Wayne Jacobsen

Unfortunately when we converted to our new website in March, our feeds for my blog at Lifestream got lost, or were not connected properly.  That has been a nightmare for all of us, especially for those of you lost feeds to the various ways you subscribed to the blog.  I apologize for that and the five months it has taken to get them fixed.  But the good news today is that they are all fixed.   

Now you can subscribe to the Lifestream blog by RSS feed, delivered to your Kindle, by email, or at iTunes when there is audio included.

We have fixed the iTunes feed so all of the Transitions and The Jesus Lens recordings are there, as well as the audio versions of Engage that we have currently released.  When new episodes of Engage are released, it will be included there as well.  These are the best audio/video tools we offer to help people connect with a vibrant relationship to Jesus.  They are, and have always been available free of charge to anyone who wants help in their journey of living in the reality of Jesus:  

We also include audio on the blog when new recordings of Wayne’s are avaiable either when he’s speaking somewhere or appears on someone else’s podcast.  

During my recent sojourn around North Carolina, Tami Rumfelt, a local radio DJ asked me to do an interview for her podcast audience about what it means to live loved, and how we get distracted from doing that by our religious performance.  This interview provides a good overview of my passion to help people discover that God wants to meet us in our brokenness and lead us into the fullness of his life.   You can listen to the interview here.

Tami described the interview on her website this way:  

Does God really love me, even though I am a mess? Am I lovely to Him? How can the God that wiped out humanity in Noah’s time be the same one who “Loved the world so much he sent his only Son to die for us”? How can I have relationship with Jesus when I just can’t believe in my heart that he really likes me?

Have you struggled with these questions? I certainly have. Listen in as Wayne Jacobsen offers his thoughts about “living loved”.

During my first trip to Israel, I was a little put off by how some of the people on the tour were trying to convert your Jewish guide, Abraham.  They kept making snide asides to him as to why he didn’t accept Jesus as the Messiah.

On the last day I found myself alone with him by the bus as we were awaiting others to bring their bags from the hotel.  I fell into a conversation with Abraham and was able to ask if he’d been personally offended by some of the comments. 

He passed it off with wave.  “Not at all,” he answered.  “I’ve been doing this for twenty years. Everyone tries to convert me to their religion—Catholics, Pentecostals, Baptists, Reformed Jews, Conservative Jews, Mormans, and Muslims—everyone.”  Then he looked up at me with a smile, “Do you want to know why none of them convince me?”

“I would!” I replied.

“Come with me,” he said as he led me around the front of the bus and to the edge of the road.  “Do you see that building down there with the Star of David on it?” 

“Yes.”

“That’s ours.”

“Do you see that steeple with the cross on it across the way with the cross on it?”

I nodded.

“That’s yours.”

And then he pointed me toward the dome of a mosque on a hillside not far away.

I nodded.

“That’s theirs.”

I smiled trying to imagine what he’d say next.

“Take off the Star of David, the cross, and the dome and underneath aren’t they really all the same thing?   You would think if one of us were serving the Living God, it would look very different.”

He was right.  Christianity doesn’t look any different from the outside as any other religion.   It doesn’t surprise me that all man-made religions would have the same components at its core. The shame of the fall draws us into religious activity that seeks to appease an angry deity and to try and please him with better living.  That’s why they are laced with fear, defined sacred space, calls to sacrifice, and are led by a local, holy-man guru-type, who officiates at rituals that are meant to at times to comfort the faithful, and at other times to threaten them for not doing enough. 

If one of us were serving the Living God, it would look very different.  I think it would.  Nothing better has expressed my lifetime quest to discover what real life in Jesus would look like today, both for the individual and for the redemptive community that unveils God’s reality in the world.  How did we go from “believing what we hear”, to observing a religion more preoccupied with doctrine, ritual, and ethics?  Could it be that what we mostly see in Christianity today is a religion that well-intentioned people have created out of the teachings of Jesus, and that many of us have yet to see the church that Jesus is building in the earth? 

