The comments on a recent blog post impressed on me the crisis we have today when it comes to hearing from the Holy Spirit—namely, there are so many frauds out there, many of us don’t know what it’s like to genuinely hear from God.

Here is my story:

One night I ran out for some lumber and groceries. After picking up some lumber and pocket cash at Lowe’s, I stopped by Aldi for a few things. While checking out, the woman in front of me mentioned “stamps.”

These were food stamps, not postage stamps. She had a full cart, clearly buying food for a large family. When it came time to pay, she started rooting through her purse for change. She wasn’t paying exact change just to be anal like me. She was just trying to pay her bill.

I heard God tell me, “Take out your wallet.” I did. Thumbing through the ones and fives, I heard God speak again.

“Not those. A Twenty.”

After sending back a box of pasta, the woman finished checking out, and I tried to figure out a non-awkward, non-embarrassing way to slip a twenty to this woman. If I was in her shoes, I wouldn’t want some guy paying part of my grocery bill in front of everyone in line at Aldi. However, by the time I was checked out, my only option was approaching her in a rather dark parking lot.

Praying that God would make it work, I set off across the parking lot as an act of obedience. God told me what to do. I had to do it.

“Excuse me, Ma’am,” I began.

“Did you want my cart?” she asked in a very friendly tone.

“No,” I replied. “You seemed to be having a rough night, and God told me to give you this.”

A worship service broke out. She began praising God and gave me about five hugs.

“I went twenty dollars over my food budget, and I was asking God for help tonight,” she said.

“Well, he heard you!” I replied.

She blessed me quite a bit. I blessed her. We both drove home with tears in our eyes.

That doesn’t happen to me every day, but it has happened enough that I have learned to recognize when something is a nudge or a message from God. While I trust that God could have used someone else to provide for that woman, why wouldn’t you and I want to hear from God so we can be a part of his work today?

Sometimes I sense God’s calling in a gentle and persistent whisper that prods me to do something. Sometimes God jars me with a sudden idea that I never could have dreamed up on my own.

I am extremely cautious about the words I hear from God. I understand that some are apprehensive about anyone claiming to hear something from God due to past abuses. However, most Christians are still willing to read the Bible for themselves despite the abuses by some. There is no reason to let the quacks and self-obsessed to ruin the gift of the Spirit for ourselves. The Bible is still powerful despite its abuses, and the same goes for the Spirit.

Discernment is critical when someone tries to speak into your life with a “word from the Lord.” The Old Testament is filled with stories about false prophets. We shouldn’t be surprised to find that there are spiritual counterfeits alongside the authentic manifestations of God.

If you are new to hearing words from God, I encourage you to simply practice quiet meditation on scripture or silent moments of prayer. Begin with, “Speak Lord, your servant is listening.” You may hear something, you may not. This isn’t a test of whether you’re a Christian or not. This is a practice that will help you live as a disciple of Jesus.

As you hear from God, test what you hear:

• Does it line up with scripture?
• Are you prompted to take action that benefits others?
• Are you prompted to take actions in a loving spirit?
• Can another Christian confirm that you heard from God correctly?

Depending on the situation, different tests are called for.

While at Aldi, I knew right away that God was prompting me to do something in line with the first three questions, and the stakes weren’t so high that I needed to confirm it. For big decisions, I generally ask my wife for her discernment. Sometimes I’ve shared words with other Christians in my family who have confirmed that what I heard seemed right in line with God’s ways.

There may be times when God speaks to you while you pray. You may also find that as you become sensitive to the ways of God, you’ll begin to hear him throughout your day. You may be standing in a line at Aldi, waiting in line behind a woman who needs God’s provision. You may even be the one to provide it for her.

God speaks to his followers today for the benefit of the church and our neighbors. If we hope to bring God’s Kingdom to earth in any meaningful and lasting way, then we must know what God is calling us to do.

I’m not a generous person. I’m not a wise person. I’m not a brave person. However, we serve a God who is generous, wise, and brave. When God is able to speak, he can bring his Kingdom to earth through the most unlikely people, even me.

A Note to Readers: Tomorrow I’ll resume my series on unity.

The original prosperity gospel makes my greed the limit for my prayers and actions. It compels me to ask for more provision, more blessings, and more possessions for myself.

