The man shuts his eyes to pray. He thanks God for the many opportunities to serve. For all the holes he’s been able to fill, all the mouths he’s been able to feed and the bumps he’s been able to smooth. He thanks God for giving him the ability to keep his life right. He knows he wouldn’t be able to do it alone. ‘Give credit where credit is due.’ He prays for provision in the mission where the mission is lacking. He prays for his fellow workers and for his enemies. He has assurance of his salvation and knows who he represents. Everything he does, he does for God. In all of his accomplishments, he gives credit to God.
God sits and watches as this caveman beats his chest and raises his stick. He flexes his muscles and sacrifices his best. He dances around the aromatic smoke and works up a sweat fanning it over to God.
God already gave the sacrifice, but for some reason, the man still wants to contribute. The only problem is, everything the man does pales in comparison to what God accomplished. The man is so busy trying to please God that he’s not even in touch with who God is or what he did.
God sits and watches the little boy tuck in his shirt and wash the dirt off his hands. He sees the little boy comb his hair over from a perfect part and tie his shoes. He waits as the little boy sings songs and keeps his eyes shut during prayer.
God sees the little boy and recognizes his effort, but he doesn’t get to watch him run. He doesn’t get to nurture him when he falls down. The boy will never fully understand who God is because he tries so hard to not need him. If the little boy never abandons fear of failure, he’ll never feel safe enough to run. If he never tries to run, he’ll never find out he was made to fly.
God watches us put in contributions to our salvation and purpose. He tells us to not worry about ourselves, but we still find ways to worry about ourselves. We’re missing out on who God is. God, the indweller and encompassor, is shut out by our moral recital.
The man who continues to live by achievement in the Law with high-minded sweat in light of the Truth is the same freed slave who went back to his old master, the Law, because of the discomfort of freedom.
If the Law were not important, it would not have had to be paid off. However, when you behave as though the sacrifice was not enough, what does that say to the Father?
God sacrificed his son so you wouldn’t have to be a slave to the law anymore. He gave because he wants to free you up to know who he is. Every time we try to earn our keep, we contradict the handout. Really knowing God produces change. Changing ourselves does not bring forth a knowledge of God.
Don’t be afraid, keep your faith simple.
Whoever becomes simple and elemental again, like this child,will rank high in God’s kingdom. -Matthew 18:3
If your simple faith and disregard for your ‘self’ sends you running off in the wrong direction, he’ll come and get you.
If someone has a hundred sheep and one of them wanders off, doesn’t he leave the ninety-nine and go after the one? And if he finds it, doesn’t he make far more over it than over the ninety-nine who stay put? Your Father in heaven feels the same way. He doesn’t want to lose even one of these simple believers. -Matthew 18:13-14
God set you free so that you can run without the fear of falling. You can stop worrying about getting it right and stop being afraid of getting it wrong. You can trust him. He’s got you covered.
Live carefree before God; he is most careful with you. -1 Peter 5:6
Scripture talks about the way of a Jesus follower being narrow and difficult. It’s not narrow because of all of the things we have to give up. It’s not difficult because of all the things we have to do.
The way of a Jesus follower is narrow because we cannot bring our ‘selves’ through the opening. It’s difficult because we are attached to our ‘selves’.
Being a Jesus follower is the most difficult for those who think they are pretty decent human beings. Why would you die to a part of you that has nothing wrong with it?
It’s tough for those who think they are ‘good’ to understand that ‘good’ isn’t good enough.
Being a Jesus follower is difficult because you have to learn how to think with a different part of you. You have to learn to see with different eyes.
Scripture says nothing about all of these little addendum’s religion puts on being a Christ follower. Different churches have different visions for what it is to be a Christian. Very little of it has anything to do with what Jesus taught.
What is so frustrating for those who ask questions is that the church members know the right things to say, but are far from practicing what they preach. They’ll tell you that the only way to eternal life is believing in Jesus, but they’ll demand so much more in actuality. If you don’t believe it, then ask anyone who tripped in their walk, needed a miracle that never came or couldn’t conquer a bad habit. You’ll hear that they were never Christians, that they have some recessed sin or that they don’t have enough faith.
Being a Christian has nothing to do with what you don’t do.
I’m convinced—Jesus convinced me!—that everything as it is in itself is holy. We, of course, by the way we treat it or talk about it, can contaminate it. - Romans 14:13
Preachers stand in front of their shiny congregations and tell them they have to walk the walk if they’re going to talk the talk. People with known sin in their lives will squirm in their seats and vow a vow that lasts until Wednesday that they won’t do [insert sin] anymore. That’s fine, I get it, but they are not the only one’s who need to listen to that preacher.
