Lifestream

Note: This is the eleventh in a series of letters written for those living at the end of the age, whenever that comes in the next fifteen years or the next one hundred and fifty years. Once complete, I’ll combine them into a book. You can access the previous chapters here.  If you are not already subscribed to this blog and want to make sure you don’t miss any, you can add your name here.

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I have been to every prayer school and intercession meeting that came into my orbit. I have pounded on heaven’s doors for the redemption of the world and for so many healings and miracles only to see meager results. I am rarely able to discern how he might respond? Can you help me understand how to engage God more consistently?
Tisha, 83-year-old widow who describes herself as a frustrated intercessor

Dear Tisha,

Unfortunately, I don’t think your experience is uncommon at all. It seems we both grew up in a time where being a radical follower of Jesus meant praying earnestly, sometimes hours a day in hopes of getting God to act on our behalf. For the first 40 years of my journey, I thought the key to an effective prayer life was intensity and desperation. That’s what we thought we needed to get God’s attention and ingratiate ourselves to him.

Groveling in repentance, repeating our requests over and over with a rising pitch, and trying to convince ourselves that if we believed enough, he had to give us what we prayed for. I spent countless hours in rooms full of people praying fervently, only to walk out having to convince ourselves that God was moved even though we rarely saw those times producing any fruit. Believing harder, praying harder, trying to live more righteous, didn’t endear God to our requests.

It appears you’ve been more tenacious in this than most, who gave up at much younger ages, convinced that they didn’t have what it took to engage God. I hope you’ll be able to take the passion you have had to discern God’s ways and perhaps channel it differently in a more effective way.

Gaze with Me

Four years ago, I helped start a gathering of men and women from different countries to pray about God’s work in the world. I’d known all of them multiple decades and had witnessed them making choices to follow Jesus even when it cost them deeply. We shared a concern for the growing delusion among many Christians, who were no longer following the heart of the Jesus but pursuing their own political and economic gain.

From the early days of our prayers, God revealed insights to us that has shaped many of us in our prayers together. Early on, he taught us how to gaze with him and not at him. That may sound like a small distinction but it’s not. In many of my prayers I would offer to God, the need I was concerned about, I would place before him, hoping to catch his gaze and by that get him to act.

Gazing with him was a different thing entirely. It was still bringing our requests to him but instead of them standing between us, he invited us to stand alongside him and view our concerns from his perspective. It changed us. Standing with him in his might and power altered our perspective and we learned to see our concerns inside his purpose instead of our desires. What would glorify his name and further his purpose in the world?

It’s difficult to be desperate when you’re standing inside his purpose, with all his resources at hand. Instead of praying out of our anxieties that God wouldn’t do what we hoped, he showed us the environment in which we best engage him, not only with our concerns but, more importantly, coming to know his. Three words summed up the spirit of our engagement with him—love, rest, and play. They became the watchwords of our engagements with him. Whenever we would lean toward anxiety or desperation, they would invite us back to the environment where our time with him offered greater insight and more effectiveness.

As we discovered the power of love, rest, and play, we spoke less to God as our adversary or as the reluctant rich uncle who needed to be prodded. Instead, we found a generous God deeply steeped in his desires to win the world into his goodness and drive out the darkness, not by the sheer force of his word, but by the gentle transformation of his people.

Jesus encouraged his disciples not to give into anxiety or the idea that worrying would add anything to God’s work. In the words of Eugene Peterson, he told his disciples, “What I’m trying to do here is to get you to relax, to not be so preoccupied with getting, so you can respond to God’s giving” (Matthew 6:31). What a shift in thinking! I spent forty years trying to get from God—get saved, get a healing, get a ministry, or get my prayers answered. Instead of working through my prayer list every day, I began to ask a simple question. “Father, what are you giving me today?” Who are you giving me to love? What do you want to show me about yourself? How do you want to resolve the crisis I’m in? Quite naturally, I abandoned my agenda and kept my eyes open for what He was doing around me.

