Truth, Grace, and Time

Today’s discussion is pretty important as it deals with the types of transactions we have with people. It gets complicated though, as the recipient of any of our words or actions can take them the wrong way and make accusations of us that are totally unfair.

We’ll start with the first half… when we find ourselves at odds with another person regarding any issue, maturity would have us in a discussion where we honestly attempted to see the point of view of another. Two parties living in useful discussion with the option to choose side A or side B or to agree to disagree and still treat each other with decency at the end of the discussion. I have many I can thank ofr these types of interactions!!

Unfortunately we seldom live in an ideal world. The passive aggressive nature of our world ends up in some level of either anger that gets expressed or some level of passivity that just tries to avoid the situation now and in the future. so , as much as there is a recognition that the two extremes above should not be, the real issue is the issue going on in our heart as the behavior gets carried out.

Am I the type of person who can face someone who sees things differently than me without attacking their character and resorting to name-calling, belittling, gossiping etc? Also can I face that without just running away. Maybe if my viewpoint can’t withstand any scrutiny, it’s possible my viewpoint needs to be explored, maybe I’m holding on to something I shouldn’t?

The real question is about the issue going on inside of me. It reminds me of the line “If I’m right, I don’t need a defense, if I’m wrong, I don’t have one.” For me this is an issue of standing in right relationship with God. His word informs me of His perspective on everything I need to know about life. I form convictions based on his truth and not cultural opinion, and in the end there are a lot of people who disagree with God, and God gets to be the judge of all that. As a Pastor, God expects me to tell people the truth in as loving a way as possible, but in the end the Bible says people hate the light and love the darkness.

This is the tricky part of the secondary issue raised at the beginning. Jesus truth telling upset the status quo and got him in so much trouble that they killed him. Jesus wasn’t avoiding telling the truth because he knew he would make people feel bad. He told Nicodemus that his birth name and all the stock he put into that wasn’t enough, he needed to be born again, born of the Spirit. He told the rich young ruler to go sell everything he had, that young man went away sad, he was ever going to do that. Jesus was willing to point out enough truth to make people hate him vehemently, read Matthew 23. Consider how deep under their skin Jesus went as he pointed out issue after issue after issue.

The difference between him doing the things he did and us doing the things we do is that Jesus did these things out of love because he was hoping for some life change if people would interact with the truth. We lash out or hide in a response to our anger or rejection or a desire for power over, control, validation. Our behaviors come from intent. Jesus intent in these circumstances came from wholeness, our intent tends to come from emptiness, thus the radical difference.

I pray we learn to love people well. I pray we learn that the response to loving well won’t always produce the result you think it might. I pray that our reaction to the reaction would always be God honoring as well. People get to gossip about me all they want, I don’t get to gossip back. Eye for eye seems reasonable, but eye for prayer is what we get! Enjoy?!?!

As much as the formation happening in my heart is between God and I, there is the observation that God himself made, “It is not good for man to be alone!!” God has created us in his image which includes many things. One of those things is that Father, Son and Holy Spirit have existed eternally together as one.

While this post is not meant to explain the trinity is does point us to the importance of life together.

Now that togetherness for us as humans is tainted with sins committed by us and to us which complicates the matter significantly. The walking wounded can find healing and live out a redeemed story or find themselves … myself in a story where I’m perpetually left out. Rejecting my self before others tell the story I fundamentally believe about myself. My imagination begins to have the force of a reality that isn’t real, except in my head.

Being wounded creates a guarded heart or self-reliance as a reaction. Why put myself in that situation ever again?

A useful part of that story is learning to cultivate a relationship with the God whose steadfast love toward us isn’t just words but action. Jesus love for you and I extends to his own willingness to endure the cross for our blessing, reconciling us to himself and adopting us as his child.

This earth shattering event of love expressed toward me is now a driving cause of repeating this act toward others.

We are to be rooted in Christ and his love. But that love invites us to risk. Rich Mullins has a quote about this kind of love…

“God has called us to be lovers, and we frequently think that He meant us to be saviours. So we ‘love’ as long as we see ‘results.’ We give of ourselves as long as our investments pay off, but if the ones we love do not respond, we tend to despair and blame ourselves and even resent those we pretend to love. Because we love someone, we want them to be free of addictions, of sin, of self – and that is as it should be. But it might be that our love for them and our desire for their well-being will not make them well. And, if that is the case, their lack of response no more negates the reality of love than their quickness to respond would confirm it.”

