Wayne Jacobsen

Outside my window this morning, spring is exploding here in Southern California. It is not only gorgeous, but it has invited Sara back out into the garden to plant a new season of flowers. All the leaves on the trees are fresh and clean, the daffodils are up and the redbuds are vivid with color. Even the grapevines have just broken out with new growth.

I love the freshness of spring and how clean everything looks. This morning that brought me back to Jesus’ words in John 15 about how he had already made the disciples clean by his word, and thought I would include the chapter on that out of my book In Season: Embracing the Father’s Process of Fruitfulness. This is the fourth excerpt we’ve run from that book. Here are the others:

• Introduction
• Chapter 1: An Amazing Invitation
• Chapter 2: In My Father’s Vineyard
• Chapter 3: The Seasons of the Vineyard

If you’d like to order your own copy of In Season, you can do so here.

Chapter 7: You Are Already Clean

You are already clean because of the word I have spoken to you.
John 15:3

Bear fruit or burn.

That seemed to be the gist of his ominous words: Unless you bear fruit, the Gardener will cut you off and throw you into the fire. But Jesus quickly made clear his words were not a threat.

They, like us, must have wondered where they fit in. What does he think of me? Am I about to be cut off? So just as quickly Jesus made clear how he viewed them: You are already clean! Don’t worry about the pruner’s shears; it is not time for that. You are already neatly trimmed and fit for the season ahead. His invitation to follow him
made them clean.

This was not something they had achieved, but a gift they had been given. He wanted them to know this was the Father’s passion and that his work would get them there, not their own ability or diligence. With all their foibles and fears, with all they didn’t understand and their limited spiritual stamina, he saw them as clean. He’d made
them that way with his own word. They truly had nothing to fear.

When Jesus told his first followers about his desire to fill them with his joy and to make them fruitful in the world, he invited them into spiritual spring. Nothing is cleaner than when it is new, and that is especially true in the San Joaquin Valley of California. This is a desert, though not one filled with cactus. Left to itself our ten inches of rain a year would produce only brief scrub brush that would swiftly melt into the dust that is such a staple in our valley. Between May and October virtually no rain falls.

Nothing of value would grow if it were not for the abundant aquifer beneath the ground and the yearly runoff from the abundant snow of the magnificent Sierra Nevada mountains to the east. These two resources have turned this desert into a garden, one of the most productive regions on the earth. But even that doesn’t eliminate all the
dirt. Whenever the fields dry up for even a few days, the ever-present dust returns. It clings to the leaves and is stirred by the slightest movement. Plowing on a tractor, especially downwind, can keep you in a cloud of gagging dust all day long. Even in sealed-up homes, dust is the constant challenge of any homemaker. It is everywhere.

Spring is the one time, however, when the vineyard is absolutely clean. The labor of winter has left the vineyard neatly trimmed and perfectly tied to the long, straight rows of glistening wire. The field is freshly plowed and every weed is shoveled away from the vines. The flexible new canes and miniature leaves are a vivid light green, and spotless. The spring rains have kept the dust at bay.

All is under control. The farmer looks across his vineyard with a deep satisfaction at its beauty and order. Everything is fresh, ready for the fruitful season ahead.

That’s where Jesus’ followers stood that evening. He had made them clean. Maybe the word pristine is even better. They were not perfect, nor had they matured. Peter would still deny him a few hours later. There was still so much for them to learn about the kingdom Jesus had laid at their feet. As they stood between two worlds—the natural one in which they had become so comfortable and a spiritual world that was opening before their eyes—he made them clean and innocent, ready for what the coming days would unfold.

That’s how everyone starts his or her spiritual journey. Jesus finds us and makes us fit and ready. He breathes new life into us and the old creation gives way to the new.

Though we miss it in our translations, Jesus’ pronouncement is an interesting word play. The word he uses for “clean” comes from the same root as the word he used for pruning in the sentence before. He demonstrates by his usage exactly what pruning is meant to accomplish: It makes the vine clean in the fullest sense of the word, not just dust-free, but trimmed and ready for growth. Jesus doesn’t seem to indicate that they had been freshly pruned. No, in their spiritual life this was their first spring. And even though the theme of John 15 is a call to bear fruit, Jesus wasn’t asking that of them yet.

