Encouragement

It was a short exchange, but hopefully a fruitful one. A man had written me about the hope of getting together some time. In his email he expressed some thoughts about a previous blog that gave me pause.

When you ask the question, “Are you worthy of Love?”, I had to think about it.

Until Papa wagged “her” finger (in THE SHACK) and said, “I am especially fond of that one”, I would have said that God was disappointed with me… He did die for me, so mentally, I get the gist of John 3:16. (But) I am worthy of his disappointment. (Emphasis mine.)

My response: I’m not sure how you meant, “…worthy of his disappointment.” For God to be disappointed he would have to have expectations of you that you could meet by your own strength. And yet he knows we were “helpless” in sin.

Wouldn’t it be great to know that God was never disappointed in you? Of course, he’s been disappointed in choices you’ve made and things you’ve done, just as you have been with your girls. But never disappointed in YOU as his child.

That’s the key, I think….

Then he wrote back:

Your email gave me reason to pause and think.

My comment about being “…worthy of his disappointment” comes from being raised that we are basically bad in the sight of God… From that “programming” I realize that it is my expectation to disappoint him.

Being helpless in my sin is such a different way of thinking.

While it would be GREAT to know that God was never disappointed in me, I have to get that to my heart. Mentally I can get that I am loved, not a disappointment, etc. I think that mental knowing causes obligation, where really knowing in your heart causes peace and rest and a returned affection.

So what really caused me to think was that I HAVE been disappointed in my girls as people… NOT just in the choices they made. My religious upbringing caused the expectation that you could not “sin” if you just tried hard enough. Therefore if you do, then you “meant to”…

I am this same way with the few relationships in my life that have gone sideways. I have a relationship where a church friend lied to me to get me to join him in work. Then he continued to lie, cheat, and steal from me. I had higher expectations of him, so I hold him responsible and I am VERY disappointed with him as a person. Forgiveness is very hard here. I have a similar issue with (a relative). She isn’t a nice person to me. Again, I realize that I have higher expectations of her. I don’t think of either of them as being “helpless in their sin”, but mean people who purposefully hurt me. I AM very dissapointed in them… not their actions.

Over the past several years of thinking what it means to live loved, I really do see other people differently than I used to. Maybe I just realized that I have different expectations of them. I have started to apply this to my daughters. It may need to extend further.

This is a great journey to explore for him, for his daughters, and for everyone else around him. Religion has pounded into our heads for so long that we are a constant disappointment to God. He is offended and angry with our sins and mistakes. Only Jesus’ death made us bearable to him. But none of that is true. God sees us as powerless against the brokenness of this age and the brokenness of our own souls.

The process of healing and freedom begins when we realize we are a treasure to God. Our failures don’t make us a stench in his nostrils, but the victims of a tragic fall, even more endearing because of the darkness of our struggle. That’s why he came to rescue us, not so that he could love us, but because he already did.

I know some see that as making an excuse for sin, as if God doesn’t care. Oh, he cares. He sees the destruction of sin in each of us individually and in the larger human experience. He abhors the pain and suffering we cause each other by our self-indulgent ways and the unintentional fruit of our coping mechanisms. But he also knows the only way out is to return to his love. People who are loved well by the Father will find increasing freedom from sin’s tentacles and become a reflection of his love and healing in the world toward others.

If God is disappointed in YOU, then you have to find your way out. If he was never disappointed in you, then you have a Father to run to and a process to engage that will set you increasingly free to live as the beloved son or daughter of a gracious Father, because that’s exactly who you are!

So in your listening to the breath of the Spirit today, see if you hear something like, “I know you’ve been through some rough waters and made some hurtful choices.  I am disappointed for the pain it has caused you and others, but I have never been disappointed in you as my child. I’ve held you in my heart every day, waiting for you to turn and embrace my love.”

No, you can’t really!  The title above should be the oxymoron of all oxymorons.

There’s nothing about real love that can be made into a weapon. But that doesn’t keep people from trying, especially scared parents and religious people.

They turn their twisted view of love into a weapon. When you’ve done enough, especially the things they think you should do, they will love you. When you don’t, they will not only withhold affection from you, they’ll resort to whatever means they have at their disposal to get you to change. They’ll give you the cold shoulder or disapproving glance. They will gossip about you with other family members. That will rant and rave until you conform to their desires. They will should all over you thinking that increasing levels of obnoxiousness will endear you to their point of view.

Sadly, sometimes it even works. Some people would rather give in to the manipulations of those they care about, than continue to endure their contempt or disdain. But even when people meet those expectations, love doesn’t grow. Resentment does. Feeling forced into change is not really change, and the never feel loved by doing so. They just get the money off of their backs.

