, she despised him in her heart. (II Samuel 6:14–16)

In this scene, David is expe­ri­enc­ing aban­don. He’s expe­ri­enc­ing pas­sion, free­dom, joy unspeak­able. God is now going to hang out with him and he knows things are going to be good, really good. He is deep in cel­e­bra­tion and is over­come by what has occurred to him in the past years when God pro­tected him and what is about to hap­pen in his future. On the other hand, Michal is frozen and see­ing this dis­play of cel­e­bra­tion and affec­tion in her hus­band, it makes her sick to her stom­ach. The real God who wants to enter her life—this God she does not want. She wants only the God of her tra­di­tions, the one where she can stay at a dis­tance. What she is doing has noth­ing to do with cel­e­bra­tion. As the Scrip­tures detail “she crit­i­cized him for act­ing in a way unbe­com­ing to a king.” (2 Samuel 6:20) She even goes on to exclaim: “How the king of Israel has dis­tin­guished him­self today, dis­rob­ing in the sight of the slave girls of his ser­vants as any vul­gar fel­low would!”

Doesn’t this sound like some­thing we might hear today? Again, here’s David aban­don­ing him­self to joy and wor­ship; he’s pro­foundly excited about what is hap­pen­ing and about what is going to hap­pen. It is a sacred moment that Michal can’t see or expe­ri­ence. God is going to turn every­thing around for Israel; every­thing is going to be pro­foundly dif­fer­ent, and yet Michal is say­ing, Come on David can’t you have a bit more deco­rum! Please be respectable. Straighten up! Fix your tie! Please, be an adult.

And rightly so, David doesn’t want to—he wants to be child-like in his wor­ship toward God—giving it his all and maybe not nec­es­sar­ily fol­low­ing all the rules and guide­lines of ‘proper’ wor­ship. He sim­ply wants to cel­e­brate. How­ever, Michal can’t see the value in David’s wor­ship to God. She only is able to value the thing that he represented—his posi­tion and his power—not as the man who shows com­plete devo­tion and aban­don to his God. I love David’s comeback.

David said to Michal, ‘It was before the LORD, who chose me rather than your father or any­one from his house when he appointed me ruler over the LORD’S peo­ple Israel—I will cel­e­brate before the LORD. I will become even more undig­ni­fied than this, and I will be humil­i­ated in my own eyes. But by these slave girls you spoke of, I will be held in honor.’ (2 Samuel 6:21–22)

David says some impor­tant things here. First, he chal­lenges, “I am not going to sim­ply fol­low the tra­di­tions of your father in how I do things. I am going to be myself, lov­ing God as I always have—in my own skin and in my own strange and pecu­liar way.” Next, he chal­lenges Michal by telling her, “Honey, I gotta be me and if that means becom­ing unbe­com­ing or what you believe to be improper in my wor­ship of God, so be it.” Essen­tially, he’s say­ing Yes, I may be dif­fer­ent in how I show my love to God. But Michal, I can’t hold back like you have been used to doing. By mak­ing this state­ment, he fore­shad­ows Peter’s own words cen­turies later—that he is a pecu­liar per­son and in this unique and extra­or­di­nary way, he will be entirely given to joy (I Peter 2:9).

In: Friend to Jesus
Tags: , , , , , ,
Nov
29
2012

This post is from a larger series under the cat­e­gory Friend to Jesus. It is a detailed explo­ration of the three stages of faith: the believer, the ser­vant and the friend of God. If you want to start at the begin­ning, it begins with the post How Look­ing at a Car­avag­gio Paint­ing Can Change Your Life and then con­tin­ues chronologically.

If you lose the joy and the fun, why bother? Jack Heffron

I remem­ber some­one once say­ing that joy is the hall­mark of the Chris­t­ian. Another char­ac­ter­is­tic of what it means to be caught in the phase of the ser­vant with regard to your faith is that this per­son has a lack of joy in their lives. This is one the main miss­ing ingre­di­ents when you get stuck in your faith—it’s often joy that is miss­ing. But what exactly is joy? First, from a bib­li­cal stand­point, there are fif­teen dif­fer­ent Hebrew words and eight Greek words to describe joy. From a gram­mat­i­cal stand­point, it is both a noun and a verb—I can have joy and I do joy.

