Wayne Jacobsen

As previously announced, we released our second webcast last night at thegodjourney.com.

The Adventure of a Lifetime discusses how thinking outside the box means pushing away from the safe, but boring confines of routine, and growing in a dynamic relationship with Jesus. Brad and Wayne also discuss the gay marriage debate, triggered by a recent court decision in California that overturned California’s ban on gay marriage.

The response to our first show has been a bit overwhelming. We appreciate your feedback and your patience as we continue to grow with this medium and provide the means where others can join the conversation.

Blessings to you all!

What a fabulous time we had together for seven days in Hawaii celebrating our 30th Anniversary. Yes, we got it in a bit early because Sara will be busy with year-end school stuff when our actual date rolls around in May. Thanks for all your prayers and blessings! We had an incredible time relaxing, reading, hiking and seeing the sights on Oahu. We also met a lovely sister there whose family who felt called away from the box of organized religion a couple of years ago. If you want to see more photos you can check out our Ofoto album of the trip at here .

Sara and I leave tomorrow for a celebration of our 30th wedding anniversary. We’re doing this a bit early. Our anniversary date isn’t until May, but Sara’s schedule is really crazy then as the school year winds down. So, certain that we’re going to stay married until May, we’re taking advantage of this time to celebrate Easter for a week at an exotic locale where we can hike, snorkel, golf, read, eat and talk each other’s ears off. That means the office will be closed until April 1.

Any books or CD orders that come in between now and March 31 will be shipped on that date. I’m sorry for any inconvenience that this causes, but we’re a two-horse operation here and haven’t got anyone to cover for us while we’re gone.

It also means this blog will be quiet, very quiet! Nothing new will happen at The God Journey and I won’t be participating in the Lifestream Yahoo Group during this time either.

Sara and I are looking forward to some serious vegging time! We both can use some real time of renewal and refreshing. We’ll be back in touch when we return on April 1.

We pray your Easter season will be filled with the knowledge and assurance of Christ’s finished work on your behalf—both in dealing with our sin at the cross and in his resurrection from the dead, the firstborn of a whole new race of redeemed humanity. What a joy it is to live in his reality and for it to become more real every day.

Blessings to you all!

This is the other letter I told you about yesterday. If you didn’t read that one you might check out A Daughter Finds Her Way Home, This one I received from a brother in Texas:

Every now and then I get a letter that just blows me away. I received two such letters this weekend and want to share them both with you—one today and one tomorrow. While I’m grateful God used something I wrote as a tool in someone’s life, I know well that the kind of work this letter describes has his fingerprints all over it, not mine. I share letters like this because I know this sister is not alone. There are many like her who have lost the simplicity of relationship with a loving Father to a religious overlay of self-effort. If that’s you, perhaps her story will inspire you and you, too, will hear God’s voice wooing you back to himself.

A new issue of BodyLife, is up on the Lifestream website. This one has to do with sexual freedom in the midst of a sexually obsessed culture.

Interestingly enough there is a new study out by the National Institute of Health and the Center for Disease Control pledges about teens who take virginity pledges. On the upside the study found that those who take virginity pledges delay their first sexual encounter by 18 months over those who do not take the pledge. They tend to marry and younger ages and have fewer sex partners. On the downside, those who take an abstinence pledge are just as likely to get sexually transmitted diseases as their counterparts because they experiment with risky alternative sexual activities that they don’t consider are included in the pledge and are less likely to use condoms.

Abstinence educators have dismissed the study and its conclusions as politically motivated. That’s sad, because there is much to be learned here. I hate seeing this turned into a political football, and both sides do it, rather than learn something from this study that will actually help us in our struggle to communicate sexual realities to our children. Do we unwittingly put kids of faith at risk of contracting a destructive STD, because we think telling them to say no is enough? A few years ago someone introduced me to the failure rate of abstinence. I was shocked to hear the term because I though abstinence until marriage is pretty foolproof. But the failure rate of abstinence is how many Christian teens in a hot and heavy moment on a Friday night fall of the abstinence wagon. And because they have to convince themselves the encounter was unplanned for guilt purposes, they rarely use any kind of protection. I’ve talked to a lot of kids in their twenties from Christian homes who confessed to this kind of struggle in their teens and their parents had no idea.

