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You’ll love this! My friend Gayle Erwin (author of The Jesus Style) has just released his latest book Not Many Mighty. Sara and I have been reading bits of it each morning before work and it has been so refreshing.

With his unique sense of humor Gayle retells the Old Testament stories and recounts the foibles of the early apostle, to drive home his point. God does not choose the most deserving people to work through, but common people who have known failure and heartache and who even make lots of mistakes trying to follow him. This book will encourage you cease from your own labors and learn to rest in his while it reacquaints you with a different side of our Biblical heroes than you usually hear.

It’s available from his Servant Quarters website. And if you haven’t read The Jesus Style yet, do yourself a favor and order that one as well.

Here’s an excerpt:

The more we look at the preconceptions of the apostles in the Gospels, the more we realize that Jesus chose a group that we would call losers. Keep in mind that he did not choose these men from the halls of academia. Education of that day was religious schools for Torah stud. Thos who lacked the intelligence or motivation to achiever were released to get a job. So, where did Jesus find these men? At work! These men were somewhere down the ladder in terms of intelligence…

So Jesus apparently chose the apostles to show us whom he could use. That overwhelms me with encouragement. For this inner circle, Jesus chose a group that affirmed the trend we see from the Old Testament—only the weak and foolish need apply. (I Corinthians 1:27)

I’m off tomorrow for a weekend in Turlock, CA and a weekend helping some people focus on the cross! Pray for us if you think about it…

I’ve had a bit of an email exchange of late with someone who has struggled with visiting her parents because they always pressure her to sing for their fellowship when she’s there. She didn’t like the pressure and having been a performer in the past, she was concerned that being in that venue would trigger those old appetites for performance.

Our conversation was a bit about the difference between honoring our parents with love and respect and being manipulated by them. Honoring our parents doesn’t mean we do everything they ask. That’s control and co-dependence and a host of other things that aren’t healthy for them or us. But I also mentioned that the work God was doing in her would really make performance tasteless over time. That’s the way it has worked for me. When you start this journey you think you’re going to die giving up the old ways you enjoyed seeing your gifts touch others. But in time you come to see how empty that is, and when that’s true you’ll never be lured back to it again. That allows you to freely go in those environments when he asks you to to help trigger hunger in others, without fearing that it will drag you back into the same old bondage again.

This is her resonse. I love what she wrote here, especially about keeping our eyes focused on the pleasure and purpose of our Father:

Thanks for getting back to me, Wayne. I so relate to your experience. I believe that I have offered my gifts to be shared with my parents and their church because I really have come to a place where I just want to bless them and encourage them. I don’t need to prove anything to them, and you’re right, they probably won’t be able to comprehend what we’re talking about. But I also feel in my heart that I’m weak, and could easily get sucked into these old patterns of performance. I spent some time with the Lord on these questions today, and He put me back in that wonderful, safe place of freedom with Him.

Over the past few years of listening to him, asking tons of questions like a child, and receiving healing, he has shown me that my performance-tendencies came from the fear of disappointing others. He really, really HATES fear! And today I was asking him what is the lie behind the fear that I’m feeling creeping up again. Here’s what he said the lie is: “If my parents (or other authorities) don’t affirm me, I’m a ‘bad girl’. I can’t be trusted. I’m ‘in sin’.

And here’s what he spoke to the lie: “If that’s true, then I’m a bad boy, I can’t be trusted, and I’m a sinner too. In fact, that’s what the Pharisees accused me of. I overcame because I stayed tuned in and focused on the pleasures and purposes of My Father. You do what you do in freedom, when it originates with the Father. Fear and frustration come when it originates in your ‘need’ to please others.†His grace is such a SAFE PLACE and there is no manipulation or love withheld in him, even if my choice isn’t “rightâ€.

What great language! Freedom in Father is unlike anything this world can offer. It can take you right back to where you used to be, to incarnate his love there, without being victimized by the expectations of others or by the fear that God will withhold his grace if we make a mistake. What a truly safe place to be!

No, we don’t need any money, so let me put you at ease there. I am, however, working on a couple of projects in which I need some help from others. I don’t like using the blog for this, but I know it touches a lot of people and I thought I’d at least ask.