This was spring, not harvest. They were ready for the process
of fruitfulness to begin. Growth in God’s kingdom does not aim ultimately for cleanliness; it simply begins there. Jesus’ word itself makes us clean and able to stand before God beautifully adorned and blameless. There is no more foundational work than this for bearing fruit. Since fruitfulness arises only out of the depths of our friendship with Jesus, it cannot begin until we are comfortable in his presence,
confident that we belong there.

Jesus made a way for us to come to the Father as freshly cleaned as a spring vine. The same word that Jesus used for clean, the writer of Hebrews takes up when he talks about the cleansed conscience of a believer under the New Covenant. Our conscience is made perfect by the work of Christ. It is not an assumption of forgiveness by someone
who has traversed the proper theological steps. It is a deep inner conviction that in spite of our weaknesses and failures we are safe with him.

That was the limitation of the sacrifices, which the Old Covenant provided. One had to believe in his forgiveness because he had made a sacrifice. But his consciousness of sin did not depart. From one who seemed to know the difference firsthand, having served God under both covenants, the writer of Hebrews extols the marvelous cleansing of the New Covenant that leads us to God’s presence with a perfect conscience. No pang of guilt endures, no fear of punishment remains. His word of forgiveness buries the past at the foot of the cross, removing all stains of sin and rebellion.

We are exhorted to come to God’s presence with confidence and boldness; we belong there. Intimacy demands that kind of confidence. Only when atonement is made can friendship ensue. All we have to do to embrace this cleansing is to repent—to turn from living life our own way and choose to live in his. This is the door into his cleansing. Its true the first time we come to know him and every day we walk
with him.

God’s first priority is not to clean up our sins; it is to help us learn how to live in his love. His cleansing makes that possible even where we still feel entangled in sin. Certainly he wants the cleansing within to untwist our self-indulgent ways, but that only happens as the fruit of living loved. Because we are clean we can live in him. As we live in him his fruit grows in us to displace the waywardness of our old ways.

The Old Testament left us with the impression that the more righteous we could be, the more access we would have to God. But that never worked. Our best efforts still left us woefully short of holiness. Jesus made it clear that relationship with him is the only doorway into righteousness. The more relationship we have with him,
the more righteous he will make us.

That’s why cleanliness begins the journey. By making us clean we can be joined to him and as his love begins to flow through us he will make the changes in our life that lead us away from the tyranny of self to a fulfilled life in him. But we cannot live in the reality of his love and not find that our self-indulgent thinking begins to yield to that love. The more he untwists us the freer we will become from sin.

Those who come from abused or neglected childhoods or have indulged in sinful lifestyles need to hear this. These circumstances give the enemy an opportunity to plant patterns of thinking that will,if not dealt with, leave you feeling like a second-class citizen in God’s vineyard. Don’t ever settle there. God wants to heal all the wounds of your past so that you can go on to know the full joy of his kingdom.
If you still feel stained by your past, let God deal with it. Seek out the prayer and counsel of others who can help you fully embrace the cleansing that God has already given you.

You’ll know this is accomplished when you can rise each day confident that God has great affection for you. Then for the rest of your life guard that cleanliness. Keep it fresh by continued repentance and surrender to God. Don’t get defensive at the things God might expose in you, for he only wants to forgive and transform you.

Like the disciples, our first days of faith are our first spring. Nothing better describes those who embark on a new walk in Christ! We begin in his kingdom newly made, fresh and clean. But this is not our only spring in the kingdom. Periodically we will note times when God freshens his presence and renews us with promise and vision. These times will come on the heels of our spiritual winter, when our lives are pruned and prepared for the next work that God wants to do.

Fruitfulness begins in the confidence that he has made us clean. It begins when we can be at rest in the presence of the Holy God, even though our lives don’t yet reflect that holiness. That will come in time. For now, we can simply live in the confidence of his love for us and watch what he will do to transform our lives.

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Excerpted from In Season, Embracing the Father’s Process of Fruitfulness available from Lifestream.

