The Soul’s Worth

I’m reading through a book by Gerald May called The Dark Night of the Soul.  Gerald May was a psychiatrist who, in his own words, became weary of the medical profession’s way of handling the soul of patients.  He eventually became a spiritual director and author of several works related to spiritual development.

In Dark Night of the Soul, May, exploring St. John of the Cross’s work by the same title, discusses the work of the Lord God deep within a person’s being as a mysterious and beautiful thing, an intimate work that is initiated in love and is designed to free us for love.  St. Teresa of Avila was a contemporary of John, and in fact, he counted her as one of his spiritual mentors and teachers.  Being contemplatives, both Teresa and John recognize the utter worth of the human soul, its beauty and goodness.  May quotes Teresa as saying, “I can find nothing with which to compare the great beauty of a soul… we can hardly form any conception of the soul’s great dignity and beauty.”

Those words certainly sound mystical to our ears.  We rarely speak of the soul today, although it is gaining more attention in some circles, like  Christian psychotherapy.  John and Teresa recognized it as, next to God Himself, the most beautiful and worthy thing.  They loved it, adored it, respected it, because they began to see that God treated it with such dignity and love, that Jesus came for ransom of it and freedom for it.

There is a recent movement in Christendom to recognize what’s been called the “good heart.”  This “New Covenant” movement (as one author puts it), which I believe God is very much behind, seeks to bring to light the inherent goodness and strength of a heart given over to Christ, that it is no longer “deceitfully wicked” as the Scriptures say of a heart detached from Him (Jeremiah 17:9), but rather “good” and even “noble,” to quote Jesus (Luke 8:15).  This runs counter to much contemporary theology, which seems to see the heart as perpetually wicked, and which tries to operate a kind of “sin management,” in Dallas Willard’s words, to keep the believer from running amok doing all kinds of bad things.

The implication of the “good heart” theology is pretty radical.  It means that we can begin valuing the deep heart within once more, and recognize the awesome thing that it is.  It means we can work with one another to help set each other free, and that once we are disentangled from all the briars (what John of the Cross calls “attachments”), we can “run in the paths of [God's] commands” (Psalm 119:32) and walk in the “path of life” (Psalm 16:11) that God shows us.  We can drop the sin management stuff and bring dignity back into our ministry with folks.

What stands out to me in what Teresa of Avila and St. John of the Cross say is that recognizing that the heart is “good” isn’t enough.  They push the envelope even further.  They suggest that the heart (or “soul” in their vernacular) has “great beauty.”  John writes that once we enter fully enough into union with God, we will see ourselves aright.  ”The soul,” he says, will “see herself as a queen.”  This is far beyond merely being “good.”  This is a kind of glorious honor, an extravagant dignity.  The soul is ravishing.  Glorious.  Beautiful beyond compare, especially to the One who made her.

Could this be a part of the “secret wisdom” that has been “hidden” and that “God destined for our glory from before time began”? (1 Corinthians 2:7).

In our Christmas hymn, we sing of how “the soul felt its worth.”  But how often has that happened?  How many people do you know who can say, truly, “I have felt the weight of my soul’s worth, and it is beyond telling.”  Can you say that?  Can i?  What is that, the soul’s worth?  What could that be?

Sitting in my office meeting with people day after day struggling with life, what would it mean for me to recognize that, no matter how scarred and damaged and suffocated their souls may be, they are still beautiful and the reason for the Great Invasion brought by Christ?  I wonder, what would this mean to our ministries and our churches if we were to really believe it.  What would it do to our personal lives, our interactions with God and with one another.

 

Conversatio Morum

NEWS?

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All of us have hang-ups when it comes to praying. Sometimes we get tripped up and stumble around for awhile trying to figure out how to pray. Some of us at various times wonder if we should pray. At other times, we know we can, we know we should, and we even know how, but we simply do not have the desire to pray. Some of us have been stuck in dry, empty routine for some time. Others have completely given up on the hope to really connect with their Creator in any meaningful way.

Books have been written on this subject for hundreds of years. And a few that I’ve read are very good! (Wow, what an arrogant statement.) I have neither the calling nor the wisdom to offer more now on the subject, except for a bit of personal experience that I bet most of us can relate to.

