What is Good Works?

They are questions I receive often: “Do you ever sleep? Do you work all the time? Do you ever stop?” There seems to be this impression among certain people that either I am an unrepentant workaholic or that I am remorselessly neglectful toward life’s other responsibilities. The truth is far less sordid: I have invested a lot of effort over many years in learning how to simplify life and how to maximize productivity. I love to make the best use of my time and energy, and I am constantly fine-tuning the systems that allow me to remain that way.
Today I am beginning a series of articles that will share some of what I have learned along the way. I do not really know how to teach how to get things done except by allowing you into my life and into my systems. I intend to give examples from my own life, not because they are necessarily the best or only way of doing things, but because they work for me and may give you something to build from. You can take those examples as far as you want, and adapt them so they work for you. If all goes well, we will look at systems and tools and organization and planning, and all kinds of exciting things. But first we have a little groundwork to do.
It all begins with an understanding of our purpose in the world. What follows is a brief “Productivity Catechism” that provides a foundation for everything else I will say. It is only when we properly understand our purpose and mission that we can excel at systems and tools and all the rest.

Q. Ultimately, why did God create us?

A. God created us to bring glory to Him.
“For from him and through him and to him are all things. To him be glory forever. Amen” (Romans 11:36).
“…[I]n order that in everything God may be glorified through Jesus Christ. To him belong glory and dominion forever and ever. Amen” (1 Peter 4:11).

Q. How can we glorify God in our day-to-day lives?

A. We can glorify God in our day-to-day lives by doing good works.
“Let your light shine before others, so that they may see your good works and give glory to your Father who is in heaven” (Matthew 5:16).
“Keep your conduct among the Gentiles honorable, so that when they speak against you as evildoers, they may see your good deeds and glorify God on the day of visitation” (1 Peter 2:12).

Q. What are good works?

A. Good works are works done for the glory of God and the good of other people.
“Let your light shine before others, so that they may see your good works and give glory to your Father who is in heaven” (Matthew 5:16).
“Keep your conduct among the Gentiles honorable, so that when they speak against you as evildoers, they may see your good deeds and glorify God on the day of visitation” (1 Peter 2:12).
“As each has received a gift, use it to serve one another, as good stewards of God’s varied grace: whoever speaks, as one who speaks oracles of God; whoever serves, as one who serves by the strength that God supplies—in order that in everything God may be glorified through Jesus Christ. To him belong glory and dominion forever and ever. Amen” (1 Peter 4:10-11).

Q. As sinful people, can we actually do good works?

A. Christians are able to do good works because of the finished work of Christ.
“For we are his workmanship, created in Christ Jesus for good works, which God prepared beforehand, that we should walk in them” (Ephesians 2:10).
“[Christ] gave himself for us to redeem us from all lawlessness and to purify for himself a people for his own possession who are zealous for good works” (Titus 2:14).

Q. In what areas of life should we do good works?

A. We ought to do good works at all times and in all areas of life.
“So, whether you eat or drink, or whatever you do, do all to the glory of God” (1 Corinthians 10:31).
“Show yourself in all respects to be a model of good works” (Titus 2:7)…
“The saying is trustworthy, and I want you to insist on these things, so that those who have believed in God may be careful to devote themselves to good works. These things are excellent and profitable for people” (Titus 3:8).
“Women should adorn themselves … with what is proper for women who profess godliness—with good works” (1 Timothy 2:9-10).
“So then, as we have opportunity, let us do good to everyone, and especially to those who are of the household of faith” (Galatians 6:10).
“Now there was in Joppa a disciple named Tabitha, which, translated, means Dorcas. She was full of good works and acts of charity” (Acts 9:36).

Q. What is productivity?

Productivity is effectively stewarding your gifts, talents, time, energy, and enthusiasm for the good of others and the glory of God.
“Look carefully then how you walk, not as unwise but as wise, making the best use of the time, because the days are evil” (Ephesians 5:15-16).
Through this brief series of questions and answers we have established that we have been given life and salvation in order to bring glory to God by doing good to others. As this series continues we will look at ways we can organize and structure life to do these very things. Check in again tomorrow and we will continue this series by looking at the various areas of responsibility in our lives.
[Parenthetically, my son really encouraged me yesterday when, out of the blue, he said, “Dad, you always have lots to do, but you’ve always got time for us.” He’s a sweet kid.]

Free to be Honest

“The gospel gives you psychological freedom to handle the wrong things that you will do. You won’t have to deny, spin, or repress the truth about yourself. These things don’t make it impossible to know who you are.

Only with the support of hearing Jesus say, ‘You are capable of terrible things, but I am absolutely, unconditionally committed to you,’ will you be able to be honest with yourself."

Tim Keller

Doing the Kingdom Not Voting it In

Our central job is not to solve the world’s problems. Our job is to draw our entire life from Christ and manifest that life to others. Nothing could be simpler—and nothing could be more challenging.

