Lent #21: stop working on your spiritual life

Pharisees:  What are we going to do about this man? He is performing many miracles. If we don't stop this now, every man, woman, and child will believe in Him. You know what will happen next? The Romans will think He's mounting a revolution and will destroy our temple.  It will be the end of our nation.
John 11: 47-48

This is one thing that the Pharisees were right about.
Presence with Jesus grows belief in Jesus.
When you are around Jesus and people who are transformed by Jesus, it conceives belief in you, and that believes fills you and eventually, through much labor, the new self is born (or continues to be born from you/in you).

Our work is presence. Abiding. Space. Listening. I have seen many people step away from the practice of faith because it seemed like a non-ending chore list, instead of simply being present.  God does the work.  We are open and released to what God is about in us.


 I repeat:  You need make no effort to grow.  Concentrate your efforts on abiding in the Vine. The vindedresser who cares for the Vine will care of its branches also. [God] will prune, water, and cultivate the so that they will grow and bring forth much fruit.

--Hannah Whitall Smith

Lent #13: don't be afraid

Breathe:  John 6:20
I am the One. Don't be afraid.

I listen to people talk about their fears and I reflect on my own.  Our fears are deeply a part of us, formed from circumstance, personality, experience, and the reality of being human and finite beings.  Many of us share the same fears: rejection, loneliness, failure, insecurity of health or finances or relationships.

Most times we hold our fears at bay. But under the perfect storm, we are amazed at how fear tears through us, uprooting our center and making us want to hide from the world or from ourselves. When we are afraid, we want to hide, when most often what we need is to be found.

One of my fears is of exclusion--a form of rejection.  I am fearful of being excluded--of not being a part, of not being significant enough to be invited in (whether it's into a friendship, an event, or a ministry). When the sea is calm, I do not recognize this fear in my life.  But when the boat is rocked, the fear of exclusion begins to wash over me.  Perhaps I am not important or not significant enough.  Maybe I am not needed or not valued or not gifted.

One time last summer this fear of exclusion was so strong that I felt great loss.  I began to talk about this fear with a few of my friends, and as I did, it was as if Jesus spoke to the storm "Be calm" and the waves retreated and the water grew still.  The situation did not change, but the inner storm had receeded. This came through being found by my friends and being willing to name my fear (although it made me feel very petty and small).

Hannah Whitall Smith says: "The reality of [the spiritual] life isn't at all dependent upon your emotional state, but depends entirely upon your keeping you in the center of God's will."
Our emotions are sign-posts to us, but are not the same as who we are.  Our life is found in Christ, who centers us because he is "the One". What a relief that we are not the One.  We do not center ourselves or stop our own storms.  Our fearful feelings do not determine the reality of our spiritual life.

One way that we can move out of our fears and into Christ is by being found by our friends: naming our fears and allowing those feelings to be a vessel of grace through others to us.
With open ears, I hear the fears of those around me--knowing that they are mine as well.  I am amazed at how a conversation of someone else naming their fear releases the peace of Christ in me!

Lent #3: The Voice that Calls Us Home

Home finds us.

If you don't believe now, keep listening. He is the Voice, the Son of God! John 1: 34b

 By a step of faith we enter into the life of Jesus; by a process we are made to "grow up into him in all things."-Hannah W. Smith

...we grow up in every way into him who is the head, into Christ, from whom the whole body joined and knit together by every ligament with which it is equipped, as each part is working properly, promotes the body's growth in building itself up in love. Eph. 4: 15-16

The Holy Spirit pursues us.  That's why when we hear the Voice of Jesus, it is a remembering. We have heard this Voice in our lives since the moment we came into the world.  We have not always known who it was or how we heard it, but there is a Voice calling us, pursuing us, and as we recognize it, we find ourselves at Home. As we believe--over a lifetime--the work of the Voice is to grow us fully into Love.  The Remembering stitches spiritual muscles and ligaments together until the whisper of Home in us has breathed a new creation into our being.

Home find us. We become at Home in the Love of Christ.  Because the Love has pursued us all of our days. Keep listening.

Lent #2: You do not have to be good.

John 1: 17

You see, Moses gave us rules to live by, but Jesus the Liberating King offered the gifts of grace and truth which make life worth living.

Put simply, God’s part is to work; [the human] part is to trust. Although these two parts are quite distinct form each other, they are not really contradictory.—Hannah W. Smith

When Jesus came to liberate us from sin and death, he also came to liberate us from legalism and exclusion.  The Hebrew people connected their Chosenness with their family line—who was in and who was out.  They also connected their spirituality with rule-keeping and purity practices that intended to make them a set-apart, holy people.

