:: In.a.Mirror.Dimly ::

One of the most disconcerting phrases in the Bible may be, “We rejoice in our sufferings.” How in the world could a sane person ever arrive at the conclusion that suffering is something to celebrate?

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.

Have you ever become frustrated by the Bible? Sometimes the commands of Paul set me on edge.

He writes to the Ephesians, “be renewed in the attitude your minds.” Fine, I’m all for that. My mind is feeling a bit stale these days. How exactly should I go about that?

It’s tempting to read these verses and to think it’s all up to me. However, the bigger picture of holiness presented by Paul and throughout the Bible actually takes quite a bit of pressure off us.

The power to become like Jesus comes from his indwelling Spirit. However, are we really off the hook completely? I mean, we dare not insert our own works into the equation?

This is where Protestants can especially struggle since we’re so “salvation by works-averse.” The power is 100% from God, but we can neglect it. I’m not in any way capable of powering my chop saw, but I need to plug it in to the power source and keep it there if I want to cut anything.

The word that Jesus used to describe this process was “abiding.” The abiding is our work. It’s what we have to do if we want to become holy and renewed in our minds. A branch can’t grow any fruit on its own, but it needs to remain connected to the vine in order to grow grapes. The nutrients come up through the vine as the branch stays connected.

Our abiding work tends to put us at odds with our fast-paced culture that values multi-tasking and increased efficiency. Dare I suggest that our culture doesn’t really know what it is to “abide.” It seems lazy or wasteful. The heroes know how to squeeze every last ounce of productivity out of their time, money, and even other people. Those who know how to abide are an anomaly.

The examples of abiding in scripture are sometimes quite extreme to our eyes:

• Moses spending 40 days on the mountain.
• Joshua remaining in the tabernacle long after Moses had left.
• Samuel sleeping in the tent of the Lord.
• Anna fasting and praying night and day for her entire life.
• John the Baptist spending his adult years in the seclusion of the wilderness.
• Paul wandering in the wilderness by himself before beginning his ministry.
• Jesus praying for an entire evening.

Why would all of these founders of our faith spend so much time in solitude, away from productive ministry and work? What is the value of this time?

The connection is this:

• Without 40 days on the mountain, Moses fails to lead the people to the Jordan River.
• Without those evenings in the tabernacle, Josh falters when he leads the people into the Promised Land.
• Without those nights in the tent of the Lord, Samuel can’t hear God speak to him.
• Without fasting and prayer, Anna misses the Messiah and the message God gave to her.
• Without wandering in the wilderness, John and Paul can’t hear the message God wants them to share.
• Jesus modeled this for us. It’s striking to think that even God incarnate set aside time to hear the voice of God. It’s like a Trinitarian brain teaser.

Do I honestly believe I can imitate Jesus effectively by praying less than he did?

If I’m ever frustrated by my lack of progress with holiness, one of the first places to begin is the work of abiding. I can’t explain what happens when God gets ahold of us or how he “makes” us holy or renews our minds. We have models who have gone before us who suggest that this is the only way to be changed.

The final straw arrived last night—the one that breaks the camel’s back. Like an angry camel I flopped onto the ground flailing and spitting. Proverbially spitting that is.

Or are llamas the ones who spit?

Regardless of the spitting involved, I hit my limit last night. Enough things had gone wrong, enough projects had piled up, enough incidental circumstances had mounted to the point that I snapped.

The crazy thing is that under normal circumstances, the final straw was actually a pretty good thing tinged with a few problems. It was something that I would normally thank God for. But oh last night, I didn’t need one more thing to do. One more urgent deadline was too much after pushing to meet more deadlines than I could count. The constant urgency of one thing after another got to me.

I stomped out of the house because I needed to break my little pity party. I needed… Mediterranean food. I could try to tie this back to my camel metaphor (I mean, where else would a camel in Columbus go?), but I’ll just stop things there since I ate a lamb wrap.

