Search Results for: breath of fresh air

When Spring Arrives Overnight

4 Comments / Encouragement /

May 3 does seem a bit late for spring to arrive. But we were in upstate New York after a brutal winter. Four days before we were watching snow flurries.  A day before Sara and I had taken a walk and commented on the dark, grey trees that lined the horizon. It was May, and there was not even a hint of green among the trees.

The next morning, however, as we drove Sara to the airport to begin her journey home, we were amazed how spring had arrived overnight. All the trees had popped and the, fresh green leaves of new growth shaded the country side in a beautiful shade of spring.  The rest of my time there, I got to watch spring wash over a region that had waited way too long for its arrival.

It reminded of an email I’d received a few months ago, of another spring arriving on a desperate soul.

About a year ago, I was struggling with a profound sense of feeling spiritually dead. We were attending a small “Bible believing” church and I was bored with the preaching and even more burned out from “serving.” I figured it was from a prideful heart and not “being in the Word enough” so I began diligently reading the Bible which led to questions, which led to searching and eventually back to Jesus. He guided me toward a number of resources out there, which of course I was told not to trust because these people didn’t have “sound doctrine”.  It’s a cliché but the only way I can describe it was escaping the matrix.

My husband and I were in agony about “leaving the church” and our pastor gave us the warning about following sinful desires of our heart, but we bravely and as quietly as we could stopped going. After that I found your ministry and wow! What a joy it was for us! My husband found himself saying, “I actually find myself loving people again.” I feel as if like you, we went through a pharisectomy. We very much miss the friends and community that was the best byproduct of our Sundays, but we are becoming more intentional about loving people in our neighborhood and really loving our children.

I know not all Christians experience the conservative legalism we did and God doesn’t have a prescription for His church.  Who knows where the Spirit will lead us, but I’m actually happy again and I used to think being happy meant I was somehow being sinful. When I ponder on God, I no longer feel this terrible conflict or confusion about His character, I only feel His affection and freedom.

What a story! I love to hear when people awaken out of the dreary despair of religious performance. Starting your pharisectomy is a lot like waking up to spring. To hear she’s “finding myself loving people again” and to “actually be happy again,” fills my heart with joy.

Of course we know that spring doesn’t really arrive overnight. Long before those trees burst into color on May 3, the sap was already running to the far corners of each branch and stem. One day, we could finally see it, but the process had been going on for a long time. I love that the Spirit was already drawing her into those realities before she and her husband found their way there and that anything I said had only helped affirm what God had already put in their hearts.

So if you find yourself today stuck in your own winter of your own spiritual discontent, don’t give up hope. The hunger Father has placed in you is doing its work. Just because you can’t see it yet, doesn’t mean he isn’t stirring things deep within your soul. One day it will pop out and your pursuit and patience will all be worth it.  This is in his hands more than yours. Ask him to help you relax in the moment as your own spring approaches. (If you want more detail about this process, it is the theme of my book about the vineyard:  In Season:).

It’s never easy to push away from religious performance, especially when others warn us not to and our friends no longer trust us. But it’s the road worth taking and you’ll never regret finding love and joy again.  If we could only learn to lean out of those things that make us restless, exhausted, anxious, or obligated to someone else’s expectations, and lean into those things that express love, hope, rest, and joy, we would find the journey far more engaging.

The sudden burst of spring, took my breath away. Hearing stories like this lady’s does, too. Can you imagine what it will be like when we awaken from this corrupt age into the full glory of what it means to be God’s children in a new heaven and a new earth?

 

 

 

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Finding God’s Grace when Tragedy Strikes

1 Comment / Culture Watch, What I'm Reading /

It is so easy to find God in the midst of life’s joys. Finding him in the midst of our pain is another and perhaps no pain is deeper than the loss of a child. Two new books speak directly into this arena by people who know it all too well. These stories just don’t wallow in the tragedy but unpack for the reader how to triumph in the midst of loss, pain and disappointment. You will be touched by both of these and learn how to handle your own tragic circumstances inside the affection of a gracious Father.

hillsTo Be Continued by Allen and Tammy Hill
(Paperback, 295 pages, self-published)

Allen and Tammy’s only child was murdered in the Virginia Teach shootings nine years ago this month. This is the story of Rachel’s life, that horrific day, and living in its aftermath of her loss, learning to lean into God’s love and even forgive the perpetrator of her death. Both The Shack and He Loves Me play into this story in a critical way, through which I came to know the Hill’s and have been friends with them over the past eight years.  I can vouch for the fact that they genuinely live in the freedom and grace they write about in their story.

The subtitle of the book is, “The life of Rachel Hill, and God’s grace to our family in the Virginia Tech tragedy.” And what a story it is! Rachel was a freshman at Tech, a talented and passionate young woman who was life was cut short. She was also a passionate follower of Jesus and you’ll see how her journal encouraged their own journeys in dealing with the pain. In so many ways, and through so many people, God wrapped his arms around the Hills and have not only worked great healing in their hearts, but made them lights to others as well. This is a raw story of, honestly and lovingly told. You will be inspired by their words and touched by the magnificence of God’s grace at the depth of human pain.

They came to discover that their hopes and dreams did not die that day, but that life was “to be continued”. In time God helped them discover how to enjoy life again and not be ruled by tragedy and grief.

Click here for a compelling interview with excellent Allen that aired on ESPN 950 in Richmond, VA, which aired last week on the 9th anniversary of the tragedy.

You can order this book from Amazon, or get one free by sending your address to them by email.  Or if you’d like to order one by mail, or even help them with a gift so they can keep making these books available, you can write them at:

Allen and Tammy Hill
P.O. Box 1685
Glen Allen, VA 23060

 

 

wtsWhen Tragedy Strikes by Laura Diehl
(Paperback, 295 pages, Morgan James Publishing)

This book is not just a story of a parent’s loss; it also offers hope and instruction as to how we can find God in the midst of our most tragic circumstances and let him teach us how to live beyond them.  The book’s subtitle is, “Rebuilding your life with hope and healing after the death of your child.”

Laura and Dave lost their daughter, Becca, six months short of her 30th birthday to a heart condition. She was married with a nine-year-old daughter when complications set in and despite their prayers, Becca died. Shocked and broken, with pain that made her feel as if she couldn’t breath at times, Laura found that God was big enough for this, too.  This is the raw account of her journey from deep darkness back into light and life. Now she wants to extend a helping hand to others who find themselves in the midst of unanticipated tragedies as well.

Laura has lived all of this and doesn’t offer cheap cliche’s or pat answers, but honest and real encouragement and instruction as to how invite God into our deepest pain and find healing an life beyond it. If you’ve been through this kind of pain, or want to learn how to better help others going through it, this book will help you.

Here’s what I wrote for the jacket of her book:

If you have suffered great tragedy and struggle to connect with God in your grief and disappointment, When Tragedy Strikes was written for you. Laura Diehl knows the unfathomable pain of losing a child in tragic circumstances, and through the grief and pain finding her footing in the love of an affectionate Father. As she describes her own journey with honesty, compassion, and wisdom she will help you process your own journey and find a glorious hope beyond your darkest days.

 

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It’s What You’ve Been Given, Not What You Lost

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Last week Sara and I went to see the new Narnia movie, The Voyage of The Dawn Treader. The book it is based on is my favorite in the series, especially for Reepicheep’s humorous, sometimes reckless, but indomitable spirit. I was looking forward to this movie and overall I was not disappointed. It’s beautifully shot, the new Eustace actor is perfect for the role, and I love it when Aslan sneaks into camera range. Much of this movie I really enjoyed, but like the others in this series there’s something about it that doesn’t quite draw me in as deeply as I wish it would. They still come off a bit stiff, the special effects forced, and without the heart I found in these books. I guess the movies of “The Lord of the Rings” set the bar pretty high for me. Still, it’s well worth seeing.

Toward the end of the movie as the main characters stand at the edge of Aslan’s country contemplating whether to go further, or stay in their respective worlds. At that point King Caspian offers a breath-taking observation, “I’ve spent too long wanting what was taken from me and not what I was given.” It hit me smack between the eyes. There are two ways to live in this world, either being thankful for what God has given you, or growing in bitter frustration at what you’ve lost.