Looking back over the last few months, I’ve discovered a certain theme in regard to the ways I’m approaching God through prayer. I rarely begin where I am. Rather, I always feel like I have to crawl to some certain place to where God is before I can set out to really share my heart with the Lord or hear from Him. Like I have to ascend a mountain or climb to some spiritual level to reach Him. It’s not penance. I don’t mean that I feel like I have committed a certain sin that keeps me from His presence. I mean, rather, that I feel as though I have to earn His ear, like I have to clamor for His attention. Do something fantastic, even if it’s reaching some level of humility so that I can come before Him (forgetting that I immediately become proud of my humble attainment anyway).

The feeling, if I were to put it into words, goes something like this: “I am not worthy of God. He’s really busy. He’s not that interested in me or my life. So I’ll just be really cautious in the way I approach Him.” Translation: “I am not worth anything to God. He is limited in power and limited in love. I will be faithless and godless and only pretend to be holy so that I can feel better about myself.”

My devotions have become routine. Communion with God has been replaced with assumptions (“I think this is what God thinks about this or that”). Obedience has become guesswork (“I guess God would want me to do this or that”). And the zeal and zest for life, that expectancy that Paul spoke of when he said he approaches God with an anticipation of “What’s next, Papa?” has been usurped with dull and drab predictability. “I wonder what’s next” is spoken aloud to no one in particular.

It’s all certainly a step away from “fearlessly and confidently and boldly draw near to the throne of grace” found in Hebrews.

I’ve noticed this for a few weeks now. I’ve been paying attention to the way in which I approach God, or don’t. And why. I had conversation with a friend and afterwards wondered why I wasn’t asking Jesus in that moment how to encourage him or what I was to take from our time. I have decisions to make at work. Have I consulted God about them? There are hundreds of men gathered on a mountain right now to meet God, and I have been called in to intercede for their time. Am I asking Jesus how to do so? What of my own heart? Am I coming to Him with the ache and confusion and hope — eyes wet with tears or fists raised to the sky, whatever the moment calls for — or am I biting my lip and putting on a smile and faking my way through?

How I’ve gotten here isn’t so important as the question of what I am to do with this reality. What do you do with that? It can be a bit despairing, actually. Okay, so I’m blowing it in a big way. Great. Whew, that’s a relief. Glad to hear it.

The options are pretty few, actually. As I see it, I can either 1) continue with what I’m doing now, or 2) recognize what I see as less than what I want and move toward change. Given those two choices, I’d think the second is the most appealing. The problem is, though, I’ve tried this. I’ve tried to get up earlier to pray more. I’ve tried to read more Scripture. I’ve opened a couple of those books I mentioned on prayer. Nothing seemed to make any lasting change, though.

The reason none of them worked is because in doing them, I’m still living in the first option. It’s the same thing. I’m not going to God. I’m trying to get myself together, get to a better place of prayer, but I’m not actually praying at all. I’m doing it on my own. Which was the source of the problem to begin with. So this is what I finally decided to do. A few days ago, I asked Jesus something very simple, “Stir in me the desire to seek You.” That’s it. Nothing profound. I can’t even say it was particularly heartfelt. I didn’t wait until it “felt” good at all, or until I “felt” passionate desire for it. I’d wait forever and never approach Him if that were the case.

And then yesterday a friend shared his story of having conversation with God. It was over something really simple, something so small, in fact, that I thought, “You can’t do that. Can you? I mean, God doesn’t care about something like that. Does He?” Turns out, God did care. And He showed my friend that He cared. And He honored my friend by his coming to God about it in prayer. He met him, right where he was. This friend of mine was the first to admit that it wasn’t a particularly nice place he was in. He was irritated and selfish. But he came to God anyway. And God honored him for it with friendship.

Well, this story pierced me. And anytime something pierces me I always assume that it’s God’s doing. Most of the time, anyway. Certainly this time I felt it was, since I just asked God for help. Then there were two more things that happened. First, after I heard that I asked Jesus if there was anything that was keeping me from hearing His voice. (In John 10, Jesus promises that we would hear His voice.) I listened, and I heard His reply. He said, “only you.” In other words, only my refusal to come “boldly” into His presence. That’s it. Not my sinfulness, not my selfishness, not my irritability, not my weariness, not my insolence. It’s not a matter of time or attention or spiritual warfare. It’s a matter of trust. Do I believe Him when He says that I really can have intimacy with Him, that I can commune with Him on matters of the heart?