I’m asking myself this question today: Would it be helpful if we redefined the prosperity gospel?

The limit for the new prosperity gospel will be the needs of those around us.

We are called to give of ourselves and our possessions until everyone around us is prosperous.

We earn money so that we can care for our families and our neighbors. There is wisdom in accumulating wealth for our own rainy days in the future, but the new prosperity gospel recognizes that many of our neighbors have rainy days now. If we don’t help them, who will?

It’s true that we need to be responsible with the money we have earned, but the new prosperity gospel recognizes that we can hide behind responsibility as an excuse to avoid generosity and love for neighbor. In fact, the new prosperity gospel thrives on love for neighbor because we see how generous God has been to us. It compels us to become joyful givers, spreading God’s prosperity to others.

The original prosperity gospel is all about making myself and perhaps a few others in my circles prosperous.

The new prosperity Gospel is about spreading the wealth, sacrificing so that our neighbors have food, healthcare, shelter, and the ability to care for themselves. All that we call our own comes from God, and therefore our “possessions” become assets in God’s divine economy to use as he pleases for his message of prosperity where the needs of all are met.

Bandwagon fans want all of the enjoyment at the end of the season without enduring the regular season. So far as I can tell, that’s perfectly fine in sports. However, when we apply the bandwagon fan principle to other things, it’s not quite as attractive.

The Bandwagon Fan for Campaigns

For example, we have politicians campaigning right now for positions such as president, best friend to lobbyists, and most likely be swayed by large campaign donors. Campaigns have staff and volunteers who invest long, hard days for the sake of their candidates.

Can you imagine someone refusing to help this candidate when given the chance, merely clicking a button in the voting both, and then celebrating as if he/she had been an integral part of the campaign? The bandwagon fan doesn’t look so hot in that scenario.

Bandwagon Faith

The interesting thing about Jesus, is that he’ll welcome anyone into the Kingdom at anyone point of his/her life. If you receive Jesus with your dying breath, you’re just as much a part of the Kingdom as someone who was raised in a Christian home, serving Christ with every breath.

There are no merit badges to accumulate in the Kingdom. We can enter it at any time.

On the other hand, when we are given an opportunity to follow Jesus today, and we put it off until a later point, we have a major problem. We are reminded in the book of Hebrews that today is the day of salvation. If you hear God’s voice today, don’t ignore it.

Let his voice speak into your life, and then take action. Faith is demonstrated by works in the present, not future aspirations.

Bandwagon faith says that we don’t need to fully commit ourselves to God’s Kingdom campaign today. The “bandwagonner” plans to celebrate fully in the Kingdom some day, but fails to invest in the work of God today. Bandwagon faith tries to squeak by with the bare minimum of commitment, ignoring the call of God in the present.

When Christians fail to live in obedience, it’s like we’re saying to God, “We’ll take care of ourselves today, and we’ll get around to you later. Oh, and we can’t wait for that big party with you some day!”

Obedience make’s God’s call a priority, taking tentative, sometimes faltering steps forward. When we leave bandwagon faith behind, we are able to find the joy and peace of God in our present circumstances, even if the way forward is sometimes uncertain and difficult.

We learn that the joy and celebration promised in God’s coming Kingdom can actually be ours to enjoy today. Bandwagon faith robs us of the most precious gift of God: Jesus fully present in our lives today through his Spirit.

Even worse, we’re guaranteed troubles, trials, persecution, and other forms of suffering in this world. Something in the back of our minds may tell us this is the case, but it doesn’t help to read that right in the Bible.

In other words, the Bible assures us that trouble is coming. Then, once trouble comes, it assures us that we can rejoice in the midst of it. How does someone arrive at this point? In fact, should we even desire to reach this point?

Discipleship is all about the process where God reshapes us into people with his priorities. We become committed to manifesting his Kingdom in this world and detached from the desire to build our own kingdoms. Instead of building faulty structures for our own security and comfort, the Kingdom sends us out. Before we’re willing to leave our faulty buildings behind, we need to be changed.

Left to our own devices we’ll opt to stay put, to compromise the calling of discipleship. People untouched by the power of God have not been conformed into his image. They will steer clear of anything that could lead to suffering or persecution. They have their own kingdoms to worry about.