The first involves a coming trip to Europe. I’ve been invited to two different events in Europe this spring and summer and need to decide between making two trips—one in the UK in April and one in Ireland in June—or combining these into one trip in late June. Whenever I fly so far, I also have an ear out for other invitations in the same area to make best use of my time and the flight expenses. I am not seeking invitations nor asking people to plan something just because the opportunity is there, but simply trying to get in touch with those who have asked about my coming in the past to see if you sense God is wanting to do something around these trips. Please let me know, even if it would involve a hop over to the mainland.

The second involves some connections for a book I’m trying to help find traction for its release. Many of you know that I am part of a team that is helping to publish a new novel called THE SHACK. I have never read a more engaging work of fiction that reveals God’s heart and grace in the midst of human pain and suffering. This is a superb work. Also, if we can facilitate 100,000 of these being sold we have the possibility of 20th Century Fox helping to produce it into a movie. To that end, we are looking for some connections that will help us put it in the hands of some key people we think will enjoy the message of this book and help us let others know about it. We are working on a number of connections that we already have but would like to get it in the hands of some people we don’t know and don’t have connections to. If you have any connections to one of the following people, would you please see if they would be willing to take a look at this book for us and possibly write a blurb for it? Tony Campolo, Anne Lamott, Larry Crabb, Phillip Yancey, Brennan Manning or Michael Card. If you have ways for us to get in touch with these people, would you please let me know. If you have other connections you think we should know about, please let us know that as well.

And for all of you waiting to read it, we hope to have the book in print sometime in April… I can’t wait!

I have gotten a ton of responses from people since posting the video of Sharing in Father’s Affection. I have been blessed by the impact this has had.

Many have asked if we have it available in full size on DVD and we’re working to put that together now. I hope to have more information about that in the next couple of weeks. Also, for those who keep track of my travels, I’ve just finalized trips into Central California, Tulsa, OK, Nashville, TN, and Washington DC over the next couple of months.

Now, back to the video. Here’s one of the emails I have received, and I know this dear brother is not alone. My heart resonates with his cry to know his Father again:

I just finished watching the video your posted on your blog today. Thank you for sharing that teaching. I must say that it tugged deeply on my heart. I spent almost thirty years of my life ministering to people, really thinking I was truly loving them. When things in our minstry went awry, I was deeply hurt and wounded. All of the unloving things that were done and said to me and my wife unfortunately I laid in the Father’s lap. I quickly forgot how much He loved me, and consequently I basically quit loving others, and have pretty much refused to be loved by others for fear of being hurt again.

Needless to say, I miss my Father and I miss giving His love to others, and there is nothing outside of His love that can fill that void. I intend to listen again to this teaching as I think it is the fundamental truth that we all need to embrace. Thanks for letting God work in you to make this available on the internet. I have kind of been doing a Forrest Gump for the last 5 years..running, and running, and yet I am no farther away from the Father or closer to Him. He is just waiting for me to get exhausted enough to grab His hand again. I know there is still a place for me in His household, and my wife and I are looking for His direction in the coming year. Please keep us in your prayers.

And as I prayed for him, I pray for others of you that feel as if your hurts in organized religion have not yet been overrun by Father’s emmense affection for you. I pray that you’ll have the freedom to open your hear to his love again and stop all that running! I get tired just reading about it. I know how vicious ministry hurts can be, when our life in God gets all tangled up in people’s needs and demands. It is quite a mess. I pray God unravel it all and put a clear path before you and set you ever-more at rest in his presence.

And let us all remember that this is something God does in us, not something we can produce on our own. Just tell him you want to know the depth of his affection for you. Follow whatever nudges he puts on your heart to that end and let him untangle all that blinds you to the reality of his affection.

I absolutely love stories of God’s transforming work in other people’s lives, and judging from the mail I get in response to the ones I post, I realize they are very encouraging for others as well. These are not easy-fix stories, but stories of transformation God has been working over them for some time. Often we may not think he’s doing anything at all, then something happens to show us that he has in fact been working deeply and now when the sprout finally emerges from the soil, we can see and enjoy the splendor of his working.