Perhaps this partly explains why we have allowed ourselves to be so thoroughly co-opted by the world. It’s hard to communicate to a prostitute her unsurpassable worth by taking up a cross for her, serving her for years, gradually seeing her change on the inside, and slowing winning the trust to speak into her life (and letting her speak into our life, for we too are sinners). Indeed, this sort of Calvary-like love requires one to die to self. It is much easier, and more gratifying, to assume a morally superior stance and feel good about doing our Christian duty to vote against “the sin of prostitution.” Perhaps this explains why many Christians spend more time fighting against certain sinners in the political arena than they do sacrificing for sinners. But Jesus calls us and empowers us to follow his example by taking the more difficult, less obvious, much slower, and more painful road—the Calvary road. It is the road of self-sacrificial love.

When we return to the simplicity and difficulty of the kingdom of God, the question that defines us is no longer, What are the Christian policies and candidates? No, when love is placed above all kingdom-of-the-world concerns (Col. 3:14; 1 Peter 4:8), the kingdom-of-the-world options placed before us dwindle in significance.

What if the energy and resources Christians use to preserve and tweak the civil religion was rather spent feeding the hungry, housing the homeless, befriending the drug addict, and visiting the prisoner? What if our focus was on sacrificing our resources to help inner-city schools and safe houses for battered women? What if our concern was to bridge the ungodly racial gap in our country by developing friendships and collaborating in endeavors with people whose ethnicity is different than our own? What if instead of trying to defend our religious rights, Christians concerned themselves with siding with others whose rights are routinely trampled? What if instead of trying to legally make life more difficult for gays, we worried only about how we could affirm their unsurpassable worth in service to them?

In other words, what if we individually and collectively committed ourselves to the one thing that is needful—to replicating the loving sacrifice of Calvary to all people, at all times, in all places, regardless of their circumstances or merit? What if we just did the kingdom?

Doing the kingdom always requires that we bleed for others, and for just this reason, doing the kingdom accomplishes something kingdom-of-the-world activity can never accomplish. It may not immediately adjust people’s behavior, but this is not what it seeks to accomplish. Rather, it transforms people’s hearts and therefore transforms society.

Baptism and New Identity

In a previous post, I wrote about the nature of baptism as union with Christ, drawing from Paul's discussion in the sixth chapter of his letter to the Romans. There I described the transformational character of baptism -- how it changes our state of being, so that we are not under the power of sin any longer but dead to sin and alive to God, just as Christ is dead to sin and alive to God forevermore.

Now it should be obvious that a change of being, a change of status, implies also a change of identity. This is what Paul talks about in another (admittedly very brief) reference to baptism in his letter to the Galatians. Consider what he says:

. . . in Christ you are all children of God through faith. As many as you were baptized into Christ have clothed yourselves with Christ. There is no longer Jew or Greek, there is no longer slave or free, there is no longer male and female; for all of you are one in Christ Jesus. And if you belong to Christ, then you are Abraham's offspring, heirs according to the promise (Gal 3.26-29).

In this passage we find a lot of the same language of union with Christ that we saw in his letter to the Romans. Here speaks, as usual, of being in Christ, of being baptized into Christ, and of clothing oneself with Christ. Imagine that: just as you put on a uniform and become in some sense a police officer, or a priest, or a judge, or a worker, or whatever, in the same way you put on Christ through baptism. And what does that make you? It makes you children of God, and Abraham's offspring.

We will return to these things in a moment, but I want also to bring your attention what Paul says in the middle of this passage. He says: all of you are one in Christ Jesus. Here is speaking to the Galatian church which consisted of all the baptized believers; he tells them that by virtue of their baptism, they are united with Christ, and therefore they are united with one another. They are all one in Christ Jesus! (In his letter to the Corinthians Paul will speak more specifically of them as members of Christ's body, which further enforces the same point.) Would you imagine that this ought to inform the way we treat and think about one another? If I am one with you in Christ Jesus, then how can I hate you, refuse to forgive you, spread lies and slander about you, or in a word, fail to love you? Can I split the body of Christ in two? Do I dare to break it once more? Or consider it a different way: Paul says that no one ever hated his own body (Eph 5.29); can I hate my own body by hating you, knowing that you and I are members of the same body of Christ? Clearly not!

We cannot divide Christ's body; we cannot break it, once it has already been broken once for us. Consequently, Paul infers from this that previous differences of identity that might have once separated us from one another are invalidated by our union with Christ. He says: There is no longer Jew or Greek, there is no longer slave or free, there is no longer male and female (v. 28). There is no longer Jew or Greek, because the ethnic and national dividing lines have been destroyed by Christ, who has made a new humanity in his one body (cf. Eph 2.14-5). There is no longer slave or free, because we are all God's slaves and we are all free from the demands of other men because of our belonging to Christ. There is no longer male and female, because both alike have access to union with the one Christ. If they are both a part of the same body of Christ, then neither is superior or inferior to the other!

Now importantly, if these distinctions and dividing lines are invalidated by our union with Christ, then neither can they become the principal sources of our own identities. If in Christ there is no longer Jew or Greek, then I cannot think of myself fundamentally as a Jew or as a Greek, as an American or Romanian or Serbian, or whatever. If there is no more master and slave, then my identity is no longer my job or any relation that I hold to any other human person; I am not fundamentally a CEO or a theologian or philosopher or bus driver or whatever. If there is no more male and female, then my fundamental identity is no longer a man or a woman, a husband or a wife, a brother or a sister. Above everything, I am a child of God in Jesus Christ and an offspring of Abraham!

