The Glorious Return

LORD your God, the Holy One of Israel… has endowed you with splendor.
–Isaiah 55:5

God seems obsessed with this for his people, this notion that we will become glorious and full of splendor. It’s riddled throughout Scripture, and in fact the entire story of redemption is one in which we will come back to God, not just as a people ransomed from death and set back into right relationship with him, but as those who have seen hell and been dead and so coming back alive becomes even more amazing than having been alive the first time. In other words, our ransom and redemption is more amazing than our original stature. We are glorious ruins being restored.

I think it was George MacDonald that said that our spiritual journey is not of coming to God, but one of returning back to God.

Remember the story of the prodigal son? Why is he called prodigal, by the way, or lost, as some Bible translations have it? Would it be better to simply call him the younger son, or the found son? Or why not Henry or Jeff or Jake or whatever his name might have been? It is because we will forever remember him as the one who had come from squander and hunger, as the one who had left and come back. And as the son, we will forever remember his father, seeing him looking, looking, waiting, longing for his son to return home, and running helter-skelter after him when he was a long way off. And do you remember what happened next? A party. An extravagant celebration in honor of his return. Wrapped in his father’s robe, his father’s ring on his finger, sandals on his feet, his dirty and bony face now shining with relief and bewildered joy, the son was no doubt more glorious for having been found and restored back into the family than for having ever left to begin with. That’s what we understand by the inability of the older son to even enter in on the party of redemption thrown for the younger.

And if Jesus’ words are any indication, not only are we radiant now, but we are becoming so radiant that even nations will be summoned to us. That’s at least what the Lord says just earlier in verse 5 of Isaiah 55: “Surely you will summon nations you know not, and nations that do not know you will hasten to you…” He is actually talking to us there, not about Himself. Surely this is what Jesus meant when he said that we are the light of the world, a city on a hill that cannot be hidden. The picture makes sense in light of Isaiah’s passage. Weary travelers would be drawn to the hope and promise of the city’s shelter and provisions. They would come to it on their way to wherever else they were headed.

Just a bit further into chapter 55, God says to us that we will go out in joy and be led forth in peace. “The mountains and the hills will burst into song before you, and all the trees of the field will clap their hands.”

There again is the splendor. The mountains and the hills will burst into song before us? The trees will clap their hands? It sounds almost as if they are rooting for us, celebrating our journey, pulling for our arrival. They are in on some great conspiracy, some great drama, more aware of it than we are. (How’s that for humbling! Ha!) The rocks are in on it, too.

Loy Mershimer explains that our lives of distraction are actually a result of this refusal to embrace who we really are, or at least who we are really intended to be. "The human condition is a paradox of despair: We cannot cope with what we are intended to be, and so despair. Yet we cannot cope with despair, so we desperately try to convince the self that we are not really in despair. So we lead lives of distraction, luxury and success…"

I think we are more than we have come to believe about ourselves. I think our role now in this world and with our God is greater than we’ve allowed ourselves to imagine. Why have we shrunk back? Maybe because if we were to acknowledge who we were intended to be, it would require either a great God who could restore us to that place, or we would dive into despair. We have imagined God to be less than He is. We are his sons and daughters. We are his works, his collaborators, his co-laborers in this amazing story he is telling (Romans 8:17). Humility is not in making yourself small. “The true way to be humble is not to stoop until you are smaller than yourself,” notes Phillips Brooks, “but to stand at your real height against some higher nature that will show you what the real smallness of your greatness is.”

If we are endowed with splendor, imagine how majestic is the Endower. If we are his workmanship, imagine the Artist. If we have this treasure in jars of clay, imagine the Potter. If we are on the journey of faith, imagine the Author of that story. We are the prodigal sons, “prodigal” that we may remember where we came from, “sons” that we may recognize the extravagant grace of our Father.

And it’s not an easy journey, or an immediate transformation. We are being transformed “into his likeness with ever-increasing glory, which comes from the Lord” (2 Corinthians 3:18). But the veil has been torn, our faces now radiant with the reflected renown of our King and Friend. The journey from here is a constant burgeoning of that radiance, “from glory to glory, until we all appear before the Lord in Zion” (Psalm 84:7).

Ready your hearts, my friends.

Feel the Heat

Come near to the holy men and women of the past and you will soon feel the heat of their desire after God. They mourned for Him, prayed and wrestled and sought for Him day and night, in season and out, and when they had found Him the finding was all the sweeter for the long seeking... They want to taste, to touch with their hearts, to see with their inner eyes the wonder that is God... and in Him we shall find that for which we have all our lives been secretly longing. -A.W. Tozer, The Pursuit of God

Ice lays thick on the streets and in the yards and on houses and cars and everything else in sight right outside my window. The Midwest has been hammered with an ice storm this week, and we are among the lucky few that still have electricity.

As beautiful as it is, there’s something smothering about the ice. It’s... weighty. It’s heavy. That is, literally, what’s caused the power outages – power lines buckle under the weight of the ice, or are snapped by fallen tree limbs. Travel becomes treacherous. Moving becomes difficult. Everything slows to a frozen standstill.