We’d never take the risks of discipleship without God’s power in our lives that makes us holy and renews our minds. This process of being conformed into God’s image is why holiness is so critically important for disciples.

As we learn to value holiness, we’ll realize that suffering is a sign that this world is passing away, that God’s Kingdom is our only hope. Suffering helps us see the world from God’s perspective.

Suffering reminds us that our little kingdoms are weak and flimsy. God is present in the midst of our suffering, preparing us for the day when all tears shall be wiped away and our joy will be made complete.

This was not flashy ministry. He didn’t perform any miracles or signs that we know of. He simply pointed people back to God, and the only way to God involved repentance. He challenged people to face their issues.

There is no short cut to revival.

Any serious steps forward into the holiness and joy of God must first trudge through our junk, our dark areas that we’d rather forget. If we want to go anywhere with God, our dirty baggage needs to be tossed. Otherwise it will hold us back.

As I look back at my own life, I’ve seen this principle time and time again. In fact, there are times when I’ve opened myself up to the Holy Spirit’s leading and suddenly discovered some bitterness or anger I’d been hiding just below the surface.

It’s not pleasant to have my personal delusions challenged.

And yet, growing into the freedom and power of God’s Kingdom demands an ongoing housecleaning. Oftentimes I also find that once I stop clearing things out, I begin adding more junk.

Living in God’s Kingdom is a constant work of faith that is demanding, but promises rewards that we have yet to fathom.

Life was simple. I knew who the “dangerous” people were. I feared their agenda, and listened to people who acted as watchmen, protecting me, my country, and my faith.

Yesterday I realized that the tables have turned quite a bit in my mind.

Today I think I fear extreme conservative Christianity and politics a lot more. Why do I fear them? Because I believe they’re dangerous, though for a different reason. I have fallen into the same exact trap as before: developing an irrational fear that a whole segment of America is “out to get me.”

I’ve been thinking a lot about who is actually out to get us and whether everyone around us is really all that dangerous.

Who Benefits from Danger and Fear?

Having been on both the conservative and liberal end of things, I can see with relative clarity that I’ve wasted a lot of time worrying about people who are just trying to honestly make sense of the world. Everyone ends up valuing different things and listening to different experts.

If people with PhD’s and tons of peer-reviewed research can’t agree on what’s best for our economy or what constitutes religious freedom, how can we expect average citizens to see eye to eye?

We may have good reason to be flustered at times, but to think of a whole group of ordinary citizens as a lurking horde of communists or Nazis doesn’t do anyone much good. These caricatures only serve to make us feel smarter and superior—as if we’re in the know and those other dummies are deceived by “The System.”

I have darn good reasons for believing the things I hold to, but the existence of another perspective may be more of a sign of health than of dysfunction.

Who Should We Really Fear?

If fearing fellow citizens who believe differently doesn’t help us all that much in our daily lives, then do we have anything to fear? My sense is that we do have people to fear, but there are very few of them and they tend to be easy to spot.

Some of the people who are at least worth fearing (I’ll get to whether or not we should fear them in a minute) are the ones who tell us to fear groups of conservatives or liberals. They are the ones who desire power over us and to control us. And as a caveat, there’s a world of difference between pointing out the error of a group and spreading fear about a group. Having listened to conservative talk radio for years, I think I have a pretty good grasp of the difference between the two.

Besides the public voices ramping up fear and division, there are also the quiet forces moving behind the scenes who are politicians, corporate leaders, and even a few “news” organizations who are working hard to maximize their profit no matter what the cost to us. I’ve been learning that there’s a big difference between the organization that, for example, spreads misinformation about health care reform instituting death panels and the person who believes it.

In this example, there is a place for robust debate about topics such as health care reform, and there is no need to fear people who oppose it because they have other ideas. However, the people who try to spread fear and terror are the ones who merit our scrutiny.

My sense is that we have very few people who are worthy of being feared. However, should we bother fearing people?

What Should We Do with Fear?

Writing as a Christian who has his fair share of struggles with fear and anxiety, I honestly don’t need another thing to worry about. I’ve stopped listening to and reading the news because I noticed that I need to work on healthier ways to process what I hear and read.

A big step for me is learning who I shouldn’t fear.

