The Treasure in our Midst

Some rough thoughts on treasure...

We have this treasure in jars of clay… that his life may be revealed in our mortal body.

2 Corinthians 4:7, 11

Treasure. Prize. Fortune. Riches.

The treasure that Paul is speaking of here, in part, is God’s life in us, the kingdom of heaven, the same kingdom that we are to take possession of with all of our devoted, fierce, desirous, “violent” hearts (Matthew 11:12). Treasure also means that that is “beloved” or “cherished.” It is that we are cherished by God that is our treasure, or, put another way, His love and rescue and invitation of us is our supply, our resource, our advantage, our fortune. The gospel, the rock-hard reality of God coming to win and have us, is our greatest prize. We get to be His, and we get in on all that He is up to. And He is up to giving us life.

When Jesus said that the sum of the law was to “love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your soul, with all your mind, and with all your strength, and to love your neighbor as yourself” (Luke 10:27), he was saying first to make God your treasure (or, better, to recognize Him as your treasure). Growing in love to God is real freedom, and growing to love Him is growing to know Him (to know Him is to love Him), and that is what Jesus said would be our very lifeblood (John 17:3).

Of course, to treasure someone is to begin to recognize what it is they hold dear, and to even begin appreciating it yourself, and even grow to prize it as well. My wife loves basset hounds. I never did. But we got one, and her love of that little guy has grown on me. I love him, at least to the degree I do, because he is important to her.

As we grow to treasure God we grow to treasure what He treasures, and He treasures us, what He calls “the world” (John 3:16). To grow to love Him is to grow to love others, to recognize others as His treasure, even as we embrace ourselves as His treasure. And what does it look like to love others?

It is to realize that there is something within the hearts of us all that Jesus came to have as His own. The possibility of having it, after all, gave Him enough joy to endure the cross (Hebrews 12:2). To recognize that this treasure lies within us all, or better, is us all, is to see others as the treasures of the Kingdom that they are. Beneath the masks, underneath the posing and posturing, beyond the pain and shame and scars from this world. Even for those who are not yet God’s, there is a hint, an echo, a scent of what was meant when they were created. That is what God wants back.

Can you imagine what it would be like to live this way, to recognize every person you meet as God’s greatest treasure, unique and desired more than His very life? We’d stop at very little to have God and to have others be His. To have others be rescued from captivity into the full freedom of real and lasting life. To push beyond the fear of a real encounter with someone. To fight all of hell for someone. To have His heart for His bride.

It would be to have the heart of Jack Sparrow. Picture this scoundrel from Pirates of the Caribbean. What does he want? What is he after? One thing. The treasure. Always, the treasure. He keeps nothing, has nothing, serves nothing but that will bring him what he wants. That is the kind of singular passion we are to have for God. And, as mentioned earlier, to be wild for Him is to want what He wants: His bride, His treasure, back home in His arms.

All of that means, of course, that we would be desperately dependent upon God for training, provision, skill, and passion for “seeking first the Kingdom of God and His righteousness” (Matthew 6:33) and for all that entails. As I walk in intimacy with God and learn of His heart for me and receive His intimate council, I begin to see others as He does, or at the very least to recognize in holy fear that others are more than I see them to be (1 Samuel 16:7), and in humility that I am more than I see myself to be as well. It is as C.S. Lewis said in The Weight of Glory, that we have never met a mere mortal.

It is a serious thing to live in a society of possible gods and goddesses, to remember that the dullest and most uninteresting person you may talk to may one day be a creature which, if you saw it now, you would be strongly tempted to worship, or else a horror and corruption such as you now meet if at all only in a nightmare.

Having the heart of Christ and His character formed in us opens our eyes to see the unseen (2 Corinthians 4:18), namely the treasure of the heart within. Then, we are free “to say whatever needs to be said” and “to go wherever we need to go” (Ephesians 3:11, The Message). We will run and not grow weary; we will walk and not be faint, headed straight out to find what has been lost, alongside Jesus our Rescuer and Friend.

This is the wild romance of God with us, more passionate and intentional than we imagine. These are the ways of God, the allure of His heart for us, and the invitation to soar with Him where eagles are scared to fly.

There are three things that are too amazing for me, four that I do not understand: the way of an eagle in the sky, the way of a snake on a rock, the way of a ship on the high seas, and the way of a man with a maiden.

-Proverbs 30:18-19

Diluted

A friend and I were discussing last night the movie Wild Hogs. He told me he hasn’t seen it yet because he doesn’t like Martin Lawrence. I told him that he appears alone in scenes fairly infrequently, since the thrust of the story is about four men discovering something together on the cross-country journey they have set out on. I used the word “diluted,” as in “Martin Lawrence’s antics are diluted in the movie, since he’s usually in scenes with other main characters.” That is to say, his presence is not as strong. His personality doesn’t come through as much. It’s watered-down, reduced, weakened, skimpy, washed out. It’s not a story about Martin Lawrence; it’s a story about Martin Lawrence and. It’s about the band of friends who call themselves the Wild Hogs.