A few hours later I had some perspective.

I hadn’t prayed about things. I’d just reacted. It was alright that I recognized a need for a change of scenery, but it took me far too long to realize that some of the things that had pushed me over the edge were essentially answers to my prayers.

I just didn’t expect those answers to my prayers to arrive along with all of this other junk.

So now I just feel like an ungrateful jerk who asks God for stuff and then doesn’t even recognize it when it arrives. In fact, I had the audacity to see his blessings as a problem.

I feel like I need to channel my inner Ann Voskamp and work on this gratitude thing. My spirit runs dry for want of gratitude and worship.

My mother-in-law once said that we overcome sin and the schemes of the enemy with worship. And if I was honest with myself, something that is not a guarantee, I’d have to say my “woe is me” attitude is a pretty good sign that I’ve been a tad self-absorbed lately.

I need to redirect my worship to where it belongs.

I had to confront one of my fears a few weeks ago. It’s a bit too private to share all of the details on a blog, but if I had to list the top three things that freak me out, I’d say this is right up there. It’s the kind of fear that I can’t control, that I know can only be resolved through prayer that I’ve been too afraid to seek.

A few weeks ago, I decided to take action. I wasn’t facing anything life threatening or uncomfortable, but I was in a situation that made it really easy to face that fear. The freak out was pretty awesome: sweaty palms, beating heart, short breaths. I was a ball of fun at close quarters in the elevator that day.

And then something changed. I gained an understanding of the actual source of my fear, and I realized that I’d completely mischaracterized it. It wasn’t quite as bad as I thought, even if it still kind of freaks me out.

By staring into my fear, I discovered a weak point in its defenses, and you’d better believe I’m praying into that weak spot with everything I’ve got.

On Becoming Less Fearful

I had a chat with some classmates at my 10-year college reunion, and one guy asked how we’ve changed over the past 10 years. One friend said that he is now less fearful after working through so many hard times at his first job. He cares far less about what people think of him, and he is far more confident as takes risks and pursues challenges.

In a sense, his first job blasted him with so many sources of stress and anxiety that they soon lost their power. He saw them at their worst, and he realized that God was able to sustain him.

There are real things to fear in this world, but so much of what we fear is insubstantial, lacking teeth. The substantial parts of our fears may knock us around when we face them, but God is able to deliver us because Jesus is Lord over all.

Facing our fears often seems like a terrible at idea in the thick of things. However, we’ll never have a chance to experience God’s power and deliverance unless we own our fears and let him begin working in us.

I have found that deliverance is often a process, a series of stumbling steps forward. As I discovered in the elevator that day with my nervous faith, God can break through and begin to heal us when we face our fears.

I’ve never been all that good at sleeping. I’m still not sure I know what a nap is. I don’t believe my wife when she talks about “taking” one. Where does she find it?

When we started planning our move to Ohio back in the February/March ballpark, sleeping became really difficult. I would lay in bed for hours staring at the ceiling as my heart raced. I knew I didn’t have heart problems. It was my old friend anxiety manifesting itself in a new and annoying way.

I’ve been dealing with anxiety for a long time now. I’ve read a lot of scripture about fear and have received prayer. Prayer usually works.

One night I asked Julie to pray for me, and sure enough I didn’t have the racing heart and anxious thoughts I’d struggled against.

However, I still wasn’t sleeping great. Something wasn’t quite right when I laid down to sleep each night. I stumbled into a solution when I looked into solving another problem.

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While in seminary, a small conservative church hired me to teach their Wednesday evening Bible study. It was the perfect opportunity to get some practical ministry experience, even though I never saw myself leading that kind of church one day. I was also planning to get married in the near future, so the extra money didn’t hurt.

The group was rarely larger than ten people, but I took it very seriously. I dug through commentaries and prepared some pretty substantial sermons each week. I didn’t know how to lead a discussion, but I think they wanted a teacher, not a discussion leader.

