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!

Can I sell books and CDs without selling-out God’s life in me? I get this question about every month or two, so I thought I’d let you look over my shoulder again at a recent exchange I had with a brother I don’ know. I appreciated the gentleness and openness of his heart in broaching a difficult subject. He wrote:

Wayne’s response: I can appreciate your dilemma, but I’m not sure I can sort it out for you. I’m not sure what God is stirring into your heart and to what end. I do not think there are clear ‘principles’ that should guide these issues. I am convinced that as God sorts out his life in us we will know what he is asking us to do. I can share a bit with you how we have sorted it out at this point in the journey. But I don’t consider we’ve arrived at a permanent spot, and are still being refined by the Lord’s working.

The conflict between offering ministry freely and charging for materials is a real one. We’ve wrestled with it from the beginning and still do. Here’s how we are currently sorting it out: The content of what I do is offered free of charge to anyone who wants it. The website articles and BodyLife mailings content the bulk of the content that I share with people. I also answer emails, phone calls and talk with people individually or groups without charging for my time or even requiring my expenses be paid. Sometimes people want to share in those, especially if I’m traveling, but most do not even think of it. We withhold nothing we have from anyone who needs it it. We often send books to people who cannot afford them as our gift. I also do tent-making work outside of Lifestream as God provides to help cover my living expenses.

We look at books and recordings as a different packaging of similar material. People who want those and can afford to pay for them help offset the other ways we serve the people Jesus has asked us to serve. And for the vast majority of people who will spend $12.00 for a movie or $40.00 on cable TV, buying a book is not a burden to them.

Do I think it is ideal? No. A few months ago we released the PDF version of He Loves Me , which is the most important book I’ll ever write. Anyone in the world can read it free of charge now and we did that because God made it really clear to us that this is what he wanted. I don’t know how that will affect book sales. We consider the results of that up to God not us. We still sell the book because man people would rather read a book in their hand than sit so long in front of a computer screen.

I would love to see the day when everything we have is given away freely and those who have been touched by it in one season, would help us meet the financial costs of passing it on to folks who will be served in the next season. That’s how I see it working in the New Testament. Paul made tents in some locations and in others he was supported by the generosity of others he’d been with previously. That way anyone receiving the gospel from him received it without cost or obligation. I love that.

That’s often how my travel, speaking and consulting works, but people don’t seem to have the same awareness of the expenses of printing and duplicating or of web design and availability, much less the time it takes the craft the content for those. We still make them available, however, offset by book and audio sales and gifts from a few folks who regularly share in this task with us financially.
Our desire is to keep listening to him and do what he asks of us. Though I don’t expect that we’ll ever do that perfectly, I am amazed by how he has blessed and cared for us through the last decade of our helping people live free in Christ outside the box of religious obligation.

Yes, part of that has come from book and audio sales, but it is far less than most people think. Very few people make significant money in publishing of any kind. I’m not sure how God will lead us in days to come, but our heart has always been to help people first and deal with the costs as a secondary issue.

There’s one other thought I’ll add to really tie this into a knot. I’m not sure I consider the wisdom God gives me to do what he asks of me is any more Godly than the wisdom he gives a child of his who is a carpenter to build, a CEO to manage, or a teacher to teach. Doesn’t all wisdom come from him, and isn’t he involved in our lives just as much if it isn’t ‘ministry’ as if it is? It’s interesting that some think they have more a right to be paid for their services if they are secular in scope than if they are helpful to others in the kingdom. No one questions my being paid for the mediation I do for public education when that requires just as much of God’s wisdom and favor as it does sitting down with a burned-up couple and helping them sort out the reality of Jesus. I wonder why that is?

In February I posted a link to an article called Ten Myths of Church Leavers. Debbie responded to that post with the following concern and I think there are many more who share her concern.

Debbie, and others who feel similarly, let me say that I sympathize with your concern and I applaud your hunger. So let me make the following observations that may help us all sort this out:

• First, wanting to have relationships with other followers of Christ is what being part of the body is all about. Don’t lose that hunger, just look for ways God wants to fulfill it in you.


