Confession

I believe in Jesus Christ, the eternal Son of God, my elder brother, my lord and master; I believe that he has a right to my absolute obedience whereinsoever I know or shall come to know his will; that to obey him is to ascend the pinnacle of my being; that not to obey him would be to deny him. I believe that he died that I might die like him—die to any ruling power in me but the will of God—live ready to be nailed to the cross as he was, if God will it. I believe that he is my Saviour from myself, and from all that has come of loving myself, from all that God does not love, and would not have me love—all that is not worth loving; that he died that the justice, the mercy of God, might have its way with me, making me just as God is just, merciful as he is merciful, perfect as my father in heaven is perfect. I believe and pray that he will give me what punishment I need to set me right, or keep me from going wrong. I believe that he died to deliver me from all meanness, all pretence, all falseness, all unfairness, all poverty of spirit, all cowardice, all fear, all anxiety, all forms of self-love, all trust or hope in possession; to make me merry as a child, the child of our father in heaven, loving nothing but what is lovely, desiring nothing I should be ashamed to let the universe of God see me desire. I believe that God is just like Jesus, only greater yet, for Jesus said so. I believe that God is absolutely, grandly beautiful, even as the highest soul of man counts beauty, but infinitely beyond that soul’s highest idea—with the beauty that creates beauty, not merely shows it, or itself exists beautiful. I believe that God has always done, is always doing his best for every man; that no man is miserable because God is forgetting him; that he is not a God to crouch before, but our father, to whom the child-heart cries exultant, ‘Do with me as thou wilt.’

I believe that there is nothing good for me or for any man but God, and more and more of God, and that alone through knowing Christ can we come nigh to him.

I believe that no man is ever condemned for any sin except one—that he will not leave his sins and come out of them, and be the child of him who is his father.

I believe that justice and mercy are simply one and the same thing; without justice to the full there can be no mercy, and without mercy to the full there can be no justice; that such is the mercy of God that he will hold his children in the consuming fire of his distance until they pay the uttermost farthing, until they drop the purse of selfishness with all the dross that is in it, and rush home to the Father and the Son, and the many brethren—rush inside the centre of the life—giving fire whose outer circles burn. I believe that no hell will be lacking which would help the just mercy of God to redeem his children.

I believe that to him who obeys, and thus opens the doors of his heart to receive the eternal gift, God gives the spirit of his son, the spirit of himself, to be in him, and lead him to the understanding of all truth; that the true disciple shall thus always know what he ought to do, though not necessarily what another ought to do; that the spirit of the father and the son enlightens by teaching righteousness. I believe that no teacher should strive to make men think as he thinks, but to lead them to the living Truth, to the Master himself, of whom alone they can learn anything, who will make them in themselves know what is true by the very seeing of it. I believe that the inspiration of the Almighty alone gives understanding. I believe that to be the disciple of Christ is the end of being; that to persuade men to be his disciples is the end of teaching.

-George MacDonald, The Unspoken Sermons, Vol. 3/Justice

Pour Out the Rain

Lord, when I get to Heaven… can I help pour out the rain?
-Buddy Jewell

What will we do in heaven?

It’s such an important question. Peter, this “Rock” of the church that knew Jesus in a profoundly personal way, a man who knew something of how not to lose heart, how to live with passion and joy, with desire and anticipation, says that we are to set our hope fully on the grace to be revealed to us when Jesus returns (see 1 Peter 1:13).

Really? Did you catch that? Fully? Set our hope fully on the grace to be revealed?

Earlier in the same letter, Peter makes this really astounding proclamation. He says, “Because Jesus was raised from the dead, we've been given a brand-new life and have everything to live for, including a future in heaven—and the future starts now! God is keeping careful watch over us and the future. The Day is coming when you'll have it all—life healed and whole.” (from The Message).

The Day is coming. All will be ours. Life. A life healed and a life whole. Our wounds will be dressed with leaves from the Tree of Life. The burdens we have lived under will finally be lifted off. We will shed our dead skin and enter into “the joy of the Kingdom.” We will be feasted. We will stand in silent awe. We will laugh. We will enjoy. We shall be filled. We shall rest.

But then what?