The second thing that happened is that I read somewhere that all the things that keep us from praying are not important. “Never mind them,” the author said, and I received it as confirmation for what Jesus told me. Nothing can keep us from Him.

And so, there’s this subtle change that is taking place in my heart. It is a shift of orientation. (“Orientation,” by the way, comes from the word “orient,” which means “to face toward the east.”) It’s a small shift, but the effects of it are great. Therapists call this change “generative,” meaning a small change on one level has momentous effects on another. Thinkers and writers of old had a phrase for this kind of change — conversatio morum. Death to the status quo. Richard Foster explains its meaning as “constant change, constant conversion, constant openness to the movings of the Spirit.”

I’m re-opening myself to these “movings of the Spirit.” It’s been a combination of my desire to be done with the status quo and the Lord’s kindness that has led me back into His presence. It’s a cliché to say this, I know, but the truth of it is so profound: God is always present. He is here and available to us now. “The sheep listen to his voice and heed it; and he calls his own sheep by name and leads them.” This is the promise of Scripture.

We must begin here, with simply coming to our Shepherd as sheep in need. Maybe again and again. Everyday, maybe. Or maybe just for the first few seconds of prayer, a kind of recognition that we come into the throne room of grace by grace. Not because we’ve ascended to where it is, but because God has condescended to us in Jesus. Anything else would be unbelief, a refusal to acknowledge Jesus as the Christ. And from that place, from a conversation already happening, then we can grow in intimacy with our Lord. But it must begin with recognizing that He’s come to us. I can’t remember who said it, but I remember hearing once that every other religion is man’s attempt to get to God. Only in Christianity has God come all the way to man. All the way. We start there. The easy fellowship and light burden of walking with God must begin with our response to His invitation to draw near now.

 

A Few Precious Words

Todd Nettleton, a friend and author of Justice For All, wrote on his blog this week, “If you choose carefully the right words, you don’t need nearly so many.” He was highlighting Abraham Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address, which every junior high student studies and often memorizes in history class some 150 years after it was first delivered at the dedication of the Soldiers’ National Cemetery in Pennsylvania four months after the infamous Battle of Gettysburg.

Edward Everett took the stage before Lincoln and addressed the crowd for more than two hours. His oration was 13,607 words long. Lincoln followed him, speaking for somewhere between two and three minutes a speech consisting of 272 words. Tradition has it that he threw together those words on the train ride to the cemetery. But how powerful those words became.

Who remembers Everett? Who remembers anything he said? Perhaps a few history books have some of the transcript recorded. But who can ever forget the iconic beginning of Lincoln’s address, “Four score and seven years ago.” To this day, the world remembers his passion.

I love what Todd says to this. He points out that you don’t need many words when you choose them carefully, when they are packed full of the power and passion of truth and beauty. When they are compelling and stir the soul. When they give vision toward a freedom to fight for. When they are transcendent.

I thought of Jesus’ last words, his recorded conversations with his friends and his last, dying utterances from the cross. Everything from “I go to prepare a place for you” in John 14 to his prayers for us in John 17 to, perhaps most poingnantly, his declaration from Golgotha that “it is finished” (John 19:30).

Some — not all, but some — of what Jesus meant by “it” being finished was the very thing that Lincoln tried to speak of in his Address. It is what the Nez Perce Chief Joseph fainted in longing for in his famous “from where the sun now stands, I will fight no more forever.” Eisenhower had it when he said that “freedom has its life in the hearts… of men.” Ralph Waldo Emerson wanted it when he asked, “For what avail the plough or sail, or land or life, if freedom fail?” Poets and politicians, warriors and lovers since the beginning have longed and fought for this it that Jesus simply declared was then, at the cross, finally done with.

In that declaration, something, perhaps everything, of the old world started dying, and the New started coming on. All of the freedom, the true freedom, that we long for was given us by His act on our behalf.