Such often is the case with our own hearts. What is this reluctance, this gravity, this freezing up, that keeps us from rising up and shining and seeking after the heart of God? Why is it we can often go days or even weeks on some kind of spiritual momentum after contact with God, but then we soon slow up, our joints freeze, we grow cold, and frigid wind finds its way in through the cracks in our souls and snuffs out the fire within? Our desire is stolen. We quit our hope and courage. We lose heart.

I don’t want to use a very real and very prevalent and very painful phenomena as fodder for poetry. I don’t want someone to read this post and leave and think, "That was a nice bit of wording to express that little problem." There is something as sinister and intentional in our spiritual inertia as there was behind the 100-year winter in Narnia before the Pevensies showed up on the scene, if you remember the story from The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe. There are in this world real enemies bent on snuffing out our desire for God in any way that they can. As Thomas a Kempis said, "The devil sleepeth not; neither is the flesh as yet dead; therefore cease not to prepare thyself for battle; for on thy right hand and on thy left are enemies who never rest."

If the promise is true, and I believe it is, that we will find God when we seek Him (Jeremiah 29:13) and that in finding and knowing God we will have life (John 17:3), then it is equally true that we will not have life if we do not know God by seeking Him. It all begins with desire. Right? That’s what Jesus said, after all, that "blessed are those who hunger and thirst." Speaking to this character of the Father’s heart, George MacDonald said that "surely he may keep his plans in a measure unfixed, waiting the free desire of the individual soul!" Desire does, indeed, play a crucial role. This desire, says Gerald May, is our truest identity, "our reason for being."

I’ll never forget the night I ran across that verse in Jeremiah 29:13. I had worked for a ministry at the time, and we had traveled to Africa to film a video documenting the plight of Christians in Sudan. It had been an exciting journey, but a challenging one. Among other things, the disconnection from technology and the whirring and buzzing of television, telephone, mp3 players and the like brought with it both a welcomed relief and a unsettling silence, a space in which God could speak and I could hear.

Our compound had set on a clearing on the edge of a small sub-Saharan village, surrounded by the deep greens of teak forests to the west and open bush to the east. The days had been full of hiking and filming and interviews, and the nights had been hot and sticky.

It was late on the last night of our stay, and I had been unable to sleep. Weary of staring at the mosquito netting tented over my bed, I flipped through some pages of Scripture until I landed in Jeremiah. My eyes fell on the portion of the sentence that I’d always passed by before, "You will seek me and find me when you seek me with all your heart."

I left my tukel and took a walk underneath a brilliantly massive starlit sky. There was no artificial light whatsoever, but the sky had enough to illuminate my way. I lingered over the verse and found that it had a strange effect on me. I had felt... despair. I felt as if I would never find God, or at least not find him in a deeper and more authentic way than I had known Him before. I had wanted God, or at least wanted to want Him. What that verse had to say must have been it, I thought. It had to be the reason why it had felt so difficult to engage with God, to pray, to read his Word, to offer life to others as he had said that I would, at least over the course of the previous few months. Because I had been trying to do so without all my heart in it. Even finding God was impossible without my full heart.

But instead of hearing it as hopeful, as in "Ah! Now I know what the problem is," I found it frustrating, defeating. I thought it was a set up for an automatic loss of heart. How could I ever have hope of finding Him if I didn't even do anything with all my heart? Enraged, I balled my fist and told Him what I thought about it. I cried to the heavens, "How can I seek you with all my heart when I don’t have all my heart?!" But there alone in the middle of a foreign continent, Jesus came to speak that night, and with a single word answered my dilemma, "Exactly." I came to see that all my efforts to get to him were futile, that only his work first on my behalf would enable me to find him. He would, as he promised, give me an "undivided heart" (Ezekiel 11:19), so that I could then find God, and live. He had been waiting for me to simply see that I could not know Him without first His restoration of some large pieces of my heart.

These years of walking with God since have been just that, a journey of restoration and reconciliation, and alternating cycles of deeper healing and more intimate communion with God, and usually an odd and beautiful mixture of both. Coming to Christ first gives you a beachhead, a place from which the kingdom will continue to advance. But there is more. There are new avenues of freedom and joy and even ecstasy to have. Even after the children came into Narnia, it took some time for blossoms to appear on trees and the rivers to unfreeze and run wild once more after so long dormant and cold.

So much of our life now is a process of both healing and of learning to walk in the new way of the kingdom of God. It’s what being a disciple of Jesus is all about, since he’s the One to usher in this new way of living. It’s him and his disciples and friends that Tozer was speaking of when he said to draw near to them and feel the heat of their desire after God. As we walk in this New Way, God sets our hearts free more and more vibrantly so that we may enjoy in constantly fuller measure what it is to really know God, to really love, and to really live.

I’m taking Tozer’s counsel to heart. I’m opening up the Scriptures to find the men and women who were delirious in the desire after God. I’m discovering that passion in David’s psalms and in Paul’s letter to the Philippians. In John’s gospel and in Peter’s epistles. And I’m not stopping there. I’ve discovered George MacDonald, St. Athanasius, Dallas Willard, and Tozer himself. And so many other saints that have gone before and a precious few that are still around. But that’s not enough, either. Because God has given us community, where together with other glorious hearts we encounter the Living One and rediscover with forgotten joy His true intentions for us and through us. Don’t forsake that fellowship; it is vital for your heart and memory, to keep before your eyes the real gospel, that "in Him we shall find that for which we have all our lives been secretly longing."