We’ve all lost stuff living in this darkened world. Some lose their innocence through abuse, a place in ministry because of betrayal, a part in business because of a dishonest colleague, a marriage because of unfaithfulness, or a hundred other things. The enemy thrives in our world to steal, to kill, and to destroy and can seem to find no end of humans who will cooperate with him in that passion. None of us our immune and thus our lives have painful moments as well as joyful ones.

Focus on what you’ve lost in this world and you’ll become a bitter person, driven to destroy others in your misguided attempt to get what’s fair. Focus on what you’ve been given by God, however, and you’ll understand the true joys of heaven. Maybe some of us we have wasted so much time and energy focusing on what we’ve lost, that we’ve lost sight of the gifts he has given us. If Jesus’ life taught us anything it’s that there is still much life, grace, and love even where others seek to exclude us, lie about us, and persecute us.

When you focus on what God has given rather than the things you’ve lost, you can know great joy and gratitude even in the painful realities of the age we live in. God is the redeeming influence in your life, not the destructive one. Those who seek your destruction are pawns in the hands of a diabolical enemy. As painful as they can make our lives, God is bigger still. He can even turn our losses in this age into a treasures far greater by making himself known in the midst of our pain and disappointment.

True treasure is not in the material things of this age anyway. I don’t understand people who use material reward as the bottom line for their actions. Last week the sports writers in our country were incredulous that a baseball pitcher gave up an offer from the New York Yankees to play for another team at $40 million dollars less than the Yankees offered him. The lead story here for everyone was what he gave up. People thought he was stupid for not taking every dime off the table that he could have. Their compass is only set by maximizing income. The pitcher was more concerned about being on a team he would enjoy playing for. Lost in the story was that he was offered $100 million to play for the team that he wanted to play with. Sure he could have had more, but there are lots of things that aren’t worth trading your pwesonal well-being to have.

Just how much money does it take to be happy anyway? A recent study in the U.S. said that it’s about $75,000.00. As people’s income rises to that point their personal sense of happiness increases. They don’t have to worry about the necessities and have enough left over to enjoy. But the study also showed that happiness decreased as income increased beyond $75,000. I thought that was fascinating. More money doesn’t make people happy. Above $75,000 the stress of protecting it, keeping it, managing it, and the complication it brings into real relationships became destructive to the well-being of the people who have it. I know that’s hard to believe. Most in our culture believe that the more money they can get their hands on will only add to their joy. It is not true. Money is not what really matters in life.

I have found a fresh joy in no longer whining about the things I’ve lost. Life in this age is filled with loss. Like King Caspian, I want to enjoy the things God has given which do not rust away and cannot be stolen by the enemy or his pawns.

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Back and Gone Again

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Sara and I just finished one of our best vacations ever, enjoying the island of Hawaii with our daughter, son-in-law and two grandchildren. We spent a lot of time just to rest, refresh and recreate together. We enjoyed hanging out with the family and playing with the grandgirls while we snorkeled, played on the beach, read and ate. It was fabulous. And while we were there I got to experience two of the most awe-inspiring moments of my life in God’s creation.

One evening my daughter, son-in-law and I went snorkeling in Keahou Bay with 12-14 foot-long manta rays. We held onto a bar that projected lights into the ocean, which drew plankton. The plankton were like a buffet line for the manta rays as they came to feed. We were out there for over an hour as these gentle giants would glide through the ocean, curving, swerving and flipping over right next to us. They would approach with their huge mouths extended to sweep in the plankton and then curve right along your chest, at times even bumping into us. It was breath-taking to be so close to something so large and so wild.

On another night Sara and I took a light plane flight over to the volcanic region of the island. It turned out to be what the pilot called his best flight ever. We looked down the throat of the caldera, to three hundred feet below the surface, to molten magma bubbling and spewing up from the earth’s core. Then a few miles later we found a break out in the lava tube that spilled lava down the hillside in rivers of fire. We circled it for a long time and watched the newest land on earth being created.

But now we’re back home, at least for a few days. We apologize for any inconvenience caused by our office being closed the last couple of weeks, but we are catching up. And, since Brad is in Nashville Sara joined me for the next podcast, which will air this Friday. Also, Forbes finally did the article about THE SHACK, though its focus was more than disappointing.

On Thursday, I’m off to Tulsa and Edmund, OK to see what God has in mind with believers there. I’m teaching at a Because of Jesus Fearless conference Friday and Saturday in Oklahoma, a fellowship in Tulsa Sunday morning and a Livin’ Loved conference in Edmund on Monday and Tuesday nights. (You can use this link, but you need to type in ‘waynejacobsen’ for the password.) After that it is on to Oregon, Colorado and Michigan in July and possibly Toronto and Maine in August.

And somewhere through all of that I hope to get some more writing done.

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Transition to Relationship

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I got a beautiful email last week and wanted to share it. I do so well aware that it could be easily misunderstood. This sister is in the early stages of moving from the stale emptiness of religion into a fresh and vibrant relationship with Jesus. God is revealing himself to her. Recently God began to open her eyes to one of the ways in which he works. I love it and resonate with the content of this exchange. This is God’s heart for her, her husband and many others.

However, I don’t want you to be put off by the form in which she shared it. She shares it as a conversation between her and God. I do believe he speaks like this, but people who don’t understand may feel that God never speaks to them this directly. I doubt it was a voice she heard externally, nor a conversation quite this way. When God reveals himself to us, he spills into our consciousness with insights that we then put to words. I think it is absolutely fair to characterize it as a conversation as our sister has below, but it could mislead others who think that engaging God happens quite this way.

So don’t focus on the form, focus on the substance of what’s shared below. I think it will encourage you too, especially those who are in the middle of this process:

I have really been praying a lot lately about the decision to leave church and how it has meant being misunderstood by so many people. So as I sat there I started asking why the journey out of (organize religion) needs to be a lonely one, I don’t always get an answer but the freedom to ask Him for some kind of insight has made me feel more like His child and less like an acquaintance.

With that one question I opened up Pandora’s box so to speak. I’m getting better at hearing that still small voice in my heart and it seems that sometimes the Father especially loves to have our ear. Immediately I felt like He was asking me if I really wanted to know Him. Of course I said yes! So he gently reminded me that there is a lot of him to know and that to know him is to know Truth. He IS truth. So much of what we have been taught is not the truth about Him, as if any religion could contain the One who breathed out the stars. “It’s so hard for you to see me through the deception that swirls around you like snow in January“. Instantly I got this image in my mind of a snow globe with the little plastic snow flakes floating slowly down. If we take a big step back from the noise of religion all the deception will fall away and what is left standing will be the Truth. “This is the beginning of really seeing Me”.

I also felt Him say that religion encourages us to live in our heads but to see Him we need to live on our hearts. So hard to do when you’ve been hurt I thought. “Children are all created to live in their hearts. Look at how easily they love and accept. But every time someone hurts you, you pack up a box…maybe trust or courage and you move it upstairs…from your heart to your head. After a while you’re living in your head and my voice gets far away.”

So how do I fix that?” I asked. “You don’t” was the instant reply “I do. I move the boxes downstairs one at a time so you begin to live out of your heart again.”

” So how do I let that happen? How do I know it’s you?”

“I will begin to move boxes downstairs one by one. As I help you unpack it you will begin to recognize ways in which I am teaching you to trust me. As you start to recognize each lesson you will also see more and more of me in it.”

As He spoke to my heart is was as if my spirit recognized the Truth and freedom and love in His words and my skin even felt tingly. It was as though He was infusing me with the strength to believe something that would require me to turn away from so much of what I had been taught for so long. I felt such hope and peace even in the face of going on in this without the support of our Christian friends. I know it has been hard for my husband as he is very hurt that people he believed to be close to us have walked away. I asked God to help him see this wonderful Truth and to help him to hear His voice more and more like I was beginning to. ” What should he be doing to hear your voice?”

“What does your husband know about a father/son relationship?”