So we have seen that baptism involves a fundamental change of identity. But what does it mean to be a child of God and an offspring of Abraham? Here I will give my opinion.

Adam, says Luke, was the son of God (Luke 3.38). He had received a calling, one appropriate to every son and one which comes naturally to us: to be like his Father, to be God's image and likeness (Gen 1.26-7). We know that Adam had failed in this calling because of his sin, and his sin had disastrous results for the rest of the world (cf. Rom 5.12ff.). But Abraham (when he was still Abram) was given a promise by God that I will make of you a great nation, and I will bless you, and make your name great, so that you will be a blessing. I will bless those who bless you, and the one who curses you I will curse; and in you all the families of the earth shall be blessed (Gen 12.2-3).  He will be made into a great nation, and his offspring will inherit a land blessed by God (v. 7).

God was in the process of repairing a world broken by Adam's sin, and he was determined to do it through the offspring of this man Abram, whom he had chosen. Long story short, Paul says that Christ is that offspring of Abraham (Gal 3.16). Now if we are united to Christ by baptism, then we become Abraham's offspring and we inherit the promise! We become sons of God, which is to say, we begin to embody that image and likeness of God; we participate in the restoration of the created world and become the persons God intends all of humanity to be. And we become heirs of God's promise to Abraham: a new and restored land, in which we will live and worship God and prosper!

Baptism and Union With Christ

In the religious tradition I grew up in, baptism was something you did when you were old enough to make a voluntary confession of faith on your own. More to the point, baptism was just that -- it was a sort of public confession that "I have decided to follow Jesus, no turning back." There was nothing particularly mystical about baptism; it was taking a bath to let people know you love Jesus.

My present conviction, however, is that baptism actually involves much more than that. I think a sort of super minimalist conception of baptism such as the one I grew up hearing is certainly true, as far as it goes, but it doesn't say enough. Baptism is a greater and more profound mystery than that!

Consider what Paul says in Romans 6, the most sophisticated and detailed discussion of baptism in his letters. It opens with the question: What then are we to say? Should we continue in sin in order that grace may abound? (v. 1). Why should he begin with this question? What might motivate this line of reasoning? The answer is that in Paul's theology, God is very unfair; when people sin, rather than responding in terms of equal and proportionate punishment for the sin, he provides grace and salvation! This God shows his love for us by dying for us while we are still sinners (5.8); God reconciles us to himself while we were enemies (5.10). When despicable sinners turn their backs to God and go off on their own way, his response, rather than destroying them or leaving them to be fall apart as a natural consequence of sin, is to restore them and reconcile them. In a word, where sin increased, grace abounded all the more (5.20). But if sin does not get its comeuppance with God, why then should we be holy? How do we motivate holiness with a gracious God?

The answer Paul gives has to do with baptism. His answer is that we do not go on living in sin because we have died to it, and more specifically that this death to sin has taken place during our baptism (6.2-3). Now this is very profound! What he is saying is that through baptism, our fundamental mode of being is entirely changed: whereas previously Paul says that all, both Jews and Greeks, are under the power of sin (3.9), now he says that we Christians who have been baptized are dead to sin, and that this has been accomplished through baptism. This inspires further research; how can something so simple as baptism free us from the power of sin?

When we look more closely at Paul's reasoning, we find that baptism for him has to do with union with Christ. Notice the language he uses:

. . . all of us who have been baptized into Christ Jesus were baptized into his death. (v. 3)

. . . we have been buried with him by baptism into death . . . (v. 4)

. . . we have been united with him in a death like his . . . (v. 5)

. . . we have died with Christ . . . (v. 8)

. . . consider yourselves dead to sin and alive to God in Jesus Christ. (v. 11)

Paul's reasoning appears to my mind to be this. God is gracious, but that does not provide us with motive to sin. On the contrary, we are not to sin because we have died to sin; we have undergone a fundamental change with regards to our identities, with regard to our state of being. This has been accomplished through baptism, because in baptism we were united to Christ, who died and was resurrected.

Now if we are freed from sin because of our union with Christ, this must be because Christ himself is freed from sin. Indeed, this narrative is behind Paul's reasoning. Notice what he says:

We know that our old self was crucified with him so that the body of sin might be destroyed, and we might no longer be enslaved to sin. For whoever has died is freed from sin. But if we have died with Christ, we believe that we will also live with him. We know that Christ, begin raised from the dead, will never die again; death no longer has dominion over him. The death he died, he died to sin, once for all; but the life he lives, he lives to God. So you also must consider yourselves dead to sin and alive to God in Christ Jesus (vv. 6-11).

Here the NRSV's choices of translation leave a bit to be desired. What they translate here as "our old self" (ὁ παλαιὸς ἡμῶν ἄνθρωπος, v. 6) I would sooner translate as "our old humanity." The idea is that Christ took upon himself a human nature such as our own, fallen and subject to sin and destined for death, the same as us. Torrance emphasizes this point, but so do Athanasius and Gregory Nazianzen. He takes our condition upon himself in order to redeem, sanctify, purify, and deify it! This is precisely what he does, ultimately through his death.