I just saw him again, I think. That young hawk who was learning to fly last week is out swooping back and forth across my back yard. He’s still not as smooth as his parents, but he’s learning. He’s much more at ease now, not fighting the wind so much and not so desperate to find a perch for his feet. I smiled as he flew by my window. There is such joy in seeing him become what he was created to be.

I have that feeling a lot when I travel, especially when I return to some place I’ve been before and watch how those people have been transformed since I was last with them. That hasn’t always been true. When I traveled around doing seminars, people might have been impressed with my teaching and hungered for me to return to teach them more. Often they asked if I’d come back and plant a church there. While gratifying to the ego, it frustrated my desires for them. Now that I’m more concerned with encouraging their journey rather than giving them my teaching, I see far more transformation. Often I see some of it before I leave. Those who’ve been trying so hard to get God to do something for them begin to rest in the growing trust that God will do what they can’t do. Heaviness gives way to lightness, and striving in their own efforts to beginning to recognize how Father has already been at work in them.

Learning to live loved is a paradoxical process of becoming comfortable with the uncomfortable, certain in uncertainty, and at rest when others are frantic and desperate. Why? Because it gets our eyes off of our own abilities or lack of them, off of the judgments of others no matter how well-intentioned, and off of the circumstances that challenge them. Instead they look to who Father is, what he is doing, and how they only have to simply respond to his unfolding reality rather than trying to make something happen on their own.

No, it doesn’t happen overnight, but it does happen. They become far more comfortable riding the wind with less effort and more grace, just like the young hawk out my window. Each bit of progress brings delight and encouragement as the frustration of our religious efforts gives way to a new creation growing in our hearts. He really is, who he said he is, and he really can draw us into the life that really is life. It will take months and even years to really sort it out, but we’ll relax into the process instead of pressing for the outcome. This is his process after all. He’s never in a hurry. And he seems to enjoy the process as much as we enjoy watching our own children (or grandchildren) grow up.

I got a card in the mail yesterday from a woman from Europe. She’s been through a difficult transition, following Jesus’ voice into freedom out of a strict religious order that could not encourage her journey but instead had to reject her from the community. I’ve exchanged emails with her, met her this summer in Europe, and am overwhelmed with gratefulness at the work God continues to do in her heart. She’s learning to fly! This is what she wrote:

God is doing a marvelous work in me, and I could say, in your words, “I am so getting it!” The revelation about God’s eternal purpose and the true meaning of the cross of Jesus is breathtaking.

 

I just wanted to say thank you for putting words to the deep longings of my heart. Your books and on-line teachings have been instrumental in the journey I am on–an exciting and deeply satisfying journey of joy and hope for my nation and all nations.

Awesome! If you read that with frustration that you’re not in a similar place yet, then you may be looking at your own human effort. That’s always discouraging. But he is not. I hope you read it with encouragement that Jesus is also teaching you how to soar in the new creation and though you’re not as far along as you might want to be today, he is going to help you get it, too. This is his process, not yours. It takes time for God to unravel what sin and religion have twisted in our hearts and to open our eyes to his reality.

All you need to do is just keep leaning into him as best you can see to do each day and his love will percolate up from the deepest part of your being and he will win you into a new space of living loved at rest in his working. Don’t worry that he would leave you out. He isn’t like that. It is his great pleasure to give you the kingdom.

Remember we don’t “get it” by trying to get it. We get it by simply receiving what the Father gives to us.

My friend, Jack Gray of Auckland, NZ turned 90 years a couple of weeks ago. He’s one of the men I spent some time with last year as part of what I’m affectionately calling now my, “Old Coot Tour!” He’s one of those brothers and sisters who’ve spent multiple decades living life inside a relationship with God. When I sent him birthday greetings, he sent me back a link to a video from his birthday party where he took a few moments to address the family and ended with this challenge to his grandchildren:

    Be seekers of the Truth. And when I say the Truth, I mean the ultimate Truth. Not truth you put into a kind of a statement, but the ultimate reality. And what I have discovered in my ninety years, and I’ve probably only discovered the fringes of it is that truth is not in science, or with the philosophers, nor is it in any religious institution or system. The truth is a person. A person who said, “I am the Way the Truth and the Life.” And of him one of his great servants said, “In him are hidden all the treasures of wisdom and knowledge.”