They were very nice people, but as I drove home each week, I’d think to myself, “Phew! That was hard work. I’m glad that’s over for this week.”

Around the same time I was visiting my bride-to-be up in Vermont, and while there I’d go into the local prison with her parents for a church service. They had a very different approach to ministry that led to a rather different kind of car ride home from the meeting.

I’ve learned a lot from them about how to prepare for ministry. While there still may be occasions when I need to consult a commentary or prepare something, the most important preparation comes when I pray and worship the Lord each morning.

I don’t need perfect planning to minister. I don’t need to be perfect. I just need to be present with God.

While praying before going into the prison yesterday, the Lord put Luke 11 on my mind, which is Jesus’ teaching on prayer. I read it for a little while and thought of some stories I could share.

As I drove to the prison that evening, John 16 also came to mind, which is Jesus’ teaching on the Holy Spirit leading us into all truth. I thought that I could teach on John 16 in order to encourage the men to share some testimonies at the beginning, and that Luke 11 would serve as my main text before we moved on to the Alpha lesson about the church.

God wanted to teach us from those passages, but he didn’t need me to do it.

I sat down, introduced myself, and then the Holy Spirit taught us how the church works as one person after another shared what God was teaching him. One guy taught us for about 30 minutes what he’d been learning about prayer, faith, and pleasing God.

I kept my eye on the clock and nodded my head as each guy raised his hand to speak, but otherwise I did nothing. The Holy Spirit taught us our lesson. I saw John 16 unfold right before my eyes.

As if God wanted to drive home the point that he had things under control, the second hour of the meeting focused on how to dialogue with other faiths in the prison and how to respond to insults and anger. I’ve studied a lot about the mission of the church, but it seems that when the Holy Spirit is given room to work, the mission takes care of itself.

The men sang as they stacked the chairs and walked back to their dorms for the evening, smiling and encouraging one another. A lot of ministry happened last night, and I did very little of it. I did one thing: I got out of God’s way and followed his lead.

I drove home last night joyful and encouraged, thankful that ministry does not have to be hard, draining work bearing unknown fruit that we may never see. Perfect preparation doesn’t take place through studies but through God’s Spirit.

Today’s post on perfection is part of Bonnie Gray’s Thursday series. For more posts on perfection, visit Bonnie’s blog and begin with her post: The Top 5 Lies of Perfectionism.

On Wednesday night our Alpha group at the local prison watched the video and met in small groups on the topic of the Holy Spirit. While I believe it’s really important to learn about the Holy Spirit—you have to start somewhere—it can also be really discouraging.

I now have a laundry list of all the awesome things that are NOT happening in my Christian life.

I caught myself sort of begging the Holy Spirit to descend on me during the video—such is my insecurity at times. However, the point of it all is that the Holy Spirit is within us, and we can’t replicate the Holy Spirit’s work among us.

Our job is to seek and wait. Those two words come up over and over again in the Psalms. Stillness and silence often help, which run counter to everything in American culture.

The truth is that the Spirit sometimes just shows up. Sometimes we need to fight off every distraction and get a drop of God, and it feels like the most precious thing in the world. Other times God fills us with himself in ways that almost seem wasteful. I want to bottle some of it up for later.

Christianity is all about God bringing the dead to life—people who spiritually have no life going on and no power on their own to connect with God. They can only seek God and wait for God to bring the Resurrection.

The Christian life is full of Good Fridays where we confess our sins and die to ourselves. We’re waiting for Sunday to come—the day when God comes to us with his presence, joy, and peace. These are the moments we realize that every other source of joy in ours lives, even playoff hockey, cannot compare with the goodness of God.

However, stuck between Friday and Sunday is Saturday. Before I start singing in an auto-tuned voice, “Gotta get down on Friday” (which can have a sort of spiritual double-meaning if you take it out context), I wanted to say something about Saturdays.