Here, too, the NRSV translators disappoint. The literal reading of v. 7 is: the one who died (ὁ ἀποθανών) is freed from sin. Campbell, by my lights, is right to read this as a reference to Christ, who died and therefore was freed from the power of sin in his human nature. This is exactly what Paul goes on to say later: The death he died, he died to sin, once for all (v. 10). Paul understands Christ at one point to have been under sin in some sense, the same as the rest of us; he doesn't suppose that Christ committed sin, of course, but merely that Christ's human nature had the "sin disease," so to speak -- that it was inclined in the wrong direction, same as the rest of us. Through his death, Christ was freed from this power, and in his resurrection he was given life to live for God forever.

Therefore, when we are baptized, we are united with Christ who is beyond the power of sin! Just as he has died to sin forever and lives to God, when we are baptized, we are to consider ourselves to be the same, since we are one with him. So Paul tells us: you also must consider yourselves dead to sin and alive to God in Christ Jesus (v. 11).

So baptism, for Paul, is far more than a mere public declaration that "I have decided to follow Jesus, no turning back." No, it is the way that we are liberated from the powers of sin through union with Christ!

Becoming Like the Accuser

When the Adam and Eve yielded to Satan and surrendered their God-given authority over the earth and animal kingdom (Gen 3), Satan became “the god of this world” (2 Cor. 4:4), the “ruler of the world” (Jn. 12:32; 14:31) and the “principality and power of the air” (Eph. 2:2) who “has power over the whole world” (1 Jn. 5:19).

Satan is first and foremost a judger. Throughout the Bible we find him bringing judgments against God and humans (The book of Job makes this most clear.) For good reason the Bible labels him “the Accuser” (Rev. 12:10). Not surprisingly, when Adam and Eve opened up their lives to this, they first accepted Satan’s accusation that God is a petty deity who is threatened by their access to the forbidden tree. Once they act on this false picture of God by violating the prohibition, they then judge God to be unmerciful as they hide from him in fear (Gen. 3:8).

When questioned by God, Adam blamed God as well as Eve for his misdeed. “The woman you put here with me – she gave me some fruit from the tree, and I ate it” (Gen. 3:12, emphasis added). Eve in turn also refused to own up to her sin and instead placed all the blame on the serpent (Gen. 3:12).
Though the couple was created to bear God’s image, the Accuser succeeded in getting them to take on something of his image, reflecting his ugly, accusatory character. The couple and all their descendants had become a rebel race of accusers, co-opted into the rebellion of the Powers against the Creator. 

Instead of receiving and reflecting God’s life and love toward on another, we now tend to view others through the eyes of our hungry soul and our assumed “knowledge of good and evil.” In our rebellious condition, we tend to “love” those who contribute in some way to our idolatrous sense of fullness of Life—the “good” people—and we tend to despise those we judge to be detracting from our idolatrous sense of fullness of Life—the “bad” people. We judge some as worth loving and others worth hating when we’re under the influence of the Accuser and our stolen “knowledge of good and evil.”
As a result, the human community has become fragmented and filled with violence. The history of humanity has largely been a history of horrific brutality.

Our inability to refrain from violence, despite our remarkable intelligence in some areas and despite our best intentions to avoid it, is arguably the single greatest sign of our subjection to the one whom Jesus says “was a murderer from the beginning” (Jn. 8:44). When people are subjected to the Accuser and filled with judgments, violence is never far away.

The biblical record bears witness to our violent tendencies as a race of accusers. No sooner had the first couple been expelled from the Garden than their first child murdered their second, judging that Abel was in competition with him for God’s approval (Gen 4). As violence always does, this first act of violence set off a chain reaction of violence, to the point that Lamech, a descendent of Cain, boasted that his thirst for vengeance was ten times great than what God had threatened (vs. 24)!
Violence under the reign of the Accuser continued to escalate to the point that, within a couple millennia the world had become so “full of violence” the Lord had to stoop still further and start the whole creation project over again by sending a flood (Gen 6). Had he not done this, all indications are that God’s plan for the human race would have been hopelessly derailed. It was God’s only hope of rescuing the human race from irreversible destruction.

Yet, as drastic as it was, this measure did not put an end to the reign of the destructive Powers. Nor did it reform our fallen accusatory nature. Consequently, sin and violence began to encroach back into the world soon after the flood. Indeed, the rest of the biblical narrative and the whole of human history is one, long, tragic testimony to the truth that, so long as we’re separated from God, we can’t help but separate ourselves from one another. Until we are free from our bondage to the Accuser, we simply can’t stop accusing, which invariably results in some people judging that their enemies don’t deserve to live.