 

Time Wounds All Heels

There are some things that time can not mend. Some hurts that go too deep, that have taken hold. -Frodo, The Return of the King

Frodo and Sam have come a long way on their journey. For months the two hobbits fought all that Mordor would bring against them in their quest to save the Shire — and the whole of Middle Earth — from ultimate destruction. “We set out to save the Shire, Sam,” Frodo told his faithful friend. Tears streamed down the loyal gardener’s face as Frodo’s words fell on his ears. Somehow, he knew that Frodo could never go back to his old life. He had seen too much. His heart had been burdened too heavily by the weight it was given to bear. Frodo finished his statement with a finality of such poignancy that Sam’s heart was wrenched from his chest, “And it has been saved. But not for me.” The fellowship that had for so long protected and sustained each of them had at last come to an end. Frodo was to board the last ship leaving for the Grey Havens, for Tolkien’s metaphor for heaven. His time on earth was over.

I hate the expression that “time heals all wounds.” It’s not true. Time heals nothing. In fact, the distance time creates is often an illusion, and can even crater a wound instead of healing it. “How do you pick up the threads of an old life?” Frodo asks himself. “How do you go on, when in your heart you begin to understand there is no going back?” There is a deep truth that Frodo, years after the fellowship had completed its mission and he had returned to the Shire, began to understand. Time had not healed his heart. It had not erased the pain of his body and mind. The weight of the ring had crippled him beyond the restoration that time could offer. He needed something greater to resurrect his life. He needed the “far green country under a swift sunrise,” as Gandalf had earlier described it, where ” the grey rain-curtain of this world rolls back, and all change to silver glass…the white shores… and beyond.”

In Tokien’s world, the ring represents evil in its purest form, and the ring bearer is slowly taken beyond the border of life into the realm of death. Throughout the story, Frodo’s life is slowly but inevitably disintegrated and diminished, soon beyond any hope of repair available on earth. Such it is with all of us since the Fall. The sin that we inherited through disobedience weighs on all of us. Even the earth itself has been set against us: “Cursed is the ground because of you; through painful toil you will eat of it all the days of your life” (Genesis 3:17). All of us have been wounded and will be by the Evil One, as God said we would (v. 15). None of us escape it. And nothing the world can offer will be able to heal these wounds or resurrect our hearts that have been weighed down too heavily by the effects of separation on our souls, torn as they are from life toward diminishment, disintegration, and, ultimately, death.

If we are to be restored at all to the life we were made to live, it must come from beyond us and beyond our world, yet come into our world to reach us where we are. We are far too weak to even reach out beyond ourselves for it. It must come to us, and it must come all the way to us.

This is the promise of Jesus for us. It is why His coming is such good news, and why people for centuries have fallen into His provision with abandon. Because there is no other. Nothing else can restore us, including time itself. What Jesus offers us is a complete restoration, so whole and complete that the Scriptures refer to it as a resurrection, meaning that the life we live now is death in comparison to the life we get to live.

I am astounded at this offer. How can we refuse it, if we really knew what it was about? And the cost… it was everything for Him. He bore the weight of it, taking it from us and transferring it to His own shoulders. Apparently, He could not stand the thought of our dying, being lost to Him forever. And so He came, wild with desire and hope and joy He came. My friends, this is the offer. How can we refuse Him? How could we turn our backs on life toward the death we now experience in our souls? How could we but faint into Him and accept this invitation? Nothing more matters to Him than our restoration back into the life He always intended us to live, a life full and at His side.

I am taken by His love, and I can do nothing but gasp with my fainting breath a solid yes to the offer. Where else could I go?

 

The Judgment of God

What a way to open up a discussion, huh! “The Judgment of God.” That’s about as heavy a phrase as I can imagine reading. It sounds like the title of some 1970 apocalyptic movie, or a promo for a particular ideology that was touted during the days of Hurricane Katrina.

But before we all sigh under the weight of that phrase, let me explain why I titled this talk as such. First off, I figured it would either run you off or intrigue you enough to actually read on. So, it may be a bit manipulative, I confess. I figure it’s worthwhile to have friends in the world, and if you can’t have them you might as well have enemies. I want at my funeral two extremes of folks present: those that are wailing and mourning, rending their clothes that I am dead, and those celebrating joyfully that I am gone. (In the latter category there will be still ideally two groups of people: Those that are joyous that I finally made it Home (and that I would be hearing these words) and those that are simply happy that the thorn in their flesh is finally out of their lives. Now that would be a worthwhile event.)

Really, though, I just wanted to discuss this topic because it’s one that I’ve not understood well, and my impetus for writing always seems to stem from some sense of wonder or from some need for clarity, and usually it’s an odd mix of both, with a dash of hope and desire thrown in for flavor.

