The Way of the Wreckless and an Update

It has again been some time since I have posted on the wall here, and again it is not for a lack of learning.  Rather, the Lord has perhaps lavished greater growth upon me in the last week than at any other point in my life.  I continue to be emboldened, and built up in the beautiful claims the Lord has made over me.  It is really quite a beautiful thing when one is freed from living out of experience and out of personal expectation and starts living out of the Lord’s expectation and declaration over their life.  Such is the freedom that I am beginning to experience in our Lord and Savior.  It has indeed been quite an eventful expanse of time, all while I have done very little.  My job taking down Christmas lights has continued, but God has been working overtime as Brie and I focus our energies on intimacy with Him.   First of all, I must give God some glory for the fact that neither of us have any  source of income set up for the next two months, nor do we have any clear direction besides further up and further into his glorious presence, and that despite those two things Satan has been unable to speak a single lie of worry over my heart.  A mighty work indeed!  I sent in this week a children’s book I have written for publishing.  We shall see what  comes of it.  I have a strong sense that God wishes to do something with that story so if that indeed is the case, I would not be surprised to be published rather soon.  In addition to that he has put upon my heart the assignment of writing a work on Identity.  It is largely for this reason that I have neglected to post any of my formless rantings in recent times.  I have instead been devoted heavily to deep study of the Word of God.  The New Year of 2012 promises to be a great year of revelation for me in the world.  Already, the Lord has blessed me with depths of insight that I did not know possible. 

If you cannot tell, I have a great joy looking forward, and am simply enjoying the blessings of drawing near to my Father, and dreaming about my days here on Earth.  I also continue to look forward expectantly to the birth of our child this summer.  As I say that I realize that many of you probably have not yet heard that news, but God has indeed created life inside of Brie’s belly.  That little blessing is expected to come along in July and God has really taught me much about his Fatherhood as I prepare to bear that image as a dad.  I could not help but marvel during our recent viewing of an ultrasound at the miracle of the little hands and face I saw.  It fills me with such great joy that those hands will be the carriers of love, power, and healing in the Holy Spirit, and that face will be the face of a kingdom-bringing saint.  I cannot wait to see that face.  Brie and I talked today on a hike we took in the beautiful mountains about a level of disconnect I have thought I had not previously realized it with the baby at this point.  All of my energies seem to be in preparation for post-birth baby, and I really don’t think about the child too much besides during my times of caring for Brie and praying blessings over the child in her womb.  God has really told me to seek him in preparation to be a father, and so I really haven’t gotten too wrapped up in the whole birthing process.  Just an interesting revelation I have not completely processed yet. 