How Judging Blocks Love

What keeps us from fulfilling the law of love that is exemplified by Jesus and laid out in the Scriptures (Matt. 22:39-40; Rom 13:8,10 Gal 5:14)? In a word, we like to pass verdicts. To some extent, we get our sense of worth from attaching worth or detracting worth from others, based on what we see. We position ourselves as judges of others rather than simply as lovers of others. Our judgments are so instinctive to us that we usually do not notice them. Even worse, they are so natural to us that when we do notice them, we often assume we are righteous for passing judgment! Because of this, it is easy to overlook the fact that our judgments are blocking our love, keeping us asleep, preventing us from living in the truth God created us to live in.

Another way of saying this is that we fail to abide in love because we choose to live from our knowledge of good and evil. This is why the Bible depicts the origin of our separation from God as eating form the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil, which was in the middle of the garden (Gen 3:1-9).

Consider, why was the fruit of the forbidden tree a fruit that was said to give the knowledge of good as well as evil? Isn’t the “knowledge of good” a good thing? Aren’t we Christians supposed to be promoting “the knowledge of good”? Isn’t following God all about increasing our “knowledge of good and evil” so we can side with “the good” and resist “the evil”? And yet, whether it fits our preconceptions or not, in the Genesis narrative the nature of the sin that separates us from God is said to be the “knowledge of good and evil.”

What is it about eating fruit from the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil that warrants its depiction in Scripture as the source of original sin? How does living from our knowledge of good and evil separate us from God? These questions are rarely asked and even more rarely investigated with any thoroughness. It is largely for this reason that the church has failed so miserably at loving the way Christ commands us to love.

We have failed to understand and internalize the biblical teaching that our fundamental sin is not our evil—as though the solution for sin was to become good—but our getting life from what we believe is our knowledge of good and evil. Our fundamental sin is that we place ourselves in the position of God and divide the world between what we judge to be good and what we judge to be evil. And this judgment is the primary thing that keeps us from doing the central thing God created us to do, namely, love like he loves.

Because we do not usually understand and internalize the nature of our foundational sin, we usually think our job as Christians is to embrace a moral system, live by it, and thus to be good people in contrast to all those who are evil. In fact, God’s goal for us is much more profound and much more beautiful than merely being good: it is to do the will of God by being loving, just as God is loving. God’s goal for us is to discover a relationship with him and thereby a relationship with ourselves and others that returns us to a state where we don’t live by our knowledge of good and evil.

Walking in obedience to God, we are still to detect good and evil, of course. Living in love in no way implies moral relativism. But we are not to derive any worth from our detection of good and evil. Nor are we to draw conclusions about people on the basis of it. We are to derive worth from God alone and to love without judgment and without conditions on the basis of the unsurpassable fullness we get from God. Out job is to love, not judge.

A Preacher Writes

It’s is God’s grace to you if your church is messy. I heard those words come out of my mouth yesterday as I was guest-preaching at a church close to home. I said them, and I believe them. At least, I believe them most of the time.
I love my church. I love the people I gather with week-by-week. They are fun and safe and easy to be with. But who said church should be safe and easy?

Yesterday, when I was at that church, I preached on the parable of The Lost Sheep, which is actually a parable about a kind and loving shepherd (see Luke 15). Like so many of Jesus’ parables, this one was told in the presence of two groups of people—people who were convinced of their own badness and people who were convinced of their own goodness. And in this case Jesus was speaking primarily to those good and religious people.

The parable is simple: A sheep has wandered off and the shepherd will not rest until he has found it and restored it to himself. And I thought about that sheep, wandering lost and alone in the wilderness, and that shepherd who went looking for it. There are so many different ways that shepherd could have reacted when he finally found it.

• He finds his sheep and rebukes it: “You stupid, ignorant sheep. How dare you wander off from me?” No. He doesn’t rebuke it.
• He finds his sheep and punishes it: “You dumb, disobedient sheep. I’ll teach you to wander off!” No, he doesn’t punish it.
• He finds his sheep and is disgusted by it: “You are filthy and smelly! What on earth did you get into? You go clean yourself up right now and I’ll come back later.” No, he doesn’t make it clean itself up.
• He finds his sheep and sells it: “I can’t have a sheep like you polluting my flock. Do you know how you made me look in front of everyone else?” No, he doesn’t get rid of it.

The text says, “And when he has found it, he lays it on his shoulders, rejoicing.” When that shepherd finds his sheep, he cares for it. He hoists that big, heavy, dirty sheep onto his shoulders and carries it home, rejoicing all the way. He carries it home and calls his friends and throws a party to celebrate.
The point of the parable is that God loves to save the lost. He loves to save sinners. He doesn’t save those who are righteous and whose lives are all put together, he saves those who are just plain bad.

If God is in the business of saving sinners, we need to expect that church will be full of sinners—those who are still wandering and those who have only just been found. If our churches reflect God’s heart for the lost, they will be full of people with problems, full of people showing the consequences of a lifetime of wandering. And this means that church may not be a safe and easy place. It may not be a place full of people who have it all together. It may be messy. It should be messy. Thank God if it is messy.