We have to persevere through our Saturdays. There’s no way around it. God does the resurrecting. God raises us on Sunday on his schedule.

On my way to visit some family this weekend while Julie wrapped up some some pressing school work, I put some worship music on in the car. All of sudden, KABOOM! God’s presence invaded, and I experienced three hours of spiritual insanity—joy, hope, peace, love, etc.

Driving through the abandoned wasteland outside of Hartford with empty lots and heaps of rubble and trash, I had a sense of God’s love for the broken people and broken places of this world. The places that no one gives a damn about are his treasured possession—the places where he is Lord. This was his domain.

I sensed his love and delight for me, his child. I felt his acceptance erasing the insecurity I manifested on Wednesday. In a few minutes he erased all doubt and fear.

When I tell people about Christianity, I don’t need to talk about too much theology, even though I’m passionate about theology. It’s moments like these when you meet with God and he turns your insecure Saturdays into the assurance and peace of a Sunday.

I follow Jesus because he rose one Sunday 2,000 years ago, and he continues to raise people every day.

I used to look at the Easter story as simply the moment when Jesus delivers us from sin by dying on the cross and rising to life. Jesus did all of the work for me, and I just needed to accept his free gift by faith.

That captures part of the story, and while salvation is a gift that is accomplished by the work that only God can do, actually claiming it by faith is a process that involves hard work on our part. It’s just not the kind of “hard work” we expect.

Easter reminds me that I don’t need to earn God’s favor or save myself. His Spirit can save me and make me holy. However, tearing myself away from distractions and opening myself to God’s saving and sanctifying power is where the hard work comes in.

Whether it’s rising early for prayer, setting aside lunch time to read scripture, sitting still to meditate in the evening, or fasting from a meal in order to wait on the Lord, the hard work and disciplines lead to discipleship.

I like how the words discipline and disciple look so similar in English.

Our day to day decisions have everything to do with how we experience God’s saving work and power.

During the days leading up to the cross, Jesus worked hard at prayer, challenging his disciples up to the last moment in the garden to sacrifice physical rest for the sake of spiritual exercise—praying that God would protect them from temptation.

He didn’t tell his disciples, “Take a nap fellahs. I’m going to be crucified tomorrow anyway. I’ve got this sin thing taken care of. You don’t need to worry about sin and temptation since you’re going to be saved by faith!”

We can never add to our salvation, but we can neglect it and fail to receive the power that comes through the cross, leading to our deliverance from sin, and through the Resurrection, raising us to new lives in Christ. During Easter I remember that Jesus saved me, but in delivering me from sin, he has called me to the hard work and daily sacrifices that discipleship requires.

For more thoughts on Easter, read Bonnie Gray’s post: Sometimes it gets worse before it gets better.

I’m on my way to wrapping up some reflections on the Gospel that began with my response to a video about how universalism impacts discipleship and how the Christus Victor explanation for the atonement captures the full scope of the biblical story and its ramifications for disciples today. Today I’d like to ask, “What does fully committed discipleship look like?”

When we run into questions about how we are saved and what it means to commit ourselves to Christ, the natural question that follows is, “How do we follow him daily?” We aren’t saved just for a ticket out of here. We are saved from our sins in order to worship and love God, serving him as disciples.

I know that we all have to follow Jesus with integrity and respond to the ways God has spoken to us, but I think there are certain ways of perceiving Christianity that can drive us insane if we follow them to their logical conclusion. These perceptions are usually rooted in biblical concepts that are somehow misconstrued or lack balance from the full witness of scripture.

It’s maddening to think that everyone outside of the Christian fold could spend an eternity in hell.

If we really believe that, then I wonder why every Christian hasn’t sold his/her home in order to spend every waking hour preaching, traveling around the world, and warning everyone about this.

I’m serious. If the eternal destiny of everyone rests on affirming a simple creed and praying a salvation prayer, then we need to get moving.