• Second, people aren’t leaving ‘church’, they’ve just found that our religious institutions are often a poor reflection of it and are seeking alternative ways to live out the life of the church with other believers. That same door is open to you. God knows how to bring other believers alongside you so that you can share this journey together.


• Third, if you know of a group of believers that meet regularly in a building and you feel God is leading you there to connect with other Christians, no one is saying that is wrong. Feel free to go, just realize what that is and enjoy the fellowship without getting caught up in all the politics and spiritual pecking-order games. I’m in all kinds of gatherings over a year’s time and I find folks in all of them who have a hunger to know God. And one great thing I’ve discovered about people growing to know God is that they are open to new friendships, especially with young believers.


• Finally, it is important for folks who have lots of relationships with other believers to keep those relationships open to others who may not have them. One person told me recently than he knows you’re a friend if you’ll help him out, but he’ll know you’re a close friend if you share your friends with him. I like that. Be generous with your friendships so people like Debbie don’t get left out and feel they have to go it alone.

People often ask me how I can encourage a group of believers who have spilled out of a religious institution one week and then go to one of those institutions the next week to do a seminar or consult with their leadership. Most times the question is an honest curiosity, but some have questioned whether I’m prostituting my gift of gab to make money from larger groups even if I don’t embrace the way they do things.

First, it would not be true that God provides for us better through larger groups than small ones. Very often the opposite is true and sometimes neither of them are able to help us with what it really takes to get me there. Secondly, I don’t accept an invitation to any group that doesn’t have some familiarity with the passions God has placed on my heart. If I’m in a more structured setting, it is because one of the things we’re talking is how the conformity of an institution easily distorts our perception of God’s working. Finally, I find people passionate to know God and his reality in all kinds of settings and if I sense God wants to be with them, I’ll go. If I’m only with people who agree with me about everything, there would be no value in my going.

I really don’t have a strategy that determines where I go. With each invitation Sara and I pray to see if this is something Father wants us to say yes to and follow whatever growing conviction he puts on our heart. Mostly that works out extraordinarily well, but I wouldn’t want you to think we always get that right I’ve been in some places where I just knew after a few moments that I didn’t belong and had missed his leading. But that’s been as true of alternative groups as it has been of traditional congregations themselves.

I guess I’m finding my perception of Jesus’ church to not be as simple as saying it has to be in a home and all groups who meet in a building are by that fact disobeying God. While I think a home is most conducive to the life of Jesus’ family, who I am to reject others who see it differently? What is most important to me is that folks I spend time with deeply want God’s life and they are allowing him to change them over time to fit with the way Father works. I’m never comfortable in a conversation drawing great distinctions between house church (HC) and the institutional church (IC), as if one is totally Godly and the other totally in bondage. It just isn’t that simple. I am convinced that we make such distinctions so that we can claim to belong to the ‘right’ group, but that Jesus has no such compulsion. He lives alongside people wherever he is allowed access and seeks to draw them into his way of seeing things.

Thus I don’t get dragged into a discussion of a church without walls being better than a church with walls. In fact, I’m convinced that from God’s perspective there are no walls, even if people think they are. Jesus’ church cannot be walled in by any human effort and acting as if it is disconnects me with his reality. I have also been to so many different groups of people living out the reality of their life in Christ and the expressions of church life that produces are vast and diverse. Yes, there are similar priorities in all of them, but how they live that out in their meetings and relationships can take on vastly different forms. I want to embrace all the ways in which God works, not serve any one expression to the loss of others.