In the last few years I have come to the end of that quest.  I’ve been able to taste of the life of the church that is “not made with hands” all over the world as I have seen Jesus quietly knitting together a family so rich and real that it doesn’t need the religious conventions.  Surprisingly it wasn’t where I thought it would be, and far closer than I’d ever dreamed. 

For those on a similar quest I would love to help you see it too. 

Excerpt from Finding Church:  What If There Really Is Something More?

By Wayne Jacobsen, an uncompleted manuscript

(Special Note:  Abraham will also be our guide on the trip Sara and I and some of our friends will be taking to the Holy Land this February. There’s still room if you want to join us.) 
 

(Important Notice:  Before I get to today’s blog I want to warn you that we’re going to shut Lifestream down for a couple of days beginning on Tuesday evening here in the States, to move it to a new server.  I apologize for any inconvenience, but among the website issues we’ve had to resolve this spring is the fact that our bandwidth needs have grown tremendously in the last few months and our current server just can’t handle it for us economically.  I apologize for any inconvenience it causes.  I hope after this we can just run smoothly for awhile.)

During my recent trip to North Carolina I had the chance to sit down with a couple in their home. As we shared our journeys the husband mentioned that even though he had a seminary degree he couldn’t understand how the God of the Old Testament and the God of the New could be the same God.  Theology told him it was, but he hadn’t worked it out.

How could the same God who seemed so vicious in Old Testament history be the same God whom Jesus talked about and demonstrated as he partied with sinners, healed the sick, and shared such compassion to mend the broken-hearted.  He thought the easiest explanation was what Marcion concluded in the 2nd century—that in the Old Testament, Israel was following a false god and the real God showed up in Jesus Christ.  But, he knew Marcion was a heretic, so that couldn’t be right. 

I started into an explanation I used in my study of Scripture called The Jesus Lens.  The Old Testament tells the story of God rescuing fallen humanity and even when he had to break into human history to deal with the destructive power of sin and preserve a line that could receive his grace.  People saw God’s passion and its occasional severity as proof that he was angry with humanity.  I used the analogy of my wife bridging a relationship with battered, stray dogs that showed up at our house in Visalia.  Instead of rushing to us, they cowered in the bushes or in the darkness, afraid we would harm them, too.  Winning a dog that has been abused takes some time.  You have to work with their hunger to invite them closer to you until they can begin to believe that you are not out to hurt them but help them. 

And then this thought came to mind, “The Old Testament is the story of God’s rescue told from the dog’s perspective.”  I hadn’t thought of it that way before, but the more I’ve meditated on it, the more I like it.  That’s why there seems to be differences between the Old and New Testaments. While God has not changed, our perception of him changes greatly through the Incarnation of Jesus.  

Before we saw him through our eyes and our mistaken conclusions.  Just like the Old Testament writers who saw God through their grid of shame and fear and deemed him a terrifying judge.  Their words reflect it.  We’ve got to understand they write from a place of fear and rejection, which only makes it all the more miraculous when they get a glimpse of the loving and gracious God whose “love never fails”, whose “lovingkindness is better than life”, and whose “mercies are new every morning”.  They were torn between a God of great affection and the blindness of their own guilt and shame. 

Thankfully, Jesus comes to tell us and to show us what God is really like.  He’s not angry with us for our sin, but sees us as harassed and helpless and wants to rescue us from our bondage into his life.  He woos us into the Father’s affection and prepared a way for us to be at rest in his presence, confident that he wants us there, as he untangles the mess we’ve made of our lives.  The writers of the New Testament tells us that same story of rescue told from the dogs’ perspective who are now inside the house.  In Christ they found peace with God and no longer needed to cower in the bushes as they had become at home in him.

We all undergo that same process, don’t we?  Abused by sin and fearful that God would either ignore us or punish us, we cower in our own self-effort or self-pity, hoping against hope that he’ll be good to us, but too overwhelmed by fears to come to him.  And yet, he keeps reaching out to us until we can finally be won into his affection. 

Then when we are won into his affection, we can hold a more complete view of God and even in those moments where God is intense and severe in setting us free or keeping the world in check, we see that as an expression of his love, not his anger or rejection of us. 

I hope the analogy helps you.  It’s one I’m going to play with for awhile and see if it stands the test of time.