However, even as I identify corporations who produce cheap products that harm their customers in the pursuit of profit and lobbyists who fight to cut things like education funding that could lift the poor out of poverty, I’ve had to figure out what to do with the emotions I feel. Anger is natural, but it’s never an end in and of itself.

I’ve begun to question my feelings, asking whether my anger or fear has a redemptive direction it can go.

That has led me to prayer: praying for those who promote fear and pursue profit at any cost. However, there has to be more to this.

I don’t have all of the answers to this one, but I keep coming back to the Good News of God’s Kingdom: God is among us and he reigns—even if his Kingdom exists on the margins among the meek and the poor in spirit. That is some good news that provides a powerful alternative to the toxic message that politicians and news organizations pump into our lives about this group or that group that is out to get us and ruin our country.

We fend off bad news with Good News, and we replace the aggression of fear with the outreach and healing of God’s peace. When God’s message gets ahold of us, we are changed by his love and can respond to others, no matter what we’ve been told about them, on the terms that God sets, not our own.

It’s my prayer that I can learn how to extend God’s terms to those I’ve been told to fear and that we will all be changed into people who live together in God’s peace and freedom. For those who know what it is to fear God and who live in his Kingdom, the fear of people is a habit we can learn to start giving up.

I don’t know why I waited so long to do this, but I began asking God, “What’s happening? What needs to change?”

God’s answer came back, “Seek first my Kingdom.”

That seemed sort of like a no-brainer. That’s right in scripture. I know that. Why did God need to remind me?

Well, because I had forgotten it. I was stuck pursuing goals that were leaving me frustrated.

So I had to figure out the next big question: What does it look like for me, Ed Cyzewski, to seek first God’s Kingdom?

That was a tough question to answer. I mean anyone can take the theology test and fill in the blank:

“Seek __________ the Kingdom of God.”

Applying it is another matter.

The Kingdom isn’t a test we pass or a creed we recite. The Kingdom is something we seek by changing our to do lists and our actions. Based on my actions, the Kingdom was something I had sought third, fourth, or fifth in my life.

What did it look like to seek first God’s Kingdom? I began to ask God for help, and with his guidance, I took action. Here are a few things that I changed in 2011:

Minister in Prison

I don’t write about serving in prison much because I don’t want it to ever sound like I’m bragging about something that I count as a privilege and blessing. However, I want to share just how much serving in prison means to me. At the start of 2011, I’d put off some training and paperwork related to serving in prison, and God prompted me to get moving on it.

Each Wednesday night I’m part of a 2-hour meeting where I share what God is doing in my life, other volunteers share, and the inmates share what God is doing with them. Sometimes we encourage one another, and often we pray for each other. Driving home last night, I sensed that I had just been with members of my family.

I serve in prison because I looked into it, I had the opportunity, and God prompted me to do it. When God burdened me to serve someone else, I needed to obey his lead if I wanted to receive his blessings.

Pray Intentionally

I don’t quite know how to say this, but I felt that I needed to pray differently. For starters, I try to pray on my knees if possible, but otherwise I at least try to stand or sit up straight—communicating respect to God through my posture.

I’m also praying out loud when I’m alone, which both keeps me better focused on my prayer and feels a bit more powerful. There’s nothing like confessing sin by speaking it out loud before God and then claiming his forgiveness and healing power verbally.

Wake Up Early

This changes depending on how much sleep I need, but I generally try to wake up between 5 am and 6 am most days. This provides me with enough time to pray, read the Bible, and wander around the kitchen until I’ve had some coffee.

Waking up early also ensures I have enough time to work on some fiction and my blog posts for the day. My writing is a ministry, and writing for this blog is a big part of that. I want to make a significant investment in this site so that readers will be encouraged and built up.

Early mornings leave plenty of time to hammer out and edit my posts, while also providing enough time throughout the rest of the morning for my business writing.

Manage my Time

As God challenged me to seek first his Kingdom, he also prompted me to write this at the top of my to do list on my computer: “Be faithful with a little.” If I had one article to do during the week, I made sure I wrote the best piece I could as quickly as possible. Soon additional projects began to arrive, and I was grateful to have improved my time management skills. Here’s what I did:

I set up a simple schedule on my Google calendar for my time between 5 am and 5 pm. It’s grouped by hour or half hour-long chunks such as work for a company, magazine projects, search for writing gigs, marketing, networking, etc. I leave the calendar open in my browser so that reminders pop up when it’s time to move on to the next project.