Well, I know his dad is a workaholic and so he learned very young that to earn his father’s attention and approval he had to work…for…it….. Ohhhhhhhhh”

“What am I asking him to do right now?”

“Nothing. He has walked away from all the ministries he was in and now even church. He doing nothing right now”

“And because the doing and the relationship were so inextricably tied together it means the relationship he thought he had with me has been taken away and he just can’t see me very well right now. It’s like the shadow of me that he had in his peripheral vision is gone. But that’s OK. He’s where I need him to be because I am about to replace that deceptive shadow of a relationship with something far better.”

“So that can apply to almost all of us. What we learned from our parents or other significant people about what a parent/child relationship is has distorted our concept of what our relationship with you can be?”

“Exactly. And that is why so many of your friends have reacted so strongly. What you are suggesting goes against everything they have been taught about maintaining a relationship with me. If they stop the doing they won’t be able to see what they think is me anymore.”

The way He spoke with such compassion and tenderness about His children that are still living deceived was so beautiful. Immediately I felt my defensiveness fade away and I began to see them as He sees them.

For so long I never knew that He wanted to interact with us in such a personal and direct way. Imagine, my Creator conversing with me like an old friend. So many people think that we have to talk to God like he is the untouchable King and we are the unworthy slaves. But He calls us His children…His friends. I understand what so many have expressed. Now that I know the depth of relationship with Him outside of religion I will NEVER go back.

Don’t get caught up on the form of this sharing. There is a lot of wisdom and God’s heart in the content of it. I hope it helps you respond to him as well.

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The Power of Living In Love

Living Loved, Living Loved Newsletter / /

By Wayne Jacobsen
BodyLife • June 2008

Life has taken some crazy turns for me since the last one I wrote in September. I will still continue to do these from time to time, but they will not be often or regular. This one is a bit different as well. Here are three related snapshots of what it means to live in the love of God.

Live Where Love Leads You

So, I ended up with a publishing company. I’m not sure how it happened. I was helping a friend with a book he had written. I helped rewrite some of it with another friend, then represented it to the publishing industry. I wasn’t a very good agent. I couldn’t find anyone in the industry who thought it was worth publishing. So the author, another friend, and I decided to publish it on our own.

And we did. Then The Shack started climbing the best-seller lists and other companies wanted to buy it from us. To our surprise one of the largest publishers in the world approached us to enter a partnership with them, not only to help us get The Shack to a larger audience but also help with my books and others we think are worthy of publishing in years ahead. They bought into the vision of what we were doing and thought there was a significant space in the reading public for that vision.

So we formed a partnership with the Hachette Book Group, where we maintain our unique identity as Windblown Media. We can do just as much publishing with them as we want to, and yet are not obligated to put everything we do through the Hachette machine. They made it clear all along that they wanted to help us not hinder us. And while we were working things out with them, The Shack rose to the very top of the New York Times Best Seller List.

How did all this happen? Believe me, we have had some amazing laughter about it all. No one saw this coming and yet simply responding to him each day has brought us into a place we could not have conceived or conspired to get to.

But that’s true about everything I’m involved in at the moment. Nothing I’m doing today, I set out purposely to accomplish. My plans for my life were very different than how things have turned out. Funny how that is! As a twenty-two year-old, freshly graduated from college, and newly married I had so many dreams and visions of the things I thought God wanted me to accomplish. I had confused my ego with his calling, my dreams for his and had assumed I knew what outcomes God had in mind. My first twenty years on that course proved horribly frustrating as I could not convince God to honor my agenda. The last 14 years have been filled with ever increasing joy and gratefulness as God’s purposes have overrun my own. And in every way he did something immeasurably beyond anything I could have asked or imagined.

BridgeBuilders began because God asked us to go love people at my children’s public school. That one decision started a chain of events that has allowed me to sit in rooms at the most incredible gatherings of deeply conflicted people and help bring about peace. Lifestream started as a way to encourage people to experience a closer walk with Jesus and more relational engagements with others. That led to books, travel and website resources. Windblown Media resulted from simply helping a friend to tell a story God had put on his heart.

Perhaps being fruitful isn’t a matter of starting something, following a five-year plan, and achieving it. Perhaps it is a matter of simply being able to respond to the people and situations around us with his love in our heart and his voice in our ear. For most of my life I have drawn too direct a line between what I think God wants and what I must do to get it. It seems Jesus warned us about that: If you try to save your life you’ll lose it. If you try to be first you’ll end up last.

He only asked us to love, one day at a time, whoever is before us in whatever circumstance we meet them. Everything else he wants to do will flow from that simple reality.

We have filled the world with ministries people have started to accomplish some great thing for God. Many of them never go anywhere. There are a lot of people who come to Hollywood to be a chaplain to the stars. They set up a ministry, beg for money to fund it, and then try to find a way to connect with those people. We do the same with missions and youth ministries. Start a program, fund it, then try and try to get people to take advantage of it.

What if we just started loving the people God puts before us each day, can you imagine what would spill out of that in terms of opportunity, ministry and even growing fellowship?

I think we have it all backwards. Jesus didn’t ask us to start ministries. He didn’t ask us to accomplish great things. He simply asked us to love others the same way we are loved by him and that will be enough for the whole world to know that we belong to him and that they can too.

People ask me all the time how they can start a house church or connect with other brothers and sisters on a similar journey in their region. Many are frustrated at past attempts that haven’t worked out. While I think we can take advantage of Internet forums, email lists and directories to see if we can find people in our area growing in the same realities, that may not be the best way. I now encourage people just to listen to Father every day and live in love toward the people right in front of you. This has worked for Sara and me in our two recent moves and has brought a wealth of relationships locally that have just grown out of taking an interest in the people around us and discovering others who are passionate for the God we love. We don’t have to start or join anything for that, unless of course he asks us to.

I am more convinced than ever that every thing God wants to do in the world will flow from us learning to live in his love and listening to him as we walk through life. This allows the opportunities in our lives to grow organically, rather than through the artificial means of organizing, promoting, and manipulating others. That may be why he told us his new command would simply be to love like we’ve been loved.

I Couldn’t Let You Go Through This Alone

Adapted from the Lifestream Blog

This may just be the essence of community: “I couldn’t let you go through this alone”. The first time I heard those words it was from a good friend who walked beside me through the most painful experience of my life. We had shared some wonderful times together, but then he withdrew for a season from our relationship. I was so blessed when we reconnected in the midst of my trial. One day I asked him why he had disappeared for so long. His answer? “I could see that you were going to get hurt badly and I just couldn’t bear to watch it.” I understood his comment. He had been through something similar and I knew how painful it was for him to walk with me through mine. I laughed, “But you’re here now at the worst of it.”

“I know,” he grimaced. “I couldn’t let you go through this alone.”

I don’t know a better definition for community. It isn’t always fun and games. Love will also not let people go through their darkest days alone. As painful as it may be to watch people we care about suffer, love won’t let us be anywhere else.

I was reminded of that recently as I read Tuesdays With Morrie by Mitch Albom. It’s an old book I’ve wanted to read for a long time. It’s about a professor dying of ALS, and a former student who shows up for the last chapter of his life. It offers lessons from the brink of death and many of them are breathtaking. Even though this man was not a passionate believer, he’d come to believe some things that are pretty consistent with the life of Jesus:

“So many people walk around with meaningless life, they seem half a sleep, even when they are busy doing things, they think they are important, this is because they are chasing the wrong things, the way you get meaning in your life is to devote yourself to loving others, devote yourself to your community around you and devote yourself to something that gives you purpose and meaning.”

And this: “Love wins. Love always wins.”

I loved this book, enjoyed the lessons, but was most touched by this former student who would come and spend every Tuesday with his former professor in the last stages of his disease. He learned a lot, but also gave a lot – friendship on the brink of death.

At my brother’s funeral a number of years ago one of his best friends stood up at his funeral and said that he couldn’t bear to visit my brother as he suffered the final stages of multiple sclerosis. He wanted to remember him as he was, not in his weakened condition. When he was needed the most he couldn’t bear to go. How sad!

