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The first time I heard it was after it had come out of my mouth.  But I’ve been thinking about it a lot since.  I was asked to speak at a local fellowship in Boise on Sunday morning last week.  I asked them if they’d be more open to a conversation instead of a lecture, and though they hadn’t done it before they were game enough to give it a try.  You gotta love their courage.  In the course of that conversation about learning to live loved I was asked a question about overcoming sin.  And I said something to the effect of, “I’m coming to see sin as a coping mechanism for not knowing we are loved by God.”  I’ve talked about that idea with a number of people since and it seems to resonate with people, even a main-line denominational pastor here locally with whom God is giving me a growing friendship.  He told me later he almost quoted it last Sunday in his sermon. 

I don’t know if it’s a great definition for sin, but what I like about it is that if it’s a coping mechanism then we there’s no way we can consider trying to fix it by strength of will alone.  If it is what we do because we don’t know we’re loved, then growing to know we’re loved is the only thing that love fills up the empty space than sin so poorly tries to fill.  At least that has been my experience.  I navigated most of my life as if I was not loved by God and thus had to earn his favor every day.  Since I’ve been growing in the awarness of his affection for me, I find that the same old temptations and motivations have been displaced somehow. They just aren’t there any more, and I’m the one who is most surprised.  That doesn’t mean I’ve got it all figured out and live flawlessly now.  Just ask some of the folks closest to me if you doubt that.  But I am not the same person I used to be and that gives me how that he is still changing me.  

In the past I was taught to attack sin by overcoming it by sheer strength of will.  I could do that for most things.  But I found like Paul the Apostle did, that self-righteousness is not righteousness at all. While it doesn’t  violate as many of the commandments, it only channels our sinful heart to religious arrogance, where we seek spiritual status above others and condemn those who do not perform as well as we do.  Paul reminded us that legalistic righteousness makes us the worst of sinners because of how destructive we become to others.

When love displaces sin, there is no room to boast in our own works. Not only does that love begin to transform us from the inside out, but it also leaves us more gentle and compassionate with others who do not yet know how deeply loved by God they are.  

When you see your sin the way God does, you are not filled with shame and contempt.  You see it as something damaging to you and people around you, but you know only he can set you free from it.  His love does that.  Grace is not an excuse not to be concerned about our sin and the damage it causes, but it is a portal into the relationship with God that can set us free from it’s power.  When you know that, you’ll resist what you can, but you won’t put your hope in your performance.  It is Christ in us that gives us hope that our lives can bear his glory in the world.  

I come away from every encounter with him having a greater desire to know and to rely on the love he has for me, and share it as freely as I can with the world around me.  

(The latest Engage Video talks more about dealing with sin inside a relationship of affection with God.  It is not what many of us have been taught about God and our sin. It’s called What About Sin? and you can find it toward the bottom of this page.)

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In other news, I’m two and a half chapters into my next book, Finding Church: What If There Really Is Something More?  and I couldn’t be more excited as to how this book is coming together.  As I’ve shared bits of it with some people, I have appreciated the feedback and excitement I hear in their voices.  So, I’m keeping my nose to the grindstone this fall and trying to get it done as soon as possible.  That means I’ll be limiting my travel this fall and not doing as many podcasts.  

There are seven slots left for our February trip to Israel.  If you are still considering it, now is the time to jump in.  You can get all the details here.  I know many people have security concerns with all that’s going on in the Middle East these days, but we are with a tour company that takes this into consideration all the time. Each morning the get briefings on the situations around Israel and even reroute the itinerary if there are potential hotspots.  And, if it is not deemed safe to go at the time we’re planning, we will reschedule it for a better time.  Tour groups like this are in Israel all the time.  Everyone in the region understand that tourism is a major driving force in the economy for all concerned and have not been targets for violence in the past.  I wouldn’t be taking my wife there if i wasn’t certain that it will be safe and secure for all.  

The Sunday morning presentation I referred to earlier in the blog can now be found here.  If you want to hear a Q & A presenation I did for the Aphesis group on Saturday night when I was in Boise, you can find it here.  

I don’t think we’re wired to live every moment in the public eye. At least I’m not.  For the past six weeks I haven’t done much on-line except continue to post the Engage videos that we’ve been taping.  Part of that time included some vacation with the family, but a lot of it allowed me to draw away into the quiet and find my rest in God’s life.  It has been incredible, and has opened a pretty wide door in my heart to things God has spoken to me throughout my life.  He has brought those threads together and presented them to me in a framework that will allow me to write my next book, one I’ve been contemplating for many years.  

I’m going to stay in the quiet for a bit longer, with minimal postings here and certainly not a new podcast every week.  I have not been this excited since I started He Loves Me over 15 years ago.  I will spend most of this fall writing that book and hope to complete the first draft by the end of December.  At least that’s my target.  Only God knows if life will unfold in a way that will let me get that done.  But I am so looking forward to the time with him and putting those thoughts to text in a way that can help others see the reality of the church Jesus is building in the world.  I’m sure more on this will leak out over the next few months.  

This morning  I’m off to Boise, ID for the weekend.  This is the only trip I have planned for this fall, though there are others we’re thinking and praying about.  As I leave this morning, I’ve posted the first God Journey podcast I’ve done in the last six weeks.  It will give you some more details on what the last six weeks have been like, and what seems to be ahead his fall, if you’re interested.   

I am always deeply grateful for all the love and support Sara and I receive as we continue to follow this amazing adventure with so many of you.  Blessings to you as summer comes to an end in the northern hemisphere…. 

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.)