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What agreements have you made?

Have you ever stopped to think about what (or who) shaped your belief in who you are or who you want to be?

For some, you were raised in an environment where parents, teachers, coaches, grandparents, friends, peers, boyfriends/girlfriends, pastors, cub scout leaders, and even the lunchroom lady constantly protected your heart from the attacks of the enemy's voice so you could only hear the sweet sound of your heavenly father speaking his truth into your heart unconditionally, "I love you", "I created you", "You are good", "You are lovely", "You have what it takes", "You are mine", "You are fearfully and wonderfully made", "You are worth it"!

For the rest of us we didn't have such privilege. We grew up where the enemy used all the above mentioned people and created personal situations to attack our hearts with false agreements about who we are and who we will become, all cultivated from his bag of lies.

I'm not suggesting that everything we grew up believing about ourselves is a lie. Far from it. We are who we are because our individual experiences along our journey have shaped us into who we are. God will use all people and all experiences in our life for good - if we allow him to own it. What I am suggesting is that there are those subtle agreements that we have made with ourselves (and the enemy), while on the surface seem like good, well intentioned moments, are actually quite damaging to who we are and who we want to become.

Somewhere In Between

Have you ever been stuck in between something, not sure how to move in any given direction, whether it's forward, backward, sideways, whatever way? 

I was reading Shane Claiborne's book, "Jesus For President" and he was writing about the parable found in Matthew 13:3-8.

3Then he told them many things in parables, saying: "A farmer went out to sow his seed. ⁴As he was scattering the seed, some fell along the path, and the birds came and ate it up. ⁵Some fell on rocky places, where it did not have much soil. It sprang up quickly, because the soil was shallow. ⁶But when the sun came up, the plants were scorched, and they withered because they had no root. ⁷Other seed fell among thorns, which grew up and choked the plants. ⁸Still other seed fell on good soil, where it produced a crop—a hundred, sixty or thirty times what was sown.

Shane was talking about the blessing of the world through the people of God is not like a violent, quick revolution that takes over power. It starts small, grows silently, faces setbacks, but nevertheless permeates the world with love. Then he made this comment which really hit close to home, "That's difficult for us in a world where we bounce between aggressive impatience and paralyzing cynicism."

Bounce Between Aggressive Impatience and Paralyzing Cynicism!

That's where I am. 

Bouncing between these two ominous opponents, stuck in a volley. My wounds keep me there. My humanity is comfortable there. My sin is alive there. And it's not just about learning to patiently love the world, but for me it seems more about being patient with those that call themselves "Christian". Either way it is the same opponents I meet, in every match, that want to knock me back and forth - in between.

I grow impatient with Christians when they choose to live life in the shallowness of their faith and yet I feel like I am paralyzed by my cynicism toward them that I forget to go deeper, further then where I am myself. 

Even more, I become a participant in my own opponents game of being impatient and cynical of myself! It is in this self destructive space that the enemy wants me to make agreements with him about who I am and who others are. I have have made these agreements in the past. 

However, I hear Jesus declaring redemption on my heart, desiring me to hear his voice of truth about me, to break the agreements I have made with my enemy, and heal me in those spaces. This is my tension that I live in each day as I struggle to push deeper into my God.

So, if I come across as aggressively impatience and/or paralyzingly cynical, know it is not who I fully am called to be, but rather it is my messy spirituality that I am acting out of. And please, trust my heart in this space. Or don't, it's up to you.

Living In The Tension

Jesus prays in John 17:

• He prays protection for the unity of His disciples, that they may be one as the Father and He were one; one in purpose, one in word, one in deed, one in life, one in community.

• He prays that his disciples that journeyed in His physical life may experience the full measure of His joy of doing God's will.

• He prays that God would not remove His disciples from the world, but rather that God would protect them from the evil one.

• He offers Himself as their sanctification so they may be sanctified to God our Father.
  

• He then prays for all of us that come after the original apostolic community known as the "The Way". He prays for our complete unity, our oneness to Him and to the Father through the original disciples message of their life experience with Jesus and the truth that He gave them.

So, do we really get that as Christians we have no liberty to preserve our holiness by escaping from the world, or to sacrifice our holiness by conforming to the world?  

Abandonment

Brenda and I are heading down to New Orleans tonight. We will be there for 6 days spending time with CRM:Communitas. We are prayerfully considering our calling to take up our cross and follow Jesus. We will sub-merge ourselves into the Communitas and ministry of the CRM team that is there.

I was reading todays entry about Abandonment in Oswald Chambers, My Utmost for His Highest. His thoughts were from Mark 10:28 and I felt that they were appropriate as we prepare to take this trip.

Then Peter began to say to him, "See, we have left everything and followed you."

Here is what Oswald Chambers wrote (emphasis mine on what struck me):

Our Lord replies in effect, that abandonment is for Himself, and not for what the disciples themselves will get from it. Beware of an abandonment which has the commercial spirit in it - "I am going to give myself to God because I want to be delivered from sin, because I want to be made holy." All that is the result of being right with God, but that spirit is not of the essential nature of Christianity. Abandonment is not for anything at all. We have got so commercialized that we only go to God for something from Him, and not for Himself. It is like saying, "No, Lord, I don't want Thee, I want myself; but I want myself clean and filled with the Holy Ghost; I want to be put in Thy show room and be able to say - 'This is what God has done for me.'" If we only give up something to God because we want more back, there is nothing of the Holy Spirit in our abandonment; it is miserable commercial self-interest. That we gain heaven, that we are delivered from sin, that we are made useful to God - these things never enter as considerations into real abandonment, which is a personal sovereign preference for Jesus Christ Himself.