We should be out on the streets with signs, bullhorns, and flyers. We should e-mail everyone we know, blanket the internet with warnings, and organize social media campaigns that sneak the Gospel message into funny little videos so that some may possibly be saved.

We need to be clear, concise, and efficient. There is no time to waste. Souls are perishing in the fires of hell.

Why aren’t we doing this?

Don’t we care?

These thoughts have kept me up at night, given me panic attacks, and plunged me into guilt and despair. I want to take the Bible seriously, and if this is what the Bible is all about, shouldn’t I act accordingly?

This approach to discipleship almost drove me insane.

If so much is really on the line, we need to match our actions with our theology.

The Mission of Jesus

I have one simple suggestion for the reason why we shouldn’t do this: Jesus didn’t advance the Kingdom of God like this.

The Kingdom wasn’t about passing along a simple and clear message all of the time—Jesus used parables.

The Kingdom advanced slowly, and it was sometimes hidden while in plain sight.

Jesus waited around for 30 years before starting his mission, traveled to a few neighboring territories, and then died on the cross at a relatively young age.

If saving thousands of souls throughout the world was so important, why didn’t he travel further and faster? Why did he speak in parables? What happened to the native peoples in North and South America? Did the gradual methods of Jesus inadvertently condemn thousands to hell?

I hope this rattles us a bit. We have made the driving force behind our discipleship this notion of eternal torment in hell for those who have not heard the Gospel, when in reality, that doesn’t seem to be what motivated the mission of Jesus or what he passed on to his disciples.

While we can’t deny the early church had a powerful sense of mission and a drive to see God’s Kingdom spread, were they motivated to save the masses from eternity in hell by passing along the basic information of salvation?

How the Kingdom Spreads

The Kingdom of God does not spread through guilt, obligation, or fear. Though God wants to extend his rule to all of creation and save people from their sins, his vision for restoration extends beyond saving souls from eternal torment. In fact, while Jesus makes it clear that some will be outside of the Kingdom and some even attack it, he doesn’t tell us all that much about those unreached by the Gospel.

In fact, Jesus seemed to care more about advancing the Kingdom effectively and thoroughly, letting it take root in his followers and empowering them to spread the holistic message of the Gospel throughout the world. There is urgency to preach and embody the Kingdom, but the details about those who haven’t heard it are limited.

The call to spread the Gospel did not come with a threat, “Preach or else the rest of the world gets it.” We don’t read about the Gospel being good news because it’s saving us from eternal torment in hell, but rather because God is coming to heal us, save us from our sins, and prepare us for an eternity with him.

It’s good because it tells us about God’s love and salvation. While it’s very possible to reject the Gospel, the driving force behind the mission of God isn’t a sense of impending doom.

We just don’t know what will become of those who haven’t heard the Gospel. However, if we can take any clues based on how God works in the Bible, he certainly doesn’t seem frantic about things. God didn’t send prophets to every nation throughout the Old Testament.

God chose to work through a tiny nation of former slaves that was bulldozed militarily by the neighboring nations on a regular basis.

The Kingdom of God that grew like a mustard seed with Jesus  spread gradually with Israel as well. I don’t think we need to go insane with preaching to everyone everywhere as fast as we can because that wasn’t God’s way either. He infects are daily lives and works through us where we are, moving us closer to his plan for us where we are, sometimes calling us to change things.

We are compelled by the love of God to give ourselves fully to him, to model his Kingdom, and to love everyone so that the greatest number of people can know God too.

The uncertain fate of those who don’t know the Gospel does not excuse us from sharing the Gospel in word and deed. In fact, I would hope that our experiences of God and his love would motivate us to preach the Gospel even more. However, I’d just rather we dropped the, “Hell is coming to all of you!” aspect of the message.

We don’t know. What we do know is that we don’t want to be separated from God. We should certainly mention that we can reject God’s love, but it’s not fear that drives us. Fear and guilt wrecks a Gospel message that is characterized by God’s love.

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.