Losing Heart

I’ve been a believer for three days now, this time around.  For almost two days before that, a total agnostic. Thirty-six hours of godlessness.  I didn’t pray.  I didn’t even lift my head.  I didn’t want to hear from God.  I wasn’t even sure He existed.

I was angry and hurt.  Exhausted.  Pissed.  Something was seething underneath, breaking through like oozing lava, fiery hot and ready to destroy.  Cars on the freeway.  People in the office.  My family and friends.  It didn’t matter.  Everyone was a target.

And then, as quickly as it came on, it left.  God broke through with the words, “You’ve lost heart, my son.”

“What?  Lost heart?  What are you talking about?”
“Yes, lost heart.”
“Me?  When?”  But even as I asked it, I knew He was right.  He must have known, too, because there was no specific reply, only an invitation to reflect on the previous hours of marked change in my perspective, in my outlook on things.
“What happened, God?  Why?”
“You lost heart because you lost hope.”

I knew it was true.  There had been several things that happened at once in my life, several things that seemed to break at the same time.  News of friends’ dissolving marriage.  A close family member sick.  Disappointment.  Pain all around.  It seemed too much to bear.  I couldn’t hold onto all of it.  I couldn’t hold onto hope that God would come through in all of it.  It felt too easy to kill hope, since it was too painful to hold onto, embrace a kind of cynical despair.  I did it without even thinking, and the result could not have been more disastrous.

I was suddenly reminded of the scripture speaking of hope being the springboard for both faith and love (Colossians 1:5).  That reflected in my life that day and a half.  My walk with God was stunted, even paralyzed.  And I could not love well.

It’s not an unfamiliar place, I suspect.  There are more godless days in my life than I’d like to admit.  Less than there used to be, but they are still there.  Days when I don’t really expect God to show up.  Days I let him off the hook, and plan everything so that if He didn’t show up, I’d still be okay.  I wouldn’t expect anything from Him.  Most of the friends I’ve spoken with about this recognize it well, too.  In fact, searching the Scriptures, I find that the Bible is quick to point out that most friends of God at one time or another crumbled under the weight of a fallen world.  Abraham.  Moses.  Jonah.  Elijah.  All his disciples.  The list goes on.  We’re in good company.  In His mercy, God is quick to pick us back up, dust us off, and set us again on the road by His side.

But we must learn from the Master how to live well, how to “live a life worthy of the calling we’ve received” (Ephesians 4:1).

That’s why God reminds us constantly not to lose heart.  In Hebrews 12:3, for example, we’re told to consider Jesus — think on Him, think of what He endured while on earth — so that we don’t grow weary and lose heart.  He endured more than we can imagine.  We need to learn from Him how He did it.

For one thing, we are being transformed.  It’s not by our good deeds, but by Jesus’ love for us.  We are being made into His likeness.  All we must do is trust Him enough to make this happen in us (2 Corinthians 3:18, 4:1).  Trust that He will come through for us.  Trust that He is for us.

When the Golden Gate Bridge was being built, several workers fell to their deaths before it was decided, halfway through the construction to put a safety net underneath the structure.  The second half of the work was completed nearly twice as fast as the first half, since the men knew they were safe.  Several still fell; no one died.

We are not condemned when we fall.  We are free men and women, free in the love and life of our God.  Jesus is, in a very literal sense, our safety net.  Like He did me just days ago, He will pick us up, dust us off, and set us back again on the Way.  He is our light through this world.  He lived, more than any other man before or since, He was alive.  And His life is our light as well, too, come alive.  (see John 1:4).

 

In-Tension

The disciples did not understand any of this.
-Luke 18:34

The journey we’re on with Christ is one of great tension, of what can at times feel like a balancing act,  tug-of-war between two opposing forces and we are tight-roping the taut rope between, trying at times with all our might not to lose our balance.

But knocking us off balance seems like a favorite thing for Jesus to do.  And He seems very intentional about it.

What confounded the disciples was not that Jesus was laying out a black-and-white picture of something, a heaven-vs.-hell, and asking them to choose between the two.  He did that at times, for sure, but typically not to those already with Him.  No.  If you notice, the disciples were always confounded whenever they encountered something about Jesus and something about the Kingdom they did not understand, and perhaps did not want to understand, because it would require so much more from them (see, for example, John 12:15-17, Luke 18:31-34, Mark 9:14-29, John 9:1-3, John 4:27-33).