The meaning of compassion is right in the word itself: “come to passion”. Passion in the old English meant suffering. Thus compassion means “to run to suffering” – to be there at the worst moment because someone we love needs us. I love that. A good picture of this are the 9/11 rescue workers who were running into the World Trade Center when everyone else was trying to run out. Compassion means being there when it’s incredibly difficult, not because we enjoy the circumstances, but because we love the person in them.

No one enjoys walking people through dark valleys or through painful reactions, but love says, I’ll be there for you. I may not know what to do or what to say. But I just can’t let you go through this alone!

A Plea for Love From the Sudan

By Michele Perry

Michele Perry was born in Florida with only one leg. After getting involved in the house church movement for some years, she sensed God calling her two years ago to the Sudan to care for children orphaned by violence. She rented a home and started taking in children. She now has 80 children she cares for around the clock and another 150 who come to her school each day. She also has an infectious passion for all things Jesus. You can find out more at: Iris-Sudan.org. After she read a copy of So You Don’t Want to Go to Church Anymore she wrote me this email. Please hear her words. They are as direct from our Father’s heart as anything you’ll read:

My day got interrupted with your book! A long-time friend told me I should download it, which I did in the London airport on my way home back to the bush of Southern Sudan. Three weeks later I got caught up in your story and my tissue box became my friend. I am a simple little white, city girl from Florida who is now in Sudan taking in orphaned children.

I was really relieved when Jesus called me to move to Sudan out of the west. When I got here I realized it was ten times more religious than anything I have ever seen. Leaders who actually know Jesus estimate maybe only three percent of people here actually know Jesus, really. The spirit of religion is so strong it feels choking at times – totally empowered by a spirit of fear. It is only Jesus as He truly is and His life that will draw them. He is the only one that can fix this mess.

When I was in the simple church movement I came to realize I was training people how to plant churches so nicely they could do it with out God. We were reproducing another box in which we were trying to contain God and saying that our box was better than the other boxes. Now, after nearing two years in the war torn bush of central Africa I don’t really give a rip whether it is house church or legacy church or cell church or open church, a sitting room, a sanctuary or a stadium – if people are growing in Jesus, walking in love with one another and being the face of His love to the world around them.

I don’t want to have to figure out whether I should embrace, conform, reform or vacate the system. I don’t have the time. Other things are too precious. I just want to do what He is doing and love people. I don’t want to debate what is the right way to have church, because it all can become a box and a prison if not filled with His life. Why can’t we all just focus on Him and fall in love with Him and love the people around us?

I don’t want to figure it all out – I can’t. I was just holding a dying woman in my arms in the hospital here whose family will not feed her or help her because the stench of rotting flesh is too bad and she soils herself and people are arguing if they should meet in homes or buildings. Last week a blind woman saw, this week a woman lay dying in my arms. I cannot figure it out. I don’t even want to try anymore. If I can’t embrace His mystery and love Him beyond my little understanding, I will limit the place I give to His majesty to be revealed in and through my life.

Meet under a tree, rent a cathedral, go on a hike with your family- but love people – learn about love.

Learn of him.

Live in him.

Have an encounter in him.

Live in encounter with him.

Be his encounter to those around you.

That’s what he said to me last night. Can’t we just do that? I don’t have any answers or anything except a heart cry to love each person he sets in front of me and stay in his presence because I love Him more than I love anything. He is my life.

Thank you for describing the One I love more than life, so beautifully and accurately. It means a lot. I met him face to face when I was seven and He walked into my room. I have read or heard very few who actually describe the One who captured my heart as a little girl.

You have!

* * * * * *

Jesus couldn’t have said it with any greater simplicity or clarity: “A new command I give you: Love one another. As I have loved you, so you must love one another. By this all men will know that you are my disciples, if you love one another” (John 13:34-35).

Would we dare to believe that his instructions would really be all that we need to accomplish his purpose in the earth, influence the culture the way he desires, find freedom from our own failures and bondages, and find the fellowship that would most glorify him in the earth? I do.

The reason we don’t experience his fullnes in our unfolding lives is because we live as if we are not loved. Fearful he won’t take care of us, we believe the lie that says God only helps those who help themselves. The most important thing we can discover is that the God of the Ages wants nothing more than for you to know him as the Abba – the tender Father who wants to sweep you up in his arms and transform you by winning you to the simple reality that no one loves you more than he does.

This is not just an intellectual conclusion; it is a revelation at the core of our being. Ask him to give you that. Pray that he will show you with ever-increasing clarity how much affection he has for you. Only then can life truly unfold!

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Learning to Follow Jesus In Europe

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What a whirlwind through Europe! I’ve barely had time to keep up with email, much less post any blogs. But yesterday I arrived in the Irish countryside, and a day or so just to rest and catch up before others soon come to town. Over the next week a number of people from all over the world are coming to Ireland to spend time with each other and time with an amazing group of Irish believers in and around Dublin who have shared relational community for nearly 30 years. I hope to blog a bit about this if I have time, and if not I’ll fill folks in on future podcasts at The God Journey.

One of the joys of this trip, too, is that I’ve had a lot of wireless connections, so that Sara and me have had regular video chats via Skype. And last night I got to talk to and see y daughter and granddaughter as well. Wonderful! But right now, I’m sitting in my upstairs room in the countryside with a lovely view of green gardens and trees all around. It is quite peaceful and I’ve had a blessed morning connecting with Jesus, catching my breath and working on some backlogged computer things. And how I’ve needed that this morning!

The last week is a bit of a blur. Sometimes I cram too much into my schedule and last week might have been a good example. I was a night in London before coming down for three days in Bournemouth. Then I flew to Holland for two quick days and then back to Bournemouth for two more. Each day has been quite full whether I’ve been sharing with people, doing a bit of touring, or connecting to planes and trains. That’s me above on Wednesday morning seeing a bit of Amsterdam before flying back to the UK. Fred, a wonderful brother showed me the city. We even got a chance to take a boat through the canals and catch the beauty and flavor of the city. The day before I’d toured an old fortress in the Dutch countryside with some other people I met here. I even got to play around of golf in England. And all of that was filled with conversations about Jesus and his work in our lives. It’s all been grand, but it has finally caught up to me.

I have met with folks form all over the continuum of spiritual journeys, from those who wanted to defend their systems, to those freshly disillusioned, to those who are well on this journey learning to live deeply in God without all the bondage of religious obligation. I’ve enjoyed everyone I’ve met and we’ve wandered into some fascinating and sometimes hilarious conversations.

One of the themes that has been consistent in this trip that Jesus wants to show each of us how to follow him and disconnect our dependency of following another man’s methods or models. Whenever we are following a strategy, we are not following him. Whenever we look for someone else to tell us what we should be doing, we are not following him. When we try to implement a model of discipleship or church life, we are not following him. It’s not at the example and words of others can’t be helpful in sorting out our own journey, but they dare not become a substitute for the gift he has given us all to love him, listen to him, and to follow the Lamb wherever he goes.

But we do have 1800 years of Christian religious history that argues against that hope and freedom, convincing people to passively follow another, instead of learning to listen and follow him! Nothing more divides between religion and reality, than whether Jesus is the one we’re following, or whether we’re trying to find his life in an institution or another human being.

I pray you have an increasing hope in his ability to teach you how to follow him and to live deeply in his life while he takes shape in you!

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The Call of the Shepherd

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The Call of the Shepherd

As put into words by Wayne Jacobsen 

BodyLife • May 2004

[I appreciate that the form of this piece can lend itself to misinterpretation. By putting it in the first person I am not claiming to quote Jesus directly or giving a prophecy. I simply wrote down as best I could the voice that rings in my heart. Much of the language here is drawn from Scripture (cf. Ezekiel 34, Micah 5, Matthew 9:35-38,11:25-30, John 10) as it speaks of God’s heart for his people.]

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.

Harassed and Helpless

I know things got complicated. I didn’t fix everything you wanted me to fix and I know that shook your confidence in me. Others told you that you weren’t working hard enough so you concluded that the success of our relationship was hinged on your effort and wisdom. When anything went wrong you either blamed me for not loving you or yourself for not trying hard enough. Both were dead ends and the life we shared eventually faded into confusion and guilt.

