:: in.a.mirror.dimly ::

This isn’t a post about God having a smite button. The results I describe are not unlike smiting, but they are entirely self-inflicted. I’m talking about the call to follow Jesus as a disciple and the daily moments we have to choose between obedience and our own plans.

I’ve learned that God lets us resist him. We can fight against God. However, we often won’t like the results. When I have said “no” or “wait” to God, I’ve discovered one of the following: frustration, anxiety, anger, or sadness. Sometimes I get a mix of them all.

I was reading the story of Elisha yesterday, and I began to wonder what would have happened if he resisted the wardrobe change that Elijah suggested for him. What if Elisha said, “No thanks. I’d rather hang here at my cozy estate and keep plowing with the oxen than put my life at risk with that crazy king of Israel!”

Here is where interpretation ceases and a little creative speculation comes into play. Sure, Elisha would have enjoyed some great years at his farm. But if you know the story of Elisha, which I heartily recommend, God repeatedly used Elisha to give the Israelites victory over the invading Arameans. When Samaria was surrounded, God spoke through Elisha and brought deliverance to the people of Israel.

What would have happened if Elisha had refused God’s call for his life?

We can only guess about the various scenarios that would have unfolded, but here are a few suggestions:

Elisha Would Have Struggled with Greed

If he had remained at his substantial farm with his 12-yoke of oxen workforce, Elisha would have continued to enjoy financial security. He never would have known God with the same intimacy as a prophet. In fact, he would have most likely struggled with greed, and who knows what could have happened from there.

Israel Would Have Been Destroyed

Without Elisha’s God-given guidance, the Arameans would have most likely captured the capital and occupied the rest of the country. Elisha would have eventually lost his farm and oxen at the end of the day.

The Worship of God Would Have Suffered

Faithful prophets of the Lord had it rough back in Elisha’s day. They had endured serious persecution under Ahab’s queen Jezebel, and even Elijah had fled in terror at her threats. Elisha helped fight against idol worship and kept his fellow believers on track. 

What’s at Stake for Us?

The story of Elisha reminds me that the decisions I make about obedience can have incredible ramifications for both my own future and the future of others. In addition, saying no to God does not guarantee safety or happiness. In fact, taking a big risk for God and watching God provide is a far safer place to be—even if the process feels anything but “safe.”

God doesn’t delight in making us miserable. He doesn’t use a smite button when we disobey him in this world. He lets us have what we want. When we repent and seek out his desires for us, the self-smiting will cease, and we’ll find peace even in the midst of facing challenges at the prompting of God.

I remember the look on my coach’s face as I threw one ball after another—as in, the opposite of a strike. He mixed a “Why me?” sort of despair with a tinge of amusement—perhaps it had to do with the absurdity that his starting pitcher couldn’t throw a strike in a play off game.

The stakes weren’t exactly high in the grand scheme of things. I was pitching in an eighth grade baseball game, but for me, it was one of the most humiliating moments of my life. I remember hitting rock bottom as my coach made an audible snide remark about me as yet another batter trotted to first base.

We often see coaches walk out to the mound to advise struggling pitchers in the majors. As much as I hated my coach at that moment, I just wanted help. What was I doing wrong? I’d practiced over and over again to the point that I knew how to throw strikes. A pre-game panic attack had thrown me into a tailspin, and I didn’t know how to salvage my form.

Looking back, I can see that my problems started long before that game. Our coach didn’t really teach our team all that much. He could hit ground balls and fly balls in practice, but I had to teach myself how to throw a fastball, slider, and changeup. I even taught myself how to throw  a knuckle ball.

Previous to that playoff game, I just showed up and pitched. My coach literally taught me nothing. He didn’t invest anything in me, and when I fell to pieces, he just stepped back and watched.

My step-dad was the one person who actually invested anything in my young, short-lived baseball career in Jr. High. He taught me a few things about how to hit, and his lessons paid off. In one game he stood behind the batting cage and said, “Think of that pitch as a big grapefruit.”

It never occurred to me that baseballs could be compared to grapefruits. How does that help anyone? I’d think that a grapefruit would just explode on contact into a sticky but delicious snack. Humoring him, I told myself that the incoming pitch was, in fact, a large grapefruit.