It was as if Jesus was wanting to open their eyes to see more of reality, to be able to take it all in.  It was as if He was expanding their hearts even as He was blowing their minds.  He was taking them by the hand and walking them into the “life that is truly life” (1 Timothy 6:19).

If we are not expecting to be confounded by Jesus when we encounter Him, if we are not anticipating our small-minded and lop-sided pursuits to be blown to bits, if we are not ready to hear what may frighten us or confuse us, we will never be able to hear the Lord God speak to us.  It was the Pharisees, not the disciples of the Living God, who needed everything to be perfectly clear and straightforward and predictable.

Let me offer an example from my life.  I have a sincere desire to love a brother of mine who is addicted to all sorts of things, making a mess of his life, and hurting a lot of other people along the way — wife, kids, family, friends.  But my desire to love this man is clouded by my anger about his actions, about where he’s taking his life.  To love him feels like being inauthentic with my own ambivalence toward him; but to embrace my hatred of his sin only is to become unavailable to love at all.

So Jesus speaks to me.  I know what I am to do.  I am to act toward him (to show in my actions) authentic love — love that calls him out to become the man he was born to be, all the while embracing in felt affection the screwed-up man he sees each day in the mirror.  In other words, I am to love him where he’s at, but not let my love for him stop there.  But these two actions feel almost contradictory to each other. Paradoxes of love. I’ve heard that God “loves us where we are but loves us too much to keep us there.” How? I know that to be true, and yet to live in the tension of that love is to expose your heart to forces fierce enough to break it.

But once again, humility begs me to confess that I’m the student in this.  If the Teacher goes there and beckons me on with Him, even if I don’t get this… well, then, I want to go there as well, whatever the consequences, for this is true life. There is life to be found in following Him — even in this — and nowhere else.  It’s like Thomas.  When Jesus announced He was going back to Judea (straight into the den of lions, so-to-speak) out of love for His friend Lazarus, Thomas chose to go with Jesus even if it meant his own death (John 11:7-16).  We must choose to go with Him as well, whatever the cost.

(Jesus’ love of Lazarus was a similar kind of tension, actually. Lazarus was dead, and Jesus came to him and wept for the loss. Yet He didn’t leave Lazarus there. His love for him brought him out of the tomb.)

So this is living in-tension-ally, to be comfortable with the discomfort and content with the discontent.  We somehow have to be okay with things not being okay, all the while trusting in the One who is out to set everything right again.  In this tension, we have to at some point come to see that Jesus is out for our good, to expand our hearts so that we may have the capacity for Him to dwell there in all His glory.

All good love — love between lovers or for a friend, love of freedom or a cause, love for life and love for God — all of these will require that we live somewhere between the Fall and the Redemption.  Our God is fully alive in this tension.  We are told to “consider Him who endured such opposition” so that we do not grow weary along the way and totally lose heart (Hebrews 12:3).  There is a way of living that allows us to make it through this world without getting torn to shreds.  Let’s find it.

 

Repentance

It’s not a popular word, repentance, even in Christian circles.  All kinds of images come to mind when you think of it: a grown woman crawling on hands and knees on cold pavement for hundreds of yards as she approaches the steps of a Bolivian cathedral; loud and embarrassing wailing from overly-dramatic congregates during the invitational at a “Spirit-filled” church; guilt- and shame-ridden self-flagellation.  None of it sounds appealing, that’s for sure.

But the repentance I want to mention here is more of a fainting than anything else.  It’s a collapsing, a kind of falling down, under the weight of things.  But it’s falling down before the God who catches us.  It has to do with rest, with quietness, with trust (Isaiah 30:15), an coming-to-the-senses and embracing the reality that all these things we do apart from Christ, we really can’t do (John 15:4).  Even if they are good things for the Kingdom.