But I never gave up on you. I knew your best efforts would not be enough, which is why I already satisfied in myself everything you thought the Father might require of you. Your righteousness is in me and guilt never has a place in our relationship. And I know I disappointed your expectations, but that was only because I had better things in mind for you. I work through times of pain as well as times of joy.

I know you thought I had lost sight of you, but I never had. It was you who lost sight of me. I know right where you are and every place you have wandered because I followed you there. I have continued to call your name and invite you into the life that really is life. But so many other things drowned out my voice, activities you thought would bring me closer to you and the busyness you got caught in hoping to hide your emptiness. Even when I tried to scoop you up in my arms, you recoiled, not recognizing my hand and I held back, letting you have the distance you thought you needed.

I’m still here ready for you to fall into my arms. I want you to see through the illusion of your own efforts to produce my work in your life, or in the lives of others. I will teach you how to trust my purpose in you so that even times of trouble will not destroy our friendship. Come, my Beloved, let me wash over you again like a cool fountain, cleansing all that has hurt and confused you. Let us start anew and I will show you just how much I love you and that all I ever wanted from you was you!

A Shepherd Like No Other

Did I not tell you that I would take care of you – that I would lead you into safe pastures and refresh you with living water? Did I not tell you that I had rejected the shepherds who wanted to use my flock for their own purpose battering and plundering them for their own gain?

You need no other shepherd but me. I will lead you into rich pastures and watch over you so that you will never need to be afraid again. I am not going to exploit you, for I am the shepherd who gives his life for the sheep. I did not run in the face of my own death, but embraced the shame because I wanted to open the way for us to be together.

No one on this planet ever has or ever will love you like I do. The great lie is that I cannot be trusted with your life. Oh, but I can! I will take care of you and teach you to follow me so that you can know the fullness of my life. I will hold you close to my heart as we walk through the days ahead. Even in the face of pain and death, I will ensure that nothing will take you out of my hand. I will draw you to myself, wipe every tear from your eyes and through it all transform you into the person I created you to be.

I know you haven’t always seen that, nor yielded to me so that I could do it. You wandered in places where you got hurt and sought out easy answers that could not work. I have not been the source of your pain, but the one who has offered you healing. All the while I wanted to teach you how I work. I do not put band-aids over your life so it will look better but seek to heal you at the deepest places. It is not something that you can do, but it is something that you can thwart if you won’t let me teach you how to yield to my wisdom and power. You have nothing to fear. Your entire life is in my hands and my hands are sure.

No More Strangers

My sheep know my voice. I call you by name and point the way for you to go, but you have found the voice of strangers to be more certain than my own. Those who take turns pretending to be the shepherd have destroyed your confidence in my ability to lead you. Wanting you to be dependent on them, they told you to follow them because they knew what would be best for you.

Many of them even meant well, but the end result was always the same. They could not lead you to life because life is only in me. They had no way of knowing where I wanted to lead you and they were blinded to my working by their own plans to do what they thought were great things for me.

And you followed them, only to be abused and exploited. It was their vision they served and not mine. Yes, I saw your pain when they turned on you for asking honest questions and cut you off when you sought to follow me instead of them. I know how deeply it hurts to be betrayed by those you thought loved you. I never wanted you to trust them more than me. I never asked you to follow any man or woman. They’re the ones who asked you to do that.

I know many of you thought they were helping you, but in the end they only led you astray. They bullied you with their imagined authority and bloodied you with guilt and calls to loyalty. But you knew better, didn’t you? Often I warned you and your heart was unsettled in the things they told you. You overrode my warnings because you didn’t think yourself mature enough to question people like them. At such times you were looking to yourself and not to me. I am strong enough to lead you in my life, even beyond your doubts and insecurities.

Anyone who knows me will teach you to follow me. They will not use you to build their ministry or to line their pockets. They will give freely, always pointing you to the only shepherd that matters – me! They will encourage you to trust my love for you and will teach you to follow me even when you’re uncertain. They know it is better for you to learn to follow me and make a mistake than think yourself secure in any program they could devise.

Are you tired of listening to the voice of strangers? I want to teach you how to know my voice again. I have others that will help you learn but listen only to those that point you to me, not the ones who would gather you to themselves. You can trust me to make clear to you everything that I want you to know and everything that I call you to do. If you don’t hear my voice in what others say do not feel any obligation to follow their counsel or their instruction. You are only truly safe in me.

Listen

Can you hear me calling you in the deepest chambers of your heart and mind? I am not loud and boisterous. I will not compete with the clamor of the world nor the busyness of your agenda. I gently call you by name, hold you close to my heart and invite you to follow me.

If my voice seems only to drift by for a moment and then fades into the harried pace of life, it is because your ears are better tuned to other things. I only seem more distant when you trust your own wisdom instead of mine. Often I have shown you the way I want you to go but instead of simply following, you looked at the challenges that stood in your way and convinced yourself that it wasn’t me at all. I do not take the path of least resistance, but neither do I send you where I will not go with you. One day you will know that your safety is not in pleasant circumstances, but in being with me.

If you have forgotten how to listen, just ask me and I will show you. It is not as hard as you think. I simply want you to draw near to me and once again let your heart be mine alone. The more you grow in knowing my love for you, the easier it will be to recognize my gentle prodding. I am greater than any doubt that troubles you or any voice that seeks to steer you another way. I will help you recognize my presence in all you do. I will show you how to live as a father or mother, child or student, employer or employee, neighbor or friend. Don’t separate me to a separate spiritual part of your life, I want to make all of your life spiritual and all of it full in me.

You Won’t Be Alone

I know that the closer you follow me the lonelier it seems. You even think at times that I have abandoned you and you withdraw into your own fears. But even there I am with you, calling you outside yourself to come into the freedom of being my child and to join your hearts with others in my flock who live for no other.

You’ve been called arrogant, independent and unsubmitted, not by those who knew my heart, but by those who wanted you to conform to their way of doing things. They can’t see the body beyond their own way of organizing. If you only knew how many people I have scattered all over the world, you would know that you’re not alone.

Some of those live just down the block from you or work alongside you. I know that you don’t know them yet but you do understand the passion that courses through their veins and their desire to connect with people who share it. I am the shepherd of all my sheep and I am not only inviting you to follow me as an individual, I am gathering my flock together from the ends of the earth – not in human systems devouring your time and energy, but in the joy of healthy friendships. No man will own it and no system will replicate what I am building between my people. Resist the temptation to follow models devised by men that will always fail.

I will knit you into relationships with people near you and even some far away so that you can enjoy the richness of my flock. Don’t try to make it happen on your own. Just live with your eye on me everyday and soon you will find people around you who follow the same Shepherd you follow.

But first I want your heart to be mine. If you try to use others in the body to get what you do not find in me, it will only ruin the relationships. I want to teach you how to share my life together, each one receiving from my hand and sharing freely with the others without demanding anything in return. As you love that way you will find that life among my people is not cumbersome, but of great joy. You will go away from encounters more aware of who I am and less focused on your needs and weaknesses.

Wherever I Lead

What do I need from you? I need a willing heart that will simply follow me wherever I choose to take you. I don’t need great talent, great wisdom or great abilities, just a yielded life willing to learn how to trust me beyond your wisdom and your fears.

I want you to abandon your agenda, for it will only distract you from what I want to do in you. Even the best of intentions can lead you to desire the wrong things and following the wrong path. If you only knew the plans I have for you with a future and a hope that far outweighs your own agenda, you would abandon yours in an instant.

Don’t try to save yourself for you will only get in deeper trouble. Stop. Take a deep breath and yield to my arms. Pause before me and listen until you hear that voice that says, “This is the way I want you to go.” Don’t worry about whether or not it makes sense to you. I’ve been here before and you have not. I know the way through your doubts and pain to greater transformation and freedom.

Wake up each day and lay your agenda aside. Live in the moment looking for my hand and listening to my voice. Don’t live in the past by copying what you’ve done before. Don’t try to secure the future with programs and models that only offer false security.