That’s because true love cannot be weaponized. Why do religious people do it? Because they have been taught God does. He loves us all, sure, but he only gives his love to those who have earned it. If you think that’s true, you will do all you can to get in his good graces. And, when he doesn’t respond the way you think he should, you can still blame yourself for not having done “enough” to qualify for his love. It’s a horribly frustrating place to live and it will wear you out trying to do so. That’s why those people turn it on others thinking they are doing God a favor.

But God’s love cannot be weaponized. It’s never the incentive to change; it is the environment in which healing happens. Every sin and broken place in our lives is caused by us living as if we are not loved by the Creator. But we are! Deliciously! Extravagantly! Overwhelmingly. We just don’t know it.

He never uses his love as a reward because it is always there for us. It doesn’t rise and fall with our performance. We can ignore it, even reject it, but we’ll be no less loved. He knows that his love is the starting place to follow him out of the darkness and into his light and freedom.

So, don’t think someone is loving you when they are manipulating you to do what they think is best to earn their affection. That’s not love, at least not God’s kind. And don’t tell someone you love them when you withhold your affection to get them to do what you want. Neither express the reality of his love and will only confuse people with what love really is.

God’s love can’t be used as a weapon; it is a reality that pulsates through the universe. You are deeply loved by the God who created you, no matter how lost you feel. If you don’t know that, ask him to show you.  Oh, and stop trying to earn it; it will only confuse you, too.

A good friend sent me this story the other day….

At the time he was manager of the campus radio station at Oral Roberts University and a seminar speaker on campus in the late 1960s. One of the best sermons he ever heard happened one morning in chapel from Campus Chaplain, Tommy Tyson:

Brother Tyson got up and read from 1 Cor. 1:30-31. “But by His doing you are in Christ Jesus, who became to us wisdom from God, and righteousness and sanctification, and redemption, so that, just as it is written, ‘Let him who boasts, boast in the Lord.’”

Then he said this: “I do not believe in redemption, I do not believe in healing, I do not believe in deliverance, I do not believe in salvation.”

As he said his the student body and faculty present gasped. He let a few moments pass before finishing, “Here’s what I believe. I believe in a Redeemer, a Healer, a Deliverer, a Savior and much, much more!”

Never settle for theologies apart from the person of Jesus Christ! Wayne, I never forgot that moment.

I love that!

It gave me goose bumps to read it.

Whenever we separate the Gospel from our relationship to the Living Christ, we are left with empty doctrine, true though it be! The purpose of the Incarnation was not to start a Christian religion with finely-tuned doctrine and rituals, but to unveil a mystery—”Christ in you, the hope of glory!”

Get to know him and watch his glory unfold. Don’t settle for substitutes.

Among those things I know now, that I wish I’d known when I was twenty-two and fresh out of college with my Bible degree, is that you cannot convince someone that something is true if they are not ready to hear of it.

Somehow I got the idea that “ministry” was about knowing the truth and convincing others to believe it, too.There were two problems with that. Much of the “truth” I had then, didn’t turn out to be so true at all. And, all of the time spent trying to argue people into my ideas, even those that turned out to be true, were as fruitless as trying to get my grapevines to produce grapes in February.

Truth has its time, and as I look back over my life at the start of a new year, I have a deep appreciation for the trajectory of revelation and transformation in the human heart. These are not things we control, but I love watching how the Holy Spirit begins to unravel our false ideas from the inside and prepare us for those moments when the Truth clarifies in our heart and we find ourselves able to take a step forward in embracing his love or finding a way to share it with others. I’ve had a lot of joy over the past few years watching this process in my own life as well as watching it in others as well.

I was reminded of this by a recent email I received:

I have just finished listening to Finding Church for the 4^th time yesterday in the past 2 months (I have a long drive to work!)

• 30 years ago the old me would have thought it weird.
• 20 years ago I would have tried to understand what you were saying.
• 10 years ago I would have wished it was true.
• 8 years ago I would have not thought it clear enough as I looked for the 10 steps.
• But now I see.  It is just by loving the one in front of you and seeing how God touches them through the interaction. It is learning that you are loved and sharing that love with others.

I laughed when I read it. Thirty years ago I probably would have declared those ideas heresy. Twenty years ago I would have been intrigued with the hope, but thought them too idealistic to work. Ten years ago, I was already seeing that reality live out in my life and the lives of others around me and my view of his church was changing. Today, I can’t think of the church any other way and with that has come a deep appreciation for the church Jesus is building in the world in spite of all that we humans have done to craft her in our own image. And when I think about ten years from now, my heart leaps with the anticipation of what I might yet learn about him and his work in the world.