No, I’m serious. What do we do then? We will be healed and made whole. Oh, praise God. This is such good news! But… to what end? For what purpose? Is it just to sit around all day? Because frankly, after a few years of napping, I’m ready to go again.

During the long days of summer when I was young, my parents would lay out a blanket in the shade for my brother and I to nap on after the hours of play wore us out. I somehow always woke up last, and to my chagrin would hear laughter and activity going on someplace around a corner -- playing in a waterhose or catching bullfrogs at the pond -- and I would always feel left out. The fun, the adventure, was elsewhere, and I was ready to be done with rest and enter into it again.

The question, “What will we do in heaven” is such an important one because how can we hope for something that we do not even look forward to? And who can look forward to an eternity of sitting it out, of napping, of “eternal rest”? It was Peter Kreeft who said that dullness, not doubt, is the greatest enemy of our faith.

A few days ago I went on a hike in the Ponca forest reserve that borders the northern edge of the Boston Mountains in northwest Arkansas with a few friends. It is a rugged terrain of deciduous wood, cut in two by the meandering Buffalo River, and edged by two- to three-hundred-foot sheer limestone bluffs. We came to an overlook, and stretched hundreds of feet below and before us was the river valley. It was breathtaking, and we sat and gorged ourselves on its beauty…

…for about ten minutes.

But then we took turns scurrying as close to the edge as we dared and started lobbing rocks off. And then we tried to knock over dead trees just behind us in the forest. And we looked for another rim to climb. There were waterfalls to discover and swimming holes to find and caves to explore. There was a lot more to do.

At the end of C.S. Lewis’ The Chronicles of Narnia, the great ones of the stories come together again, and at last. They enter into the fullness of the Kingdom of God, finally. And what do they do there? They soar up waterfalls and fly across the landscape. They breathe and they laugh and they discover and they create.

We were made in the creative image of God, and He has set out to restore us back into that image so that we may rule with Him. It is why He give us so much freedom – freedom to love and choose Him and freedom not to (see Revelations 3:20), and the experience of bringing the Kingdom of God now into this world (see Matthew 16:19). It is why in the parable of the talents (Matthew 25:14-30) those who did well, those who lived from the heart and trusted in their Master were given even more to do, more to enjoy. It becomes apparent in that story that they were being trained and tested so that, when the Master came to see they could handle it, they were entrusted with even more of His spoils.

It is why Jesus said that we are in process to become “fully trained” to be like the Teacher (Luke 6:40). Because we will one day rule alongside Him in all that is to come.

There is much ahead, much yet to explore and discover. Can you imagine what it will be like to help pour out the rain with God? And carve out the canyons. And hang “gold sunsets o’er a rose and purple sea.”

And in the perfect time, O perfect God,
When we are in our home, our natal home,
When joy shall carry every sacred load,
And from its life and peace no heart shall roam,
What if thou make us able to make like thee--
To light with moons, to clothe with greenery,
To hang gold sunsets o'er a rose and purple sea!
-George MacDonald

Lost the Story, Part II

Enemy-occupied territory---that is what the world is. Christianity is the story of how the rightful King has landed in disguise, and is calling us all to take part in a great campaign of sabotage.
-C.S. Lewis

It is this story that Christianity is about that is most assaulted and diminished. And regaining the Story is not an easy endeavor.

The plastic Aslan shield I found (See Lost the Story, Part I) had the effect of shaking me awake a bit to see how much of Reality I have lost over the last few weeks through routine and duty. God had me find it in order to raise that longing in me for a battle to be engaged in and for a King to fight for and for a people to help rescue, but there’s more He’s up to. The poet Henry David Thoreau warned us that “We must reawaken and learn to remain awake, not by mechanical aid, but by the infinite expectation of the dawn.” In other words, by believing beyond belief that we live now (and will live ever more fully) in a Story of great proportions. (It is argued that Thoreau never became a believer, but it is hard to dissect his deep thirst for life with the offer from the Life-Giver. Perhaps he never accepted the offer. Perhaps there’s more to that story we don’t know. But that’s for another time.) Apparently, there’s more God is up to even this week to reawaken me.