Lay down even your dreams for ministry. You have confused your dreams with mine and trying to fulfill them in your own effort will only frustrate you. If they are only your dreams you won’t want them and those that are mine I will bring to pass in a way that you cannot even imagine yet. Most of what you call ministry has more to do with human aspiration than it does the life of my kingdom. Your pursuit of ministry instead of me will be a barrier not a blessing. Let me teach you all over again, how much I love the broken-hearted, the wounded and the oppressed and how I set them free.

To The Heights

I can keep following you and rescuing you out of all the places you get stuck, or you can turn around and follow me and I will lead you to the heights of my glory. I am the way to Father’s fullness and I want nothing more than to take you there.

Let me scoop you up in my arms and carry you along as I show you the wonders of my Father’s kingdom. Tune your ears to my voice and look to me in everything you do. There is no situation that I can’t lead you through and no promise that I cannot fulfill in you. Trust my voice more than your own and yield to my hand as I shape you into the person I created you to be.

There is nothing you can do to earn this. It is beyond your ability, but it is not beyond mine. I am able to make you stand and establish you in my gospel. I am able to make all grace abound to you so that in all things at all times you will have all that you need. I am able to guard all that you have entrusted to me and able to help you at your weakest moment. And I am able to keep you from falling and present you before God’s glorious presence, without fault and with great joy! (Rom. 14:4; 16:25-26, 2 Cor. 9:8, 2 Tim 1:12, Heb. 5:2; Jude 24-25)

I am calling my flock back to me from all the places it has been scattered. I will take you to the heights of my glory, where you can delight in the greenest of pastures and drink the purest water. You will never need to be afraid again for you will know how much I love you and how safe you are in my hand. There is no God beside me, and no life apart from mine.

Come, my Beloved, your time is now. Draw near to me. Take my hand and I will show you all that I hold in my heart for you and you will discover the unmitigated joy of living in my rest.

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The Same Old Story

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The Same Old Story

By Wayne Jacobsen

BodyLife • January 2000

hot_air_balloons_0How quickly the Galatians had lost sight of it! According to Paul, they had had a clear revelation of the crucified Christ and the glory it produced. They had experienced a work of the Spirit that had captured their heart and had swept them to the heights of what it meant to know Jesus.

But in less than a decade, they had traded the fresh wind of God’s Spirit, for the predictable, but empty, patterns of trying to live in God’s life by their own efforts.

In one of the first letters he wrote to any of the churches, Paul was beside himself. He was in obvious anguish when he wrote them, for he knew too well what had lured them earthward again—the need to boast in their own efforts rather than to trust God’s ability to work in them. He knew how seductive it was for them to work hard for God and how exhilarating it would be for them to feel as if they had earned God’s blessing by their diligence.

He had already been down that road, remember, and knew too well that it always produced the opposite of what it promised. Instead of drawing them closer to God, it only obscured their view of him and left them mired in a host of activities and routines that only offered a form of Godliness, but denied the real power of it.

How often that story has been repeated among God’s people in the 2,000 years since. It’s even been repeated in my own life numerous times. For the most part, I’m not even aware when I’m settling out of the winds aloft to tether my craft to my way to more earthly ways of doing things, because my desire to live in God hasn’t changed. It’s just that I opt for ways that look more predictable and more in my control. I seem to only to notice after I’m good and stuck, longing for the freedom to soar with God that I have long since given up.

Regrettably the Galatians’ story proved to be more parable in Christian history than anomaly. Like them, we often need to be encouraged regularly away from the apparent safety of the moorings of the rules and routines with which we become so familiar, so that we can be carried again wherever the winds of God’s Spirit desires to take us.

Taking Flight

It has been five years now since Father delivered Sara and I from the role I thought I had to play in managing the spiritual life of a group of people. We began as a small group of people who just wanted to learn how to love God together. As we incorporated more programs to meet the needs of a growing congregation, our attention to God’s voice faded. We ended up with a large machine that required constant maintenance and where it became far easier to battle over competing agendas than to love each other from the heart.

In the separation we found more pain than we ever thought we could endure, but found more freedom than we ever knew we were allowed to embrace. It has been a wild ride since we cut the tethers that had held us down, and have come to discover that we are not alone. Over these five years we have met people from all over the world with similar journey and nearly identical hungers to know God in his life and fullness.

The conversations we’ve had have encouraged us and helped us see just what our Father is doing in these days. God is calling people away from the safety of those things they can control, to allow him to lead them to his fullness. But that process is never easy and in fact can be filled with great pain.

I wish there were a way to gather all of you next month for a week of being God’s people together. I know how incredibly encouraged you would be to see what God is doing in people all over the world. Father is opening the eyes of many people to see the futility of trying to replicate his life by our own efforts. You would be so encouraged to hear other people tell your same story and know that God really is who he claims to be and that life as his people can be filled with joy instead of pain, freedom instead of conformity, and encouragement instead of confrontation.

It would be just a small taste of what I get to experience as God allows me to meet with pockets of people all over who are struggling with the emptiness of religion and the questions and accusations they get from others who don’t underhand their actions.

I hope we can put together some gatherings like that this year, but in the meantime I want to share with you the common threads in this age-old story, and some of the lessons others seem to be learning. I think you’ll discover that your story may well be part of one far larger and far older than you may have known.

When Your Eyes Open?

It’s not that we didn’t try to find a way to make organized religion a tool for our passion to know God and help others know him. Many of us shared in leadership under one title or another, or at least gave countless hours and significant dollars trying to make the best of it. That was until we began to see some things we hadn’t noticed before.

Here the details vary somewhat. For some they discovered that their honest attempts to follow the voice of Jesus made the others around them nervous or even hostile. What began as a joyful discovery of God’s life together, quickly turned into a source of great pain as others rejected their insights or probing questions and sought to silence them or get them to leave.

For others, they found that the mere invitation to conform to the programs of religion couldn’t heal their brokenness. When they cried out for help, people became uncomfortable with their pain and pushed them aside. Instead of comforting those in pain, they often accused them of not doing enough right or for not having enough faith.

Still others, in a growing revelation begin to recognize that all the activities and traditions are not helping them either to know God any more deeply, nor to see his presence transform the inner conflicts and temptations they faced.

In almost all these cases, the initial discovery came with great excitement. Certain others would be as excited as they were with God’s working, they shared freely their hopes, suggestions for change, or even their disappointment and pain. It didn’t take long to see that others didn’t share their enthusiasm. Instead they found that their insights or struggles caused even close friends to question their passion for Jesus, their submittedness in the body of Christ or, in worst cases, even their sanity.

Cutting the Ropes

That which tethers us to our own human efforts are not easily cut. Few people I know ever intended to leave the system they were in, hoping rather to be a catalyst for change with in it. But when they met the powers of institutionalism which prefer procedure and rules over the breath of the Spirit they were shocked at how easily those who were formerly friends and colleagues would turn on them.

Here is a critical juncture. Will we risk our comfort to follow what we know in our hearts to be true? Many don’t make it past this point, preferring to co-exist in silence rather than pursue their passion. I understand why people do that, but also know that he miss out on a journey whose joys far outweigh its risks and its cost.

Those who do go on, meet resistance on virtually every front. Accused of being independent, unsubmitted, or spiritually confused, they find their own self-doubts adding to the chorus. “What if I am nuts?” “Who am I to question what has been in existence for so long and seems to bless so many people?”

But Father’s leading plays out in the deepest places of our hearts. Usually these people are not convinced they are right and that all others are wrong, but finally realize that they want only to follow God’s leading as best they understand it. But pressing ahead isn’t easy. As their eyes continue to open they see how the system is used to manipulate people and reward a select view. They see how people God cares for deeply are hurt, excluded or neglected. They see that those who have been lulled to complacency by tradition and religious activities are missing out on the greatest joys of walking with the Living God. And for many they just can’t keep quiet.

The Need to Convince

No doubt this is where the process gets most painful for everyone. Because the struggle to follow our conscience ensues without a lot of external affirmation, we find ourselves having to defend our actions. We hope others will still trust that we love God and will allow us the journey, but it is not so.

Nothing threatens systems of conformity more than those who begin to live in the freedom that Jesus purchased for us. Those who challenge the validity of the routines and traditions are often isolated and excluded. Mostly this is done through gossip by ‘leaders’ who think they protect God’s work by discrediting other believers.