Truth has its time. We don’t so much learn it in a classroom as it unfolds in us out of our growing relationship to God. Growth and transformation are a process that takes time. It would be nice to recognize truth out of the clear blue and just embrace it, but it rarely works that way. Mostly truth works its way into our heart over time as God wins us more deeply into his affection for us. Maybe that’s what Jesus had in mind when he told the disciples he would send them Another Comforter and he would guide them into all truth. He even admitted to them that he had so many more things to teach them but that they weren’t ready for them yet. I love how Jesus had a sense of the unfolding reality of truth in our hearts. He didn’t confront them with truth and demand they make a choice, but he opened the door to truth to see who was ready to walk through.

If I’d known that forty years ago, my heart would have been softer in the hands of the Master. I would have been far more gentler with people who didn’t see what I hoped they would see. I would have spent far less time trying to argue people into my view of truth. And, I would have trusted the Spirit to guide me better when others were trying to convince me of things they thought were true that didn’t yet make sense to me.

I would have taken all that energy I used to try and convince others and to let him teach me to walk in the truth I had already been given. And, I would have spent far more time encouraging others who were already hungry for the truth, rather than trying to convince others of it who weren’t yet ready and couldn’t yet see it.

In short, seeing the Spirit as the convincer of people, and I their friend has allowed me to be more relaxed in God’s process, not only in my heart, but with others around me as well. It is far more fruitful to help people into the truth they are seeking, rather than to badger them into what they are resisting. Believe me!

If you gave this question serous consideration, we probably need to talk.

The saddest words I hear from people are those that wonder if they are worthy of God’s love. That question is predicated on the biggest lie to find it’s way into God’s creation—that love can be earned.

It can’t.

Nothing disproves that lie better than the coming of Christ into our world that we celebrate at this Christmas season. He didn’t come to redeem people the Father was disgusted with, but those he loved. Even on the night Christ was born, the shepherds heard the angels proclaim, “Glory to God in the highest, and on earth peace among men with whom He is pleased.”

Pleased?  Really? With all the brokenness in the world? Sin was rampant, Humanity was ever at war with itself and his own people were under Roman captivity and lost in their legalism. How could God be pleased with humankind?

Luke certainly didn’t mean God was pleased with the brokenness in his creation, but that he was pleased with humanity in spite of it. God’s love is not so fickle as to come and go based on how good we are. Love is love, even at our most broken, no less than you would have for your children. Our struggle in the darkness only endears us to him as his compassion seeks to rescue and redeem us.

We are all worthy of love because of the place we hold in Father’s heart. No failure, or broken place changes that. The prodigal son was loved as much when he was wasting his father’s money as he was when he returned home. It’s just that he wasn’t living in that love. He didn’t believe it and though he thought he had good evidence for his conclusion, they were based on the lie. Even when he returns home he considers himself  “not worthy” to be called a son.

But he was worthy simply because of the value he held in his father’s heart. The joy of the Gospel is not in getting God to love us, but to relax into the reality of the love he already has for us. Those who grew up abused or neglected have a hard time embracing that. The rejection of their parents seemed proof that they were so flawed as to be unworthy of love. But that is just part of the lie.

Those who grow up in religious settings, who think their performance can endear them to God, fall victim to the same lie. You can’t earn what you already have. You are loved, no less today than when the Father conceived you in his heart before you were born.

That’s the Gospel. Believe it or not, the Creator of the universe is your loving Father. You have the choice to run to that love and embrace it, or hide outside of it as long as you want. Love offers a door; it doesn’t force it’s way.

He loves you as much as any other person on the planet. For those who don’t know that in the deepest part of your soul, Sara and I are praying that Father will reveal that to you and you will find the freedom to joyfully embrace how deeply he delights in you. That’s where this journey of faith truly begins.

And what a Christmas miracle that is!

Notes For the New Year:

Wayne’s Latest Book Is Almost Here

Beyond Sundays, Wayne’s newest book, will be available early in 2018. It will cost $12.00 and we’ll begin taking pre-orders in early January.  It will also be available by e-book as soon as we can get that done.

This is an adaptation of blogs postings Wayne has written over the last year about the current dilemma of people leaving the traditional congregation and the opportunity it affords for the whole church to celebrate all the ways that Father is at work among his people and how he is preparing the bride for the return of his Son.