Wayne, I am reading once again He Loves Me! This must be my third or fourth reading of it, the last time being a couple years or so ago. I “noticed” it the other day in my stack of books and today I went to pick it up once again, and wanted to share something that you wrote in it that is what God wanted me to see. I can’t seem to get past this part.

First, earlier in my morning He has shown me how He has called me to Himself to relieve me of my orphan spirit. He knows how much I need Him, my Father. A real Father. Sitting there soaking that in was/is wonderful. After a time, I recalled my “noticing” it and went to read it once again.

In the very beginning, where you wrote how you come to meetings early to mingle and get into conversations with the people, and how they are restful and relaxed in your presence until, that is, they find out that you are the speaker/author. You go on to write how God has that same problem with us, and how He had to disguise Himself as a man in order to have us relaxed enough after we get through the awkward stages of beginning to know someone enough to be ourselves. (pages 18 – 20)

I am seeing. He is revealing Himself to me, His good intentions toward me, and most of all, it’s HIS idea to be in relationship with me. This changes everything! Oh, I so hope to be growing in being loved. That’s all I want, to be loved, and know it, and if there will ever be a testimony that I carry around, that this would be it. Not out of my mouth but just because I am living loved.

This time, it’s different. These aren’t just words I am reading, something going into my mind that I can agree mentally with. No, this time these aren’t just words alone, for along with them I am hearing my Father’s Voice. His Voice! Just a day or two ago, I realized there is a Voice! …and now I am hearing Him while reading this book.

It’s not just “reading” I am doing though. He is cradling me in His arms or something as I go along in it, and ..I can’t describe this at all. This is more than just having a witness of the Holy Spirit in me, or having my spirit respond. No, there is perhaps, love? Surrounding me? Compassion?

A Voice. His Voice. Until two days ago, I don’t know if I ever heard it. Now, while in your book (and I’m only on p. 45). His Voice of Love is here speaking to me, all around me. Oh, I hope that His Voice becomes stronger!

I see now due to what you wrote, that I am getting past the angry God I thought He was, and even beyond the Powerful God that He truly is, and coming to this place, this place that is His true Voice, the Voice of Love. It’s getting past being in awe of Him, and I don’t mean that disrespectfully, but to honestly be in conversation with Him. It’s been so slow, but I am reminded of what you wrote, that this is what I can look forward to the rest of my time here on earth and, most likely, beyond.

I am helpless in that. Only HE can, and He has not given up on me, and now that I have more of a taste of a true Father’s love, I so want to know more. I don’t want to live as an orphan anymore. No, not at all. Thanks for helping me. The Holy Spirit has used your talents many times to bring me out of that orphan mentality and spirit.

Wow! I am so thrilled at what Father is consummating in you in this season of your life. I am blessed that my book has been part of that, but I think it is just the symptom of a greater work he is doing? Why is my book different this time? Because of the work he has been doing in you all along. Now, you’re getting to see some of that fruit in renewed relationship with him. But I’m not silly enough to think my book can produce that; it can only help identify it. What God does in us takes a long time. It mostly goes on where we can’t see it, and then one day somehow the veil gets pulled back and we see what he’s been doing all along to draw us closer to his side and set us ever-more free in his life.

There’s something about religion that must terrify people with God in order to get them to live according to what they think are God’s rules. That’s why religion has to treat God like an angry ruler, demanding conformity or doling out consequences to the disobedient.

Even though we talk about God loving us, most believers grow up as unloved children, trying hard to perform the way they think God expects of them. What amazes me so much about the Gospels is that Jesus came talking about a Father who loves us, who invites us into his house so that he can transform us. This transformation only happens in people who are secure in their Father’s affection for them. I think this is the biggest battle that must be won in our hearts to experience the life of Jesus. We have to stop living to appease him as live as the loved children we are. Nothing will transform us faster.