    Knowing him, serving him, and being loved by him, that is the center of my life and that is what I would encourage you to do. Seek the truth. And don’t be surprised if end up finding what I have found that truth is not in these other things. Ultimate truth is that person, the Lord Jesus.”

What a legacy and great words for us all to embrace! All the treasures of life and godliness are found in him, and no where else.

If you want to tap into more of his wisdom, you can do so at his website, The Pilgrim Path, or hear him on the two podcasts I did with Jack at TheGodJourney.com: The Path of a Pilgrim Part I • The Life of a Pilgrim Part II

Many of you who have followed this blog over the years know we have a wonderful connection with brothers and sisters in Kenya and have been able to help them with food, clothing, education, micro-loans for jobs, and care for widows and orphans. Two years ago we completed an orphanage for 72 children who were living in a slum and since have financed the ongoing expenses to provide food, clothing, medical services, education and care at $3,000.00 per month. Some of you have been a real blessing in helping us share so generously with them.

Our hope all along was that the brothers and sisters in Kenya wouldn’t become dependent upon us or anywhere else in the west for resource, but would grow in their dependence on God and how he would provide for them in an ongoing way given the great need they face. We asked them to keep an eye out for some way to help fund the orphanage locally and over the past two years they have considered a number of business and agricultural opportunities that would be able to do that. The only one that has endured is to open a petrol station not far from the orphanage, on a main road near a large city that was recently named a regional center for local government. They put together a plan that would be able to offer jobs to some of their people and generate profits that would be able to fund the orphanage. While I might have hoped for something greener, this is what Father has put on their hearts and the orphanage will be the owners of the station. It will make them self-supporting once the original costs to develop the land and put in the tanks and pumps.

That will cost $72,000, which is the same and two years worth of ongoing support. This, however, will fund them long into the future. We would like to see if we could quickly raise that money as our gift to the orphans and staff, and as a way to bless the wider community. They need it quickly, so if you would like to be involved in this with us, please send in what you can as soon as you can. I am convinced they have done their due diligence and that this enterprise will benefit the brothers and sisters there in a number of ways. In faith, they have already begun development of the property with volunteer labor as you can see below.

                               Work begins on the property.

                               Digging for the underground tanks

                                The first hole is done.

We need to make a commitment one way or another by the end of the week, and having a sense of those who might be standing with us in this process,

If you feel called to help us support these children with this enterprise, or our monthly support until it is completed, we and they would be grateful. If you want to know more about this project or the AIDs recovery home we also support in South Africa, you can see our Sharing With the World page at Lifestream. You can either donate with a credit card there, or you can mail a check to Lifestream Ministries • 1560 Newbury Rd, Ste 1 #313 • Newbury Park, CA 91320. Or if you prefer, we can take your donation over the phone at (805) 498-7774.

I just got in from Tulsa late yesterday and have a lot of backlog to sort through before I leave for Visalia tomorrow. As I was working in my study, some movement caught my eye just outside my window. It was a red-tail hawk cruising by my second story study. That’s not uncommon here since he lives in the eucalyptus tree at the edge of my neighbor’s property. I watch him all the time. But this time he wasn’t alone. A smaller hawk followed behind him and from the looks of things it appeared to me the older hawk was showing the younger one how to fly. (The copyrighted photo at left was taken by my friend, Kent Burgess and is used with his permission.)

I sat back and watched them for a few minutes as they swept back and forth across my back yard and those two gave me a bit of schooling. The older bird cruised easily in the winds of an approaching storm, riding the currents up and down with ease. The younger bird didn’t have a clue how to do that, so he tried to keep up with the bigger bird by constant flapping his wings while he twisted and turned to keep the other one in sight.

The contrast couldn’t have been more pronounced. The older bird was circling in fluid movements, while the younger looked jerky and hesitant. The older one rarely moved his wings while the other beat his frantically trying to keep up. And while I never saw the feet of the older hawk until just before he landed, the younger one kept extending his every few seconds as if trying to find something to hold on to, even though he was not near a tree or any other perch. I assume he would have been far more comfortable on foot than he was on wing.