Brie and I look forward to a church planting conference we will be attending in Idaho next weekend.  The conference is with a movement called New Frontiers, the founder of which you should all check out.  His name is Terry Virgo, a very wise and spirit-filled man.  That promises to be a blessing, and I feel a critical time of direction in terms of the future.  The Lord is really building me up over the past couple of weeks with a new level of audacity and wrecklessness in my spirit.  For too long I have been confined by a false humility that wanted to minimize myself, but the Lord is really setting me free to believe the unbelievable, namely that God desires and will do something extraordinary in my life.  I made a covenant with the Lord on Christmas Eve that I would know him more than any other human-being has ever known him.  That is very much an audacious promise to make to the Creator of the Universe but he told me to do it, so I figure I better listen.  I have always felt a strong connection with the Heart of Peter, the Rock, the Shepherd appointed to lead the flock after Jesus’ resurrection, but I have been extremely blessed in my meditation about this man today.  I read in my mornings reading Matthew 14, which includes Peter’s walking on water.  I have always been struck by a couple of things about this story, such as the fact that it was Peter’s idea and that the other disciple’s must have felt really pathetic, especially when Jesus tells Peter he has little faith.   This morning the Lord spoke to me in a new way though, and he told me how deeply he hates great works of faith half done.  Peter lacked perseverance on this night.  He lacked the strength of faith to endure and God is really preparing my heart for an endurance race.  However, God also spoke very clearly to me about the spirit  and spunk it takes to begin.  I plan on enduring, but I also want to simply cultivate the wreckless and defiant spirit that Peter possessed.  As frustrated as the Lord might have been by Peter’s lack of completion, I believe strongly that he did not soon forget Peter’s tenacity.  I believe Peter made an impression on the heart of God.  His boldness moved God to the point that it was he that was appointed the Rock.  Surely others were more cultivated, wiser, more refined, but it was just these qualities that prevented them from affecting the heart of God as strongly as Peter did.  I am in fact quite convinced, as much as we critique Peter for it, that his obstinance when confronted with Jesus’ claim that he would deny him was a critical factor in his being appointed leader upon Jesus’ return.  It may make him look like a fool two thousand years later as we read his insistence directly followed by his dreadfully weak denial, but at least he did not believe he would deny Christ, at least his heart was so vigorously set against it.  He may not have later proved to have had the strength to stand strong, but at least he believed enough in himself, and in his love for his Lord that he raised a voice that night.  What were the rest thinking?  Does their silence not make them guilty of a yet greater sin of omission.  Where is their fight?  There is a reason that it is Peter and none of the rest that falls in the line of great shepherds of God’s people with men like Moses and David.  These three men were all offended by weakness in themselves, by sin, by average.  They all have an intimacy with their Lord that makes them convinced that their far more than average God cannot be alright with average lovers.  They all had a history of talking back to God, of defying his plans, and yet they all possessed a heart after the Lord God.  Satan has tried to write his story of history and we have a God that has and continues to refuse to allow that to happen.  He is in fact  re-writing history to fit his desires for it.  Through the power of the cross he has forgotten all of humanities black-marks.  He did not remember the blunders of Moses, David or Peter, and thus when he looked at them all he saw was the tenacity of history-makers.   He saw men who hungered for greatness, and thus hungered for God.  They may have been men who at times fell hard, but with the selective memory of our great and gracious God, they were instead chosen as men who would leave legacies.  It was not their ability to follow rules, but rather their boldness to rewrite them that earned them favor with God the father.  It is that same favor I seek, that same intimacy with my God that I yearn for, and thus it is that same spirit that I petition my God to establish within this chest.  The results promise to be explosive, and I’m sure very often messy, but I have a God who specializes in mess restoration, and I believe he aims to make something beautiful out of this life I’ve been given.  Great joy and expectation, mixed with some good old fear that He’s serious about his claim on my life mark these days for me.  If nothing else, I shall know him more, and I would wager he may produce even more than that.  Praise to our glorious and merciful God.  Sorry to all for this dreadfully disconnected rambling.  It comes with many prayers of blessing for any and all who might read it.  Much love!

What is Faith?

Luther reinforced the fact that it is Sola Fide, by faith alone, that one is justified, and he was right to do so.  The Bible is very clear that it is by faith, and not by works, that one is put into right standing with God.  Unfortunately though, we have long forgotten what faith is, and have watered grace down so fully that we have people running around our churches with no love for or knowledge of God, and still thinking they’ve God things wrapped up with a nice bow.  As I was reading Romans 4 last night, I had some things open up for me in a new way.  None of these revelations are new, but I believe the perspective is new, and I want to explore them a little more deeply.

Verse 3:b – “Abraham believed God, and it was credited to him as righteousness.” Here we have the definition of grace.  Abraham believed that the Lord was capable of doing what he said he would do, and thus God just cleared his account history and wrote a big old perfect righteous in the ledger.  This is the promise for all of humanity, and why our God is the god who, “gives life to the dead and calls things that are not as though they were.” – 17b.  Abraham was not perfect, but through his faith God chalked it up for him as perfection.  The Lord was so impressed, so moved by Abraham’s faith that he failed to see anything but righteousness in him.  In fact, he was so moved that God made Abraham the father of many nations, and the root of his redemptive plan for humanity.  So what was the faith that Abraham had that so deeply touched God?