The other day I was listening to a talk given by Dr. Richard Swenson, the author of Margin, in which he was discussing the busyness of our lives that exists in such extreme measures that we no longer have time for the things most important. In his diagnosis of the malady of our day, he said that “we need to judge [those things that steal our time],” and then went on to explain that they need to be brought into the light and dealt with. His use of the word caught my attention, and I had to listen through that portion of the talk several times to figure out why it did. What was it about his statement that grabbed me?

Often we think of judgment strictly in terms of condemnation. Maybe the most famous reference to this kind of judgment comes from Jesus’s statement in Matthew 7:1, that we are not to judge “that ye be not judged.” The Greek word used here, krinō, is the same word Jesus uses in John 12:47 when he says, “For I did not come to judge the world, but to save it.” This is the typical understanding of judgment we have — a judgment against a person, which is condemnation.

But there is another kind of judgment Jesus speaks of. It is a judgment regarding a matter or against a thing. In Luke 12, Jesus is speaking to a crowd regarding “reading the times,” predicting the weather based on the direction of the wind or the look of the sky. A few sentences later he uses the word interpret and then judge in almost the same breath. He says, “How is it that you don’t know how to interpret this present time? “Why don’t you judge for yourselves what is right?” (v. 56b-57) In other words, Jesus is speaking here of a kind of discernment, of coming to an understanding regarding the nature of something and its moral standing. Is it right? Is it good? Is it true? Later, Peter and John, both close friends and disciples of Jesus who were taught to think clearly and discern the order of things by the Master himself, use the same word when speaking to the religious council of the day. They tell them to “Judge for yourselves whether it is right in God’s sight to obey you rather than God” (Acts 4:19).

In this way, judgment becomes a kind of sorting things out, a way to discern what is real and right. We are supposed to do this. It is our mandate and our place. “To search out a matter,” goes the Proverb, “is the glory of kings” (25:2). To bring light to the darkness. (See also 1 Corinthians 6:2-3 — a pretty humbling Scripture.)

The astounding news of the gospel, that Jesus did not come to condemn us (John 12:47; Romans 8:1), is truly breathtaking, especially considering that we stood absolutely opposed to God (Romans 5:8). That God loved us enough not to hold against us our hatred toward Him — that is such a relief. But, let me be clear on something — and this is often where I think many teachers in evangelical circles get hung up — this work of Jesus, as astounding as it is, stands incomplete. It’s not enough to simply be accepted by Christ. It’s not. Let me explain.

To just be accepted by Christ, were it not for the rest of the ministry He offers us, would be somewhat analogous to reading a letter from our parents telling us how much they loved us… while on the beaches of Normandy getting shot. It’s great. It’s wonderful, I mean, that they would love us and write to us to let us know, but that does nothing to help us with the trouble at hand. Or, maybe it’s a bit like a POW getting a visit from a dignitary, say even the President, and they tell them how proud they are of their service and how they give them a full pardon for any wrongdoing done back in the States. The problem is, though, that the President has no authority to free the person from imprisonment, and so he would have no chance to exercise his full pardon back home. Sorry, man. It’s just the way it goes.

Do you see how unhelpful it would be, even cruel it would be, to be accepted by someone but then have no access to them. Jesus did not leave us like that. He did not judge us, but He did judge someone. Check this out…

(This is Jesus talking here…) “When [the Holy Spirit] comes, he will convict the world of guilt in regard to sin and righteousness and judgment: in regard to sin, because men do not believe in me; in regard to righteousness, because I am going to the Father, where you can see me no longer; and in regard to judgment, because the prince of this world now stands condemned.” (John 16:8-11). Jesus judged the Evil One. What did that do for us? It disarmed this Enemy of his and ours, so that now we are free from his clutches (John 12:31; Col. 2:15; Matthew 28:18; Col 2:10; Eph. 2:6, 1 John 4:4). “With justice He judges and makes war” (Revelation 19:11). This is Jesus, our Rescuer. Who does he make war with? Our captor, the one who stole us from Him. He is our “rescuing knight” (Psalm 18:1-2). And we have the same authority over Satan and his kingdom that Jesus does.

Obviously there is more that Jesus did and that the Spirit of Christ continues to do for us, evidenced even in John 16:8-11, beyond judging our Enemy. But the grace we experience because of this judgment cannot overstated.