I’ve been thinking about that word a lot since then, diluted. The other day my wife and I bought some “organic” lemonade, which means, I guess, that it’s a mix of fresh-squeezed lemons and a bit of water. At least, that’s what I thought until I took a swig, then I realized they labeled it organic because they want to warn you of its potency. They are trying to tell you that if you drink it you may grow a lemon orchard in your stomach, if your stomach survives the toxic acidity of the stuff and doesn’t melt into your toes. That is, if you can get it past your mouth, which puckers so hard at the first drop that not even air can get through and your jawbone nearly crushes under the intensity of your flexed masseter muscles. I quickly mixed mine with about 200% water and a pound of sugar and was able to enjoy the taste with what was left of my tongue. They should write fatally concentrated on the bottle, not organic. Pure. Potent. Strong. Undiluted.

It’s such a good word to describe what we do with our lives, this word dilute. Things around us are too strong to take in, so we dilute them. We do, all of us. Especially the most important things, the pure, fresh-from-the-vine, life-giving things, the organic ones.

Take the concept of grace, for example. There, you see, I called it a concept. It’s not a concept, it’s reality, it’s breath, it’s our heartbeat, our lifeblood. I have just diluted it into a “concept” or a “notion” or an “idea,” putting distance between me and it because if I were to receive it fully, 200-proof, undistilled, it could very well destroy me by its pure and unmerited extravagance. It would melt my ego and tear my sense of independence into shreds. It might even draw me close to God, and would that this would never happen, because then I might have to face the Really Real, and my identity that I hold so dear would certainly be crucified. It was this grace that Martin Luther encountered that launched the great Reformation, enthralled as he was when he encountered in the depths of his heart the reality from Romans 3:21-26, which completely ravished him for the rest of his life… destroyed him, really, for any other thing.

Or what about the gospel? I didn’t capitalize the word, did you notice? Officially, when you speak of the “good news,” you don’t capitalize the word, but you do when you talk of one of the four books about the life of Jesus canonized in the New Testament. Grammatically, you only capitalize “proper” names, those designating a particular thing, a specific or immediate one. The “gospel,” then, is not specific or immediate. It is, then, general, conventional, customary, commonplace, delayed, distant, removed. Distance. Do you see it, the way we dilute our experience with the gospel, with our experience of the Kingdom here, right here, right now, right among us, and the King here present in the here and now? Talk of the gospel as watered-down is prevalent in various circles of Christendom, and I won’t get into now how that is or where it comes from, because ultimately it’s me that waters it down, fearful of what it might require of me would I but believe it, enter into it, and encounter The One who brings it.

And so, we dilute things. It’s no coincidence, I don’t think, that another friend in that conversation last night mistakenly heard me say the word, “deluded,” as in to mislead, to elude or evade, to frustrate the hope of. That is an accurate description, I think, for what we do to ourselves and our friends that would otherwise fall hard and fast into the life and love of God would that we live and present it as it is with nothing added or taken from it.

The book of Hebrews says that Jesus offered up prayers and petitions “with loud cries and tears” to his Father, to the one, it says, “who could save him from death” (5:7). God heard him “because of his reverent submission.” The Amplified Bible has it “because of His reverence toward God,” and then goes on to describe His reverence: “…in that He shrank from the horrors of separation from the bright presence of the Father.”

In other words, He was horrified of being separated from the bright presence of the Father. He was terror-stricken at the prospect of separation. Why? Because He knew his Father, and He loved him with all he was. He was intimate with him, and reveled in being His son, the Son.

I think all our pale excuses and fearful shrinking and hiding in the shadows will be blown away by the bright presence of God. I have a suspicion that not only is a real encounter with the Risen One what we most fear and what we most need; it is what we most want. To open ourselves up to Him unreservedly, to plead and cry out for His life and presence with us, until we, too, shrink not from Him but from the horror of separation from Him. Wide-eyed with wonder. Sweaty with anticipation. Giddy with the hope and prospect of the encounter. Dry-mouthed, jaw-dropping, knee-knocking with expectation and trembling with awe.

In C.S. Lewis's A Horse and His Boy, Wihn is a talking Narnia horse who longed and rode hard for her home country, exiled as she had been. When she finally encounters the Christ-figure of Aslan, all she can do is, trembling, kneel before His beauty and declare, “I would rather be eaten by You than fed by any other.” It was the presence of his presence that was captivating and for her it would be a horror to think of separation from him. She would sooner have death. Or, in the words of a poet, she would rather be “broken in his hands than whole in barren lands.”

Keep me, Lord, with thee. I call from out the dark
Hear in thy light, of which I am a spark.
I know not what is mine and what is thine
Of branch and stem I miss the differing mark
But if a mere hair's-breadth me separateth,
That hair's-breadth is eternal, infinite death.
For sap thy dead branch calls, O living Vine!
-George MacDonald

Redeemed from Fire by Fire

The dove descending breaks the air
With flame of incandescent terror
Of which the tongues declare
The One discharged of sin and error.
The only hope or else despair
Lies in the choice of pyre or pyre –
To be redeemed from fire by fire.