7 Conditions for Confrontation

They begin with Galatians 6:1-2: “Brothers, if anyone is caught in any transgression, you who are spiritual should restore him in a spirit of gentleness. Keep watch on yourself, lest you too be tempted. Bear one another’s burdens, and so fulfill the law of Christ.” And then they provide seven conditions for confrontation which apply not only to conflicts between church leaders, but between all Christians:

1. It should be done between “brothers.” This sets the tone for the conversation. You’re family, which implies that you have an unbreakable bond with each other. No matter what happens in the conversation, your commitment to each other as brothers and sisters in Christ will remain. 
2. The other person must be “caught in transgression.” The sin must be clear and present, not just assumed and implied. This is particularly true when confronting someone’s underlying motivations, which are extremely hard to discern.
3. It should be done by “spiritual” people. This means you need to be operating in the Spirit’s power, not out of anger and frustration.
4. The goal should be to “restore” the other person to a healthy relationship with God and to restore unity to the partnership. If your primary goal is to get the other person to stop aggravating you or to get him to conform to your personal preferences, you’re not ready to do this. Go back to condition 2.
5. It should be done in a “spirit of gentleness.” A harsh rebuke almost never brings someone closer to Jesus. It only erects walls between his people.
6. You must “keep watch on yourself” during the whole process. When the other person reacts defensively and questions your judgment, morality, and right to question him (as he might), you’ll be tempted to respond in pride and arrogance. You’ll want to start using all the ammunition you’ve been storing up in your mind over the years, reminding the other person about all the ways he’s offended you, failed you, and disappointed you. Did you notice all those “you’s”? They have nothing to do with restoring the other person, and therefore no place in your conversation.
7. Be ready to “bear one another’s burdens” over the long haul. The process of restoration probably won’t happen overnight. Offer your ongoing love, support, and gentle accountability to your partner. Help him take concrete steps to overcome the sin through God’s Spirit-empowered grace, which is the “law of Christ.”

Totally Criticized and Completely Forgiven

“Give up your success-and-failure patterns. Seek grace in Christ, humbly and honestly. Understand that a conviction of sin does not make you neurotic, but rather it spells the beginning of the end for neurosis. After all, what is a neurotic? Simply a hurting person who is closed off to criticism in any form and yet engages in the most intense, destructive self criticism that produces neither hope nor help.

What a marvelous relief God’s grace in Christ offers. I had been totally criticized, and at the same time I was completely forgiven. As I rested in the work of another, my heart was at peace with God; and for the first time, I felt at peace with myself.

— Rose Marie Miller

What Kind of Sinners Feel Welcomed at Your Church

Perhaps the greatest indictment on evangelical churches today is that they are not generally known as refuge houses for sinners—places where hurting, wounded, sinful people can run and find love that does not question, an understanding that does not judge, and an acceptance that knows no conditions.
To be sure, evangelical churches are usually refuge houses for certain kinds of sinners—the loveless, the self-righteous, those apathetic toward the poor and unconcerned with issues of justice and race, the greedy, the gluttonous, and so on. People guilty of these sins usually feel little discomfort among us. But evangelical churches are not usually safe places for other kinds of sinners—those whose sins, ironically, tend to be much less frequently mentioned in the Bible than the religiously sanctioned sins.
It is rare indeed that a drunkard, drug addict, or prostitute would think of going to church because he or she just needed to feel loved and accepted. These people may go to bars, fellow addicts, drug dealers, or pimps to find refuge and acceptance, but they would not go to a church. In fact, as with the Pharisees in Jesus’ day, the church has generally represented everything people with these kinds of sins want to avoid at all costs. It has most often represented nothing but condemnation for these people. Indeed, churches frequently cultivate a reputation for “cracking down” on sins that fall into their “unsanctioned sin” category. To fail to do this, many have assumed, is to compromise our reputation for being set apart for holiness.

The sins we declare ourselves to be against are invariably selected to not target ourselves. If we were consistent in cracking down equally on all sins, we’d be cracking down on ourselves more than on those outside the church. And if we retained a system of evaluating sin at all, sins such as impatience, unkindness, rudeness, and self-righteousness—all indications that love is absent (1 Cor 13:4-5)—as well as prevalent “church” sins such as gossip, greed, and apathy would rank higher on our list than sins such as homosexuality or heterosexual promiscuity.

Striving for a holy reputation is also self-serving because the whole enterprise is unconsciously designed as a strategy for getting life for ourselves. Though it is mostly unconscious—indeed, though we uniformly deny it—we are feeding ourselves with our devised sin lists. We feel righteous and secure that we are “in” while others are “out” as we compare ourselves favorably with others who don’t measure up (according to our own biased measuring devise).

Above all else, love is that for which the church is called to be known. Sadly, in the name of acquiring for ourselves a reputation of holiness, we have often compromised the one reputation God calls us to have. Jesus was willing to forsake any possibility of having a holy reputation for the sake of loving those who were unholy.

To be sure, Christians are called to be a holy people, set apart by their good works. This is what transforming love looks like as it takes hold of people. But this is not a reputation we should seek to acquire or protect. The one reputation we are called to acquire is identical to the one reality we are called to live in: We are to be, and to be known as, a people who receive and give love in an outrageous, impartial, unconditional way.