We should be listening to this stuff as if we had something to learn. The sixty-year-old, white-haired pew veteran needs to be called out in her opaque stockings. The relentless aunt with her dishwater hands and her mousy hair needs to know that the preacher isn’t just talking to the fifteen year old boys, they’re talking to them, too.
The preacher needs to stop trying to pinpoint who God is talking to. Don’t add to scripture when you’re trying to push some unknown listener over the edge. Give the scripture and let it wiggle back in forth as it settles in the dusty hearts. People will assume you’re not talking to them because you didn’t mention their sin while you were stabbing in the dark.
When you say, ‘walk the walk’. We think it means ‘walk like a Christian’ then you’ll give us seven and a half different characteristics and post more on the church blog. We go out and start making t-shirts with puffy paint and baking judgment into our bake-sale brownies. We’re a bunch of monsters because you’ve given fifteen different ways you can tell if someone is a Christian.
It’s disheartening to hear people teaching their own convictions and not teaching the truth. We are humans and we mess it up way too much to not simply stick to the basic teaching of Jesus. If you want to teach someone how to be a Christian, teach them how to love.
The way we know we’ve been transferred from death to life is that we love our brothers and sisters. Anyone who doesn’t love is as good as dead. - 1 John 3:14
All the rest is religious jewelry and pious cologne.
If I speak with human eloquence and angelic ecstasy but don’t love, I’m nothing but the creaking of a rusty gate. If I speak God’s Word with power, revealing all his mysteries and making everything plain as day, and if I have faith that says to a mountain, “Jump,” and it jumps, but I don’t love, I’m nothing. If I give everything I own to the poor and even go to the stake to be burned as a martyr, but I don’t love, I’ve gotten nowhere. So, no matter what I say, what I believe, and what I do, I’m bankrupt without love. - 1 Corinthians 13:1-3
Start with Love and all the other things will fall in to place. If we get the other stuff right, but mess up the love part, we’re done-for. The way of love is the only way. Obedience in forgiveness, selflessness, and love are the first steps to the freedom and depth of relationship with Jesus that we beg for.
Love requires you to lose your ‘self’. And thank God because you can’t fit where you’re called to go. Be warned, losing your ‘self’ is excruciating and crazy liberating. It’s the last thing you think you need to lose and it’s the first step to freedom. What a contradictory and inside-out existence it is to be a follower of Jesus.
Enter through the narrow gate. For wide is the gate and broad is the road that leads to destruction, and many enter through it. But small is the gate and narrow the road that leads to life, and only a few find it. – Matthew 7:13
‘You don’t believe me because you’re not my sheep.’ – John 10:27 MSG
Don’t you get it? The message of grace is hard to swallow. You’ve got this message running through the veins of scripture, setting captives free. Pulsing freedom. Theives and liars are sipping wine from the Savior’s cup and He’s laughing at their jokes.
You can’t imagine the god in your head putting up with such unrefined morality and you’re quick to point out the short comings and set yourself up as the rule police in the lives of those unfortunate enough to sit next to you in the pew.
And you: the one living in fear of getting off track. Messing things up. Listen to me. Read the scriptures. There is freedom in there.
This is one thing that you can’t mess up. Unless you try. Trying messes things up. Here, I’ll show you:
What is denying Christ? Is it sinning? Think about this. What did Jesus do? He came to die for your sins because you are incapable of not sinning. (If you disagree on that point read 1 John 1:8.) Denying Christ is denying what his life, death and resurrection stand for. If you try to mold your life into one built on Christian standards and set yourself up to avoid failure and sin, then you are denying Christ.
You who are trying to be justified by law have been alienated from Christ; you have fallen away from grace. – Galatians 5:4
You deny him by behaving as though what he did were good enough to get you started, but not good enough to keep you.
Let me put this question to you: How did your new life begin? Was it by working your heads off to please God? Or was it by responding to God’s Message to you? Are you going to continue this craziness? For only crazy people would think they could complete by their own efforts what was begun by God. – Galatians 3:2
Setting your lives up to avoid needing Jesus is the most socially appreciated stance and the most spiritually devastating thing you could do. No one will chastise you for your self-inflicted sacrificial lifestyle and that is, possibly, the scariest trap you could fall in to. ‘I don’t do this, I don’t do that. I don’t hang out with her, I don’t associate with him.’ All traps. All steps moving away from Jesus. Since when is salvation earned, maintained and completed by your moral efforts? We need to realize that we’re not God. We have knowledge of good and evil, thanks to Adam and Eve, but we are absolutely incapable of following any set of rules. Following a set of rules hold you responsible to them. Accepting Jesus and the gift of grace that only comes from him sets you free from the rules and the only way to reject Jesus is to go back to them.