De and I went last night to a bookstore with some dear friends. I started looking through Philip Yancey’s new book, Prayer, per my friend’s advice. It is another piece of the discipleship-calling I hear Jesus inviting me into. He might as well have said, “Come, follow me.” Here’s what Yancey wrote:

When I started exploring the subject of Christian payer, I first went to libraries and read accounts of some of the great pray-ers in history. George Muller began each day with several hours of prayer, imploring God to meet the practical needs of his orphanage. Bishop Lancelot Andrewes allotted five hours per day to prayer and Charles Simeon rose at 4:00 a.m. to begin his four-hour regimen. Nuns in an order known as “The Sleepless Ones” still pray in shifts through every hour of the day and night. Susannah Wesley, a busy mother with no privacy, would sit in a rocking chair with an apron over her head praying for John and Charles and the rest of her brood. Martin Luther, who devoted two to three hours daily to prayer, said we should do it as naturally as a shoemaker makes a shoe and a tailor makes a coat. Jonathan Edwards wrote of the “sweet hours” on the banks of the Hudson River, “rapt and
swallowed up in God.”

I interviewed ordinary people about prayer… Is prayer important to you? Oh, yes. How often do you pray? Every day. Approximately how long? Five minutes – well, maybe seven. Do you find prayer satisfying? Not really. Do you sense the presence of God when you pray? Occasionally, not often…

Pretty to-the-point, huh? Here’s the thing. I didn’t feel guilty or condemned or running around in my brain grasping and trying to figure out how to pray more. I’m not even sure this is what Jesus meant in bringing me to that portion of the book. What happened, though, was a certain kind of drawing. Something inside clicked. I said to myself, “I want that.” I want a deeper intimacy through prayer, a life lived more fully by abiding more deeply and immediately in Christ.

The disciplines are an important part of life with and in God. I know that has been largely lost in the Western church, but there is a move to bring them back to their rightful place as aids to help us live the life Christ has won for us. Dallas Willard brings to light the fact that Jesus never commissioned us to make Christians of all nations, but rather disciples, those who would do what they saw Jesus doing. And, well, Jesus spent quite a lot of time praying and communing with the Father, among other things. John Piper described prayer as “the walkie-talkie on the battlefield of the world. It calls in for the accurate location of the target of the Word. It calls in to ask for the protection of air cover. It calls in to ask for fire power to blast open a way for the tanks of the Word of God. It calls in the miracle of healing for the wounded soldiers. It calls in supplies for the forces. And it calls in the needed reinforcements.” That, of course, only makes sense if you are living in a Story where battle plays a major role. C.S. Lewis understood that, calling this world “Enemy-occupied territory.”

So last night I have it in my heart to rise a little earlier than usual this morning, and I set my alarm to help me up. But this is where the phrase “Enemy-occupied territory” is stripped of all cliché and all romantic allusions. I struggle – I mean, really struggle—to get out of bed, knowing I need this like I need food or breath and yet unable to force my muscles to push against the weight of gravity and heaviness. I lay there for awhile and kid myself into believing I can pray without getting up. Naturally, I fell back asleep. Forty-five minutes later I finally roll myself out of bed and head for another room, where I am hammered again by evil spirits that are troubling me (like in Luke 6:18), and I cannot even concentrate because of doomsday thoughts swirling in my tired head. Finally, after half an hour of trying to break through, I give up and head to the shower.

Now, I’m not saying that I am a loser for not being a “spiritual giant” like George Muller or Charles Wesley. It’s not my goal here to become a spiritual Charles Atlas or anything of the like. It’s that I genuinely desire to drink from the life-giving water that is God, and it is opposed.

It is hard to fight through all that is set against our life in God. If you don’t believe we are at war and that your heart is the target of our Enemy, just try spending unending hours in quiet adoration or passionate pleading or joyful communion with God. It happens, it can, it does. It’s won for us – that’s how we are called to come to the Lord God (Hebrews 4:16). But it does not come often without a fight. It becomes readily apparent why we must suit up in spiritual armor.