As I have said, there are many words for joy in the Bible, but per­haps my favorite is the Hebrew ranan. For me, this word encap­su­lates the broad scope and the mean­ing of joy. It sim­ply means to over­come or to cry out in exal­ta­tion or dis­tress. The part I like is the aspect of being over­come by some­thing. Here I can think of what was hap­pen­ing to me inter­nally on my wed­ding day. I was over­come by the experience—something spe­cial was hap­pen­ing when I com­mit­ted my life to Julie. It was a beau­ti­ful day. It was an intense day. It was unlike any other day that I have expe­ri­enced. The pic­ture of that moment in time for me is what it means to be a fol­lower of Jesus in so many dif­fer­ent ways. I mean think about it this way—what exactly hap­pens to us when Jesus enters our lives full-blown? What might be an anal­ogy of what hap­pens to me when I give my life to him?  When joy hap­pens, this is what hap­pens to me—I am over­come by his joy. Did you know that a key char­ac­ter qual­ity of God is joy?

Joy then is sim­ply the pos­si­bil­i­ties of what it means to have a grow­ing rela­tion­ship with your Cre­ator. Often we might think of joy as plea­sure; but it’s not that. A word that I think of when I think of the word joy is aban­don. To under­stand this, let’s go back to my wed­ding day and use an anal­ogy of our sex­u­al­ity. Sex is good and fun and plea­sur­able, because it’s all about aban­doned inti­macy at its core. It’s about enter­ing this dra­mat­i­cally intense and inti­mate expe­ri­ence with your spouse. It’s becom­ing your­self. It’s about becom­ing the other per­son. Spir­i­tu­ally and phys­i­cally, the Scrip­tures describe it as the two becom­ing one (Mark 10:8). Beyond the phys­i­cal plea­sure, to expe­ri­ence sex in its purest form is a soul-pleasure at its core. The best sex is when you get lost in your spouse, and yet at the same time, you become your­self in that inti­macy. You touch a place in your­self like never before. Emo­tion­ally and spir­i­tu­ally, you go to another place like never before, and you under­stand another per­son like never before.

Joy is sim­i­lar. But it is way beyond the feel­ing of plea­sure. Joy is feel­ing good, but it’s also con­sis­tent and deeply expe­ri­enced. It is nat­ural. It’s inside you. You feel good about your­self. You know that God is con­fi­dent in you, and that you are con­fi­dent in him.  Jesus is our model with this, and there­fore, because he was a man of tremen­dous joy, we can do the things he did because of his over­whelm­ing con­fi­dence in his Father, but also because of the Father’s con­fi­dence in him. Jesus guides us when he says, “I tell you the truth, any­one who has faith in me will do what I have been doing. He will do even greater things than these.” (John 14:12) You can walk on the water. You can tell the moun­tains to take a step to the left and move out of your way. You can move into someone’s life and bring life-changing restora­tion. So let’s summarize:

  • First, joy is about rejoic­ing. It’s celebration.
  • Sec­ond, joy is about enter­ing into an expe­ri­ence full-heartedly.
  • Third, joy has an inten­sity about it. Joy = passion.
  • And lastly and most impor­tantly, joy allows peo­ple to be them­selves, really themselves.
In: Friend to Jesus
Tags: , , ,
Nov
01
2012

This post is from a larger series under the cat­e­gory Friend to Jesus. It is a detailed explo­ration of the three stages of faith: the believer, the ser­vant and the friend of God. If you want to start at the begin­ning, it begins with the post How Look­ing at a Car­avag­gio Paint­ing Can Change Your Life and then con­tin­ues chronologically.

 

It is the great­est truth of our age: Infor­ma­tion is not knowledge. Caleb Carr

When you are too sure about God and faith, you are sure of some­thing other than God: of dogma, of the church, of a par­tic­u­lar inter­pre­ta­tion of the Bible. But God can­not be pigeon­holed. We must press toward cer­tainty, but be sus­pi­cious when it comes too glibly. Stan Wiersma

 

And here is the main prob­lem with bas­ing your faith on obey­ing a bunch of rules. Once you get it down, once you become really adept at bas­ing your rela­tion­ship with God on mak­ing sure you you are doing every­thing just right—it’s real easy to become what I call a know-it-all. Have you ever met a know-it-all? This is a per­son who when you are in a room talk­ing and you ask a ques­tion, this per­son comes out of nowhere and gives you the answer unin­vited. This is the per­son who, in any kind of dis­cus­sion, they never let up and will make sure they have the last word. This is the know-it-all:

  • The best books to read—where do I start?
  • The rea­son for poverty—let me give you the real answer.
  • How to make a proper omelet—let me show you how.
  • The very best polit­i­cal can­di­date—let me tell you a thing or two.
  • How to live a right­eous life—I’ve got that one down.