- Greg Boyd

The Cure for Shame

Shame will be our default position and the virus in every relationship -  unless it is healed. Shame says, "You are flawed to the marrow, have nothing significant to offer,  hopelessly addicted,  and inherently prone to blow it.   The good in you can never outweigh the bad in you.  You will never be enough."
A shame-consciousness will be the Achille's Heal for every leader, organization, and every family and parent-child relationship, unless we find the cure.  And there is a cure.
But when we look to the pulpit or Public Television or TED pundits for a cure for shame, it often sounds like one the the following, often reasonable-sounding antidotes:
Acceptance as an antidote to shame:

"I am loved."
"I am accepted."

Self-confidence as an antidote to shame:

"Practice positive self-talk."
"Believe you are worthy."

Forgiveness as an antidote to shame:

"I am forgiven."
"God's grace is greater than my sin."

Discipline as an antidote for shame:

"Step up your prayer life and spiritual disciplines."
"Try harder not to miss group meetings."

Release from guilt as an antidote to shame:

"It's not your fault."

Positive thinking or better self-talk can't handle this.
Yet, as helpful and often true as most of the above antidotes can be, none of these solutions is sufficient to heal the root of shame.  Most Christians think that one or more of those antidotes I listed above will do the trick; yet it often feels like we're up against something much bigger than positive thinking or healthy self-talk can handle. 

Our best efforts to fend off our critics [whether external or internal] often feel a bit like the leather-tough cowboy who pretends the bullet lodged in his gut doesn't hurt; or the female CEO who tries to casually shake off the brutal criticisms lobbed at her by the Board, while she privately sheds angry tears in the bathroom stall. 

We're tired of pretending we're o.k., and though we are reluctant to admit it, pretending only temporarily shoves away the pecking buzzards, knowing the scavengers will always return until the kill is devoured.    Pretending we're o.k. doesn't actually heal us.

The cure for shame
The best question to ask is, "What does Jesus think the cure for shame is?"  Does Jesus have a way to heal the root system of shame within the human personality, rather than asking us to coax ourselves into positive self-talk or try to act bravely in the face of our critics?
In Jesus' own words, the cure he offers is this: "I will give you a new heart and put a new spirit in you." [Ezekiel 36:26]  His answer is as astoundingly simple as it is unique.  The heart is the root system for a person's relational health.  Jesus restores the root system in order to restore the person.    The moment you enter friendship with Jesus, the diseased root system is removed:  The heart that has driven you into a shame-mindset your whole life is taken away.  In its place is emplanted a remarkable, noble and radiant heart - a new root system.  Everything you hoped you could be is embedded in that new heart you've been given, waiting to be affirmed and released.

What Jesus might say to set us free: 

Jesus might say,
"Let's be truly authentic here, no pretending.  There's no need for that.  You're safe with Me.  No mustering up a sense of worthiness that shields you from the critics;  instead, let's take self-defense off the table forever. 

When the Devil comes to Me and tries to accuse and slander you to My face, I point him to your new and noble heart.  It infuriates the Enemy because self-defense is the only thing he has to teach you.

Your new-hearted nobility is a gift from me, and no one feels compelled to defend something they know is a gift:   If you didn't create it, you're not responsible for defending it, right?  I defend you so that you don't have to.  Your new heart is how I defend you against your critics."

The Distinctive Mark of Jesus Followers

Jesus’ teaching to love our enemies was understandably shocking to his original audience—just as it is to us today. Jesus expected much, which is why, after telling his audience to love their enemies he added that if we only love those who love us and do good those who do good to us, we’re doing nothing more than what everyone naturally does (Luke 6:32-33). But his followers are to be set apart by the radically different way of love. The distinct mark of the reign of God is that God’s people love and do good to people who don’t love them and don’t treat them well—indeed, to people who hate them, mistreat them, and even threaten them and their loved ones.

To drive home the importance of this, Jesus says that if we love even our enemies, “then your reward will be great, and you will be children of the Most High, because he is kind to the ungrateful and wicked.” The parallel in Matthew has Jesus saying, “Love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you that you may be children of your Father in heaven. He causes his sun to rise on the evil and the good, and sends rain on the righteous and the unrighteous.”

Just as God is indiscriminately kind to the ungrateful and the wicked, and just as the Father causes the sun to shine and the rain to fall indiscriminately on the evil and the good, so followers of Jesus are to be distinguished by our ability to love indiscriminately. It makes no difference whether the person is friend or foe. And this, Jesus emphasizes, is the condition for our receiving a Kingdom reward and for our becoming “children of your Father in Heaven.” Our willingness to go against our nature and love and serve enemies rather than resort to violence against them is the telltale sign that we are participants in the Kingdom of God.

Notice that there are no exception clauses found anywhere in the New Testament’s teaching about loving and doing good to enemies. Indeed, Jesus’ emphasis on the indiscriminate nature of love rules out any possible exceptions. The sun doesn’t decide on whom it will and will not shine. The rain doesn’t decide on whom it will and will not fall. So too, Kingdom people are forbidden to decide who will and will not receive the love and good deeds we’re commanded to give.