Loving well is a risk that God knows about all too well. When you and I move into that realm of risky love, may the rejection we might feel never steal away the chance to risk again. The ability to do that comes from a life drenched in Gods love for us, a cup running over… an easy share with the world.

Almost universally we see faith as a private matter, but if this private matter is transformative in nature there will always be a public result.

This is expressed in the purposely ridiculous lyrics I used in a sermon a few weeks ago from Steve Taylor…

“I’m devout, I’m sincere and I’m proud to say
That its had exactly no effect on who I am today.”

We hear these types of statements all the time in political moments, “Keep my personal life out of it” or “my personal beliefs don’t shape my policies or my actions don’t define me.”

Well, they do. The sum total of my actions is my character. and the best predictor of future behavior is past behavior… except when…

We become participants with God on this journey of Spiritual Formation. If I learn how to love the way Jesus loved, there will be public witness to that effect. If I learn to serve the way Jesus served, there will be a change that people will witness.

Which leads to the potential question of “why” it’s happening. Is it happening because Christ has become my focus and I’m learning to live His way? Or is it happening as a result of my just trying a little harder to make sure the externals have better optics. The first one is sustainable and bound for continued improvement all my days. The later is a white knuckle ride of highs and lows where it works sometimes and fails at others.

There’s no doubt that all of this can be a bumpy ride and I wish it was always a steady trajectory towards godliness. But this formation in our hearts, rooted in His love and the power of the Holy Spirit will change who we are. As Isaiah says “We shall become oaks of righteousness, a planting of the Lord for the display of His splendor.”

In one of the last installments relating to our bodies as part of this redemptive work, the author addresses the issue of Sabbath.

In a culture that promotes busyness and getting more things done than the next person as a measure of success, it’s difficult for us to process that committing 1/7th of our week to rest, could make us even more productive.

After being part of numerous silent retreats one of the funny statements is “You haven’t come to a point of rest until the twitching stops.” The need to reach for my phone, fill up the silence, do something with my hands, solve some issue in my personal life, work life, family life. Sitting still seems so unproductive.

But what if these are the moments when we slow down enough to encounter God. Think about the Old Testament heroes that were shepherds. Talk about hours of silent reflection to ponder. To decompress from the rushed state we live in to the restful state of simply “being” and not just “doing”

I have a Pastor friend who like many, takes four weeks of vacation. He has decided to take them all in the month of July. I always feel like a week of vacation barely is enough to break the cycle of busyness, that really two weeks is better. Imagine four all together!

But I’ve always thought about the idea of 52 days of vacation regularly throughout the year. One day every week to release everything that is not God. To be overwhelmed by Him on that day, then press in to my work week.

What kind of solitude and silence could you carve out in your week? No phone in the AM, no radios in your car (just prayer), 30 Minutes of TV cut out in the evening, lunch break dedicated to devotional thought. Take your pick, but find a way to discover a moment to hear through Gods word and through some silence. Wait for the twitching to stop…

I apologize for the break. I’ve been a part of a retreat of sorts (renovating my heart) so a few days have been well spent but not spent on my blog.

We’ve covered the renovation of our hearts, thoughts, actions and the consideration this week has been that of our bodies. As the book states, the place for which we have dominion. While there might be moments when we have dominion over others as boss, parent, coach, teacher, there is one place to center our focus as you and I have dominion over the choices of the will that are ours.

Retraining our body for Christlikeness is part of the discussion. The tongue was used as a great example. James informs us that our tongue is a restless evil full of deadly poison. Retraining it to bring life to those around us instead of death and destruction would be a reflection of a transformed heart.

The next chapter speaks of releasing our body to God. It certainly reminds me of 12:1 and being a living sacrifice and Paul’s statement about “I die daily.” That God would take up residence on the inside of my life and that my living would look like Christ living in me. A sacrifice offered while I am still alive, yielding my body to the purposes of the Kingdom and not reserving it for my own purposes. There is an acknowledgement that this becomes an act of the will, it doesn’t naturally just happen. Just like the Old Testament act of the will “As for me and my house, we will serve the Lord.”

The final chapter addresses the ways in which our body leads us astray. That moment we begin to worship our own body as a center of pleasure and the main instrument in the task of getting what we want. Becoming the self-focused slave of our own desires is the natural end that would crowd out God and a calling to a much greater use of this gift He wants to give us.

