:: In.a.Mirror.Dimly ::

I didn’t start gardening because I love pruning tomato plants or figuring out the ideal lay out for our perennials.

Everything changed when I had my own lawn to mow.

I couldn’t dig up the chunks of grass fast enough. Every square foot of garden was one less bit of lawn to mow. When we looked into renting a home in Columbus, lawn size was always in the back of my mind. Once we moved into our home, I hauled a mountain of dirt to our back yard for raised bed gardens that cut the lawn in half.

Jesus said we need to love our enemies. That’s fine with me. I don’t think that applies to my attitude toward the lawn.

After tilling up our first garden a few years ago, I discovered that gardening has a dark side: weeds. For all of the joy I gained by turning our useless lawn into a productive patch of beauty and food, the weeds brought their own torments. Weeding is essentially mowing the lawn one blade of grass at a time.

Weeds choke out healthy plants and steal their nutrients. I couldn’t ignore weeds, but I also hated the hours of rooting around in the dirt for the “mythical” weed roots. I soon learned that weed prevention was preferable to weed pulling.

I learned through a hyperactive gardening expert that cardboard and wood chips can make for nice paths, but my rows of lettuce still suffered weed infestations amidst the straw I laid around them. I found the solution at a community garden plot.

One lady planted her lettuce in a group underneath her sunflowers. The sunflower provided shade during the heat of summer, while the packed lettuce fought off any weeds that dared to invade. She still had to weed a little at first, but soon the overwhelming numbers of lettuce prevented the weeds from ever returning.

Good plants can choke out the bad plants.

When we take that gardening lesson and apply it to the parable about the four kinds of soil and the message of the Kingdom, we have a fascinating alternative to the seeds that were choked out by weeds. The good seeds grow and essentially take the offensive against the weeds.

Pulling Weeds Isn’t Efficient

I don’t think Jesus intended his followers to spend their time pulling the “weeds” out of their lives. Weeding takes us away from cultivating the good plants that can feed us. While weeding is necessary for the short term, weed prevention is the best long term strategy in both gardens and in our spiritual lives.

Cultivating Healthy Plants to Fight Weeds

As we cultivate healthy spiritual practices such as meditating in silence, trusting our needs to God, and reading scripture daily, we’ll fertilize the fruit-bearing seeds of the Kingdom in our lives. As these practices help us grow and produce fruit, we’ll crowd out any space for sin.

When sin does sprout up in our lives, we can’t let it overshadow the good seeds that God has planted in us. We uproot them through confession, trusting in God’s power to restore us. A few weeds don’t ruin the value of everything else in the garden, but they can’t be left to flourish either.

Creating space for God’s Spirit in our lives helps God’s good things flourish so that we don’t have to spend all of our time weeding out every sin that pops up.

The Greenhouse

What’s one thing that most interferes with your prayer and scripture time? Can you remove it for one day?

What is one thing you can do to help yourself look forward to prayer? What if you walked to a place today that feels peaceful? What if you lit candles in a dark room? Would kneeling beside your bed help you focus better? Try something different out today for your prayer time.

Taking Root is a series of meditations I’m writing and editing for Central Vineyard Church during the season of Lent. You can download the podcast version of each post by subscribing to my church’s podcast for each day of the series.

If you read the Bible long enough, you’ll realize that reading the Bible isn’t enough. In fact, if you learn every story and law and try to imitate everything you read, you’ll drive either yourself or everyone you know crazy.

The more you try to systematically obey the Bible, the harder it will become. Jesus didn’t leave us with a one-size-fits-all blueprint for obedience and discipleship. He asked different things of the various people he encountered.

Some were called to leave everything and follow him. Others were told to stay put and serve their communities. Still others were told to go and sin no more without a command to start following him.

There surely were some basic ground rules in place for followers, but the we can find examples in the New Testament of both rich young rulers who were asked to leave everything behind and home owners who practiced hospitality and generosity.

What is Jesus asking you to do?

The Bible tell suggests this: You’ll need to ask him rather than looking up the answer in the Bible.

And that creates an interesting picture of obedience.

There are the basic rules that must be obeyed if you want to be part of God’s people. Love the Lord first, love your neighbors, and don’t let anything prevent you from doing either. Those who allow greed, pride, selfishness, anger, or any other sin interfere, the call is for swift repentance.

Obedience is pretty simple to figure out since we know exactly what God requires of us in the scriptures. But there is another form of obedience where we hear from God and know what he expects of us, and we can choose to disobey him. We should have some biblical precedents for this kind of obedience, but this is a little different because it tends to apply to individuals or groups.

One example would be Paul and Barnabas who were praying and fasting when the Holy Spirit set them aside for missions work. Some Christians were called to stay put in Antioch, but in the case of Saul and Barnabas, they had specific work that God called them to do.

There were biblical examples of this kind of prophetic calling to God’s mission, but this kind of obedience is far more specific to individuals in a certain situation. God both lays out the ground rules for us in terms of general obedience and speaks to us concerning particular callings.

If we make an obedience system out of the stories in the Bible, then we’re going to miss the guidance provided by the Holy Spirit and we’ll fall into legalism. Some things in the Bible are quite clear, but other aspects of obedience require an attentive ear to the Spirit of God.

As I’ve started to understand the latter aspect of obedience, I’ve found that Christianity makes a lot more sense. I’m not called to be a Paul. I’m called to listen like a Paul, resist sin like a Paul, and obey like a Paul, but there’s a good chance God hasn’t called me to make tents. I’m not a lover of camping and God especially knows I don’t pay close attention—a real problem if I started sewing tent seams together.

