God’s Spiritual Roadmap

God has two primary goals for us, and both of them start with the gospel. According to the apostle Paul, the gospel is the power of God for salvation (Rom. 1:16). In practice, the power of God in the gospel accomplishes two things:

1) The gospel is the message of salvation from sin through Christ’s atoning death on the cross, his resurrection from the dead, and his enthronement as King of Kings and Lord of Lords. God wants me to believe in the gospel, to give my life to Jesus, and thus allow him to forgive me and cleanse me from the guilt of sin.

2) The acceptance of the gospel ushers me into an intimate and loving surrendered relationship with the Father through the Son within which he can begin to transform my heart and mind. In this process he cleanses me, heals me, strengthens me, and slowly begins to unravel and redeem the broken and twisted parts of my life, thus freeing me from the power of sin.

In most of modern Christendom, we have tended to focus overwhelmingly on the first, and paid very little attention to the second. It’s true that you cannot really have the second part without the first, but forgiveness, wonderful gift though it is, is far from all God wants for us. He never intended for us to get stuck at the first part. In fact one might even say that forgiveness is but a necessary first step toward what God really wants for us.

For the last five years or so, my ministry has primarily involved helping Christians (and non-Christians) move into this second part of the experience of God. It is a ministry of relational spiritual nurture, and it happens slowly — more like a crockpot and less like a a microwave. It doesn’t happen in a six-week (or even twelve-week) program. It happens best in the context of an ongoing relationship. Remember, Jesus spent three years with his disciples and even then they needed the Holy Spirit to finish them off.

The journey God ultimately wants to lead us all on is to a deeper experience of his love, and consequently, to a greater trust. This is discipleship, or what Jesus calls “abiding in him” (John 15:4-6).

Abiding deeply in Jesus changes us in the following ways:

1) We find an ever-deepening comprehension of God’s love (Eph. 3:16-19), enabling us to rest in that love. Paul calls this “the fulness of God.” Simply, we are learning to live loved. Living loved frees us from fear (1 John 4:18).

2) We develop a richer understanding and appropriation of grace, and the consequent freedom from a desperate need to perform or produce in order to be acceptable to God.

3) We increasingly enjoy a life characterized by a “peace that passes understanding” (Phil. 4:7).

4) We increasingly surrender more of ourselves to God (because we will not obey one whom we do not trust, and we will not trust one whom we do not believe loves us), and thus more often choose obedience.

5) We find growing freedom from the need/desire to manipulate or control circumstances and people to make things turn out a certain way (Matt. 11:28-30).

6) And overall, we experience a growing holiness (sanctification), a greater sense of being led by the Spirit, and the increasing manifestation of the fruit of the Spirit (Gal. 5:22-23).

Because you cannot give what you do not have, these six ongoing internal changes God makes in us equip us for gospel blessing (what we typically think of as “outreach” or “evangelism”) in the following ways:

1) God develops in us a greater capacity to love others.

2) God develops in us a greater ability to live love without agenda (a greater capacity to nurture others in their own search for God without trying to control them or to trying to produce certain outcomes).

A Christian simply cannot engage in outreach effectively without the transformation that only comes through a discipleship of abiding in Jesus. Said another way, outreach flows naturally and organically from a life of abiding in Jesus. Fully formed disciples truly become leaven in the world around them.

Over the last ten years, these truths have become some of my deepest convictions about God’s work in the world. The place to begin all ministry must be helping people come to a deeper experience of God’s love and a growing intimacy with him. In the end, it is only the power of God that can change us. As Jesus reminds us, “apart from me, you can do nothing” (John 15:5).

Shalom

The Road Back to Church – First Steps

Confession Time: For the last 10 years or so now I’ve been working through some issues related to my experience of church. In the process, I’ve also been working through some issues related to personality, identity, family-of-origin, and calling. All of that has kind of come to head in the last few years, during which I’ve been in a fairly consistent funk. Some might be tempted to call it a mid-life crisis, but since it doesn’t involve motorcycles, ponytails, or piercings, I’m just going to keep calling it a funk. One could, perhaps, say I’m funky! 😉

Anyhoo, it’s no secret to those who know me that I’ve been hurt by church. I often refer to myself as a recovering church minister, and some would say that a certain amount of hurt just goes with the territory. But the idealist in me bristles at that. ChurchHurt (yes, you can hashtag that) should not be a given, something we just expect. God’s people shouldn’t hurt one another, I think. Perhaps it’s naive of me to believe that, but nonetheless, that belief persists. It’s often said that part of the Hippocratic Oath for physicians is, “First, do no harm.” If doctors can pledge that, why can’t Christians? Anyway, that’s a part of my baggage. But there are other parts.

So since I often process things best by writing, I’ve decided to begin a little blog series here in which I get some of my inner monologue out into the light where it can be weighed and measured in a way that’s healing. I intend to explore the best and worst of all my church experiences, starting as a child and moving forward. The goals are to come to some clarity about where I’ve been, to discover God in the good and the bad, to make some degree of peace with it, and most importantly, to perhaps give me some direction going forward.

I intend to try and be as honest as I’m capable of regarding how I’ve been personally impacted by my interaction with churches and church people. But I also intend to be as fair as I can. People often hurt others unintentionally. And I’ve found, especially in the fairly conservative churches I’ve mostly inhabited, that we’ve frequently struggled with projecting both Truth and Love at the same time. In trying to be as charitable as I can, I think most people in churches have good intentions, even if those intentions often play out in unhealthy or unholy ways. So this is NOT about bashing certain people or certain “camps” of believers.

While my experiences will certainly be seen through my own eyes, I will try my best to see my experiences through the cultural norms that existed at the time (things were quite different in the 1970s, for example, than they are today). This will allow me, I hope, to extend some grace to people and situations that I didn’t have the capacity to extend grace to at the time.

So I don’t know where this will all lead. First and foremost, I hope it brings some clarity and healing to my own soul with respect to church. But maybe along the way, you’ll find something useful in it as well.

Shalom.

Next: Growing Up Methodist

Identity and Expectations

When does trying to meet the expectations of others become unhealthy? Most of us have found ourselves on a wicked treadmill of being driven or consumed by the expectations of others.

I’d like to suggest that the only way to not be constantly blown around by the expectations of others (or by the ridiculous expectations we sometimes place on ourselves) is to live in a state of confidence in your own identity. Who you truly are. Who God has made you to be.

Ah, but where do we acquire such confidence? Most people I know have only the vaguest sense of who they really are. If you ask them who they are, they’ll start telling you what they do. Push them a bit farther and they quickly grow quiet. Only God can give you such confidence because only God can give you your identity. Only your Creator can tell you – accurately – who you were created to be.

Furthermore, only knowing who we really are – at a heart level – can direct us toward what we are to do (our calling or vocation), and by extension, away from what we’re not to do.

Sadly, many (most?) people are deaf to God’s “still, small voice.” Many (most?) people cannot hear God speak into their Iives his message of peace, love, healing, and identity. This is so because they have not created any space in their lives in which they could hear God.

Intimacy with God is the cultivated space in which God can do the work of deep healing and identity formation in the heart of the disciple.

We will never move beyond the warped sense of self we all possess until we create the space in our lives in which God can begin to work on our hearts – shredding the false self and all its attachments, props, and masks – breathing life into the shell that remains, and recreating a new person – redeemed and transformed into his image, and thus confident in their identity.

Shalom