The study only points to something Paul makes said in Romans 5-8, that where law increases sin increases all the more. The focus on a pledge alone, without a relationship to the living God that sustains that pledge and transforms the life from within will have a limited effect. The mind set on abstaining from the flesh is still a mind set on the flesh and it can only produce death. We certainly have to give our children more tools than a vow of abstinence if we’re going to help them value one of the greatest gifts God gave and use it with absolute safety in the way God designed it.

It certainly brings together more than a year’s worth of effort to sort out how God wanted Brad and I to fulfill an idea he put on our heart to communicate more effectively his life in the world.  Many of you know we were approached about hosting a local radio show last year, but in the end we were asked to do things that in good conscience we couldn’t do.  In the last few months we’ve seen a new way to take that show to the world and bypass the suits of Christian radio. 

Webcasting via mp3 files has been done for some time and now it is launching a new industry called podcasting as people are downloading these audio files to their mp3 players and listening to the kind of radio they want to hear.  The New York Times and USA Today have done articles on this phenomenon and Wired Magazine in its current issue calls podcasting and satellite radio the end of regular radio, as we have known it. 

So much of the Christian media overtly and subtly reinforce only one view of church life that an increasing number of people are finding insufficient to fulfill their spiritual hungers or to help them discover the rich vitality of the body life they read about in the Scriptures.  So do many conversations with other believers, championing human effort over God’s power, guilt over acceptance and the misguided priorities of our culture’s thirst for money, celebrity and achievement, rather than finding the joy in surrendering to Christ’s work in us.  We felt it was time to add this resource to that conversation in a way that can encourage people who are thinking outside the box

Today we are releasing our first webcast and some additional material from our practice tapings. You can find them at The God Journey’s own website.  We look forward to growing with you in this new endeavor and value your input and prayers as we explore what this might be able to do to encourage people in the life Jesus came to bring us.

Continuing with our weekly theme of Q and A, here’s another bit of dialogue with a brother concerned about relationships:

What do you mean loser? I think you may be taking personally, what is not personal and I’d be careful about abandoning one-way relationships. Believe me, I can understand the frustration of feeling like you’re the only one pursuing relationship, but don’t dismiss that gift so quickly. Honestly, of the people I meet (and I meet some pretty awesome people) I’d say less than 25% have the courage, motivation, or presence of mind to intentionally build relationships or facilitate others doing so. Isn’t that sad? I’d think anyone growing to know Jesus would be excited to meet others, invite them over or out to lunch, or even call once and awhile to see how someone’s doing, but that simply isn’t true. And though I know that relationships are a lot more fun when both people exhibit the same desire to get-together, I think you might want to reconsider tuning out those who don’t seem to reciprocate.

I say that for a couple of reasons. Jesus specifically warned us about the trap of reciprocating relationships. He said it in the context of inviting people for dinner who can also invite you back. He encouraged us to invite those who can’t invite us back. The reasons for that may be financial, but they could also be emotional or something else. I know people who desperately want community, but they can barely keep their head above the water of job and family responsibilities to make the choices to actually participate in it. That’s epidemic in the States, I think. Yes, it may reflect a lack of discipline, but not necessarily a lack of desire.

Second, you may be the only relationship that other person has, and though they don’t have the wherewithal to initiate contact, they may be deeply appreciative of the contact they do have. I have come to look at relationships this way: Two-way relationships are the stuff of community and deep fellowship. When both parties are involved intentionally, it is the best. I look at one-way relationships as ministry. I may not get much back from them, but I’m willing to give all I can to help them further along the journey. Over time some of those one-way friendships actually develop into real community as the person gets freer from the demands of this age and learns to live in the invitation of the kingdom.

And yes, I have ended up in far more one-way relationships than I have two way, but now I’m no longer worried about it. The question I deal with now is not, “What am I getting out of this?” Rather, it is, “What is Jesus asking me to do to encourage life among his family?” Every community group that survives over time has at least two or three folks in it who can initiate fellowship, facilitate getting together and keeps others on their heart so serve them however they know to do it. Would that all God’s people lived that way. What a body that would be! But for now we have to realize that few people really understand how body life really happens and have the strength, time and emotional resource to reach out aggressively to others. We need more of those, not less. So, hang in there, Bro! I know it isn’t easy. You may not see the fruit of those relationships for years, but when you do it is worth the time planting and cultivating.