They landed in the tree a few moments ago and if I could sneak up there, I think the older one would be sitting comfortably and the younger one huffing and wheezing trying to catch its breath. The older one rode the wind; the younger one was always resisting it. What I love about brothers and sisters who have lived this journey for awhile, is that they live at rest in the wind of the Spirit (See John 3). Instead of resisting what God is doing in the circumstances around them, they have learned to flow with him. They’ve learned not to resist the Spirit to stay in their own comfort zone, and have found a new comfort zone in the movement of the Spirit that helps them soar above the capricious circumstances of this world.

Those who haven’t learned to do so, live such frantic lives, driven by their fears and always seeking to find a foothold they feel like they can control. They have yet to learn that the wind is their friend and rather than resisting it, they can learn to ride it. That’s what I loved about this young bird this morning. He was out there doing it, even though he would have been far more comfortable sitting in a tree. Sure his flight path was erratic and his heart was beating a mile a minute, but he was facing down his fears to learn the joy of being a hawk. Of course it wasn’t fun yet, but it soon will be.

Even the most seasoned saint living at rest in God’s unfolding work today went through that process themselves. No one starts proficient at rest, especially in a Spirit we don’t control. But it is possible to learn how to recognize and ride the wind of God’s Spirit as he courses through our lives.

Ask him to show you, and while he does you just might want to find an old bird to keep an eye on so you can see how they do it.

For the first time in four months, I’m going to wake up early in the morning and head for an airport. It has been awesome to be home with Sara for such a long stretch as she recovered from surgery and to have time with friends and family locally. Though I am not looking forward to another fly day, I am looking forward to spending some time with people in Oklahoma and surrounding states who are learning to live in the reality of Father’s affection. And what makes it even more fun, some of them are old friends, way back to my childhood. If you want to join us, you can get all my travel details here.

So I leave you with this. I’ve never liked the word ‘mystic’. Mostly when I talk about people having a real, tangible relationship with God and they ask me if I am a mystic, they are using it dismissively. Like, “Oh you’re one of those…” I’m not always sure what words they finish that with in their own minds, but I think it has something to do with being a whack-job, psycho, or just plain weird. And I think it’s strange that so many Christians are unsettled when someone talks about having a prayer life with God in the conversation. That kind of access is why Jesus died and was resurrected.

But I love what one of my favorite Catholic thinkers, Fr. Richard Rohr, said about it when he was asked, “What is a mystic?” A good friend sent me a link to an interview he did on the subject. Here’s what he said:

      When I use the word mystic, I simply mean experiential religion. That’s all. It’s not mystified. It means that I don’t just have a belief system or belong to a belonging system, but I actually know something, calmly, materially. God has shown God’s self to me.

      So you say, well how do you know that? Paul would say in Galatians, by the fruits: “love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, gentleness, and self control. When you see the fruits of the Spirit after someone has said they’ve had a God-experience, then, well, I think it might be an authentic God-experience. When I see the fruit…

      If I don’t, I don’t see the fruit. I see militarism, domination, greed, ambition and avarice, I don’t think you’ve had an authentic God-experience.

   Just define mysticism as experiential knowledge of God. Experiential, not just theoretical. Not just believing things because you read a Scripture, but you know it to be true and then you go back and say, “Wow, that Scripture is true!”

I still don’t love the word ‘mystic.’ I think it has a better flavor in the Catholic tradition than it does outside of it. But I love how he defines it: “God has shown God’s self to me.” I would hope every follower of Christ would cultivate that reality. That’s where faith begins, with God’s revelation as we come knocking. Following Jesus was really meant to be following Jesus as he makes himself known to you, not following a set of principles derived from our often-flawed interpretations of Scripture. Would that we are all mystics, by Rohr’s definition.

I also appreciate what he looks for to validate whether someone’s claim of God-experiences is valid: the fruits of the Spirit. No, you don’t have to be perfect, but those who are growing to know God will also be growing in those fruits that bear his mark. And that takes care of those who claim God told them to kill their neighbor, steal from work, or betray their spouse.