There are steps we need to take to ensure that this body doesn’t bring us into a world of pleasurable enticements and away from learning the nature of surrendered giving which brings a very different type of pleasure to us, but then also brings life to the souls of those around us. Satisfaction for self-alone, or a deeper satisfaction that serves others as well.

I’m a big fan of understanding systems theory. Systems theory is the recognition that individual components are a part of a greater whole and therefore the interconnectedness of all of the components is important.

Our body is a system of systems. Nerves, muscles, skeleton, circulation and many more are systems that all have to work together. When one thing begins to fail, it affects the rest of the systems. Moving beyond our bodies into groups of people, each of these is another system. Your family, workplace, friend groups, church, hobby groups, government, Lion’s Club, each one of them is a system. A group with expressed and unexpressed rules, those in formal and informal positions of power, those who are not. I could go on and on.

The chapter today wants to acknowledge our body as a system to which we should be aware. Our body is the center of our Spiritual life. The Bible calls our body a temple of the living God. From the opening page of my blog

“We are not wasted space, we are temples of a Holy Being greater than ourselves, temples to be inhabited and brought to life. -Rich Mullins

The body is my primary place of dominion. I can control my thoughts, my hands, my eye movement, what I touch and what I pull my hand away from when it’s important. I might not be able to have dominion anywhere else, but when it comes to my body…

The danger lies in our desire to have dominion over others who make different choices than I do. Depending on the vast nature of those differences, it can create varying reactions in us. Jesus tossed tables around the Temple and healed people without fixing their theology, there is a range of appropriate reaction.

Like many things in life this body of ours can be used to gratify itself or function as a tool to bless others. In a recent sermon I spoke about the Olympic Athletes that train in Colorado Springs Colorado. The news story was specifically about their diets. The report centered on the idea that food for these athletes wasn’t really the pleasure center that it is for most of us. Food is simply fuel to take care of the greater need of physical peak performance. Just like a high-end engine doesn’t work on the cheapest gasoline, so it is with these Olympic athletes. What they put in their bodies is a means to an end, not the end itself.

So it is with this temple of mine (that isn’t mine!) The older I get, the more my body pays for eating like a 10-year-old. And the older I get spiritually, that observation applies to my heart as well.

¹¹ When I was a child, I spoke like a child, I thought like a child, I reasoned like a child. When I became a man, I gave up childish ways. ¹² For now we see in a mirror dimly, but then face to face. Now I know in part; then I shall know fully, even as I have been fully known. I Corinthians 13:11-12

Now we’re beginning to cross over to where the rubber meets the road, beyond theory and into exercise. As I ponder today’s chapter I consider the idea of having “margin” in our life.

Remember back in the day of notebooks/notepads/ paper you’d take notes on in class. A large empty headers with margins on each side of the paper. You weren’t intended to write on the whole sheet, you were intended to write between the margins. If you do that, and you then need to add something, you have some margin to deal with that. A great illustration for how we fill up our lives. If we’re smart, we’d leave some margin, some space that’s not filled up.

To speak of the spiritual disciplines talked about in this chapter is generally met with a margin type issue, “I don’t have time for that.” As the book so cleverly stated ,” The person who intends to will what God wills must first know what God wills!!” It’s in the course of spiritual disciplines that we shut down some of our desires to hear what God desires for us. Some space is needed in our lives to reorder what’s there.

Spend some time in silence and discover what you might hear. Discover what other type of appetite might feed you rather than just bread alone. Consider (and do!!) an act of service that is a blessing to your church or community. Start off in some small way and see what God might have to teach you through your obedience and making some room!!

The order of practicing all of this to the fullest extent.

Surrender

Abandonment

Contentment

Participation

Let me keep it simple today…

Surrender: when we surrender our will to God we yield to his supremacy in all things.

Abandonment: If our surrendered life is characterized by grace we move on to abandonment. Surrender covers all circumstances.

Contentment: Being assured that God always has and will always do well by us. Psalm 16:6 ” The boundary lines have fallen for me in pleasant places; indeed, I have a beautiful inheritance.”

Participation: We are part of accomplishing God’s will in the world.

Today’s reading starts off with a clear definition of our will. “Our will is what comes from nothing else but us. Will is the ability to originate (or refrain from originating) an act or a thought… what arises from our will is from us alone.” We have the capacity to turn something on or turn something off.