First of all, I think we should ask the question of what people most often think of when they think of Abraham.  The answers I think would either have to do with his having a child when really, really old, or with picking up his family and moving just because God told him to.  What is interesting is that both of these things are works, and yet we cling to Abraham as a kind of proof that faith without works can get the job done.  James is clear in telling us that “faith without works is dead,” but let’s see if we can find that right here in Romans 4.  Here is the sticky verse with number 5, “However, to the man who does not work but trusts God who justifies the wicked, his faith is credited as righteousness.”  Many lukewarm, mainstream, lazy, American Christians love to get their hands on that verse and do nothing for God.  It does say after all that the one who does not work gets it credited to him as righteousness.  The problem is that we tend to jump right over the middle part about trusting God who justifies the wicked.  We have a God who takes dead people and makes them alive, who takes wicked people like Abraham and calls them righteous.  It is our trusting in him that is the key to freedom.  The problem is that we have to walk with God from death to life, and the cheap flaky grace so much of the church totes does not recognize the fact that we are dead in our sins.  Anyone who has not died and been resurrected through Jesus Christ is simply dead.  Thus, you cannot simply tack on a faith in Jesus, go nowhere and pretend that you are no longer dead.  Verse 12 tells us that Abraham is the father of those who, “walk in the footsteps of the faith,” that he had.  It is a tragedy that faith is no longer thought of as an action, as a lifestyle.  This is not wholesale true, but largely and too largely faith is thought of as something one possesses, has, or says.  The reality is though that Abraham’s faith is only in his works, in his action.  If Abraham would not have picked up his family and moved, or would not have trusted God to give him a son, he would not have had it credited to him as righteousness.  Why?  Not because he didn’t do the works, but because if he wouldn’t have done the works he also wouldn’t have had any faith.  This is the clincher.  Much of the church today actually believes that the works of Abraham are just for the radical, the crazies, and because they have grace they can just hang on to their faith.  If you aren’t willing to be obedient to the Lord in your actions then you don’t have faith!  If you aren’t doing things that seem downright impossible than you probably aren’t trusting the God that calls things that are not as if they were. 

Interestingly enough, I think the fundamental question is about God’s power.  Do you believe that God has the power to save you, and the power to orchestrate your life.  Do you trust him enough to hope when it seems hopeless.  Abraham was fully persuaded that God had power to do what he had promised, thus he was willing to try things that were impossible.  Neither going to an unknown land of promise, nor having a child at 100 were things that Abraham could have done under his own power.  These works required authentic faith in the power of God.  We have today created a church where humble works of talent are considered the best display of faith.  Anyone who does anything too crazy is simply caught up in trying to earn their salvation.  This is a lie, and 180 degrees of a falsehood.  It is the church where people serve in their menial ways based on what they can do under their own power that is trying to be justified by works.  Such a people have no faith in the power of the Living God, they simply want to please him, and soothe their consciences with churchy tasks.  The reason Abraham had it credited to him as righteousness was not because he had the faith to do churchy tasks, the Pharisees had that.  It was credited to him, because he had such faith in God that he was willing to see works done in his life that he could not do himself.  His works were extraordinary because he actually trusted in the God that supercedes human capability with marvelous power.  His faith was in a God much bigger than his works, and thus his works testify to his faith in a way that is seldom seen in the American church.  I am convinced that the church that gets most defensive when people start doing big “works” in the name of Jesus, is the church that is least under grace, and most caught up in trying to earn salvation by their own works.  The symptoms of a grace church, of a church justified by faith is one where ridiculous works are happening because people, “[do] not waver through unbelief regarding the promise of God, but [are] strengthened in [their] faith and [give] glory to God!”  Let us WALK in the footsteps, the active lifestyle of faith, of our Father Abraham, and leave behind our cheap, false grace of works.

Do Not Worry!

Do Not Worry.
This command is probably one of the least acknowledged by the community that claims to follow Jesus as Christ. If he is Christ, he is God. If he is God, he knows everything. So he should know what he is talking about when it comes to how we should live. And yet people either don’t trust him or don’t believe him or frankly outright disobey him when he says, “Do not worry…” I think this is a sign that many people simply aren’t living in step with the Spirit or in communion with the Father whether people realize it or not.