It was not until I was driving in to work this morning that something finally broke through. The lines of communication with God were unjammed somehow – maybe an angel came or my attempts at exercising the authority of Christ triumphed – and I felt as if I could breathe again, and lift my head beyond the ground just beneath my feet. I had the opportunity to take some time during lunch to drive around and pray. And I will set my heart to rise again tomorrow morning and “enter boldly into the throneroom of grace” and remain there throughout the day enjoying God and being enjoyed by Him. Because I must if I am to come alive to Him and to the Story of Reality.

Lost the Story, Part I

With every step of our lives we enter into the middle of some story which we are certain to misunderstand.
-G.K. Chesterton

It’s been a difficult weekend, with so much of our deeper life and movements in the Kingdom of God opposed and thwarted. Homework this weekend has been soul-killing in its intensity and its propensity to steal time for other things, like sleeping and spending time with De. And I have not fought well for my time with God in the disciplines needed for my training in living well in this Kingdom, in my growing up into God: study, prayer, journaling, fasting, silence and solitude, service, and the like.

And I think I know why it’s been especially difficult to follow Him into those places of connection. The epiphany came while taking some time away from homework to take a walk with my niece and nephew who were spending the weekend with us. Being the imaginative kids they are, it’s hard for them to stay on the street when walking. And being the imaginative kid-at-heart I am, it’s hard for me to keep them on the street. We found a cement culvert that had collected all sorts of paraphernalia during the last storm. Walking among the mess, I saw a broken shield on the ground. It was in three pieces, and I only found two, but it was evident that it had been some kid’s play shield, made of plastic. The most striking feature of it, though, was the image embossed on its crest. It was a lion’s head, with full mane, and its face a mixture of kindness and ferocity, as if were this lion to come alive and step outside its plastic barrier you wouldn’t be able to decide if you should run from it or hold your breath in anticipation and hope that he would speak to you. It was clear who this lion was. Even the kids knew. It was Aslan. My nephew exclaimed, “This was Peter’s shield!”

My pulse quickened. It’s an odd thing to become alerted and aroused at the site of a plastic bit of trash, I know, but you should have seen it. It looked almost real, and only its flimsy thinness gave away the illusion. I longed for it to be real, to be heavy with iron and steal and leather. A real shield. For a real battle. In a real story.

And then I realized why my devotions are so hard to pursue lately. They are not necessary training, mission-specific orders, a place to have battle wounds healed, the interior tent where the Commander awaits our meeting, a time away from the front lines to regroup and recharge and reassess. They are a disconnected set of duties that have little to do with my life because I have lost the story of the Kingdom advancing upon the dark forces of the Enemy by the violent-hearted for the rescue of God’s precious ones. For were I to have my eyes opened, my ears attuned, my heart laid waste by that reality, I would be a fool to miss one weapon or one moment or one command the Lord of Hosts, the Commander of this Invasion, would give me, and I would set my face like flint to seeking Him for my life and, by way of it, for the lives of others He has it in his heart to rescue.

Where They Lie

For the Son of Man came to seek and save what was lost.
–Jesus of Nazareth (Luke 19:10)

I’m pierced by how personal the gospel is. I mean, how different it applies to each of us in such specific ways, and yet it is the only salvation for us all, this daring rescue by Jesus. I’ve come to believe that he was about more than just granting me some kind of asylum, just “letting me in” when I die. And frankly, I’ve always heard this bit of Scripture quoted from Luke 19:10 to mean that I was a lost bit of wretch, but now with Jesus appearing on the scene I can be a “found” bit of wretch, with “found” meaning still really messed up on the inside, but I get to spend all my messed-up days playing harps on clouds in heaven when I die.

Yea.

This, my friends, isn’t what Jesus was saying. The good Jews of Jesus’ day would have well recognized who Jesus was talking about when he referred to himself as the “Son of Man.” He was referencing the Old Testament accounts and prophecies that used the phrase and referred to the Messiah, such as Daniel 7:13-14. But He was communicating so much more than just a simple nod to the reality of his divinity.

Let’s catch up with Jesus there at Zacchaeus’s house where he made the statement.

All right. Jesus comes into the town of Jericho, and he is swarmed (as was usual) by this crowd that were a mix of people who wanted to see Jesus do something really cool (they were there because he was happenin’) and those who were genuinely desperate for Jesus to heal them, or touch them, or speak to them. This day, it was the man in the sycamore tree that caught Jesus’ eye.