Regretfully some of us fall into the trap of bolstering our confidence by striking back. We too point out their faults, rail against the abuses and gossip about those who we find opposing us. That isn’t always wrong. Jesus may want us to confront openly the failures of institutionalized Christianity, but we need to be sure.

More often, our reactions come from our insecurities and wanting to defend our reputations. We don’t want people to misunderstand us nor distort the passions of our heart. We speak up hopeful that others will listen. They rarely do. We think they will be easily convinced if they just have the right information. But the sad fact is that many people find more comfort in staying tethered to someone’s program rather than to soar on the heights of trusting God.

Though God may call us to speak up in truth, he never makes us responsible to convince others. I have long since realized that people won’t see the fallacy and pain of institutionalized religion until God himself shows it to them. Sadly, that often only comes in moments of great pain where God allows the institution to fail us, so that we can see our trust has been vested in the wrong place.

We have to remember that those who don’t see it yet, are not usually complicit in the destruction it causes. I’m convinced that the real danger of religion is that it takes our best motives for God’s life and turns them against ourselves and others. All the proof I need is seeing how people caught up in religion can harshly treat others who disagree with them.

Where to From Here?

Many people I know are right here in the story. They have seen something they cannot deny and are willing to follow God’s leading no matter what the cost. But how he seems to be leading them is very different.

Some stay right where they are, learning how to live in God’s freedom even among those who are caught up in religion. They disregard the guilt-inducing sermons and glean what encourages their relationship to Jesus. Not wanting to waste time maintaining machinery, nor needing the notoriety of a title, they decline invitations to participate in leadership positions that are invariably offered. This will work as long as God calls them to it, but it is certainly not for everyone. They can find their motives questioned for not helping out or conforming enough, and few can resist for long the hypnotic complacency that religion tries to trade for our radical passion for Jesus.

Others find themselves out of the system entirely. Many are forced to leave by outright request or by never-ceasing gossip; others simply are unwilling to be a partner any longer in the damaging environment. This time can be incredibly painful and you’ll find that people with whom you’ve had life-long friendships will no longer acknowledge you or seek out your company.

But what do we do for fellowship now? Some try other local congregations hoping to find one that is more focused on Jesus and less tainted by organized religion, but that doesn’t work for many.

The temptation is to distance ourselves entirely from other believers and think we can make it on our own. While God may call us ‘outside the camp’ for a period of time to reorder his place in our lives and to reinstill a hunger to find genuine and healthy relationships to his people, his passion is to reconcile people together and place before his son a bride fit for him. That process may take longer than you want it to, just because you may not be able to find others who want to meet regularly to encourage each other in Christ. But let it have its end.

Freedom to Fly Higher

That needn’t concern you unnecessarily. What is certain is that whatever ways we find to be the church with other believers, is initiated by Jesus himself, the head of the church. He knows how, when and where to connect you with other people. Some are finding each other through internet resources and are willing to travel periodically to find meaningful fellowship. Others find spontaneous encounters or simply fellowship with good friends to be a starting point. Where people are free to love Jesus passionately, the bride will emerge.

Personally, I’m thrilled to find believers who want to be God’s church together. They want to learn how to listen to him together, to encourage one another on the journey and to care for each other through the twists and turns of life.

Without the trappings of religion, however, that takes a firm choice on our part and a willingness to invest time in other believers. I don’t know how Jesus will produce that in you, but isn’t it thrilling to see the number of people seeking out home-based church life? It’s not easy and we may have to re-learn how we think about God and his people, but the freedom it gives us to share life with each other relationally instead of organizationally is incredible.

The temptation all of us face, however, is to abuse this new-found freedom as an excuse for the flesh to reassert control of our lives. He sets us free from guilt and manipulation so that we can know him better, become more like him, and reflect his glory in the world—to believer and unbeliever alike. We can’t make that happen by our own efforts; but we can choose to draw near to him daily, hear his passion for our lives, and follow him wherever he leads us.

Recently I heard someone in a clerical collar express his outrage on TV at those who question organized religion. “What would you prefer disorganized religion?”

It’s a cute comment, but truly misses the point. The problem is not that our religion is organized, but that it is religion at all. Religion is managed spirituality—an attempt to make people feel better about themselves without helping them discover the reality of their own friendship with the Living God. It is man’s attempt to do God’s work.

It will forever keep you tethered to your own best efforts when Father wants you to ride freely on the wind of the Spirit.

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Rekindling Passion

Leave a Comment / Living Loved, Living Loved Newsletter / /

By Wayne Jacobsen

BodyLife • January 1999

Can you remember the last time you awoke in the middle of the night, not to anxiety or fear, but to Jesus’ invitation to spend some time with him? Or when last God’s presence was so real neither of you needed to say anything and the minutes raced by as if time itself no longer had significance? How about the last time being obedient to God landed you in hot water because someone misunderstood or because, “that’s not the way we do things around here”?

There is nothing like the days when our passion to know God burns white-hot. No matter what life may throw at us, God shows himself bigger still making himself known in the most unexpected places. Living like that makes every day an adventure in Father’s life and his work in you becomes far more real than the circumstances that try to pull you down.

During such times you search his Word, not because you should, but because you can’t wait to see what God might have hidden there for you to discover that day. You get with other believers and find yourselves sharing the deepest secrets and struggles of your heart and end up praying together just to see what God might want to add to the discussion. When he puts someone on your heart you don’t hesitate to contact them and find the timing was perfect, for both of you!

If you’ve experienced such times, you also know how easily they fade away. It happens so subtly that weeks, months or even years can go by before we realize we are just going through the motions of something that once had so much more life. Without ever making a conscious decision to do so we end up trading the dynamic relationship with the living God for religious activity that never satisfies our deepest hungers.

But it doesn’t have to. Living in passionate love for Father is what he’s offered us every day.

Where Are the Radicals?

Whenever God renews people in relationship with him, almost always a conflict results between them and those who control the religious institutions of the day. I saw it happen in the early days of the Charismatic renewal and the Jesus People revival. But it has also happened consistently throughout church history. Virtually every denomination that exists today began as a reaction to the loss of passion in the institutions of their day. Even when Jesus himself challenged people to think differently about God, he was spurned by the very people who thought they were serving his Father.

This cycle repeats itself because institutional needs and spiritual passions operate on two different planes.

Institutions champion safety, conformity and tradition. As such they can provide wonderful experiences and even helpful instruction about the living God. In the process, however, they can easily negate the risk, vulnerability and spontaneity that allow us the depth of relationship Jesus wants with each of us.

In the 70’s and 80’s, I knew so many people who hungered to see Jesus do something new in his church, so that corporate life would encourage people to know the living God, not supplant that hunger with order and routine. We risked the comfort of our institutions to seek ways to help people experience passionate relationship with the living God. Where are these people now? Amazingly they ended up back where they began, only now in institutions they control.

Alan Richardson, in Who Builds the Church? expresses the same dismay that I have often felt.

The pioneers, those men who in the late 60’s had found no satisfaction in an institutional church, had gone full-circle. Ironically, many today stand in the pulpits of new “sanctuaries”, bigger and better than they left 20 or so years ago. Yes, those same men who sought to be on a cutting edge that threatened to unsettle the security of the institution of those days, have now themselves settled for the security of structured, comfortable and well-ordered ‘church’.

Please don’t misunderstand that statement as a sweeping condemnation of the groups we call churches. I don’t think that’s Alan’s intention or mine. The point here is not how we do church, but whether or not we are living in a daily, passionate love for God or whether we’re ensnared in religious busyness that doesn’t satisfy the passion with which we began.

Passion and comfort offer us two different journeys. Those who wonder why their passion has been lost, rarely consider that their need for safety, predictability and control has taken them down a different path. Recently I spoke with one pastor who admitted that he had been through his more radical days. Now he was managing a large congregation. “I know this isn’t the best. I know it isn’t taking me where I most wanted to go, but I’ve decided just to make the best of it.”

I hurt for people like him who don’t realize that Godly passion wasn’t meant to start us down the road, but also to walk with us all the way to its end.