Over the last few months, I’ve been there, coming back to the heart of God and the salvation offered through Jesus.  (Once again, all kinds of things come to mind with the word salvation.  Here, I mean a rescue, a shouldering of burdens, a kind of brother-like sharing in the experience of living, and at the same time a restoration in the heart of reality — of my place with God and my role alongside Him.)  Back in April of this year, I wrote

Over the last couple of months, I have been in a journey of repentance, of returning back to the heart of God and His life in subtle ways, of re-orienting my heart back to Him. A re-consecration of my whole being to Him.

So, I guess it’s been more than just a couple of months that I’ve been on this journey back deeper into the heart of my Father.  And maybe it’s just an ongoing process.  Maybe our journey to God is better described as a constant return back to God.  I think this is how C.S. Lewis thought of it.

Lately, I have recognized areas where I have tried to go it on my own, resulting in three primary effects in my life: pride, unbelief, and idolatry.  Man, even laying them out there like that is painful.  It’s hard to see those thrown out there like that.  But there they are.

And here’s what I mean, in brief… When I am really burdened with something, I rarely go to God and lay down my burden fully and abandon it to Him and expecting in return for the exchange an increased intimacy with Him.  Instead, I hide from Him, and hide my burden from Him, ashamed that I am not strong enough to carry it… or, I will go to Him with my burden, pray about them, and then leave shouldering the same heavy loads (not having laid them down radically at his feet), still thinking I am supposed to be strong enough to shoulder them on my own:

Pride.

I am fearful that Jesus will not meet me where I am and bring me into intimacy with Himself, will not bring me to life:

Unbelief.

And so I choose instead to find some sense of strength in something else, typically for me a false idea that I am more spiritual than I really am.  And I have to portray that to others because instead of being able to find my identity and sense of validity in Jesus’ present and immediate love for me, I have to find it in what others think of me:

Idolatry.

“Come to me, all you who are weary and burdened, and I will give you rest. Take my yoke upon you and learn from me, for I am gentle and humble in heart, and you will find rest for your souls. For my yoke is easy and my burden is light.”  -Matthew 11:28-30

This is what I’m returning back to.  I’ve come to think that the invitation Jesus offers is radically different than what we often do.  It’s not enough for us to come to Him, hold up our weakness and weariness, and ask for Him to help us with it.  He’s asking more of that.  He’s asking that we completely abandon it, lay it down totally, so that we are free to enter into discipleship with Him (take His yoke).   We can’t demand that God do something about your burden.  We can’t even fret about it at all anymore, even to look at it.  We must instead fix your eyes on Him.  This is the command of Scripture, repeatedly (Hebrews 12:2, 12:3; Philippians 4:8; Psalm 34:5; Colossians 3:1; 1 Chronicles 16:11; Psalm 105:4; Psalm 123:2; Matthew 6:33; Psalm 37:4).  Only then will we understand that the truer story of our lives was never really about the burden to begin with, but rather about the intimate relationship between God and us.

Michael Warden, in The Transformed Heart, has written about this process.  We abandon our heart to His strength and to His life.  That’s repentance.  That’s rest.  That’s trust.  And in that act is our salvation.  It’s not about doing more; it’s not about doing at all.  It’s about collapsing into the strength and love of Christ.  Once we are free to join with Jesus in who He is and what He is about (taking His yoke, becoming His disciple), He will teach us not how to shoulder the burdens better (remember, we have completely forgotten about them), but rather He will teach us about Himself, and about where real life is found — the life we have been looking for all our lives and only mistakenly thought was somehow tied to our shouldering the weight of the world.

None of this is easy.  Man, I know that full well.  That’s why it’s taken me some time for God to pierce through my fear and defenses to bring me into this journey.  Like everyone, I have a host of burdens — hopes and dreams that I still strive for, pains and hurts I still run and hide from, a life I worry will collapse around me, day-to-day details I fear won’t go well, and the list goes on.  How is it that Jesus could possibly ask of me to abandon these things to Him?!  Abandon them?! Meaning, no longer even think of them?  Yet this is what Jesus is talking about when He says that if we seek to save our lives, we will lose them, but if we lose them for His sake, we will find them (Matthew 10:39).