In those seconds, I no longer saw a tiny, spinning baseball with red stitches. I saw an enormous yellow grapefruit that had been lobbed before me and was just begging to be clobbered. I swatted that ball with everything I had, sending it way beyond the centerfielder. I remember my step-dad yelling, “Yes!” as I took off for first base.

It felt good to have his support at that moment, something so different from that other time on the pitching mound when I couldn’t throw a strike. Someone wanted me to succeed. He invested in me, stood with me in my moment of challenge, and celebrated when I succeeded.

I write all of this not by way of publicly chronicling my stellar baseball career. I assure you, these are the highlights—save for the one game where I really got my knuckleball going. I wanted to talk about the feeling you get when someone is supporting you and working hard to help you succeed.

To say that God isn’t like a Jr. High baseball coach ventures toward the obvious, but I honestly think that I sometimes turn God into this smug, wait-and-see coach who is just watching us fall apart from the sidelines. God wants us to succeed because he expects that of us, but it’s tempting to think that he could take us or leave us depending on our performance.

God doesn’t want failures… or does he?

I had already made up my mind to write about this topic today, and then I read Ezekiel 18 this morning. Check it out. It’s a beautiful statement by God about wanting his people to succeed, forgiving them when they fail, and welcoming them back.

God is deeply invested in you and me because he is passionate for his people—even if we fail. His Spirit is here with us because he’s with us in the game. He’s empowering us, cheering us on, and dusting us off when we fall and sulk back to him.

We can go back to God after we fail because he’s right there with us, hoping that we’ll come to our senses and turn our “no’s” into “yes’s.” As long as you have today, your “no” does not have to be final. Your fail does not define you.

Stop looking at your failure. Look up to God because he’s leaving the sidelines where you expected to find him. He’s coming out to help you.

Over the weekend our kitchen was full of bowls with hacked up apples, huge pots boiling with water, a food mill, and rows of quart jars. The promise of homemade applesauce for the long winter prompted us to spend the bulk of our Sunday hard at work in our kitchen scrubbing, cutting, boiling, and ladling.

I like to play the part of the menial slave who just focuses on one big project: washing the apples, cutting the apples, etc. My wife is far better suited for the supervision and “big picture” part of canning. She’s good at reading recipes and devising a plan.

I’ve never been good at following recipes. I usually forget something. Knowing this tendency, I could stand in front of a cook book for hours trying to make sure I got it right. If I was in charge of making the applesauce by myself, there’s a chance I could still be standing in front of the cookbook today.

When you’re canning something, you need to follow the instructions carefully to ensure everything stays sterile and that you cook your fruit/vegetables enough. The instructions are important, but the nourishment comes from putting them into practice and making something. No actions, no applesauce, no matter how well I think I understand the instructions. In fact, the instructions aren’t doing me much good without the applesauce they’re supposed to produce.

Theology often needs more applesauce.

That is to say, if theology provides us some critical instructions and guidelines relating to the nature of God, they’re only useful to the point that we actually meet the God we learn about. Our nourishment is knowing God and doing his will—it’s like eating a warm loaf of bread.

For all of my pouting about following recipes, the irony is that I often prefer just reading theology over putting it into practice. I’m malnourished because I miss out on God’s sustaining presence. If I’m not producing fruit that will last—or fruit that is “preserved”—there’s a chance that I’ve put too much value on learning “about” God rather than living “with” God.

Recipes are useful for pointing us in the right direction. We need good recipes just like we need good theology, but if the recipes don’t lead to something substantial and life-changing, we’re probably just starving ourselves.

In the sometimes illogical world of sports where beards are grown in the playoffs and jerseys are left unwashed for good luck, there is a term for fair-weather fans who only support a team at the peak of its success: bandwagon fans. The bandwagon fans don’t endure the losing seasons or the ups and downs along the road to winning the championship.

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.

There are four kinds of sermons or Bible studies I have heard over the years. Only two have the potential to do us much good, and only one is fully grounded in reality. Here’s a thumbnail sketch of each kind.

Sermon A

Here is truth.