There will certainly be a day of judgment, in which the motives of men’s hearts and the actions of their lives will be judged (Romans 2:16; 1 Corinthians 4:5; Hebrews 10:30; 1 Peter 4:5; 2 Peter 3:7). But here’s where the good news of Jesus’ grace comes into play. For those of us who are in Christ, who take on our new lives in Him and put to death the misdeeds of the body, we will be judged not by our sinfulness or misdeeds (that would be being judged by the law — Romans 2:12), but rather by Christ’s righteousness, by His perfect life (Romans 3:21-22, 4:5; Philippians 3:9; 2 Timothy 4:8; 2 Peter 2:9; 1 John 4:16-18).

God’s judgment has revealed both death and life to us: death for those who do not trust in Christ and His perfect sacrifice and ministry for them; and life for those of us who cling to it tenaciously with deep hope (Galatians 5:5). His judgment, then, means our rescue and restoration and reward.

Surely the righteous still are rewarded;
surely there is a God who judges the earth
-Psalm 58:11

We also have a role in our own judgment. A.W. Tozer, in That Incredible Christian, states that, though the final judgment on the heart is God’s, “there is, nevertheless, a place for self-judgment and a real need that we exercise it (1 Corinthians 11:31-32).” Tozer points out that we should not exercise judgment on the hearts of one another (Matthew 7:1-5), and we should be careful in even trying to judge ourselves (1 Corinthians 4:3), there is still a place for self-discovery, for knowing ourselves, and for using that knowledge to grow in Christlikeness (this is the whole purpose of God’s judgment of us, anyhow, as already mentioned). He continues, “While our self-discovery is not likely to be complete and our self-judgment is almost certain to be biased and imperfect, there is yet every good reason for us to work along with the Holy Spirit in His benign effort to locate us spiritually in order that we may make such amendments as the circumstances demand… In discovering who I am I will also be finding whom I am not and whom I can be through Christ. Revealed will be those areas where I most need to submit to the Spirit’s transforming power.”

 

The Tell Tale Heart

Perusing through some blogs this morning, I hit on a post by my friend Kendall here called “Inside Where?” In it, he tells of reading through a book called Neverwhere where the protagonist finds himself hurled into a world where things don’t make sense and he has to begin to simply accept the extraordinary for what it is rather than trying to understand it.

Kendall relates the story to his life, saying that he is left with the choice to try to make the life he experiences fit into his own expectations or to “start accepting the extraordinary and out-of-box realities of every moment.” Something he writes concerning relating to others hit me between the eyes. He says, “There are people I meet that, if I follow my prejudices and expectations, should be complete screw ups, and yet, are some of the strongest hearts I’ve encountered.”

I can’t quite say why, but when I read those words my eyes filled with tears, my heart convicted and I think compelled by the possibility of a new approach to some old relationships. And there are a couple of friendships I have enjoyed along the way that have lately done that very thing — grown old.

Often, I am crushed by the desparity between who I am today and who I know I will one day become. The worship song “When You Call My Name” by Brian Doerksen and Steve Mitchinson capture the prayer I often utter to Christ: “I am seeking true identity in the light of Your presence. I am longing to know how You see me. In the time that You have given me, release the strength to follow and the grace to be who You say I am.” It is a faith, I think, that says, Give me grace, Lord, to be not who I think I am but to be who You say that I am. That reality is often unseen, buried ‘neath the layers of “coats and hats” we put on and take off to protect ourselves from the world’s weather, as Frederick Buechner has it:

“The world sets in to making us into what the world would like us to be, and because we have to survive after all, we try to make ourselves into something that we hope the world will like better than it apparently did the selves we originally were. That is the story of all of our lives, needless to say, and in the process of living out that story, the original, shimmering self gets buried so deep that most of us end up hardly living out of it at all. Instead we live out all the other selves which we are constantly putting on and taking off like coats and hats against the world’s weather.”

And this works for others, too. Everyone you see is more than just what you see, much more than what you may first encounter or who you may come to know even after years of friendship. Many of us are familiar with C.S. Lewis’s famous thought that you “have never met a mere mortal.” All of us are made for glory, and we are constantly being shaped either to bear that glory or to shrink from it.