And I think it’s a harder thing for many of us Christians who have been walking with God for some time, not because we don’t have experiences where He has come through on His word and shown Himself good — for certainly He has — but because we think we are supposed to be doing all this good stuff we have going on and that surely God has expected that we shoulder it.  I mean, He has given us all kinds of opportunities and ministries and we see all kinds of needs, so surely we are meant to carry it.

But to take His yoke upon ourselves is to enter into the kind of life Jesus lives and live it the way He lives it.  It’s to come alongside of Him and walk in step with Him in the same direction as Him.  And He is always about intimacy with the Father and the ransom of our hearts back to His.  Always, every time.  That’s His singular stance.

There’s been a shift in my own heart through the course of even the last few days.  Even the way I’m seeing things has changed.  I’d say things feel lighter, and that my orbit is changing a bit as I am gravitating back to Jesus as the source of my strength and joy.  I’m learning again to seek Him first and to delight in Him — meaning that all my attention and affection that would have otherwise been spent securing what I need to continue on is now spent on Him.  It’s only in that place of truly abiding in Him will we have life.  Only.  He says that, very explicitly.

for more, see The 12 Most Profound Ideas I Ever Had, George MacDonald’s Self Denial , and the last paragraph of Mere Christianity.

 

Standing Firm

Therefore, my brothers, you whom I love and long for, my joy and crown, that is how you should stand firm in the Lord, dear friends!
-Philippians 4:1

I’ve been mulling over some thoughts recently about “standing firm” in the strength of the Lord God.  Here are some rough notes concerning our role to remain strong in Christ…

How should we stand firm in the Lord?  Paul has just told of the promise and hope of Jesus’ return.  From Philippians 3:20-21 : ” But our citizenship is in heaven. And we eagerly await a Savior from there, the Lord Jesus Christ, who, by the power that enables him to bring everything under his control, will transform our lowly bodies so that they will be like his glorious body.”

Paul seems to suggest that the reality of our present citizenship in heaven and the power of Jesus to bring everything under his control and conform us to his glorious image is the way that we stand firm in Him — by understanding this, trusting in it, and by setting our hearts and hope in its reality for us now.

In 2 Thessalonians 2, Paul says nearly the same thing.  Essentially, he explains that the motive and power for standing firm comes from the truth that we get to share in the “glory of our Lord Jesus Christ.”  Here:

But we ought always to thank God for you, brothers loved by the Lord, because from the beginning God chose you to be saved through the sanctifying work of the Spirit and through belief in the truth. He called you to this through our gospel, that you might share in the glory of our Lord Jesus Christ. So then, brothers, stand firm and hold to the teachings we passed on to you, whether by word of mouth or by letter (v 13-14).

Check out the way The Message translates Paul’s words from Galatians 6:13-15 concerning standing firm, specifically how to stand firm.  What it looks like.  Here it is:

Be prepared. You’re up against far more than you can handle on your own. Take all the help you can get, every weapon God has issued, so that when it’s all over but the shouting you’ll still be on your feet. Truth, righteousness, peace, faith, and salvation are more than words. Learn how to apply them. You’ll need them throughout your life. God’s Word is an indispensable weapon. In the same way, prayer is essential in this ongoing warfare. Pray hard and long. Pray for your brothers and sisters. Keep your eyes open. Keep each other’s spirits up so that no one falls behind or drops out.

And from 1 Corinthians 15:57-58:

“But thanks be to God! He gives us the victory through our Lord Jesus Christ. Therefore, my dear brothers, stand firm. Let nothing move you. Always give yourselves fully to the work of the Lord, because you know that your labor in the Lord is not in vain.”

 

Something Bigger

Your life is now hidden with Christ in God.
-Colossians 3:3 

I have a friend who is a major St. Louis Cardinals fan.  When I say “fan,” keep in mind that it is shortened for “fanatic,” as in whoa, that dude is a fanatic or have you ever met someone as fanatical as he?  That’s the level of “fan” I’m talking about here.  He’s a devotee, a follower, an admirer of the Cardinals.

Apparently, he has difficulty functioning when baseball season comes around.  He goes to work and all that, but is constantly obsessed with the games and scores and players.  He’s told me about times when he couldn’t listen to the radio in the car because the day before the Cardinals lost and he couldn’t bear to hear the repeat of their failure over the airwaves.  Or how he meant to study for one of his classes but couldn’t because a game was on.  The other night I road with him for an hour in the car and counted 8 times that he checked the current game’s score on his phone.