When Jesus came, he lowered the bar of acceptance.  He redefined the family of Israel. Now, it was not what your heritage and ancestry was—and how pure your Israelite connections—it was instead the state of your heart.  He invites all into the family of God.  No more complex law-keeping, intense purity codes or dance-steps with rules.  Jesus liberated us from legalism. No more trying to get it right.

Then, Jesus raised the bar of covenant.  He did not give us another rule/morality/legalistic system to keep. Instead, he invites us into a faith that asks all of ourselves to be in covenant relationship.  A covenant that understand holiness not as “do’s/don’ts”, but as a commitment to a love-relationship that changes the way we think of about God and then, of course, each other.  A covenant that doesn’t lower us to being moral, but instead asks us to be holy.   It becomes not about the laws that define us and keep us “pure”, but about the heart that motivates us to honor one another and ourselves with holy lives.

This is quite radical (radical's true meaning of being "cut back to the root"). People outside the church still think that being a christian is about being moral. Not about being holy. There must be something to this misperception--perhaps that people who follow Christ are still trying to be moral, instead of being in covenant relationship.

Jesus immerses us in this covenant relationship.  Our part is to trust, Christ’s part is to do the work.

It’s like riding a surfboard. We do not generate or shape the wave.  We learn only to trust that the wave will take us to the shore.

We can’t make ourselves holy or liberate ourselves by our actions or even our thoughts.

We love, we trust, we follow in the wake of God.  And even that is God’s work.

This is extremely important because in our western Christian world being a Christian is understood as being a moral person who is trying to find self-actualization. 2000 years later and we are still like the Pharisees: we haven’t exchanged our moral codes for real relationship.  And we still try and make the mark and become our “best self” instead of surrendering to Jesus.

Christians and those who do not follow Christ both still live at the intersection of “being good” and “becoming better”.

It’s not about being good. It’s not about being your best self.

It’s about trusting God with your broken, messy self and Christ hiding your self in him.

Give it up. You can’t make yourself holy.

You might as well stop trying and begin releasing.

As you love God with your whole being--slowly and surely that love relationship will release you into immersion of Jesus Christ and real holiness.

Lent #1: Breathe

We begin today the downward walk to the cross along with Jesus.  Breathing in Christ's love and sacrifice for us.  I am following the Asbury Reader for Lent, which you can find here:  Breathe.  Breathe uses a new translation called The Voice .

During Lent, I will be sharing a few thoughts and reflections that I have along the way as I journey through Breathe. It would be good to do this with you--whoever you are--as sisters and brothers of Christ.

John 1:4
His breath filled all things with a living, breathing light.  Light that thrives in the depths of darkness, blazing through murky bottoms.  It cannot, and will not, be quenched.

"At the very beginning then, you can be sure of this: that Jesus came to save you fully--now, in this life--from the power of sin, and to rescue you altogether from your spiritual enemies."--Hannah Whitall Smith, from The Christian's Secret to a Happy Life

Where do we get this idea that we should be further along than we are?  I encounter it constantly--in myself, in others.  We carry this shame of being less whole, less holy than we imagine that we "should" be. We apologize for our need for God.  Some of it is from true conviction--we recognize that our sin is staring us in the face. We see our compulsions and addictions, the anger in us, the resentment that clouds our vision.  We know that it is not of God.  But the shame that we live under for not being more healed and more whole! We are embarrassed of how much work there is yet be done! We see habits that still have a hold on us and pain that burns angrily inside. We think that we should be done with sin that still shows up in our life.

I believe that God fully releases us from the power of sin in our lives.  We can be unbound by the forces that control us. It begins with embracing ourselves in the love of God--and loving even the parts of us that embarrass us and keep us beaten down.  The breath of God will not be quenched. There is no darkness in us that puts out the light of God.  We can rest at the feet of Jesus, knowing our sin and shame, and recognize that we don't save ourselves from our own sin.  We bring it to Jesus. We celebrate our need for Christ.  We are not are own spiritual directors. Jesus died for us at the point of our deepest darkness. Somehow Christ gave us at our place of deepest shame worth because he did not cast us aside but embraced us.  Today we can rejoice at our need for God, at the depth of our sin, because it is all the more room for Jesus to work in us--fully and completely.

Breathe in your need for God today. I am breathing in my need.