Who then devised the torment? Love.
Love is the unfamiliar Name
Behind the hands that wove
The intolerable shirt of flame.
Which human power cannot remove.
We only live, only suspire
Consumed by either fire or fire.
-T.S. Eliot, The Four Quartets

The fire of God’s presence is consuming. Those who wish to know Him will be asked to walk straight into it. Nothing will be expected, but all will be required. Richard Foster describes the intimacy of knowing and walking with God as the incarnational or sacramental life, the “crying need to experience God as truly manifest and notoriously active in daily life.” The mystery of God made manifest in Christ destroys or feeble notions of Him, demolishes our own pursuits of security and safety, and dissolves our illusions that we can have life outside of God.

This is what T.S. Eliot refers to here as Love, the unfamiliar Name, who redeems from fire by fire. Our choice concerning God (which is to say, concerning our very lives) is actually rather clear: we are either destroyed by fire or consumed by Love so intense it can only be described as a fire. The way of rescue for us is through the flames of His presence, His life that is “the light of men” (John 1:4). And it is a constant rescue, a constant Presence with us. Moses was led by a flaming torch by night; we are led by the Flaming Torch within, “even unto the ends of the age.” It is not that we possess life, but that we are possessed by Life.

It is this incarnational life with God that has been often left out of the more evangelical church circles. And how can that be, since this intimate communion with God is the very heartbeat of our souls? Without this consuming and mystical connection, our pulse weakens, our skin grows pale and clammy, our hearts grow faint and cold. Calvin Miller, in his book Into the Depths of God, has this foreboding warning: “When the mystery is gone, so is the church – at least the vitality of the church.”

So what of these words by T.S. Eliot? Was he too mystical? Is the mystery of his poetry too far out there? Should it make us uncomfortable and so we turn the other way? Not at all. It is in this mystery, this mystical longing after God and recognition of His heart for us, that is ultimate reality. We cannot ignore our vitality in God, or try to tame the flames of it, without losing our very lives. Jesus said as much – “whoever wants to save his life will lose it” (Matthew 16:25).

“God waits,” Calvin Miller continues, “for those who will love him and who hunger for things too excellent to be understood.”

So where do we go from here? How do we come back into intimate communion with God, or rekindle the heat? How do we grow in our love for Him, in our desire for him and those “things too excellent to be understood”? I think the answer has something to do with our fainting, with out gut-level recognition that we cannot get there on our own. We begin by praying not, “Lord, I want you,” but rather the more authentic, “Lord, I want to want you.” Maybe that is all we can muster. But it is all that is required. If we are willing, and only if we choose, we can begin moving deeper into the heat of God’s life. In the same breath, Jesus told us, “but… but… whoever loses his life for me will find it.”

In Mere Christianity, C.S. Lewis says that “there must be a real giving up of the self. You must throw it away ‘blindly’ so to speak… the very first step is to try to forget about the self altogether… your real, new self (which is Christ’s and also yours, and yours just because it is His) will not come as long as you are looking for it. It will come when you are looking for Him… look for Christ and you will find Him, and with Him everything else thrown in.” Paul knew this. It is why, I think, he told us in Colossians that “your life is now hidden with Christ in God.”

So we are to find it. If God seems distant, it is because He is waiting, “waiting to be wanted,” as A. W. Tozer had it. As our desire for God grows (and only as He births in us deeper desire), we can begin seeking after God, wrestling for Him and praying to taste and touch and see the wonder that is God. “And in Him,” Tozer discovered, “we shall find that for which we have all our lives been secretly longing.”

If we heed the invitation to delve deeper into this Love, even in the smallest degree, we really can “mount up on wings as eagles” and learn to fly. Calvin Miller again put it, “Earth holds a strange power that ties us to dust, so that ponderous souls are bound to her crust. But the wind whispers tales of a force in the sky, and those with the courage to scorn dust can fly.”

The other morning, I heard whispers from the wind of that invitation into the intimate life with God. I took Him up on it – how could I pass? I recorded what happened next:

The breeze was some cool at that hour, so I put on the hoodie I’d been shouldering, and set out walking south down our street to the wooded area just beyond.

I had set off in the cover of darkness. It was a romantic early morning, and I knew the meeting place. But it was also my choice to go, weighed as my heart was with the need to be away to pray. There were some things I wanted to bring up with God, and He with me.

It was more than an hour I had spent there, and much was addressed in our time, too much to make mention of here, and things perhaps too deep to record – old wounds and accusations from my former life as well as new and enticing promises for my new one, this one, the one extending into forever. The work of Jesus for me. The ministry and counsel of the Holy Spirit. His fire, burning flame of love. The invitation of the Father into more authentic sonship. An heir of His, coheir, coheir (!) with Jesus.

He was so amazing it all of it – God, the Trinity. So strong, so tender, so engaged, so holy. So triumphant. So ready. So prepared. So delighted. So intent on my wholeness and holiness. So alive with life that is my light.

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