Sermon B

Here is truth, go do something.

Sermon C

Here is truth, let God do something through you.

Sermon D

Here is truth, let God do something through you, or else.

What Should We Do with Truth?

As you can tell, I belong to an evangelical tradition that prizes truth and sound doctrine. Though we may squabble amongst ourselves over some of the details, we all value what God has to teach us. We read scripture, we pray, and we, hopefully, listen for the Holy Spirit’s leading.

However, sermon A simply aims to give us information. Certain traditions lean more toward this because they believe so strongly that God alone saves us. They’d say our goal is to change our minds and our actions will follow, and therefore new information is sufficient.

The preacher of Sermon B realizes that God’s desire is to change us into his kind of people, but it doesn’t point people to the Holy Spirit’s power in their lives. It skips to the results and forgets the process that brings them about.

That’s where Sermon C comes in. Jesus said to abide in him and we will bear much fruit. Sermon C tells us truth and connects us with God’s power for love, joy, and good works.

Our lives should change. Obedience is very important, but it’s not up to us to make it happen. The “work” we do as branches is abiding in Jesus, our vine. If we want to get results, we don’t focus on producing the results. We focus on the vine.

However, if we stop here, we have missed something key in passages such as John 15.

The Consequences of Disobedience

God’s love and grace is inexhaustible and given to us freely. God forgives and saves anyone who turns away from sin and calls out. However, the goal of saving us is to give us his love and joy, manifesting his coming Kingdom to others and sharing his love.

Obedience is essential. If we run off to do our own thing, there are consequences. At the start of John 15, Jesus mentions the “non-fruitful” branches being cut off—twice.

I’ve grown up in hell-fire fundamentalism. I’m turned off by preaching with threats or dramatic imploring to be saved from the fires of hell or whatever they call it these days.

I don’t like the idea of telling someone, “Resist God long enough and you’ll be cut off the vine! Don’t get mad at me. It’s in the Bible”

But then the words of Jesus are very tricky to preach. He doesn’t give us a chart or a formula for disobedience that tells us when someone will be cut off. He just says it could happen. God’s love is here for us to enjoy, but it can be resisted, ignored, and ultimately lost.

If not for the trauma of my fundamentalist past, I could accept that without too much fuss. This is far from the angry, vengeful God who is crouched behind a corner waiting for me to slip up. This is God the ignored lover who will let us go our own ways if we so choose.

A branch that refuses to be part of the vine will wither plenty on its own. The act of cutting it off is only a final formality. It’s not like God is chopping off partially healthy branches that simply need to be rehabilitated.

As we consider the love of God for us, I pray that we can see God’s generous, unearned, and inexhaustible grace for what it is. I pray that we can abide in the love that Jesus has for us and that our lives will bloom with the fruit of his love and goodness. And lastly, I pray that we’ll remember that there are consequences for persistent disobedience and resistance to this love.

May we be drawn to God by his love and arrive at a place where we can’t imagine another day without it.

I had the privilege of growing up as a Catholic which means I spent my time learning pithy little, extra-biblical sayings and fearing both God and nuns—though not always in that order.

Fate being a cruel thing, I have come full circle and concocted my own little pithy little, extra-biblical saying: Stay busy, sin less. I like it because it’s counter-intuitive because we often think of the word “busy” as a bad thing.

Don’t we need more leisure and rest?

Sin and the Right Kind of Busy

Avoiding sin is not so much a matter of restraint as of occupation. I’ve found that it’s important to be the right kind of busy.

If we’re busy with God, then we won’t allow ourselves time to get into trouble, and he can transform us. However, that won’t happen while watching TV or browsing Facebook. I’m still working on a way to derive spiritual growth from my time on Twitter.

I’ll tweet you if it works out.

The right kind of busy looks like a cycle that begins with offering myself and listening. It ends with praise.

Listening

I begin each day both fighting my morning grogginess and restraining my desire to launch into my writing for the day as I try to clear a spot in my mind where God can settle and say something to me. I need to hear God, and I need to receive his direction for my day, trusting him with the process and the results.