Each morning I assign 30-60 minute tasks to each block of time so that I ensure I’m hitting the right mix of business writing, magazine work, and searching for new gigs. 

Some Results

Praise God, 2011 is nothing like 2010. It’s not that 2010 was a total waste of time. Some great things happened during that year, and I certainly learned some lessons about what not to do.

However, there were some places in my life where I felt stuck, and the biggest game-changer for me was figuring out what it looked like for me to seek first God’s Kingdom each day. That means I serve in a prison, wake up early to pray, and faithfully use my God-given talents for writing.

My hope is that the next time I face a theology test about the Kingdom of God, I’ll be declared exempt from it. I won’t need to be tested on my knowledge because the right answers to the test will be evident in my life.

What is something new God is asking you to step out in?

For more posts on this topic, visit Bonnie Gray’s blog today: 5 Principles of Starting New.

Sailing and snow camping are two activities that I do not enjoy.

Stick me in a kayak to bob around, and I’ll be happy. Strap some skis to my feet, and I’ll glide along for miles provided there’s a promise of hot tea and chocolate in my backpack. However, once you introduce the variables of gusting winds or freezing temperatures, there’s something that doesn’t quite click for me about sailing and snow camping.

Perhaps it doesn’t help that I was raised in the flat, warm climate of Philadelphia, never setting foot on a sailboat until I started dating my wife. You see, my wife’s family is totally into sailing, and my wife enjoys snow camping with her brothers—snowshoeing into the woods with a tent and sleeping bags strapped onto their backs.

They are rugged New Englanders.

I don’t join them. And unless someone from my wife’s family leaves an unexpected comment on this post, I’m still recognized as part of the family. Our unity as a family is based on something deeper, mysterious, and spiritual than shared activities or our agreements.

Almost nine years ago Julie and I were married, and that is the foundation that everything else flows from. While I still need to work on our marriage and maintain our unity, there is a lot of room for us to disagree on things like putting yourself at the mercy of high winds or making her watch the NHL playoffs with me.

While I don’t think life gets much better than the NHL playoffs (I mean, did you see the Caps/Lightning game last night?), Christian unity is pretty awesome. Here are a few thoughts about unity for the Rally to Restore Unity hosted by Rachel Held Evans this week:

We Don’t Have to Do Everything Together

Christians don’t have to read all of the same books and blogs. We don’t have to listen to the same preachers, sign the same statements, or go to the same conferences. We don’t have to swim in the same streams of tradition. Our unity is not based on doing all of the same things together.

We all have been given something from God. Some have moved from Catholicism to evangelicalism, while others have done the opposite. While there should be a family resemblance and some common points of unity in the work of the Spirit among us, there’s nothing wrong with Christians from different perspectives working parallel to one another.

Personal Unity Means More Than Unity on Paper

I’ve studied quite a bit of theology, and I’m less and less impressed these days with common doctrinal statements about what makes someone an evangelical, or whatever. I think truly useful unity is what we experience with the people we actually know, not what we can write up, post online, and then leave a comment on.

Commenting online is an inferior form of unity.

When I get together with my Reformed or Catholic friends and pray with them, I’m experiencing real unity that is far more powerful and meaningful than anything online or on paper. For people who serve an incarnate God, meaningful unity is also incarnate.

Whether or not someone signs a document doesn’t do much for unity. When we can pray for one another, share the Gospel with a  united front, and encourage one another to draw near to Jesus, we are practicing true Christian unity that trumps statements made by national leaders or people who seem important.

Unity Requires Faith

I don’t know why there are so many different branches of Christianity or why God shows up to certain people in certain ways, but that’s what requires faith. I was chatting one day with a guy who used to be Arminian who felt that the Bible finally made sense from the Reformed perspective of Calvinism.

I had the exact opposite experience.

We both need faith to trust that God is working in each us, revealing himself in ways that communicate with each person. There is a huge uncertainty gap, and perhaps we may sometimes find it unsettling that our theological views didn’t work for someone else. All I can say is that I trust where God has led me, and I trust that God will lead others as they require.