The world is a better place without me trying to make tents or traveling from town to town to debate in synagogues. I’m grateful that God has made us with our individual gifts and particular callings. I’m grateful that the Holy Spirit keeps me from making myself and my family crazy.

May we have ears to hear what the Spirit is speaking to us today.

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.

God is great at remembering his promises and at forgetting our sins. I tend to think he’s either great at one or the other. Either he remembers his promises AND all of my sins, or he forgets my sins but he also fails to follow up on his promises.

It’s hard to imagine how God does it. In the past I’ve failed to follow up on commitments or e-mails. I typically feel awful about it, and then I get to enjoy the guilt that comes with letting someone down. So I know how to fail pretty comprehensively.

God is so unlike us!

It’s so important to sit and reflect on the work of God because it’s counterintuitive. God’s promises are better than anything we could cook up on our own. If we don’t let his Spirit reshape and renew our minds, we’ll never figure it out.

In fact, God promised to do this for us. The new covenant means that God’s law will be written on our minds and hearts. God promises to make himself known to us. At the climax of these promises in Hebrews 8, we find this incredible statement:

“I will forgive their wickedness, and I will never again remember their sins.” – Hebrews 8:12

These promises are being fulfilled today. God is here to redeem people who fail—people like me. People like you. That redemption means he’ll never forget what he has promises to do, but our sins are forgotten.

Sometimes I fear that I’ve taken God’s grace too far. I often find God is far ahead of me, offering me something greater than what I can imagine.

John the Baptist had some dirty work to do. I’m not talking about munching on locusts or roaming around the desert. I’m talking about challenging people to bring their sins out before God, confess their sins, and prepare themselves to enter God’s Kingdom.

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.

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.

I’ve been thinking a lot lately about sin. To be honest, I think I’ve completely misunderstood what sin is and what it does for most of my life.

I’ve probably posted about this before, but some things finally clicked for me last week and over the weekend. It was like I finally understood with some degree of personal certainty what sin is and isn’t.

Sin as a Chainsaw

There’s nothing like a head full of Bible verses to freak you out when you sin. I catch myself wondering if I’ve used up my sacrifice for sins or have somehow exhausted God’s mercy. I mean, is there a point where we’ve decided to cross God one too many times before he gives up on us?

I don’t think so, but then again, I’m really good at finding Bible verses to convince myself otherwise.

I tend to think of sin as this chainsaw that cuts me off the vine of Christ. I think of myself stuck on the ground, separated from God, and in need of a long, drawn-out restoration process.

My general approach has been to wallow and beg for mercy, which has some serious issues. I’ve been learning over the past few years how wrong that view really is, but it all came together last week.

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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.

Last Saturday I posted a response that challenges a video by a leading Christian author who said that discipleship hinges on whether or not universalism is false—as in, if universalism is true, then we have no reason to leave all for the sake of Jesus. I wanted to take the discussion there one step further into the way we discuss salvation and how it impacts discipleship.

As I said last week, most Christians agree that the Gospel is more than a ticket for us into heaven, but what is it supposed to accomplish then?

I used to think that the Gospel was only supposed to deliver us from sin. Jesus took my place, and that’s all there is. However, I still struggled with sin and living as a faithful disciple of Jesus.

When I discovered the atonement theory known as Christus Victor, I found a historically rooted narrative for salvation that tied substitutionary salvation into the entire story of scripture and gave a full picture of the Gospel.

A Gospel that only delivers us from sin without encompassing the rest of the salvation story naturally becomes our ticket to heaven. Sin is defeated, we get to go to heaven, and then we’re left to wonder what to do with the rest of the Bible and the persistence of sin.

Understanding the death of Jesus as substitutionary for us certainly captures a central event in our salvation, and I’m sure if we only know that much, God can work with us. However, that is only part of the larger narrative of God’s salvation. If God only wants to substitute himself for us, then universalism certainly is a problem that threatens a specific method of being saved by understanding something about the work of Christ.

However, in the larger narrative of salvation, universalism becomes irrelevant. While I believe universalism is still wrong because it turns God into a deity who forces himself on us whether we want him or not, we don’t need to worry about whether or not its true because we are entering the advancing Kingdom in the present and are being transformed into God’s holy people.

We follow God because he has delivered us from sin and death and is healing  and using us.

In other words, God is placing his law in our hearts through his Spirit because he has defeated sin. The process by which he defeated sin was substitutionary in that Jesus took our place, but he has now defeated sin and has given us his Spirit so that we can live in his freedom and share that Good News of the Kingdom with others.

By saying that Jesus took our place, we’re only sharing half of the good news. While we need that victory, we need the resurrection and the consequent filling of the Spirit. We weren’t saved just to be saved. We were saved to be holy and to do God’s work here on earth.

I see the victory of Christ as the controlling narrative of scripture where God delivers us from our sins and the power of evil that we often submit to in this life—we are responsible for our sins and need his substitionary deliverance. The means is substitutionary, but the narrative is larger and more powerful than Jesus taking our place. We have been delivered for his holy calling.

When we find that larger narrative, we can see that Gospel does more than defeat sin, it opens us to God’s healing power in our lives and empowers us to follow Jesus as his ambassadors who are compelled by the love of God to share his Kingdom’s Good News.

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.