A Child's Wonder

Then this weekend De and I had our niece and nephew stay with us. It's hard to appreciate how much time kids take when you really want to invest in them. We were busy with the laundry and the cooking and the dishes and the bedtime prayers and the baths, of course, but also with the deeper things of going after their hearts, discovering what it is God has made deep within them, teaching them through stories and adventures and leading them to explore the world and learn from what it has to teach them.

We played video games for awhile, but then we needed to go outside to where the adventures are far larger. We went on a hike through prairie grasses to a small lake. We ventured around it and into a dense forest full of thick undergrowth. Through that we found an old abandoned mining community. We broke glass from an old building, read graffiti on the walls (I censored it), walked across unstable floorings and loose bricks, wondered aloud what this machine used to do and about what function that portion of the fallen building must've been used for (we agreed it had to be the chamber where they tortured the bad guys for information). A large chat pile in the distance was Mount Kilimanjaro (we had already made the unsuccessful attempt of climbing it a week ago, when we abandoned the attempt after we nearly lost our tracker due to a rock avalanche). Next to it was its smaller mountain-cousin we called Mount Shasta.

In those couple of hours, we backpacked across the island-continent of Australia, trudged through the harsh heat of the Kalahari, and sailed past the dreaded Isles de Muerta. We came across swashbucklers, stomped as giants on ant-sized villages, and proved to ourselves that there was something greater in us than in the challenges we encountered in the tall grasses and weeds and mud and rock.

Especially for my 9 year-old nephew, he learned something about himself: that these circumstances not only arouse something in him to come through and, when he does, proves that he has what it takes to do so, it also shows him that he was made for adventure, made to both conquer and be conquered (by One greater than he).

And how good it was for my heart. At one point they pointed to ruins of an old bridge and with the wide-eyed wonder of children not yet exposed to the cynicism of adulthood, they exclaimed, "There is history here. This was here long before we were!" They said it with that sense of amazement and excitement that took me back and I thought, "It's true. The gospel is written in our hearts long before we hear it with our ears." In fact, I have a suspicion that we only encounter the gospel in our hearts, and all that the best hearing of it can do is to take us back again to that place we knew of when we were young, yet beyond it. I lose too often that sense of wonder and abandoned belief and simple delight. Here I stood leading these two beloved children further into the gospel, and all the while they are teaching me to recognize it as it comes.

Restless Heart Syndrome

I’ve spent the last several nights restless, up at the early morning hours. I wrote this in my journal:

It's early in the morning, too early to be hammering away at the keyboard, but I haven't been able to sleep yet. I am restless and aching with longing and desire. I just finished watching an episode of Man Versus Wild on the Discovery Channel. Bear Grylls taught me how to survive my time in the Moab Desert if ever I find myself there with only a knife, a flint, and a canteen. It was intriguing, and the contrast between battling on the edge of survival and all it means -- eating raw raven's eggs, swimming underneath a debris field in deep cavernous water, fighting against Pygmy rattlers for sleeping shelter -- felt piercing when compared to my surroundings laden with empty boxes of carry-out pizza, a heating blanket with its controls sitting on my nightstand next to my cell phone (oh, who's call did I miss?), and a fluffy, cozy bed. I'm drawn into the exploration and adventure coming through the TV screen.

Keeping as quiet as possible so as not to wake my wife, I tiptoed to the office and turned on a small reading lamp and pulled one of my journals from the shelf and flipped randomly to an entry from a little over a year ago. I wrote it days before journeying to Colorado to attend a retreat geared toward helping a group of men discover the deep calling and passion placed within our hearts by the Father (Psalm 139). Here are highlights from that entry:

"...I keep wanting to act on the world instead of having the world act on
me. I want something real and relevant and holy to come from within me
like a spring gushing up instead of standing out waiting for the promise of rain
by elusive and swift-moving storms. I want to pour out to the degree in
which I am filled up... ...I answered a email questionnaire that asked ‘'What
did you want to be when you grew up?' My response is pointed, 'A pioneer
of some sort, leading the world into some new way of living.' Everything I
ever wanted to be or do comes from that, from an astronaut to a musician to a
speaker to an actor to a scientist. Exploration. Discovery.
Expression...

"...This is what I would love for Jesus to do for me this week in Colorado,
to say to me something of my true heart and calling, to commission me, to speak
into me as One who knows, and knows deeply. To say to me something in the
same way He spoke into Peter on the shores of the Sea of Galilee that fateful
and bright morn, 'Then (because you do love me), feed my sheep.'

And this is my desire still on this morning a year distant, a year further along on the journey Homeward. Frederick Beuchener said that in whatever other "official" way God may speak to us through the church and Scripture and such, surely He is also speaking through what happens to us, through the events of our lives. I feel this to be an important moment, full of holy ache and mystery, my heart itself becoming in some sense a wild bit of bush burning without being consumed.