When we come up against the barriers of natural relationship, where is Jesus Christ? Most of us desert Him - "Yes, Lord, I did hear Thy call; but my mother is in the road, my wife, my self-interest, and I can go no further." "Then," Jesus says, "you cannot be My disciple."

The test of abandonment is always over the neck of natural devotion. Go over it, and God's own abandonment will embrace all those you had to hurt in abandoning. Beware of stopping short of abandonment to God. Most of us know abandonment in vision only.

So my prayer through this journey is that I learn to give up my miserable commercial self-interest. That I am willing to seek God for God's sake and not for my own interest in return. Regardless of where, when, how and what God calls me into next in my journey that I would never elevate "that" above the desire to gain heaven, to be delivered from sin and to be transformed by the renewing of my mind to be used by God.

Beauty From Pain

Sometimes things happen in life that are painful. The pain can seem very intense and very overwhelming and Hope can seem so far away. This pain can come from anywhere, decisions you make, decisions others make, random circumstances, natural causes. But when it does come - it's real. It leaves you feeling hopeless and confused. You try to make sense of it and you can't, it doesn't make sense and you wonder if God is really there, if he really knows what he's doing. Jesus felt the same human emotion while fully God when he hung on the cross, in pain, dying, and he cried out, "Father, why have you forsaken me?"

Like Jesus, it feels like God has forgotten you and it feels like this can't possibly be the plan for your life....you wonder, why would he want me to walk through this pain!?! What's the point? The truth is there isn't an easy answer for that question. For each of us the answer is different. The journey is different. For some reason we have this idea set in our mind that a loving God wouldn't allow pain. But he does. And it can be beautiful if we allow it to be.

I have some dear friends that are in this season of life...The Journey of Pain. My heart is breaking for them. I want to rescue them and tell them it will be alright! But I can't. There is a purpose for this pain and they need to walk through it. Not around it, but through it!

There is hope though. God doesn't want you to stay in the pain but he wants you to heal from it and be stronger and to allow him to become bigger, to become greater in our lives. Are you experiencing this right now too?

My wife has great CD with a mix that her wonderful sister made her that we listen to all the time. The second song on the mix is a song  by Superchick called "Beauty From Pain." I thought of you when I heard it today. Here it is dear friends. Listen to it and let it speak to your hearts! Let God show you the beauty He has for you from your pain!

I must become less

I was reading in John 3:22-36 about John the Baptizer. It is a great story about John baptizing at Aenon ("because there was much water there" - that's funny to me) and that people were constantly coming to be baptized. John's disciples came to him and said,

"Rabbi, that man who was with you on the other side of the Jordan - the one you testified about - well, he is baptizing, and everyone is going to him."

You can almost hear the strain in their voice. The concern of losing people to a competitive baptizer. The thought of their status dwindling as the only baptizing agent in town. The idea of their career's as potential rabbi's being tarnished by the potential loss of appeal to those seeking to have their sins washed away. You can also hear the question in their statement. "Rabbi, what are you going to do?"

John's response,

"A man can receive only what is given him from heaven. You yourselves can testify that I said, 'I am not the Christ but am sent ahead of him.' The bride belongs to the bridegroom. The friend who attends the bridegroom waits and listens for him, and is full of joy when he hears the bridegroom's voice. That joy is mine, and it is now complete."

Wow! John tells his disciples that he is the servant of Christ and nothing more, and his joy is in serving Jesus, not being concerned about his rise in popularity. And here is the verse that really spoke to me,

"He must become greater; I must become less."

Oh how I want this in my life. I want Jesus to become greater and greater in my life and for my own selfish sinful ways to become less and less. To live as Jesus lives. To love as Jesus loves. To serve as Jesus serves. Cause let's face it, left to myself I can be pretty self absorbed.

What is Success?

I grew up playing baseball, basketball and football. I still play all three sports in the "old man" leagues. As I grew up playing competitive sports I was trained to perform in order to receive recognition and reward. After all, the best players earned the playing time. And when I received recognition and reward based on my performance, it sent a very strong message that, "I was successful!" As a result, I developed a real appetite for performance based success. I craved it. Still do.

Time Well Spent

As I have been listening more to the Spirit of God lately and have been trying to seek his direction in how I should spend my time ministering to others, He has revealed one important thing to me. My mind has been too busy with things that don't matter and consequently as a result, that has spilled over into how I spend my time.

I left the business of being a professional pastor 9 years ago. When I left, I made no declaration of "how long" I was going to be out. Or "if/when I was going back in" (those were the words I used). You see I was paid to think about Jesus, albeit in a very structured specific way. And it was my job to come up with creative and innovative ways to get more people to think about Jesus come to our church.

Christians are Hypocrites too ya know!

Ouch! I know that stings a bit! But before you start thinking that I've turned on my own and loaded my bow with the arrow of cynicism out of my quiver of bitterness that hangs on my back, read on.

Locks of Love???

Setting: Friday night family dinner. Sitting at the table.

Makenna: "Daddy, I want to cut my hair and give to Locks Of Love so they can make it into hair for someone else"

Daddy: "Really??? Why do you want to do that?"

Makenna: "Remember when we went to breakfast the other day?"

Daddy: "Yeah."

Makenna: "Well, we saw that girl with no hair and you told me that she was probably sick and her medicine made her lose her hair."

Daddy: "Yeah."

Makenna: "Well, she needs hair."

Daddy: "Wow! What made you decide this?"

Devin: "Because she is a Christ follower and God is calling her to do it!"

I think they are starting to get it! By the way, she told me tonight that all she needed was at least 10 inches to do it, so she was going to go measure her hair. Now based on her determination here and the fact that Brenda and I absolutely love her heart in this, I'm sure there will be an update sometime in the future.