Obeying

When I get a sense of what I need to do, I can begin my day at peace and in faith, trusting that God will provide what I need and that he’ll give me the grace to work through the day’s obstacles. If I sense that I need to do something specific or avoid something, then obedience is important in order to stay connected with him.

Obedience builds up our resistance against sin. I think of it as momentum. Once I’m hearing God and obeying him, I feel great and want to stick with it. If I’m busy listening to God and obeying him throughout my day, then sin can’t find any room.

Praise

I have quite a few long term goals that I’m working on in addition to my short term goals, and therefore I usually try to review my progress each day or week to see where I’m at. This has been a great practice not only for my writing but for my worship of God.

If I can praise God for the outcome of my day, then I know I’ve been relying on his provision. If my hand is firmly planted on my back, then I know I’ve been relying on myself.

Praise is one of the best ways to end a day. When I wake up the next morning to battle with my morning grogginess, it’s heartening to be reminded of yesterday’s provision as I seek God’s leading for a new day.

The Right Kind of Busy

Remaining in a cycle of listening to/waiting on God, obeying God, and praising God keeps us busy in the right kinds of ways that can generally prevent sin from even crossing one’s mind. I’m not saying that this keeps sin from ever happening, but a cycle of listening, obeying, and praising strikes me as one way to abide in Jesus and to steer clear of sin.

In the game of hockey, players are only allowed to use one stick. Holding onto the stick of another player in addition to your own is against the rules and should result in two minutes in the penalty box for holding or obstruction.

I think that’s a pretty easy concept to… grasp.

During the playoffs this year, one former player mentioned during the commentary in-between periods that one player on the Flyers has perfected a way of sliding his stick next to another player’s stick in tight quarters, grabbing both, and then using both. It’s clearly a penalty, but it’s almost impossible to see. Only two players on the ice know what’s happening.

The game of hockey relies of referees to keep things fair. In fact, I’ve seen games where referees let certain violations go, and soon the players became more reckless and broke more rules. Without the rules and the referees, hockey games would descend into chaos—which I think says a lot because most people think hockey is already kind of crazy.

Can you imagine a hockey game where players called penalties on themselves?

While such personal enforcement doesn’t seem possible in the game of hockey, there are many ways in which Christianity relies on self-enforcement. We could say a lot about the role of our communities in helping us deal with sin, but there’s a sense in which sin does become a personal matter of personal conviction from the Holy Spirit.

God wants us to learn the rules, stop ourselves when we sin, and then stick ourselves in the penalty box.

On one hand, this could sound crazy, almost reckless on God’s part. However, I think this is part of a wider trend that I’ve noticed in Christianity: Jesus is both more lenient and more demanding than we could ever imagine.

On the one hand, God wants to trust us to make solid decisions about sin with the help of the Spirit. James writes, “If anyone, then, knows the good they ought to do and doesn’t do it, it is sin for them.” (4:17). Paul follows a similar line of reasoning in 1 Corinthians 8 and 10.

We don’t have a hard and fast rule book to follow in every situation. That can be quite liberating for those of us who grew up under the constraints of fundamentalism that seemed to be little else than rules at times.

However, and this is a big however, we have to open our entire lives to God. If we’re wise, we’ll learn to open our lives to others as well. The implication in James is that we become both player and referee, scrutinizing every aspect of ourselves to make sure we’re in line with God’s desires and commands.

We are both more free and more responsible.

That’s the trend I see over and over again with Jesus. This is a far more relational and personally costly way to live.

Instead of keeping to a list of laws, we have to open ourselves up to God’s Spirit, making sure that our consciences are pure. Bearing that weight of responsibility is a much better way to live in the long run, and it prepares us to become God’s kind of people who can live with him in eternity.

We can place ourselves in the penalty box when we step out of line, but the goal is that we’ll know the rules so well and desire a pure conscience so badly, that the penalty box will one day become a faint memory.

The Only Item on My To-Do List

I used to have a Christian growth check list. It read something like this:

• Daily prayer time.
• Daily Bible study time.
• Sin-free day.

If I had a major revelation during my prayer or Bible study time, I added a star or a sticker to my Christian growth list. OK, maybe not, but you get the idea. I had a clear picture in my mind of what a successful Christian looks like.