If we give up and turn our backs on all we’ve learned, all we’ve been given, all the truth we now know, we repudiate Christ’s sacrifice and are left on our own to face the Judgment—and a mighty fierce judgment it will be! If the penalty for breaking the law of Moses is physical death, what do you think will happen if you turn on God’s Son, spit on the sacrifice that made you whole, and insult this most gracious Spirit? This is no light matter. – Hebrews 10:26
We used to try to be good on our own and we failed. Then we heard about the ‘clean slate’ that didn’t depend on who we were or what we did. Now we can get called ‘good’ by what we believe. Don’t get away from the realization that got you in. Don’t go back to your old life of trying.
This teaching is freeing because it’s the Truth.
ps: Don’t be afraid of your freedom. If you mess up and behave selfishly, it reduces your freedom until you learn how to be selfless again. Sin doesn’t take your salvation away, it takes your freedom away. We weren’t set free to be selfish, we were set free to love. You’ll figure it out.
Just make sure that you don’t use this freedom as an excuse to do whatever you want to do and destroy your freedom. Rather, use your freedom to serve one another in love; that’s howfreedom grows. For everything we know about God’s Word is summed up in a single sentence: Love others as you love yourself. That’s an act of true freedom. If you bite and ravage each other, watch out—in no time at all you will be annihilating each other, and where will your precious freedom be then? – Galatians 5:13
Remembering who we are is one of the hardest things to do.
The experiences we have in flesh and blood distract us from the experiences that take place in the spirit, the ‘wind hovering over the water’ life.
It’s hard to rip the flesh out of the equation. Needs make us aware of the ability in our hands. Passion makes us aware of the energy in our shapes. Dreams make us aware of the potential in our time. Pain makes us aware of the energy in our tears. Anger makes us sense the power of our fists. We use God like a shovel. We wear God like cheap perfume. We use oils and chants as though God were a genie. Our sense of entitlement thinks God wouldn’t want us to cry. Our so called righteous indignation uses God like brass knuckles.
When will we see that the flesh is separate from the spirit? We have the freedom to move about the world and all of its experiences without being bound to them. Things in this life do not sustain us because their loss cannot break us. We navigate our lives choosing liberation or capture.
It’s not about choosing right for the sake of choosing right. You’re choosing freedom. Not freedom from pain, failure, consequences or punishment. These are all things that have to do with the flesh. Flesh is relative and based on perspective.
Freedom has to do with the spirit. Nothing in the here and now should be used to navigate you. Only distract you. You have a force working against your freedom. An enemy who wants you to feel not only pain, guilt and uncertainty, but also relief, success and security. We are distracted by all of those things. We are tied to all of those things. We are held captive by our flesh in more ways than we know.
The power of the wind. An invisible force gentle enough to make chimes sing. Sturdy enough for birds to rest their wings. Strong enough to put a farmer’s tractor in the trees. The power of the wind hints at a terrifying and awesome invisible made visible by the effects it has on what we can actually see.
Flesh is only a whisper, not an infallible entity. Don’t submit to things that die with passing time. It’ll never be fascinating enough to hold you and it will never be simple enough to make you understand.
“You’re not listening. Let me say it again. Unless a person submits to this original creation—the ‘wind-hovering-over-the-water’ creation, the invisible moving the visible, a baptism into a new life—it’s not possible to enter God’s kingdom. When you look at a baby, it’s just that: a body you can look at and touch. But the person who takes shape within is formed by something you can’t see and touch—the Spirit—and becomes a living spirit.”
A man was betrayed by his wife and he begs her to be patient with his pain while he props her up with pillows, lights the candles in her room and runs his fingers through her hair. ‘I don’t want you to hurt,’ he tells her, as his own grief breaks his voice. ‘You’ve been away for a while,’ he whispers, ‘…just rest and don’t worry. My love is bigger than this.’
A woman is betrayed by her husband and she refuses to give up. If the test requires a fight, she’ll use the only weapon she’s got and she says that weapon is love. Her words are her shoes and they move her feet. Her feet take her legs through the door of the other woman and the hope in her heart make her hands clutch the gift that she hopes will say what her mouth doesn’t know how. Chocolate when it should have been venom.
A woman rests to her music and watches the candle dance in her place. She had choices and when she made her decision she chose chains. Yet, she is excused without having to explain. She lays in a bed with clean sheets when her pillow should be soaked with guilty tears. Hope comes up with the sun and the freedom that love provides transforms her into who she wishes she was.
‘….he hears the prayers of the righteous.’
But what makes you righteous? Righteous is justifiable. Justifiable is defensible. Defensible is able to be protected. Protected is safe. If something is safe, then it is not likely to be lost.
‘….you are justified freely by his grace….’
Justified because of grace and freely made righteous. Prayers that get heard.