And because we don’t know how to live as beloved children of his, we have no idea how to relate to our brothers and sisters. Often we act like competitors, tearing each other down to feel better about ourselves or trying to get to the top of the authority pyramid so we can lord it over others. Beloved children don’t live that way. They don’t need to. In living loved, they will love in return and experience the fullness of New Testament community without the need for rules and rituals. That’s why I am convinced that getting our relationship with God right is far more important than finding a right way to do church. If we do the former it will bear the fruit of the latter. If we don’t do the former, nothing we ever do will truly look like his church on the earth.

That’s why I’m excited today to post a teaching I gave over a year ago that lies at the heart of everything we share here at Lifestream. Sharing The Father’s Affection was videotaped and we’ve been able to put it into a file that people can stream over the Internet. Though this isn’t my favorite kind of venue, it did allow us to get this recorded in video. And this is the most important stuff I share with people who want to discover what fullness in the life of Jesus looks like.

As with most video files, broadband is recommended or great, great patience and a good dial-up connection. And for those without either, we’ve also included it in an audio-only version.

You gotta love the picture! This is how we can live each day of our life in him and if we do, we will be transformed in ways that will astound us.

The family who sent this picture to me had an extraordinary Christmas dinner that I want to tell you about. They live in New Zealand and this Christmas their two youngest children were going on mission trips and some of their older children and their families weren’t going to make it home for Christmas. So instead of having the large Christmas dinner they were used to, they were down to only five people. As they thought how small that would be they felt nudged to plan a larger dinner anyway and go out to the highways and byways and look for some people to invite to dinner. Does this sound familiar? I love this stuff!

So on Christmas Eve and Christmas Day they were on the prowl looking for people that didn’t seem to have any place to be for Christmas. They saw a ‘scary looking’ guy in a campervan and followed him to a campsite, where they met his wife. They introduced themselves and said, “Our kids away and don’t want to do small. Would you like to come and share a Christmas meal with us.†They sound found out they were Aussies and were missionaries to the Aborigines.â€

They accepted the invitation, as did another German father and two teen-aged boys in the same campground. They now live in Malaysia, where their wife and mother was seeing to some Christmas commitments. They came too. They also invited a ‘social misfit’ from their small village that “is a real loner, done the drug/alcohol abuse thing. When they picked her up at noon they also met some cyclists and asked them, but they couldn’t come.

Here’s their report:

And did we have fun! There’s real humourous rivalry between the Aussies and NZers, ;and so there was a lot of bantering going on. And the German folk had a great sense of humour too. It was just the funnest time! At one stage, we both realised that there were four different conversations all going on at the same time – none was being missed out. We laughed and chatted and ate.

I guess for me personally, was just the greatest thrill of learning to trust Dad in all of this. And I had no obligation of feeling I had to share Jesus with anyone – yes, he did come up a couple of times in our conversation, and that was neat, but I guess it was more just being us and loving others – and all because HE LOVES US!

That night when we lay in bed we were just overflowing with gratefulness to God. He is so good!

I’m not much on New Year’s resolutions. I don’t make them and don’t try to follow them. That’s not to say at regular intervals I don’t assess what God seems to be doing in my life and contemplate what choices he might ask of me to move into the next phase of my journey. That’s pretty regular, though it rarely falls on the turn of a calendar.

And it usually is not some kind of self-made attempt to change myself. I gave that up a long time ago.

But I got an email yesterday that gave me a wonderful chuckle in the middle of the day. I might be able to get in on resolutions like these. Here’s what Charity wrote me…

Last Year I gave up my microwave for New Years to see how life with out instant gratification would be.

Its all good.

This year I have made the decision with the help of some godly friends that maybe I should give up religion.

I’m nervous but know I have been given a great opportunity to walk with Jesus.

We have introduced a new design on our front page at Lifestream. Come by and visit again when you have the chance and check out the new look, which we hope will allow first time and regular visitors to find their way around the site much more easily.

Also, I was looking over some web stats yesterday from last year and was shocked to discover that at Lifestream last year we had almost 80,000 visitors view 588,000 pages from 141 different countries around the world. That blows me away. I have no idea who all those folks are, but I am intrigued by the amount of hunger there is in the world to discover a life of intimacy with Jesus, rather than just endure our religious rituals.