I am all for you having relationships in and out of the body! Great stuff! I just wouldn’t make rules about it and simply be free to follow the Lamb wherever he goes. When he puts someone on your heart, pursue it. Don’t worry about their ability to reciprocate. Be a blessing to them and watch what God does…

Another question came up over the weekend, which I think falls into this week’s theme, or so it appears.

Actually, I don’t think “How do I get to heaven?” is the most important question. This is where I think we’ve been robbed. Jesus didn’t come just to save us to heaven… He came to rescue us out of sin and lead us into a relationship with his Father through him in the power of the Holy Spirit.

Yes, the outcome of that relationship will affect our destiny, whether we end up in heave or hell, but the primary purpose of salvation is to lead us into relationship with him. I think that is very important. If not, then we’ve got to sort out the right ‘techniques’ for salvation between sinner’s prayer, baptism, confession, etc., when the reality of these things is not in any outward act, but in the heart itself. One can go through the motions and really not surrender their lives to the living God.

Thus the proof isn’t in what steps we’ve been through, but whether those steps have actually brought us into relationship with the Living God. Do we know him and are we finding how we can live in him and be transformed by his life and power. Yes that involves repentance at a heart-level and it involves God making himself known to us and filling our lives with is presence. Peter in Acts told the crowd to repent of their sins and be baptized and they would receive the promise of the Spirit. That’s pretty good for me. I encourage people to explore who God is. When they are convinced he exists, they can surrender to him in prayer and confession and in the obedience of baptism. At that point I pray with them to be filled with the Spirit’s life and power.

If it’s all real, they begin a relationship with the Living God that will transform them. Yes, they will probably need some further help learning how to walk in a new relationship with the Lord of Glory, so I don’t mind taking that time with them. If something doesn’t awaken in them to God’s reality, we might do a bit more seeking and praying to make sure something is really happening in the heart, and not just that someone is looking for a get-out-of-hell-free card. Jesus’ invitation to salvation was to come back into right relationship with God through his work on their behalf.

Does that help? That’s about as clear as I can be in a brief email.

This seems to be question week. I’ve got to others that I’ll include over the next cvouple of days. Here’s one that I got this weekend:

I don’t think I tread lightly, but I find a lot of the ‘charismatic language’ has been co-opted by those in the ‘movement’ whose priorities are far less than spiritual and use the terms in ways that are divisive and self-exalting. Thus, I am careful how I use them.

I believe living in the continued and growing fullness of the Spirit is the normal life of the believer. I believe in the present-day value (I would say necessity) of the Spirit’s presence and the gifts. I regularly pray in the Spirit and look for other gifts to be made available through my life and through others as God desires in any situation I am in.

I am not convinced, however, that we are on theologically solid ground when we describe that initial experience as ‘The Baptism of the Holy Spirit’. Scripture uses that term primarily to describe the result of those who are born again in the New Covenant. This is how Jesus works in the heart of every believer. For many of us we were never trained to recognize that initially and had subsequent experiences of yielding to that presence that we have termed ‘the baptism.’ Paul called that ‘being filled’ with the Holy Spirit and described that as an every day reality, not a one-time historical event.

The problem today, 40 years into the so-called renewal, is that we have lots of people who claim to be ‘baptized’ and ‘speak in tongues’, who live self-centered empty lives with no reality in their life in God. They claim to be following the Spirit’s leading when they only manipulate people to their own advantage. I also know many people who wouldn’t claim to have been ‘baptized in the Holy Spirit’ by Charismatic terminology, but who live vibrantly alive in the Spirit’s fullness every day. So, I guess I’ve become less focused on past experience and theological debates and more on the present reality in a person’s life. But if people don’t know how to ‘be continually filled with the Spirit,” or grow in the functional use of gifts God wants to share through them, that may be something they will want to sort out with Jesus. I yearn for more of that reality in my life every day.

Also remember this is the five-minute answer, so there is a lot I’ve left out here!