Passions Lost

So where does our passion go? Jesus told the parable of the sower (Matthew 13) to answer that question. He points out there what the early church also discovered to be true many people get a taste for God but don’t see it through to its fullness. Four things rob people of their passion and leave them adrift in lifeless religion:

  • A lack of understanding. Some experience God’s love briefly, but never understand how to live in that love. Instead of letting God live through them, they try to do things for him. That approach will allow the seeds of God’s life to be snatched away by our own religious fervor. We cannot embrace God’s life and passion by our own efforts. They will leave us empty.
  • Trouble or persecution. Others find joy in God as long as times are good. Whenever difficult times come, they withdraw in fear that God will not be big enough to get them through it and change them in the process. In every circumstance we will always have two options either to entrust ourselves to God or to save ourselves from the discomfort he would use to teach us to depend on him. Those who chose comfort over the cross will find dry times ahead.
  • The worries of life. They wear on us, don’t they? Our jobs, family responsibilities, relationships, fears and uncertainties can take up the whole of our life if we let them. Whenever we slip into survival mode just getting through another week the demands of this life will choke our our passion just like weeds. Instead of sitting at his feet in trust that he’ll take care of us, we will scheme to make things work out our way. Passion dies when we live to necessity and we’ll always wonder where it went.
  • The deceitfulness of wealth. “If I just had more money…,” is at the root of wealth’s deceit. You don’t have to be rich to fall under it’s spell. It is just as powerful for those who don’t have enough, and think their lives would be fuller if they did. Jesus warned us that whenever we mix God and mammon, God’s best for us is swallowed up by our need to survive. We’ll do what our financial wisdom tells us is best and miss out on God’s fullness.

C.S. Lewis said it best in The Screwtape Letters: “Prosperity knits a man to the world. He feels that he is ‘finding his place in it,’ while really it is finding its place in him. His increasing reputation, his widening circle of acquaintances, his sense of importance build up in him a sense of really being at home in earth, which is just what we (demons) want.”

Do you see any of these things disarming your passion? Join the club. These are the battles every believer fights, and those we cannot win. If you recognize yourself in these words, please don’t try to change things on your own. Run to the only one who can restore your passion.

Passions Restored

If you’ve ever tried to restore your passion, you know there are lots of places to try: participate in the right church, read a good book, absorb a new tape series, attend a conference or retreat, or even follow someone else who has it. But you also know none of these will work. Yes, they might let you soar for a short time, but they cannot take you far.

I’ve only found one place to rekindle my spiritual passion at the feet of Jesus. Take a long walk, or sit down in an undisturbed place and pour out your heart to him. Tell him that the passion you desire to be the center of your life has faded away and that you want his help in uncovering it again.

Pray the scariest prayer of all: “God, whatever it takes, I want to know you with all my heart and live in an open, passionate relationship with you.”

What? You’re not feeling anything yet?

Good. Passion is not a feeling. It is not something he will just do at some given point. He wants to unwire you from ways you think about yourself and him that disarms his work in you. This will take some time, so don’t despair in the process.

Just keep going to him; day after day, week after week, if need be. Sit in his presence. Tell him what you’re really thinking. Learn how to see him again and how to recognize his heartbeat. Stop trying to get him to do what you want and trust that he knows well enough what needs to happen in your life and willingly surrender to whatever he wants to do.

Then, as if you heart were coals in the fireplace, his breath will fan you into flames again. Slowly your passion will begin to rise. You’ll begin to see him in the smallest things. You’ll see things about your life that you never thought could be there both your failures and his gifts. With either, you’ll know you are safe enough to explore them in his presence and see what he has in mind for you.

Treasure each revelation of his with thanksgiving. Notice the conversations he leads you to, the people he puts on your heart to pray for or to contact. When he stirs your heart to do something, do it. When he challenges you to be still and do nothing, then do that.

And keep coming to him. Breathe a prayer in the shower. Talk to him while you’re driving or walking down the hallway at work. Let him show you how to live in him every day not just for a brief time but every day for the rest of your life.

Going the Distance

Life in God is not a sprint. It’s a long-distance run. Passion is what you need to get to the end of it.

I am encouraged to know that the same struggles I have staying passionate also infected the early church. The book of Hebrews was written to a group of believers who had been more passionate in their early days than they were when he wrote them.

He reminded them how they had faced persecution with joy, even when their property was taken and they were arrested. They didn’t shrink back in fear, but stood boldly, knowing that their inheritance was not in this life, but in God himself.

But time had taken its toll. They were older now, but also far less passionate. The author sends them back to the only place they could find that boldness and confidence again to risk life with God. Like children who needed to learn how to swim again, they needed encouragement to let go of the deck and trust their teacher to keep them afloat.

So he reminded them with a great roll call of faith men and women who had braved the harshest of circumstances because their vision of a more enduring city burned deep within them. That passion allowed them to go through anything and only grow in their love for God and by doing so only further demonstrate that they were not at home in the world at all.

Then he called them to the highest place: “Fix your eyes on Jesus…” Get them off of your comfort in this age. Get them off of what other people are doing or what they think of you. Get them off of yourself and your own failures. Behold the living God!

He both began the work in you and will perfect it concerning you. Read the story of his life again and again, seeing how he endured such hostility because of a greater joy before him. Watch him love the Father more than anything this life offered him and how it drew him ever-closer to his Father. See him enthroned at God’s right hand, already victorious, and know that nothing about God’s will concerning you need ever be in doubt again.

Today a fresh call has gone out from the Father’s heart. He seeks a generation of men and women who will allow him to enflame their hearts with his love so that he can demonstrate his glory in the earth.

Do you hear him calling you? Listen to him. Put down this article and just wait in his presence. What do you hear him saying to you?

If you’ve never known such spiritual passion in your every-day life, now is the time to turn your heart toward him and ask him for it.

If you’re one of those who’ve tasted it before, come drink again. You, who were pioneers in earlier days of renewal, don’t think he’s shelved you now. God has a place for you alongside younger men and women who hunger to see what you have already seen.

Allow Jesus to fan you into flame againblowing off the ashes that have covered up your passion and letting his Spirit re-ignite the depth of your love for him. Let him lead you through disappointed expectations, personal failures and places where other believers hurt or rejected you.

This is a time for people to arise who are passionate in their love for God. The finest hour of his work does not have to lie behind you. He has greater plans ahead.

Come with me, will you and let’s run after him with joy all the way to heaven’s gate.

Quote:

“Let me just tell you what Jesus is all about. It’s about unconditional love and being willing to be crucified. And if you don’t like the game, join another religion.” — Tony Campolo Quoted in On Being Magazine

Sidebar #1: Church or Jesus?

A friend recently told me about a conversation he was having with another believer whom he had just met. They had spent an hour sharing about Jesus and the impact he was having on their lives. Toward the end of the conversation the other one asked my friend what church he went to.

My friend paused a moment, certain his new acquaintance wouldn’t understand the nonstructured environment with which he now gathered with other believers. He finally said, “We’ve spent the last hour talking about the one who unifies all thing in himself. Do we really want to switch now and talk about the one thing that has caused the most division among his followers how we gather for church?”

I don’t think so!

Sidebar #2: Tribulation for Breakfast?

The church has been through many a plague, famine, fire and sword in the last 2,000 years. The church of the Lord Jesus Christ is no “cry baby.” She is the toughest lady in the universe, and eats tribulation for breakfast. She does not fear. She is feared!

What kind of Christian teaching depicted this lady as afraid of anything? This woman, the Bride of Christ, the daughter of God, is afraid of nothing!

What kind of God have you? That is the wrong question. What kind of church have you?This lady, named Ekklesia, is the scourge of Satan, the terror of demons. This lady- and never forget this-this is the gal who kicks down the gates of hell.

This lady shines in adversity! This woman, the fiancee of Jesus Christ, is made for trouble. She uses famine, pestilence, war, recessions and depressions to show forth her triumphant Lord… and to bring glory to His name. She had done so before, she will do so in this (coming) depression. This is her hour!

— From Economic Doomsday By Gene Edwards

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