We have never advertised Lifestream. We’ve never asked anyone to link to it. I haven’t even filled out the meta tags that search engines use to help people get to our site. From the beginning I wanted Jesus to bring just as many folks here as he desired, even if it was only a few dozen. And I’m constantly amazed at what people put into search engines such as, “Am I Nuts?†or “Tired of Church†and have had our site come up. And the statistics I saw yesterday just astounded me. I wish I hadn’t peeked! I felt like David taking the census. Yukk!

But I came away overwhelmed at the range God has given us through this website and our others sites. Most people don’t have any idea how uncertain our steps have been, and how things that began on a seeming whim, turned out to have more impact than we would have guessed. I’m reminded here of Paul’s words to the Philippians, “We couldn’t carry this off by our own efforts!†Amen to that! We weren’t nearly so bright as to have concocted all of this, nor to have met so many incredible people in the process. So I am overwhelmed at God’s doing in all of this, for it has truly been him far more than any of you perhaps know.

When we began thirteen years ago we couldn’t have conceived that the Internet would allow us to put books and audio and other resources into the hands of so many other people, and to facilitate such magnificent connections by email, Internet lists and forums. We had no strategy here and still don’t, beyond just loving people God puts before us and sharing freely of our own journey to encourage others who have shared our hunger to know Jesus in truth, and to find living expressions of the church as she really is in the world.

And God has ensured that we have not had to do all of this alone. At so many moments, God put the right connections together when we needed help with legal matters, computer expertise, graphics design and so many other seemingly mundane things. We have also had many, many people pray for us and send us their insights and concerns that have helped shape what we do and how we do it. We’ve met other fellow-travelers from further down the road who have shared the lessons they have learned with us, and even offered timely words of correction to our course. And in just the right moments, without any pleading from me, people have sent us financial gifts that have been important parts of God’s provision for us.

The graciousness of our Father through these people is what has freed us to post so many free resources to help others. last hear the PDF file of the Jake Colsen story was downloaded almost 5500 times around the world, and viewed much more in readings off the web. And the Transition series has been downloaded almost 2300 times since we posted it in June.

I just wanted you to know that all of this, however it touches you, is a result of God’s amazing generosity. I’ve just been reminded of that and my heart is with awe at his working, and filled with joy for all of you who have been such a big part of that.

From the bottom of my heart, thank you! Thank you! Thank you!

2007! Can you believe it? I hope you had some relaxing and refreshing times over your holiday season. We did here. It was a marvelous time with family and friends. But, I’ve got to tell you, I really enjoyed getting back into more of a routine this morning and getting back to those things God has put before me in this new year.

But one of the things I hope to hold on to this year is the childlike wonder I see in my granddaughter. (Yep, that’s her again on the left. Sorry, the combination of her expressions and my daughter’s photographic skills, makes it irresistible.) We got to spend a couple of days with her and her parents up in the snow, which we don’t see much of around the Los Angeles area. This picture of her captures perfectly what it was like being with her. Almost everything around her filled her with wonder and laughter. I love seeing the world through her eyes. (And if you want to see a bit more of the Jacobsen’s in the snow with kids and dogs, you can check out our very own YouTube video here.)

I’ve been spending some time of late with Nicodemus in John 3 for a future BodyLife article. I am challenged by Jesus’ words to him that to see the kingdom we must become like little children. I think part of that includes this sense of wonder that pervades our life, even the most difficult moments with the expectancy of his appearing within it.

I think that may get more difficult as we get older and get more focused on the challenges, pains and unfulfilled wants of this age than we do the love of our Father. Even as Aimee was wondrously enraptured at the scenery, she was also cutting in some molars that have been more than painful. Somehow, for her the wonder of all things new still outweighs the bad stuff.

I know many people facing the direst of circumstances as this year begins, in terms of medical challenges, financial needs and emotional brokenness. I know it isn’t easy to keep our head up when the world throws it’s nastiest stuff our direction and so many challenges seem to pile on, but one look into the face of the Creator of all, and the Gracious Father of love, is enough to melt our hearts and restore our joy. He knows you and he loves you, and his purposes in you will not thwarted by the most brutal of circumstance.

There is no greater wonder than the simplicity and power of his glory. May you often in this year, turn your eyes to the Father of all!