Of course, there are degrees to this type of per­son; some peo­ple are worse than oth­ers. And of course, there are those who are gen­uinely knowl­edge­able, but there is dis­tinc­tion between that type of per­son and the know-it-all. Usu­ally that dis­tinc­tion is that for the know-it-all, there is an arro­gance or pride mixed into the bat­ter. There is a way in which they use their knowl­edge as a weapon or in a man­ner in which they get to shine and be the cen­ter of attention.

Very eas­ily, one can turn into this per­son once one has been a Chris­t­ian for some time. Remem­ber, believ­ing is sim­ply men­tal assent and it is easy to use knowl­edge as the device in which one grows their rela­tion­ship with God. Knowl­edge then becomes the end pur­suit. The end game then can become this: hav­ing a greater under­stand­ing of doc­trine, know­ing the bib­li­cal premise behind bap­tism, know­ing the prophetic lit­er­a­ture of the Old Tes­ta­ment inside and out, etc.—this is what makes you a Chris­t­ian. Now, noth­ing is wrong with any of these kinds of pur­suits, but it boils down to the moti­va­tion behind that learn­ing. Usu­ally, we pur­sue knowl­edge for two rea­sons: for under­stand­ing or for power. The stu­dent who enters med­ical school can learn about dis­ease and the inter­ac­tion with the human body to help oth­ers or they can study and log in all of those hours sim­ply for more money or to wield their influ­ence over oth­ers. Each aspect of knowl­edge is like this: I have met peo­ple who learn about world his­tory, lan­guages, com­put­ers, fash­ion, engi­neer­ing, lit­er­a­ture, mechan­ics, par­ent­ing, the tax code, and even the Bible, not for the joy of learn­ing and grow­ing, but sim­ply to be able to wield that knowl­edge over oth­ers. In the end though, this pur­suit for knowl­edge becomes a machine to impress or control.

This is exactly why this period in the Chris­t­ian life can be so dan­ger­ous. All that we know at this point about God in some sense is just knowl­edge and infor­ma­tion. This is the Peter that we read about in the gospels. Read one of them and see how much he knows and how often Jesus chal­lenges him on what he knows. Over and over, he is telling Peter, “No, it’s not quite that way…let me explain it this way to you.” Do you remem­ber the scene in which Jesus actu­ally calls Peter the devil? This is Jesus chal­leng­ing him as the know-it-all.  He basi­cally tells Peter to shut up. That’s how bad Peter was get­ting in his arro­gance. (Matthew 16:23)

This is what Jesus saw in Peter—he was becom­ing very much like the Phar­isees, the teach­ers of the law with whom Jesus always had the harsh­est words. The Phar­isees were the crème of the crop when it came to being know-it-alls. This impor­tance of knowl­edge over rela­tion­ship with God is the chief com­plaint Jesus has against them. The Phar­isees were care­ful stu­dents of the Jew­ish law, and in fact, in Jesus’ eyes—too care­ful. They had the Scrip­tures mem­o­rized back­ward and for­wards; they defin­i­tively knew what was right and what was wrong. In this pur­suit of infor­ma­tion, they even had come up with some of their own rules! But they missed the point entirely. In con­trast, St. Augus­tine was so auda­cious with this issue that he wrote that “God is best known in not know­ing him.” What Augus­tine was attempt­ing to say was that pur­su­ing just knowl­edge in the end could get in the way of gen­uinely under­stand­ing who God is.

And so with that, in the end the Phar­isees began to mis­use the dogma they stud­ied. This is the tremen­dous pit­fall of the one who bases their entire expe­ri­ence with God sim­ply on attain­ing knowl­edge about him—they will even­tu­ally miss the major points like grace, for­give­ness, and free­dom in Christ. These are things they have never expe­ri­enced per­son­ally, and there­fore, these points of impor­tance don’t con­nect with them inter­nally. Their knowl­edge is merely based on rote learn­ing which is flat and imper­sonal. This per­son might be able to talk at length about grace and other such the­o­log­i­cal fun­da­men­tals, but gen­uinely expe­ri­enc­ing them is dis­tant and missed. This is why Jesus called them “blind guides.” (Matthew 23:16) If a per­son has the essen­tials of faith wrong, they will obvi­ously begin teach­ing oth­ers these ungrounded pre­sump­tions, which will cause fur­ther harm. Look at all the unset­tling stuff that gets prop­a­gated in the church today.

  • Those who have can­cer or rela­tion­ships prob­lems (or any other prob­lem) just don’t have enough faith.
  • You shouldn’t go to “rock” concerts.
  • So and so is the best preacher and you should only lis­ten to him.
  • You have to read this ver­sion of the Bible.
  • That woman should not have her hair cut so short (or that guy so long)!
  • You have to be bap­tized in this exact and pre­cise way.
  • To be a real Chris­t­ian, you have to attend our church.