Shifting from desperation to love, rest, and play is a steep learning curve. Nothing in my religious background prepared me for it and risking some of the methods of old made me wonder whether we were on a fool’s errand. It didn’t turn out that way at all. Instead, it allowed us to enter into his work with a relaxed heart that allowed us to see what he was wanting to say to us.

So how do you experience love, rest, and play with God? I’ll break it down for you in the rest of this chapter but, believe me, this is not something you’ll learn from an article, book, or seminar. You can’t mimic someone else’s language and hope to see results. This is a journey the Holy Spirit wants to take you on so that as a genuine expression of your own heart and life, love, rest, and play become the measure of your life in him.

Love

What Jesus accomplished on the cross was to prove how much the Father and Son love us, even when we struggle with sin or doubt. As beloved sons or daughters, we are welcome in his presence without the need to grovel for acceptance. Our invitation there is marked with confident belonging. We are loved by him more than we love ourselves, and his desires to work in us and around us have greater aspirations than our own.

If we come to God intimidated by his majesty, fearful that God won’t be enough, or that his way won’t be the best way, we have blinded ourselves before we begin. We may think we know what God wants, but so often we are wrong. While we want the direct approach to our comfort, God takes the eternally transformative route, which rarely means he wants to fix every hard or painful circumstance. I don’t believe for a minute that he causes hardship for us; he knows the world is dark enough to challenge us. He just wants to thwart that darkness, rarely by removing the challenge, but by using it to transform us ever more into his faithful children.

Learning to be confident in his love is a powerful process that can take significant time in our journey. As John described it late in his life, “And so we have come to know and come to rely on the love God has for us. God is love. Whoever lives in love lives in God, and God in them.” (I John 4:16) Even though John was one of Jesus closest disciples he had a learning curve as well. Early on he wanted to call down fire from heaven to burn up the Samaritans not realizing that spirit in him seeking retribution was not the Spirit of God.

In time, though, he came to learn just how loved he was and how to live out of that love toward others. So much so that he also said that’s how you know someone is born of God, because they live out of love (I John 4:7-8). When you know you’re loved, then you can engage God about the things that concern gentleness. Desperation has no place because you know that his love will be big enough to walk you through whatever may come. And not trying so hard to get what I want makes it easier to see what he is already doing.

Living in love is a beacon all its own, lighting the dark places with the quiet confidence that Father is at work around me and wants me to participate with him. Trusting his love will even set us at ease when he seems quiet, because we’re confident of his working even when we don’t see him.

Rest

Even the Old Testament teaches that we are best able to know God’s heart when we are at rest in him. “In repentance and rest is your salvation, in quietness and trust is your strength, but you would have none of it” (Isaiah 30:15). For some reason we prefer to earn our own way, which is impossible with the things of God. That’s why he gave them the Sabbath, to remind them to trust God’s provision and not strive endlessly in their own flesh. Instead, they came to see the Sabbath as its own laborious taskmaster.

But the Sabbath rest in God’s eyes was about far more than to take a day off once per week; it was a way of life. Hebrews 3 and 4 underscore that reality. The writer said that Israel never entered into God’s rest, even with their preoccupation for all the Sabbath rules. So, he reminded the followers of Jesus that a rest remains for us to embrace where we “cease from their works, just as God did from his” (Hebrews 4:10).

How can we live at rest in his work? As he deepens our trust, we will come to rely on his power, instead of ourselves and our performance. Even the act of praying with desperation and “crying out to God” is an attempt for our efforts to impress God and compel him to act. False religious thinking almost always focuses on performance and proving ourselves worthy of the answer we seek. How many of us in desperation have tried to impress God by acting more righteous or more confident than we really were? As long as we invest the success of our engagement with God by our own abilities, we will miss how he works. When we finally realize that our human effort cannot accomplish any Godly thing and that “apart from him we can do nothing,” then we are ready to learn the power of engaging God already at rest in his work, instead of trying to push ours.