One of the things about his fanaticism that I love is the way he identifies himself with the team.  He uses words like “we” and “our” and “us” when talking about them, like we played a good ball game last night or our manager in an interview said…   He connects with them so much that he talks as if he is a part of their team. 

I thought this was the strangest thing in the world, so I asked him about this once.  His reply was something along the lines of, Yeah, it’s my team.  We’re in it together.  He spoke of how at games, the entire stadium would stand as one when a good play was made, and he would be giving high-five’s to complete strangers sitting around him.  Everyone joined as one for this, their team, either celebrating or grieving depending upon their performance, rising and falling with the ins and the outs of the games and the lives of their players.  

So, in a sense, this friend “owns” the team and everything about it — not as a possession, but as a way of identifying himself with them.  Whatever they do, they do together, even with their greatest fanat –er, fans. He marks himself with the Cardinals team, connects himself with them, tags himself as a fan, labels himself, names himself, recognizes himself as the team does.  They win, he wins.  They lose, he loses.  They get injured, he feels the pain.  

We could talk about existential things like transcendence and how my friend is attaching himself to something bigger than him and about perhaps the society in which we live that has lost so much of the sacred that we used to be able to associate ourselves with.  But I think the most instructive thing in all of it is the nature of identifying with something.  There’s something sacred in it still.

It may be a sports team, a band, a business or professional organization, a school, a church, a religion, a whiskey bottle, a brand name, a family, a group of friends — all kinds of things.  The point in it is that we are made to live a life bigger than just us.

Maybe that’s what Rich Mullins meant when he said, “If I want to identify fully with Jesus Christ, whom I claim to be my Savior and Lord…”  (This Jesus who is the greatest and most transcendent thing we can attach ourselves to.)  Then the best way to do that is to throw yourself into His life the way this man does the Cardinals’ life.  Fully.  Completely.  Immersed.  Associated with, labeled, named, tagged, linked, connected.  Adoring with the whole self, “in secret, between the shadow and the soul,” as Pablo Neruda had it:

“So close that your hand on my chest is my hand,
so close that your eyes close as I fall asleep.”

 

Moses’ Training

The following article comes from a recent report from Training Ground.  It is so good, it needs no introduction.  I wanted to post it in its entirety…,

Leadership Through the Story of Moses

For Moses, 1/3 of his life is a great picture of where young men find themselves today. Till 40, Moses was “educated in all the wisdom of the Egyptians and was powerful in speech and action.” (Acts 7:22) He emerges already as a leader. Strong. Persuasive. Wise. (Many of the young men coming through Training Ground) But, he had been given everything. The golden boy. A life of wealth, privilege, and entitlement in the Egyptian courts. He was far from his people (the Israelites) life of slavery and hard labor. It says in Acts, “when Moses was forty years old, he decided to visit his fellow Israelites.”

Can you imagine the disconnect? The two different worlds colliding. This “prince” in beautiful Egyptian covered clothes, shiny clean, and trim, walking around, visiting “his people” covered in dirt and sweat. I can’t imagine what the Israelite men thought of this guy strolling around.

Moses wants to be the hero for the Israelites. He is beginning to feel the injustice of his people and even experiences his call to lead them. He is in a position of power and influence. But even his actions show how self-righteous he was. Right before he murders the Egyptian (his way of vengeance) it says, “Moses thought that his own people would realize that God was using him to rescue them.” (Acts 7:25)

Gosh, how I can relate. The narcissism. Believing that in me is that power to change the world. All those graduation speeches telling us to seize the day. All those promises of what our life could be about.

And like so many guys, Moses is relying on his own life and the power of what is around him. But, he is really untested. There is not a deep settled confidence. He has been given a life void of real experiences of pain, suffering, and hardship to know God, and how Gods works through them. The real roots of faith. He has only come into these through a fate outside his own control (leaving him ungrateful). He has little to no understanding of the people he wants to lead, and their own struggles.