I think the Body of Christ plays a crucial role in helping a person receive that grace to be who God has made him to be. I think God gives a man friends who can see the deeper heart, the man behind the mask, and can call that true man forth. The inner man, with a new and redeemed heart. But still coming into play are the insecurities and fears and wounds and old abiding places that keep that man locked inside his prison cell. It’s as if the door has been unlocked and swung open wide and Christ compells him to walk free. Jesus calls him out into the free air, and He asks His friends to come alongside the man and do the same.

But for how long? How long will Jesus remain calling a man to let go of his past life and the fears and guilt that result from it and embrace the new, robust, and glorious life that He has made available for him? Maybe this is what was going through Peter’s mind when he asked Jesus how often he was supposed to forgive a man (Matthew 18:21-22). Jesus’ response was, essentially, as much as it takes. Forgive as much as we have been forgiven. Embrace as much as we have been embraced. Love as much as we are pursued and drawn and loved into the free life.

And I am not even speaking here of strangers, but of friends along The Way, brothers of Jesus and sons of the Father, their hearts in some way ravished by the Gospel. Maybe not completely. They stumble still, broken and in need of healing, or stuck still in their prison cell, but God’s beloved bride nonetheless. Screw-ups, all of them. All of us. But chosen and beloved, hearts beating with if not love at least longing to be as loving as God, hearts telling the Tale of their rescue by the valiant Warrior-God. The Scriptures are full of such souls, as is the church today.

Rich Mullins must have wrestled with this as well. He came to the conclusion that loving doesn’t always set us free from our prisons, while even as prisoners we are still free to love. But Jesus has embraced us, His arms still “strong enough to reach behind these prison bars,” reaching to set us free to walk alongside one another with God and to join God at the feast prepared for us.

Though we’re strangers, still I love you
I love you more than your mask
And you know you have to trust this to be true
And I know that’s much to ask
But lay down your fears, come and join this feast
He has called us here, you and me

And may peace rain down from Heaven
Like little pieces of the sky
Little keepers of the promise
Falling on these souls
This drought has dried
In His Blood and in His Body
In the Bread and in this Wine
Peace to you
Peace of Christ to you

And though I love you, still we’re strangers
Prisoners in these lonely hearts
And though our blindness separates us
Still His light shines in the dark

And His outstretched arms are still strong enough to reach
Behind these prison bars to set us free

So may peace rain down from Heaven
Like little pieces of the sky
Little keepers of the promise
Falling on these souls the drought has dried
In His Blood and in His Body
In this Bread and in this Wine
Peace to you
Peace of Christ to you

And may peace rain down from Heaven
Like little pieces of the sky
Like those little keepers of the promise
Falling on these souls the draught has dried
In His Blood and in His Body
In the Bread and in this Wine
Peace to you
Peace of Christ to you
Peace to you
Peace of Christ to you

 

Too Close for Comfort

O LORD, our Lord,
how majestic is your name in all the earth!
You have set your glory
above the heavens.When I consider your heavens,
the work of your fingers,
the moon and the stars,
which you have set in place,

what is man that you are mindful of him,
the son of man that you care for him?

-Psalm 8:1, 3-4

Can you imagine what the enormous black sky, peppered with a million bursts of light, must have looked like to David as he peered into it? No other lights to compete with its glory. No light pollution to drown out its splendor. The only noises those of midnight bugs and bats and prairie animals. He is overcome as he beholds its magnificence. His heart explodes with wonder as he ponders it all. Its vastness. Its beauty. That God had time and creativity and enormity enough to create it all – not just once upon a time, but this night, right then where David was. Unique. Never again would he behold it exactly as it was then. Everything would move. All would be different the next evening as God set out again to lavish his universe with His creative passion, expressing Himself to his children, pursuing their hearts. David got it. In this moment, he was captured by this God-of-Love. He recognized God’s pursuit and wooing, and collapsed into it.

“What is man that you are mindful of him?” he asks as his jaw drops and his breath stops in his throat. “How could you even have time for man?” his heart wonders. And yet… And yet… God not only had time for David, but he did it all for him, to have his heart.