That doesn’t mean we do nothing, parking ourselves on a sofa and leaving it all up to him. He wants to share his work with us, and when you come to recognize how God works, then you will know what he wants from you. You’ll no longer lash out in fear and doubt hoping to manipulate God with your attitude or actions.

That’s where life becomes exciting because we don’t have to accomplish anything for God, just simply respond to him however he may guide you.

Play

References to love and rest are easily seen throughout Scripture, and knowing how they shape our relationship with God, it’s easier to see. But play is a different story; the only scriptures that refer to play accuse Israel of “playing the harlot.”

But one cannot read the Gospels honestly without seeing a playful Jesus, inviting people into his kingdom. Whether it’s with a Samaritan woman by a well, or a Pharisee late at night trying to understand what it is to be born again. And one cannot know God without realizing he is the most playful presence in the universe. I often see his playfulness in the unfolding of circumstances or “coincidences” that bring a smile to my face at the same time they speak safety to my heart.

For example, one day I was grieving the loss of a close relationship because of some lies spread about me. On my way to meet a friend at a restaurant, I struggled with what I should do to repair the relationship. I sensed he wanted me to leave it in hands and not fret over it. As I walked into the restaurant, signed up for a table and sat down, the refrain of Bob Marley’s Three Little Birds, which was playing over the sound system began to wash over my soul. “Don’t worry about a thing, ‘Cause every little thing is gonna be alright.” I smiled, certain that God was winking at me. And you know what, everything did turn out alright.

I don’t really know you can wrap your heart around this reality until you discover for yourself just how playful God can be with you. Some of the most humorous thoughts I’ve had seem to have come from him. And, yes, this is far, far away from my religious sensibilities as a youth. I used to be terrified of God, thinking he was austere and serious about everything and any attempt to bring levity into the presence of God was considered blasphemous.

Any good teacher will tell you that humor and play are the best ways to help people learn, just like any father would do with his children. Play connects us to intimacy while allowing us the distance of humor to grasp the power of truth. The Scriptures that help us connect with play are those that speak so positively about laughter, joy, and childlikeness. “Unless you change and become like little children, you will never enter the kingdom of heaven” (Matthew 18:3). Children are always at play; humor and laughter draw them into a conversation, and if you can engage that way, you will be able to teach them far more than yelling at them will accomplish.

It is possible for us to become so serious about God and ourselves that we shuffle our way past what God wants to reveal to us. Why wouldn’t a light-hearted approach to God be more fruitful than a heavy-hearted one? I find when I come to him with a childlike heart, I’m more attuned to him and relaxed enough to recognize his thoughts as well as to enjoy the relationship with him. Being playful with God is not disrespectful or sacrilegious since it originates in him. That doesn’t mean God isn’t serious when the times call for it, but with his children he often plays them into his reality with a wink and a nod.

I visited a family outside Edmonton, Alberta, Canada one fall and I could not believe how many toys they had to go out and play with in the ice and snow, and how much cold weather gear filled the closets and garage. When I remarked on it one day, the father responded, “It is so cold here for so long that if you don’t learn to play in it, it will own you.”

The same is true of the darkness and brokenness of this world, especially as we approach the end of the age. If you don’t learn to play with God in the pain and challenge of it all, it will own you. I’m discovering that afresh in a recent diagnosis of bone cancer that has already destroyed a vertebra in my back and has landed me on chemo to bring it to remission. In times past I would have lain awake in tears and pleading with God to spare me this stretch of the journey. This time, I’ve been able to entrust it to my relationship with God, knowing I’m deeply loved, that he is at work in some way amid  this extremity, and that I can be playful with him while we see where this goes.

I can’t imagine any posture being more helpful at the end of the age than those who can navigate difficulties inside love, rest, and play, especially when we know the outcomes of all these things. In time, whether in this life or the next, all will be well!

So, Tisha, when you sit down with God or take a walk with him in the woods, cultivate the environment where you can be confident in his love for you, at rest in his work on your behalf, and at play with his goodness. This is where you’ll find yourself at home in him and he can at home in you.

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You can access previous chapters here.  Stay Tuned for Chapter 12.