On an email list I host at Lifestream, one of our contributors was talking about their own frustration trying to find the right model for church involvement. They had left the institutional forms years before, finding more a detriment to what God put on their heart than a help to it. As they looked for other forms, they never seemed to find something that fit. They went through incredible doubt and faced hardships, thinking they were all alone. However, during this time their home had become a gathering place for a lot of young people and in the naturalness of those relationships people were coming to Christ and learning how to walk in his ways. One day God brought that all together for them as he was struggling over what church life should look like for his family:

There are no walls in this incredible family. It can look like a hundred things in various places around the world. I simply refuse to live like there are walls, even with those who try to define it that way. And I certainly won’t feel superior to them, because I used think there were walls too!

Clint Eastwood’s Million Dollar Baby won the major awards at this year’s Academy Awards and in my view certainly deserved them if Hollywood didn’t have enough regard for Hotel Rwanda. I have not seen a movie in the last 10 years where I was more drawn to the characters and cared more deeply about them and the story that unfolded between them. I couldn’t have been more surprised. I don’t usually go to movies about boxing, because I think boxing is an immoral activity (notice I did not say sport) that should be banned worldwide. But I kept hearing this movie wasn’t really about boxing. That was only the context for a compelling human story.

(Spoiler Alert: If you don’t want to know the plot twist in this movie, please stop reading here!) Many fellow-Christians have denounced this movie saying that it promotes euthanasia. I am always saddened at how one-dimensional advocates for Christian politics can be in the face of human struggle. No one could watch this movie open-mindedly and conclude that it celebrated euthanasia. In fact it pictured it exactly for what it is, a despicable tragedy grasped at by desperate people who have no hope or purpose in their lives. It is cheap answer to human pain and dehumanizes anyone who gets near it. I was deeply saddened by the tragedy and lack of hope that destroyed so many lives in this depiction.

Time magazine did an interview last week with director and lead actor, Clint Eastwood entitled, How Lucky Does He Feel. In that interview, he makes a profound observation when asked about the conflict surrounding his movie:

It seems these days we’ve put the affairs of our culture in the hand of the idiots who will use anything in our culture to advance their cause, raise funds and destroy lives. When I read the reports about Terri Schiavo’s tragedy in Florida, they ring with that same one-dimensional tone. Ms. Schiavo has been in a vegetative state for thirteen years because of a period of oxygen deprivation to her brain. Her former husband and her parents, along with the medical community disagree about her state and what actions should be taken. Advocacy groups have moved in from the left and right to use this situation to promote their own agendas. The language they use is so one-dimensional. The former husband wants to kill her to get her life insurance money and has already taken up with another woman. One report says she is unresponsive, another that she is able to communicate with her family.

Don’t believe everything you read. I’m sure this situation is far more complicated than any of the advocates want us to know. Human stories rarely fall into such one-dimensional morality plays with the villains and the good guys so clearly visible. I do know this, we shouldn’t trust what others say if we don’t have our own firsthand knowledge. And until we can see God’s compassion for all the people in the story, we won’t be redemptive in it. We’ll just use it to bash people who disagree with us.

Euthanasia dehumanizes every one who comes near it and those who think it is a viable answer for human suffering have no hope or purpose in their lives beyond the moment. But Sara and I have also wrestled with dying parents and sorting out when they would or wouldn’t want extraordinary medical procedures to prolong a life that was already slipping into eternity. These are difficult and painful realities in a world with modern medical technologies. The times call not for idiotic extremism, but the ability for God’s people to articulate his truth with his compassion.

As far as I can tell, that doesn’t happen very often. Or at least our media doesn’t cover it when it does

I love the way Eugene Peterson translated the Paul’s prayer for the Colossians in the first chapter. He pulls the language out of the kinds of terms that religion has co-opted and allows us to see what Paul was really praying. Here is an excerpt of that prayer:

The truth of this statement is becoming increasingly real in my life. I’m sad to say that most of my life was spent in ignorance of how God works. Not knowing what he was doing or how he does it, I was taught things we believers should do to try to get God to do something. I was taught to press in, pray through, lay hold, and to be more committed and more disciplined so that I could move God’s hand for the things I wanted. Not only was that a ton of work, but it was almost completely fruitless. God still did some things because he is a gracious God, but mostly I was frustrated at him for not doing the things I thought my efforts compelled him to do.