But for our modern, sophisticated, educated minds it is too much to think that God would create such a lavish universe just for us. Sadly, we come up with anything we can to distance ourselves from His passion: scientific reasoning to explain away His creations, stuffy academic postulations to push back His passion; equations and formulations to eradicate His desire. Explain it away. Keep our distance. We are “enlightened” to learn that the earth is not the center of the universe at all and translate it to mean that we are not the center of God’s heart or longing or the point of His creation. We become insignificant specks of particles on an insignificant planet held in place by the awesome force of gravitation (not the power of God Himself) in an insignificant corner of one of a limitless number of universes. To translate, it means that we have become not the center of a cosmic battle, an invasion, a rescue, a Redemption, but meaningless and pointless accidents in a sea of atoms and subatomic particles.

We come up with our scientific posits because the Reality is too much to bear, much like those in C.S. Lewis’s The Weight of Glory who cannot bear to walk upon the grasses of heaven as they are because the blades are so substantive, and they only shadowy wraiths, that they puncture their feet and cause great pain. They are unwilling to grow in their soul-substance by standing in the blinding light of the unbearable glory. We rearrange the order of the Psalm to read not “what is man that God is mindful of him,” but “what is God that man is mindful of him?”

I understand. I do the same thing. I often wake and rush off to my checklist of things to do rather than stand or kneel in the Presence of the Creator. I dabble in distraction rather than confide or be confided in by this Friend (see Psalm 25:14), to know His deep heart. I work to secure my place in the world and with the people around me rather than revere the Lord God (revere = adore, applaud, treasure, worship, wonder at, fall for, cherish, embrace, cleave to, enjoy, desire, grab a hold of, run after). I suspect we all do this. The disciples did. On the Mount of Transfiguration, Peter, James, and John witnessed the astounding glory of Jesus revealed. Jesus took off his veil, so-to-speak, and Moses and Elijah were there, too, in their full glory. Peter and the other two were terrified and fell face down on the ground. Peter told Jesus that they could erect three shelters, one each for Jesus, Elijah, and Moses (Matthew 17:4). Tents, in other words. Tabernacles. Something to hide their blinding glory from the three disciples. It was too much for them. God honored their fear and sent a cloud to veil the glory from them. He will, it seems, only give us as much of Himself as we can bear.

But what happens when we pause and really consider even the work of creation? Spend half an hour doing nothing at all except staring out into the starry night. Don’t try to discover the constellations or name the objects you see; just let yourself be pierced. What do we discover when we do? That God is glorious. Copernicus gave us the heliocentric model of the solar system, that is, that the sun is the center and we orbit around it. We took that to mean that we were not the center of anything at all. That is where we got it wrong. Deadly wrong.

We are the center of more than we think.

Why would the earth need to “tremble before Him” (Psalm 96:9)? Why would “the heavens rejoice” and the “fields be jubilant” and the “trees of the forest sing for joy” (v. 11 & 12, 1 Chronicles 16:33)? Because the Lord “comes to judge… the peoples in his truth.” Or, in the words of Eugene Peterson’s Message paraphrase, “He comes to set everything right on earth.” Because of His redemption and rescue of His people… because He has set His heart on bringing us home (see Isaiah 44:23). Everything that God does is to bring us back to Himself (see Ecclesiastes 3:14).

God has made us for Himself. Adam and Eve lived in glorious union with God. But God’s enemy and ours came and stole God’s love from Him. Adam and Even fell from grace – that is, they fell from God. And now, a cosmic battle has ensued in which God has come with fierce intention to free us back for Himself. We are the center of a great cosmic battle. All of the earth is to shout to God with joy, you see, because He is powerful enough to cause His enemies to “cringe before Him” (Psalm 66:3) and to win us back from them. He is not only a restless Lover in pursuit of the bride that His enemy took from Him (that’s us), but He is also a Warrior with enough courage and power and strength to win us back. He will find us. He will win us. He will have us. Jesus coming, dying, and rising again has proven that much.

What is man that God is mindful of Him? Man is in fact God’s whole desire. His whole heart is bent on us. On you and me. Intimacy and communion and the adventure of His love is the whole purpose of God for us. That is the purpose for which we have been called (Romans 8:28).

God will give us as much of Himself as we will allow. Jesus is the glory of God fully revealed to us (Colossians 1:15). Through Him we can approach even God’s throne with confidence and boldness, without fear or hesitation or reserve (Hebrews 4:16). We can come back to our Lover. We can come back home. This is the invitation of God to us through Jesus. This is our place. This is the beginning of our life — the adventure of walking with God.