We know a lot about Zacchaeus, even in the brief description we have of him. He was a tax collector, and he was wealthy. Which means that he was a conniving scoundrel who stole from anyone he could, a traitor to his people, and apparently pretty successful at it. Oh, and he was short. And he made good tree-climbing decisions – sycamores are easy trees to climb.

So Jesus walks right up to the tree. Can you imagine what Zacchaeus must have been thinking? He only wanted to get a better lay of the land here. He only wanted to see who this man that everyone was going on about really was. And having the great people-reading skills they taught him in dirty-trickster-traitor school, I’m sure he felt pretty confident he could size this fella up pretty easily.

Except that Jesus came right up to him. And worse than that, he singled him out in the crowd. But maybe worst of all, Jesus invited himself over for dinner.

But, and here’s where something amazing happens that we have to infer from what we read here, Zacchaeus welcomed him gladly. And more than that, he made amends from his heart for what he had done in his identity as a traitor-thief. He gave it up – not the actions, but the identity and security of being wealthy and untouchable. Something really deep and very real was sought out, was reached, was touched, and was healed in Zacchaeus. Maybe it was that Jesus simply said his name – how did he know who he was? Had he always? Did Jesus know him whenever he had ripped that old widow off and stole everything she owned? And whenever he had sold his friend’s life off for a few pounds of silver? And whenever he had cursed God under his breath when he thought to himself, “I can never be touched – I am wealthy.” And yet Jesus came to him, yet he singled him out, yet he still wanted to be with this “sinner”?

Whatever happened, you have to admit it was pretty dramatic. And it happened pretty fast. That’s when we catch Jesus saying that he came “to seek and save what was lost.”

Now, notice the word he uses. He says what was lost. Not who. What. In other places, he means who. But not here. He means what.

What does he mean “what”? What “what”?

Back to how personal the gospel is. The “what” that Jesus sought out and saved in Zacchaeus was a place in him, a part in him, something shattered, broken, tossed aside, frozen, stolen. Something deep (look how transforming it was for him to have it back) and something crucial (he could not recognize God without it) and something personal (so much so, that we easily miss what just took place).

This is not an isolated incident in the gospels, by the way. Jesus did something similar with Peter in John 21 and the woman at the well in John 4 and Nicodemus in John 3. It’s all over the place, in fact. You just need eyes to see this really beautiful and really restorative and really personal aspect of the ministry of Jesus.

Okay, so a few minutes ago I was standing in my bathroom looking at myself in the mirror and this realization hits me that I am afraid. I cannot name the fear. I do not know what it is about or where it comes from, but I do know, at least, that I often suppress it or ignore it or just try to bury it. Tonight I let it rise from within me and I asked Jesus what was going on there. It is the result of some lies, hidden and subtle and undiscovered, that I have bitten into, that I have believed – about something really important – God’s heart, maybe, or my own, or my place with Him. I simply prayed, “Come, Jesus, show me where they lie.”

Nothing happened. Not yet. But I know it will. It has countless times before. This is what Jesus does to “seek and save” those lost places in us. To bring “the truth in the inmost parts” (Psalm 51:6). He will raise issues, bring up fears or hurts. He will take us back to where something in our souls was shattered like glass in order to find the pieces and bring them all back together, melted back into one whole piece by the fires of his Spirit. It’s the way Eugene Peterson phrases what Paul says in Ephesians 3, that we are to be made “whole and holy” by God’s love, or the Amplified’s translation of Ephesians 2:21: “In Him the whole structure is joined (bound, welded) together harmoniously, and it continues to rise (grow, increase) into a holy temple in the Lord.”

It is a glorious restoration. God is rebuilding the temple, and we are His glorious ruins. Stone by stone, piece by piece, He is bringing us back together within ourselves and within each other that we may be “for the display of His splendor” (Isaiah 61:3) – healing, rescuing, speaking our names, calling us, seeking out the broken pieces, showing us “where they lie” that we might know the truth that sets free – really free. That like Zacchaeus, salvation (life!) may come to us.