We see this happening all the time, today. Isn’t that how presidential candidates are spun as being unrelatable and disconnected to the people? “They can’t relate to the working class. They are out of touch. Have never been through financial hardship. Never suffered through real life.”

But God, using Moses choice of violence and flight, leads him into the place he needs to experience. Loneliness. Blue collar work. Desert. Wilderness. Pain. Abandonment. Frustration. Loss. Even confusion. We know this as the scriptures say that Moses named his son, Gershom, “I have become an alien in a foreign land.” (Exodus 2:22) This wasn’t a process welcomed or even understood by Moses. Proving, even at the time, Moses didn’t appreciate or understand what he was needing to go through. He had given up. Believing he was removed, and far from God’s place to lead the Israelite people.

It’s the irony of God’s training for leadership. By the time God taps him as the leader of the people, he doesn’t believe God. Instead of seeing himself as ready and prepared, he sights every reason why he would be horrible at it. Oh, the irony! It’s the perfect place for God to restore Moses, and finally be his God, and his Father.

He spent 40 years being educated, and entitled. 40 years in the wilderness and in hardship, and then 40 years being God’s voice, and leader of the Israelites who are taken into desert and wilderness.

It is a beautiful picture of how education is important, suffering and testing is essential, and restoration and leadership is birthed somewhere between the two.

 

The God Who Speaks

Yesterday I had a conversation with a friend of mine about the ways that God has been speaking to her lately. She said that she used to hear people talk about “God told me this” or “God told me that” and she always wondered, “How do you know that God said that?” or “How do you know that God said that?” She said she always believed in God — it was never that she doubting in His existence or even His benevolence toward her — but she never understood how God communicated with us, how He would connect with her in a personal way.

That’s been changing as of late. She’s gone through some tough times over the last few years, really tough. Her world has been turned upside down, and while she has some familial support around her, it’s not enough to sustain her heart through it all. She has had to turn to God in desperation to hold her up. (Literally.) In so doing, she has slowly grown to encounter a God that is not only benevolent, like a friendly old grandfather, but passionate, like a wild lover; a God that not only exists, in the same way that the religion exists or that democracy exists, but a God that is real and present, hot as fire, cold as ice, firm as rock and as close as the air in her lungs. She has met the Living God. And it is changing her in some pretty dramatic ways.

One of those ways is in her perception of Him. I don’t mean just what she thinks of Him, but how she perceives Him, with the sense organ (for that it is, among other things) of her heart. She is now able to hear Him speak to her intimately and personally, just to her — a word of encouragement, a nudge of direction, a whisper of instruction — about her and about her life. Once was through a fortune cookie, another through the story of Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego, and another through the counsel of a friend.

It is not always that God is so direct; oftentimes He speaks indirectly, expecting that we engage not only with our eyes and ears but with our will, that we trust what we’ve heard before and remember it and walk in it, that we obey what we read in Scripture.  We must remember that the Spirit of Christ in us was given to us, among other reasons, to teach us, to comfort us, to speak to us.

I had that experience last night. I had a dream that I was driving in a car and needing to hear from God about something. I can’t think of what it was, but it seemed only important that I heard from Him. I looked up, and I saw written on a license plate in front of me “John 14:13-15.” I had no idea what that Scripture said, but I took it as from God, and that was all I needed.

Upon waking, I remembered the dream very clearly, which is not typical I might add. Another clue that this might be more than just about the bowl of Grape Nuts I had before I hit the hay last night. I picked up my Bible and headed for the Scripture. Yup. God coming through for me. It was exactly what I needed to remember: “Whatever you ask in My name, that will I do, so that the Father may be glorified in the Son. If you ask Me anything in My name, I will do it. If you love Me, you will keep My commandments.”

It can be hard to hear God in our culture. We distract and divert ourselves to keep from sitting still, afraid that if we were to be quiet for a moment we’d hear nothing at all, and that scares us to death. That’s also a faithless act. We don’t expect God to be there at all. For my friend (and for me, sometime earlier in my journey), it took a dark turn in life to bring her to need God at all. But once she recognized that need and stopped to listen — in hope beyond hope — to see if God would be there, everything changed… forever. Life began, “the most intimate” part of life (Ephesians 4:30) came in to dwell.