Travel Dates for Early in 2018

• Jacksonville, FL- January 18
• Raleigh, NC – January 19-22
• Greensboro, NC – January 23-24
• Charlotte, NC – January 25-29
• Phoenix, AZ- February
• Abilene, Tx – March 22-25

If you’re in these areas and still want to plan something, we do have some available time. Or if you just want to join us, please see our Travel Page, where details will be posted when we have them. If you’d like to be notified when I’m coming to your area you can sign up on our email list and include your address.

Kenya Update

Thanks to the generosity of so many of you, we have given just under $200,000 this year to the people in Kenya with orphan children and to help the people in Pokot establish a sustainable future. We put in two agricultural projects so they can grow their own food, and have helped with hospital staff, medicine, food, education and micro-finance loans to help create enterprise. Get more information here.

Staying Up With Lifestream

If you did not receive this by email yesterday or today, then you re not signed up for our blog or our mailing list. If you’d like to be, you can do so here. Include your address details if you want to receive Travel Updates when I’m planning a trip to your area. If you’re not signed up to get my blogs or the podcasts straight to your inbox, you can go to those home pages and submit your email address in the appropriate are.

For the last eighteen months a group of us have been working through the themes of Finding Church chapter by chapter. We are now reaching the end of that study.  The discussion, however, will remain up as other people can come along and start with chapter 1 and work through it now at their own speed. Our hope was to let people contemplate the content of each chapter and how that might impact their own lives as they seek to follow Jesus.

It has been a wonderful study with lots of contributions by others.  You can find out more here if you are interested.

One of the discussion questions I posed today goes to the heart of all of our journeys.  You might want to contemplate it in your own:

Finalizing my latest book for publication, I ran across these two paragraphs. They express better than any other the transformation I see in people all over the world who move beyond religion and embrace a different way of living:

Following ritual and rules that others demand of you is still following law, even if we call them “New Testament principles.” God doesn’t transform us through obligation or meeting the expectations of others. The reason why many of us grew frustrated in religious settings is because they made promises they couldn’t fulfill. The harder we tried the emptier we felt. God has been inviting you to live in a new creation where his love transforms us in the deepest part of our soul.

Over this season you’ll learn to see through the manipulation of obligation, accountability, guilt, and fear and into a different rhythm that will allow you to live more at rest, aware of others, and free from the corrupting influences of this age. Instead of doing what others think you should do, you’ll be freer to discern his work in you and find yourself embracing his realities of grace, forgiveness, freedom, and generosity.

It all begins as you ask him to show you how deeply loved by God you are, then watching for how he shows you that reality. This is the trailhead that will lead you to greater freedom and fullness.

It’s a worthy journey, to be sure.

Before there was Jesus Calling, I wrote this article about the kinds of things the Shepherd whispers to help people who had lost a sense of his voice, to find their way back to him.  Written in 2004 as part of a quarterly newsletter we used to send out, I was reminded of it in a conversation last week, so went back and sought it out.

As I read it again, I thought it might be worth sharing with those of you who haven’t seen it.  I hope it encourages you and helps tune your heart to hear the words he is always speaking to your heart.

Here’s how it starts:

Do you remember the first day you knew that I loved you? Do you remember how clean you felt and how light your heart was? The air seemed clearer, the colors of my creation brighter. You felt as if you had stumbled out of a dark, dirty cave and plunged headlong into a clean, cool stream. You drank in the reality of my presence and splashed with delight in my goodness.

In that moment nothing else mattered. You knew at the very core of your being that I was real, that I had great affection for you. Even in the face of dire circumstances, you were convinced that there was nothing we couldn’t walk through together. My love not only overwhelmed you, it also overflowed you with grace for others, even those who had wronged you. You woke up every morning in eager anticipation of what I’d show you that day. You delighted yourself in me as I delighted myself in you and each day became an adventure together.

Wouldn’t you like to come back to that space?  That’s not just where I wanted you to start. It was where I wanted you to live every day.

Read the rest here.

I just found out today that Jesus is coming back this Saturday night at 11:30, though I’m not sure what time zone that’s calibrated for. It has something to do with the star alignment and Revelation 12:1-2. I

DO NOT BELIEVE IT!

This stuff comes up every few years with someone mixing a dangerous amount of Scripture (far too little) with a bit of cosmic wizardry and sends people into a tizzy. Some have even quit jobs in times past to “prepare” for the return of Christ, and been disappointed and sometimes economically devastated when such dates prove untrue. I’ve watched this go on for the last 50 years and hate what it does to people. All it does is create a lot of attention from someone, often sells a lot of books, and in its failed aftermath creates a wake of people disillusioned with God and weary of waiting for his promises.