But then he was asked about those who do not show the fruits of the Spirit. What does it mean for them?

       Sometimes they’ve just had poor teaching, there are people… who have had God-experiences, authentic God experiences, but they’ve been given lousy theology, and it narrows them down much narrower than their honest experience taught them.

What a great answer! It could be that their God-experience is only in their mind, but it could also be that their experience was genuine, but they didn’t have the equipping to process it. Thus they continue in the narrow space of religious performance and frustration rather than come out in the wider space where God continues to make himself known and their lives begin to fold into his reality.

God is inviting you into a spacious place of him winning you to his reality and his love. It is my hope that the new Engage series that we’ve launched at Lifestream will encourage people cultivate the space where God can show God’s self to them!

Here are some more thoughts that have touched us from The Way by E. Stanley Jones. If you want some backgound on this book, please see my earlier blog about it.

Here’s something he wrote about God:

If I were to sit down and try to think out the kind of God I would like to see in the universe, I couldn’t come up with anything higher than that He should be like Christ.

Me too! Strange how Jesus still gets a ninety percent favorability rating in the United States and the God that religion presents gets blamed for disasters and bashed for being a bully. And you know what, God is just like Jesus. He loves broken humanity and seeks to rescue men and women from all the places they got lost in the world and draw them back to his house as beloved children. That’s what Jesus showed us in his humility, compassion, truthfulness, and graciousness. Jesus is a far better representation of God than anything religion has produced.

So why don’t people believe? Many say that it is because they have not seen him and want proof that he exists. E. Stanley Jones wrote:

       The person who want this proved to them is like a person who stands with their back to the sunset while I describe its breath-taking beauty. They say, “I don’t believe it. Prove it to me.” I reply, “I can’t prove it to you. But turn around and look at it; it will prove itself to you.” They reply, “No–prove it to me.” Is it fair?”

Then Jones talks about why Jesus spoke with such authority. I love this and wish I’d learned it growing up”

        In other words, when He made all things, He made them to work in a certain way, and that way would be according to Christ. If the Way were written only in the Scriptures, then we might battle over the authority of the Scriptures, their authorship, their authenticity, their worth. But suppose the Way is written in the nature of reality as well as the Scriptures. Then the Way is inescapable for everybody.

        If Jesus is only a moralist imposing a moral code on humanity, then of course we can question that code and His authority. But suppose Jesus it the revealer of reality’s nature. That makes Him different. he not only reveals the nature of God–He reveals the nature of life.

        We have seen that the Way and not-the-way are written in the Bible. But for many people the authority of the Bible has decayed. It doesn’t grip or guide them. As one critic put it, the Christian faith as contained in the Bible is a “set of scruples imposed on the framework of humanity to keep it from functioning naturally and normally.” They therefore turn to the revelation of life through science and experience their guide. I can disregard the injunctions of the Bible if they are imposed from the outside, but I cannot ignore them if they reveal life itself, if the lift up laws written in the nature of things. For if I run away from them as written in the Bible, I still meet them confronting me from everywhere in daily life.

I daresay that most Christians don’t see it this way. They think Scripture is asking us to live in a way that is counter to humanity. When Sara and I recently reread Proverbs we were struck by how much living with integrity, honesty, kindness, and wisdom was not just something God said we should do, but that those who live that way are far more successful in the things that matter in life. Even as it acknowledges that living dishonestly may make you more money as you take advantage of others, such wealth is short-lived and you’re better off with honesty and a little than deceit with a lot. The real treasures are wisdom, honesty, and kindness not material gain or influence built on deception.

The Creator spoke to us about how to live in the Creation, even one defiled by sin. He’s not imposing some moral order from the outside, but inviting us to live in the Creation the way he designed us to, before sin made the unnatural seem natural. Jesus and the Scriptures speak about life itself and that we would want to follow his way not because it would make God mad if we don’t, but because his way puts us in sync with the Godly part of the Creation and offers us the wisdom to cooperate with the way things really are not the way they appear.

That puts a different view on holiness and righteousness that is so desperately needed today.