Follow the list and grow as a Christian.

It was exhausting.

I knew lots of other Christians who really enjoyed their prayer time, even if they had to discipline themselves into making a habit of it.

I knew lots of other Christians who found life-changing truth in the Bible, even if they had to drag themselves out of bed at an indecent hour.

Why was I struggling? Why didn’t I know how to make it work? I had the information, but it wasn’t clicking.

A former pastor of mine used to say, “Keep Christianity simple.” I’m all for that. I mean, it’s not like I had a very extensive list, right?

The problem? I wasn’t keeping it simple enough.

It started with a prayer time, in which I confronted the reality that God loves me. It shocked me. My life was swallowed up into something more accepting and powerful than I could have ever imagined. As I opened myself up to God’s Spirit, his leading, and the love he gave to me, I found my desires changed and shifted.

I wanted more of God.

I wanted to spend time with him.

I wanted to listen.

I wanted to obey him.

The result? I began to grow as a disciple.

Prayer, obedience,  and scripture became sub-points under the single item on my new to-do list: fall in love with Jesus.

Love prompts me to seek the leading of the Spirit, toss aside my goals and priorities, and steer clear of sin. Love drives me to greater discipline in prayer and study of scripture.

A wise man once said, “If I do not have love… I am nothing.”

Without love all of the best intentions, all of the hardest work, and all of the to-do lists in the world will just wear us out. May we never grow weary because we rely on God’s unfailing love.

Bring your mess to God, but don’t expect to hang on to it.

The story of the Prodigal is a great starting point: yes, God will take us in with all of our doubts, sins, and messy, complicated flaws. God doesn’t want us to come to him perfect.

How could we?

But when we become God’s people, his adopted children, and those joined to him through the Holy Spirit, obedience needs to enter into the equation if we dare speak of loving him.

God loves his people, but he wants his people to demonstrate their love through obedience.

In the book of Deuteronomy we read the words love and obey together in chapter six because we can’t say we love God unless we obey him. However, we also won’t obey God unless we love him.

God is not looking for people who will just obey him without loving him. He also won’t have much patience for love without obedience. How many marriages would last if husbands never listened to their wives?

We can turn God into a tyrant, but we can also turn God into a pushover. The reality we find in scripture is a highly relational God who wants intimacy with his people—intimacy that isn’t marred by destructive decisions or selfishness.

He gives his love to us because he wants to change us, to make us more like him. In changing, we’ll find that the old things we once valued no longer carry the same appeal. It’s a process, but it’s one that is well worth it. God loves us and he’ll patiently stick with us while we figure out what it means to be loved by God, to love him in return, and to obey him out of love.

This post is part of Bonnie Gray’s Thursday Faith Jam on love. For more posts, check out Bonnie’s post “Giving Myself Permission to be Loved.”

Yesterday I wrote about those times when God leads us into wilderness periods in order to teach us to depend on him. When all of our sources of security and provision have been stripped from us, we realize that all we ever had was God himself all along.

Hopefully the lessons from the wilderness will stick with us.

However, walking through the wilderness is not a virtue in and of itself. God wants to shape our hearts and minds, fostering reliance on His Spirit. Make no mistake, this is something we can squander and screw up.

While in the wilderness the Israelites refused to trust God to provide, complained when he didn’t provide what they wanted, and worshipped an idol when God didn’t show up on their time table. There were serious consequences to this battle of the wills.

God does not back down when we resist the lessons he wants to teach us.

I can fight him, persist in sin, and complain that the wilderness isn’t what I deserve. However, God has his plans for me and for you, and these are good plans for our benefit. The process may not feel pleasant, but it can produce real fruit if we submit to his plans for us.

Resistance, selfishness, or sloth will not lead us out of the wilderness. Some days I feel like I’m slowly piecing together the lessons he wants me to learn, other days I gripe and complain, and then other days I have a refreshing glimpse of the blessings he wants to start unfolding in my life and in the lives of those around me.

Until God becomes our greatest desire, may every other source of comfort and security leave us frustrated, stuck, and confused. May nothing take the place of God in our hearts. May we learn that lesson sooner than later.