As much as I would love for Jesus to come this Saturday, and I would be the first to cheer if he does, this whole approach certainly does not have the fragrance of Father about it. The way they twisted Scripture and the constellations to get the date is absurd on the face of it. I actually laughed when I read the reasoning behind this weekend. When Jesus said his coming would be “like a thief in the night”, he was telling us to ignore any so called Bible or cosmic expert that would set a date. It only provokes fear and really, really poor planning. If he comes, great! He will some day.He said those who would be most prepared for his coming would already be faithfully doing the things God has put in their heart to do. They don’t need a date. Even Jesus didn’t have a date, but entrusted all that to his Father.

So, please don’t quit your job, or sell your possessions. You’re going to need some of that on Monday morning. And don’t freak out your friends or family with your fears and anxieties.

If you’re already living like he could come any time, why would you need a date? Especially dates that prove over and over again to be completely misguided. Remember, The 88 Reasons Jesus Is Coming in 1988? Oops! Missed that!  But the author of that book immediately turned around and wrote 89 Reasons Jesus Is Coming in 1989.  The math was off.  Both books sold well, but the body of Christ was not served well. Remember when one author staked “his entire reputation” on Y2K ushering in a worldwide depression that would precede the coming of Christ?  Wrong again!

So don’t take your direction from soothsayers who twist history, Bible, and astronomy to set dates and seek for notoriety. If the same Spirit who raised Christ from the dead dwells in you, then you have all you need to follow him today. And if you’re following him, the knowledge that he would come on Saturday night would not change one thing about how you’re living today.

And that is as he desired it to be.

I’ve just begun a two-week trip to South Africa, where I will be meeting with people in Durban, Cape Town, Mulzenburg, and finish up in the Johannesburg area. I have no idea what God has in store for me or the people I’ll be with over that time. I don’t go anywhere anymore with notes and topics I want to speak on. I used to. I’d “discern” what “God wanted” me to “impart” to others and then bring lots of notes to lecture from.

Somehow all of that faded away a a couple of decades ago. I discovered that my plans were mostly, well, my plans. I thought they were God’s because it was stuff on my heart after I had prayed for wisdom, but I came to discover that they were mostly formulated so I wouldn’t have to worry about what I’d say. But more and more I noticed that God was nudging the conversation elsewhere and sticking to my notes became more difficult and less effective.

I discovered that my “preparation” was about my need to have all my ducks in a row and it kept me from helping people by joining them in their world, sharing where needs and interest lie, rather than where I was comfortable or thought I’d be most entertaining. It was a gradual process of learning to encounter people in “their time” rather than my own. I also learned that God was more concerned with how I was living alongside him and loving who is in front of me today than he was giving me a topic to speak on a week from now.  He is the God of the present after all. And while I was praying for future events, I was missing opportunities right in front of me.

So I’m learning to walk with God each day in whatever circumstances I’m in.  I don’t show up with my plans anymore, but simply with a prepared heart ready to see what people are hungry for and how I might help. Oh, I might have an inkling of things God will sprinkle into the conversation, but I use them only if they unfold in the moment. It has been so much more helpful to people who are really on a journey of living in the Father’s love to let them shape the conversation and offer myself as a resource for their journey, rather than try to dazzle them with mine.

And it has helped live more full in the present, whether I’m home, on a plane, or in a far off land.  That’s why I have come to love this quote by Aldous Huxley because it captures the possibilities that every day affords us:

Every moment of our human life is a moment of crisis; for at every moment we are called upon to make an all-important decision – to choose between the way that leads to death and spiritual darkness, and the way that leads towards light and life; between interests exclusively temporal, and the eternal order; between our personal will, and the will of God.

A Quest for Values

I realize this can be read from the darkness of performance, where a demanding God is looking over our shoulder every moment judging everything you do or say. That is how I used to see him and I didn’t enjoy quotes like this because they just made me paranoid. No matter how many good decisions I made, I know I wouldn’t get them all right and I was far more aware every day of where I fell short, than where I had leaned into love and life.

That’s the problem with performance-living. Every day demanded perfection, which of course wasn’t possible so every day ended in frustration and confession and pledges to try harder.  But you now what? No child would learn to play piano, baseball, or ride a bike if they had to be perfect at it on the first day. God intended life to be an adventure, not were we get it all right today, but where we simply make progress in learning to walk alongside him and see the world through his eyes. Then we’ll know how to live and that will spill over in helping others.

I love how he is setting me free on the inside to be more aware of what’s unfolding around me and have a sense about how I might be loving, kind, or helpful to others. It’s not a demand of his; it’s an adventure of mine to learn a bit more each day what an amazing world he created and how I can be in it to bring hope and healing rather than more destruction.

Nope, I’m not perfect, but I am making progress and I honestly think that’s all he desires for me.