So many well-intentioned believers get caught up in trying to do some great thing for God. So much of that is borne not out of responding to what we already see him doing, but out of our anxieties that we’re going to miss him in some way so we do the best thing we can think to do. We’ll even quote Scriptures to justify it. But in the end we’ll end up in that fruitless place where our own efforts make us miss the very things God is doing.

In my own journey, I’m just beginning to learn how to recognize Father’s fingerprints in my life and in other people’s lives. When I see that, then I know what work the Father is asking of me. That’s what Paul prayed for. He wanted the Colossians to have a thorough knowledge in the ways in which God works, so that they would know what their part is. We are responders not initiators. God doesn’t fulfill our agenda, he invites us into his.

Anxiety is a great deterrent to this process. If you are doing something for God because you’re worried you’ll miss out, or that he won’t respond in love to you, or because you think others can snatch it away from you, it will be almost impossible to see what he is doing. He is easier to recognize when we are at rest in his presence because we know he loves us and will take care of us through whatever circumstances life brings.

And if we don’t see him doing anything in our situations, we still don’t need to panic. Just lean into him more each day until he makes his work in us clear. I just shared some of this with a congregation in Wichita and this month have included the audio from that teaching in our Audio Library as the teaching of the month. You’re welcome to listen to it if you like…

I hope it encourages you to look to what Father is doing, instead of trying to do things for him. He’ll show us. He wants to give us the very kingdom itself. And until we see what he is doing, we do not need to feel any compulsion to ‘do something.’ And when we do see his hand moving, then we’ll know exactly what he wants us to do and in doing that we’ll get to taste of the fruit of his kingdom…

Our local paper ran this story from the Fresno Bee about a special-education student and a miracle basketball shot. It is not what you think. Teen’s Basket Brings Crowd To Tears This is not a story about believers, but it truly demonstrates the heart of Jesus among a group of people in a gymnasium last Friday evening in Central California.

I teared up reading this last Saturday morning. My daughter was spending the weekend with us because her husband was out of town on a business trip. When I tried to read this to my wife and Julie I was so choked up I could hardly get through it.

Read it! You’ll love it!

I remember singing the old hymn, Is Your All On the Altar? and hoping desperately it was. It was a popular song at revival meetings, last day at camp, and those it’s-time-to-repent-and-get-serious-with-Jesus sermons. We’d all go forward, pledge our new-found commitment and then find a few hours, days or weeks later that we’d lost it again. We weren’t completely sold out and we’d just have to try harder.

Honestly now, I think it is one of the traps of the enemy to keep us focused on ourselves instead of living this journey in the freedom of the Spirit where we are transformed into his image with ever-increasing glory. (2 Corinthians 3)

That came up in a recent email exchange that might be of interest to some of you:

My response: I think I see this journey a bit different than you do. I don’t think any of us have completely died and given everything to God… Life with him is a process and hopefully each day more of me dies so that more of him can live through me. I expect that process to continue until he call me home, either through physical death or his physical appearing. Then and only then, when this corruptible puts on incorruptibility will it be said that I am completely his…

Until then we live in the conflict between the old Wayne and the new. Some days I live more freely in him than others. Some days he is letting some of those old things be exposed in me, so that I might learn how to lay them at his feet.

I used to think like you do—that there was some way to be totally surrendered to him. I can only surrender to him today, to the degree that I am aware how to do that. I am much more blessed knowing that is an ongoing process and not having to pretend I’m at its end. That way when new bits of his glory or Wayne’s old nature pop up, I am not discouraged. I am excited to embrace whatever new chapter and new depth he opens for me.

This was posted on an Internet list that I frequent, and reading it today touched me deeply. It is supposedly a well-known story that has circulated among the believers in China during persecution. I do not know who wrote it, but would be happy to give credit where credit is due if we can find a source for this story. Until then, enjoy an incredible story…