Matthew 6:25-34. Everyone knows the passage and I don’t think I know anyone who fully lives into the promise of this verse:
“Do not worry about your life, what you will eat or drink; or about your body, what you will wear…for the pagans run after all these things, and your heavenly Father knows that you need them.”
So, children of the good Father who gives good gifts, do not worry. Ever. About anything, for “who of you by worrying can add a single hour to his life?”
This isn’t a suggestion to a better life, although if it’s a command, it already means it will make your life better. It’s not a suggestion. If you are a child of the Heavenly Father, you will not worry for you know he is taking care of you.
Only orphans worry about these things because they need to fend for themselves. They need to fight for what they need because no one else is watching out for them.

In Christ, we are no longer orphans. Why then do we live as though we are?
This means:
Do not worry about jobs/income.
Do not worry about paying the bills.
Do not worry about insurance.
Do not worry about making a living.
Do not worry about where God is planting/leading you.
Do not worry about LIFE!
LIVE IN FREEDOM!

The command to not worry about food or bills or life does not give us the freedom to misuse and abuse how we live and assume God will still come through. It gives freedom to live…for Christ and his glory free of worry! Sometimes I think people take this “do not worry” as a license to be foolish with the resources God has given or to be lazy and unwilling to work. Maybe to pay the bills, God has given enough to live off of but there is a need to make some cuts, like cutting the cable bill or cutting the internet connection or moving into a smaller home. Maybe it means no more eating out or random shopping trips for accessories or more clothes. Quite frankly, we don’t even have to think about worrying about clothes because most middle class Americans have a wardrobe for 10-15 people. At least. I don’t know if God will give us the budget to continue living this “American Dream” or continue to be hip or continue to be with culture or up-to-date with technology. And honestly, when we are consumed with the Father, these things simply don’t even matter anymore; they are just a waste of time.

Here is the key to living into the passage of Jesus’ do not worry command which he states right after in verse 33: “BUT seek first his kingdom and his righteousness, and all these things will be given to you as well.” Do not worry, BUT rather, pursue the Father. In living with the Father and under the blessings of the Father, there are conditions. We do not worry as the pagans do, as orphans do, FOR we do not live as orphans do! Our life is to be consumed with the Father—seeking his kingdom and his righteousness above all other things.
Imagine—or watch—little children and their fascination with their dad. Andrew told me of how he would get his fake lawn mower and mow right behind his father. I loved listening to my dad on the guitar at night and had my own fake guitar to play and sing on. I loved making cookies with my dad and would imitate him on so many things. When the Father is around, a child is not usually too far behind even on tasks that don’t seem to be much “fun” like mowing the lawn. There are so many little daddy shadows…and there are many orphans who do their own thing.
As being children, we need to look more like a shadow than doing our own thing. Seeking his kingdom, pursuing his righteousness, mimicking his character, delving into who he is should be the goal and the purpose of our lives. When this begins to happen, what is there to worry about? We have a big, strong daddy with us!

We are to look different, be different. We are children of the Most High king. We need to come to grips with this reality and start living into it otherwise we will directly be disobeying the word of our Lord. Furthermore, as Jesus ends his teachings at the end of Matthew chapter 7, he tells the parable of the wise man and the foolish man. The foolish man is the one who hears the words Jesus says and does not put them into practice. The wise man, on the other hand, puts them into practice in his life. The “do not worry” section of Jesus’ teachings is only one of several that lead up to the parable of the wise and foolish man, but it is important to see that if we do not begin to live like children—pursuing and becoming obsessed with the Father and in turn not worrying about our lives—then we are the foolish man.

Lord, give us your identity as sons and daughters of you, our loving, good Father. May we become so wrapped up in you that nothing else makes us waver with worry, for we are pursuing you, your kingdom and righteousness and glory. Show us the things and activities in our lives that are not for you or your glory. Help us to make cuts in our lives that distract us from you. Draw us closer. May that be the desire of our hearts gracious God. Consume us. How we praise you for being our Father. Glory be to your holy name!