The book goes on to clarify from yesterday’s reading that our character develops from our will that we exercise and goes on to mention that God doesn’t override our will because of the precious nature of it. This gets into the nature of the discussion about sin and the will of humanity. It is an act of love on God’s part to allow us to honestly chose as an act of our will. God doesn’t step in and bribe us to do the right thing or strongarm/force/coerce through power to manipulate us to do the right thing. At the heart of love is choice, I chose my wife, and she chose me, and we made vows to each other. I did not buy her and there was no shotgun at the wedding, we wanted to commit ourselves to each other, this is the way of real love.

Even though God has made his way clear to us, there is an allowance in our choices so that there are moments of conflict between my will and God’s will. Rich Mullins would say my 20’s were conflicted years, this battle to assert my will or submit my will, and after a good decade of that battle you could look back and see all of the things God was trying to save you from if you had just submitted to His will.

The title of today’s chapter “The Splintered Will” helps us understand the tension we live in as we navigate the difference between Rich’s submission to His verses assertion of my own. This tension is called duplicity, from the idea of a double life. when we fall into this mode the human heart moves into some level of deception. Deception directed at others to try and cover up what we are doing, but even worse we fall into self-deception.

This is where the verse about Jesus saying, “My yoke is easy, and my burden is light” comes into play. As Judge Judy always says, “It’s not hard to remember if you just tell the truth.” Sorting out what lies we told to who (including ourselves) becomes a lot of work.

My time spent volunteering with MN Adult/Teen Challenge (Yearlong Drug Rehabilitation Center), the men in the program had spent years lying to themselves and everyone else. It was difficult for them to speak the truth over even the smallest of things. The challenge of truth telling was a new skill to be learned. At some point the switch is flipped and the absolute honesty made for interesting insightful conversation!! But that’s the goal here…

One Heart, One Mind , One Soul, redeemed and reconciled by the grace of God!!

We’ve spent a lot of time considering our thoughts and feelings, how they are rooted in the condition of our hearts. Today’s topic is that of character. The books definition of character is “the internal structure of self that is revealed by our long-term patterns of behavior.”

An old definition is “Who you are when no one is looking.”

A definition from the memory banks is “The best way to judge someone’s character is by how they treat someone who can do absolutely nothing for them in return.”

It reminds me of 2 Peter 1:5-8…

“⁵ For this very reason, make every effort to add to your faith goodness; and to goodness, knowledge; ⁶ and to knowledge, self-control; and to self-control, perseverance; and to perseverance, godliness; ⁷ and to godliness, mutual affection; and to mutual affection, love. ⁸ For if you possess these qualities in increasing measure, they will keep you from being ineffective and unproductive in your knowledge of our Lord Jesus Christ.”

I see the underlined words as an orderly structure to growth in our formation. An entry into a life of faith should stimulate some good things that are new for us. Add to those new things should lead to some self-control to repeat the new thing we have learned. Things like love your enemies, pray for those who hurt you. Then when you get some self-control to do the right things, do them over and over again in perseverance. It’s in this perseverance of doing the new things God asks of us that character, His character begins to be formed in us.

Our true character is what we do during our reactions in life. It’s easy to, as an act of the will, to try and make our actions reflect Christ. I look at my upcoming day and see moments where I need to gather myself, check my heart and walk into situations where I know I am going to love my enemy. I want God to be God of my actions. I might succeed or fail to do what God wants from me in those moments.

But life isn’t always a clear road of intention, sometimes I come face to face with someone who I know is trying to undo me out in the public square and they say something intended to harm my soul. It’s in these reactive moments when I hope and pray that God could lead me in the reaction I would give in that moment. Can I love when being unloved, can I serve when someone wants to steal, can I turn the other cheek when someone is so willing to slap mine? It’s in these moments when our character is revealed and I pray the end of the above verse, that I will be effective and productive in my knowledge of the Lord Jesus Christ.

Character is what I feel or do without thinking and I pray that a renovation of my heart would allow me to live like Jesus, who when being falsely accused, drug off to an illegal trial and about to die a grizzly death in less than 24 hours would be able to take the time to pick up an ear laying on the ground and take a moment to heal someone whose goal in the moment was to kill Him. Thinking of others before you think of yourself… remarkable!