Obvi­ously some rules are actu­ally right and good, but some­times rules can turn into some­thing that becomes a pre­req­ui­site to hav­ing a rela­tion­ship with God. How­ever, the truth is that some of these stan­dards that we put on our­selves and oth­ers have lit­tle to do with hav­ing a rela­tion­ship with God at all.

And here might be the most impor­tant point—as Chris­tians we have the free­dom to NOT know every­thing. In no way shape or form do we have to know it all. All of life is com­plex and there are mys­ter­ies to which we may never know. Events will occur in our lives that will leave us haunted by these expe­ri­ences and not until we see God face-to-face will we under­stand. As the Bible says, “Now we see but a poor reflec­tion as in a mir­ror; then we shall see face to face. Now I know in part; then I shall know fully, even as I am fully known.” (1 Corinthi­ans 13:12) The world and uni­verse is vast and to expect to have it all down and under­stood is impos­si­ble. There are prob­lems we may face which sim­ply do not have clear and cut answers. When we are pre­sented with a dif­fi­cult ques­tion or prob­lem, it can be reliev­ing to just say these sim­ple words, “I do not know.” There can be a bless­ing in not know­ing it all—it leaves us room to con­tinue to explore. The­olo­gian Clark Pin­nock (as an aside, with his writ­ings, he was very instru­men­tal in our under­stand­ing about the infal­li­bil­ity of the Bible) says words which we would be well-advised to think about in rela­tion­ship to our own lives when we have mis­giv­ings with our faith:

I know what it is to doubt and ques­tion. And I sus­pect that every Chris­t­ian who takes the time to think seri­ously about his faith does so too.

I think these are good words for us to remem­ber. We need to always remem­ber that we don’t have to always know it all.

In: Friend to Jesus
Tags: , , , , ,
Oct
10
2012

This post is from a larger series under the cat­e­gory Friend to Jesus. It is a detailed explo­ration of the three stages of faith: the believer, the ser­vant and the friend of God. If you want to start at the begin­ning, it begins with the post How Look­ing at a Car­avag­gio Paint­ing Can Change Your Life and then con­tin­ues chronologically.

 

In sum­mary of this sec­tion, the per­son who is just a believer is some­one who believes in God, but in real­ity, it is they who run and direct their lives. They prob­a­bly attend church very irreg­u­larly. They usu­ally are not involved at their church in any way. They rarely, if ever, read the Bible or pray (per­haps only over a meal or because a cri­sis in their life has occurred). If you were to really ask them what they believe, they really wouldn’t be sure why they believe in God at all. So, are you a believer—is your rela­tion­ship to God pretty fair-weather? Here might be some tale-tale signs:

  • Do you find that God is dis­tant even though you gave your life to him years ago?
  • Who runs your life? You, God or some­thing else? What is first for you: peo­ple, mate­r­ial things or God? Look at where you spend your time—where is your devo­tion? What is most impor­tant to you?
  • Do you have con­vic­tions or do you free wheel it when it comes to what is right or wrong? Most of the time, what do you do when your con­science speaks to you—change your path or ignore that voice?
  • Do you have a hard time talk­ing about God? Can you pray out loud? Is that because of shy­ness or is it really because God just isn’t very real to you and prayer itself is uncomfortable?
  • Do oth­ers know that you are a Chris­t­ian (e.g., at work, your school, your friends, etc.)? Is this com­mon knowl­edge or do you usu­ally keep that a secret from others?
  • What is your com­mit­ment level? To oth­ers? To church? How involved are you? Is church a com­mon occur­rence or do you often find your­self find­ing an excuse early Sun­day morn­ing of why you shouldn’t go?
  • Do oth­ers know the real you? How good are you at fak­ing it? Do you have some sig­nif­i­cant prob­lems that you prob­a­bly should face?
  • Who are your real friends? With your clos­est rela­tion­ships, how many of those friend­ships are cen­tered on Jesus and you both learn­ing about his life? For those friend­ships in which the other per­son is not a Christian—who influ­ences who—does that other per­son influ­ence you more than the other way around?
  • Is there some­thing that stands in your way in fol­low­ing God and mak­ing him num­ber one in your life? A rela­tion­ship? Your work? Some kind of sin that is always stand­ing in your way?
  • Is Jesus sim­ply your Sav­ior, but not the Lord of your life?

Next time, we will begin to explore what it looks like to be just a ser­vant of God.…

Related Posts Plugin for WordPress, Blogger...
In: Friend to Jesus
Tags: , , , ,
UA-3459392