Unity Commits to a Larger Shared Purpose

What I like about the Rally to Restore Unity is that we’re not just sitting around trying to agree on “how” to be united. We’re stepping back from our bickering with a bit of humor and committing to raise $5,000 that will fund clean water for a community. Everyone needs water and God wants no one to die from a lack of clean water, and I think we can all agree on that.

Let’s all chip in to make this Kingdom work happen!

Make sure you swing by Rachel’s blog today for links to other posts and some hilarious pictures. Also check out the Twitter hashtag: #restoreunity.

Jesus isn’t interested in fans or in acquiring admirers.

After his Resurrection, Jesus asked Peter, “Do you love me more than these [his fellow disciples]?” Jesus wanted to know if Peter was fully committed to him with all of his heart. Even when Peter voiced his love with a weaker term of affection, Jesus made it clear that loving God with all of your heart, mind, soul, and strength was not a light matter.

In one of the parables about the wedding banquet, the King sends his servant out to invite the guests to the banquet, but they refuse the invitation because they are busy.

We receive a similar warning from the parable about the seeds and the soil. Some seeds are crowded and choked by worries and the cares of this world.

When warning his disciples about the coming destruction of Jerusalem in Luke 21, Jesus tells them, “Be careful, or your hearts will be weighed down with carousing, drunkenness and the anxieties of life.”

There are a lot of reasons why Jesus’ band of followers dwindled from huge crowds listening to his sermons, to an enthusiastic crowd waving palm branches, to a few disciples standing by the cross and then praying in the upper room.

In large and small ways, distractions prevented many from following Jesus. Some never took interest in Jesus in the first place due to distractions, while others followed Jesus but couldn’t commit themselves to him when the cost became too steep.

Whether or not any of them liked Jesus didn’t really matter. What mattered was whether they were distracted by the cares of this world or committed to the priorities of God. Those who chose to ignore Jesus and those who followed him both fell into similar traps in different ways when distractions prevented them from loving Jesus.

There are many sins and problems we face, but they typically start or become worse when distractions keep us from Jesus. Anyone can check a box on survey saying, “I like Jesus,” but returning the sacrificial, all or nothing love of Jesus changes how we work, pray, rest, act, and speak.

Perhaps the most helpful lesson I’ve learned from theologians and Bible scholars today is that our reading of the Bible must lead to a Jesus who was so dangerous and unsettling that some people either wanted him dead, while many others ignored him. The cost had to be so steep that his closest friends ran away from him.

While I think that Jesus does lead us to life, peace, and love, I also find him pointing me to another costly path of discipleship that involves sacrifice and the loss of comfort. Jesus isn’t necessarily out to make my current life better or to give me fulfillment.

If that’s all that Jesus offered, then why did some kill him and others ignore him? While he had plenty of crowds around for his miracles and sermons, those who actually followed him to Jerusalem were quite limited. Even fewer remained while he hung on the cross.

In addition, when some people say they like Jesus, but they don’t like Christians, I’m tempted to say, “I don’t think you’d like Jesus all that much either.”

I understand the sentiment such people voice, but I have to ask: Which Jesus do you like?

We may like the Jesus who was inclusive and gracious, but Jesus was also threatening, demanding, and exclusive. Jesus upset political/nationalistic aspirations, religious traditions, lifestyles, and social orders with his message about God’s coming Kingdom.

As we prepare to celebrate Good Friday and Easter this week, I want to look at some reasons why certain people in the Gospels found Jesus so threatening, while others found him easy to ignore and write off. I hope to look at the Gospel stories by digging into what the people were expecting from a Messiah, what they hoped for in their daily lives in general, and how they interacted with Jesus.

In the process, I hope we can ask tough questions about ourselves, the cost of discipleship, the scope of God’s Kingdom, and the Kingdom’s impact on every facet of our lives: family, work, politics, worship, and society.

I don’t want to assume that I would follow Jesus into the Garden and stand by his side while he hung on the cross. If I do, I may not be ready to count the cost of discipleship, confess my resistance, or receive the grace and forgiveness that he offers to those who repent.

Next Post: How Distractions Kept People from Jesus