Be the Change Now

Ghandi once said, “Be the change you want to see in the world.” It’s a profoundly Kingdom teaching.
It seems to me, however, that few people adopt Ghandi’s philosophy. It’s far easier to focus our attention on how others should change. It’s far easier to spend our energy assigning blame for the problems of society on others. It’s far easier to try to control the behavior of others by gaining political power over them. This approach keeps the focus off ourselves and helps us feel righteous and wise. If you think about it, all political conflict is premised on the assumption that we who espouse a particular ideal are more moral and/or wiser than those who disagree with us.

“Everybody wants to rule the world,” as the band Tears for Fears sang. Everybody is sure the world would be a better place if only their superior morality and wisdom was the rule of the day. The funny thing is, this is precisely the mindset that keeps the world broken.

While everyone is free to assess social problems and work toward political solutions as they see fit, this is not Jesus’ way of transforming the world. He never so much as commented on the hot political issues of his day. The Jesus way of transforming the world is not by assuming a position of moral or intellectual superiority as we assign blame for society’s woes on others. Rather, it’s by assuming a position of humility and focusing our energy on the log in our own eye rather than the dust particle we think we see in a neighbors eye (Mt. 7:1-3).

From a New Testament perspective, the primary job of Kingdom people is to simply be the change we want to see in the world. More specifically, we’re to simply be the Kingdom we know is coming. We’re to manifest the future in the present; the Kingdom of God in the midst of the kingdom of the world; God’s will “on earth as it is in heaven.” We are to humbly be the first fruits of the coming harvest (I Cor. 15:20). The “first fruit” in ancient Israel referred to fruit that was picked before the rest of the crop. These early pickings were, among other things, considered the guarantee that God would be faithful in bringing forth the rest of the crop.
Whatever will be in heaven, we are to manifest now. Whatever will not be in heaven, we are to rid ourselves of now.

When the Kingdom is fully established in the future, every knee will bow and every tongue will confess that Jesus Christ is Lord (Phi. 2). So, in the power of the Spirit and the love of Jesus Christ, we who are first fruits picked ahead of time are to passionately bow our knee and confess Christ’s Lordship now.

When God’s reign is fully manifested in the future, everyone will get their life, worth, significance and security from God alone and will reflect this fullness of life to one another rather than trying to get it from one another. All idolatry will be abolished. The job of first fruits is to manifest what this looks like now. We are to display the beauty of a life that gets worth, significance and security from God alone and that is thus free from the ugliness of idolatry.

When the Kingdom of God is fully established, all that is inconsistent with the radiantly beautiful character of God will be done away with. So, empowered by the Spirit and the grace of God, we who are the sign of the coming Kingdom are called to seek to eradicate everything inconsistent with God’s character from our life and our world now.

When God’s will is fully established on earth as it is in heaven, there will be no more power structures privileging some people over others: men over women, rich over poor, intelligent over the intellectually challenged, talented over the untalented, whites over blacks, or anything of the sort. So, we who are the first fruits of the coming Kingdom are to manifest the beauty of an equalized humanity now. We are to individually and collectively manifest what it looks like for humans to be completely free from all of the artificial ranking scales fallen humans impose on one another.
When the whole of reality becomes the domain of God’s reign, as it was always intended to be, there will be no more violence, either among humans or among animals. The creation on every level will be restored to the peaceable Kingdom it was always intended to be. We who are called to manifest the future in the present must commit to eradicating all violence from our lives, and from our world, now.

When the beautiful Kingdom is fully established, the defeat of the ugly Powers will be fully manifested. We who are the first fruits of this coming beautiful kingdom are not to simply wait for this final victory: we are, as much as possible, to display now what it looks like for humans to live free from the oppression of the powers. We are to be a people who intentionally swim upstream against any aspect of our society and culture that is not consistent with the will of God as revealed in Jesus Christ.

- Greg Boyd

Prayer and Providence

“Coming events cast their shadows before them, and when God is about to bless his people his coming favour casts the shadow of prayer over the church. When he is about to favour an individual he casts the shadow of hopeful expectation over his soul. Our prayers, let men laugh at them as they will, and say there is no power in them, are the indicators of the movement of the wheels of Providence. Believing supplications are forecasts of the future, He who prayeth in faith is like the seer of old, he sees that which is to be: his holy expectancy, like a telescope, brings distant objects near to him." — Charles Spurgeon

God's Dream for the World

The future doesn’t yet exist—which is why it’s future instead of the present or past—this doesn’t mean I’m claiming the future is wide open. To the contrary, it’s very clear from Scripture that God has a great plan for the future, and this plan steers the course of history by setting limits on what can and can’t occur and influencing what comes to pass. God created the world and is now moving it to the fulfillment of a glorious dream.

We see God’s glorious dream expressed in Jesus’ prayer in John 17, which is the most outstanding prayer ever recorded, if you ask me. Jesus prays to the Father on behalf of all who will come to know him (which he hopes will be the whole world) (vss. 20, 23). He further prays to the Father that his followers may be “one…just as you are in me and I am in you” (vs. 21, emphasis added). He then proclaims that he has given us the same “glory” that was given him before the foundation of the world (vs. 22, 24), and he did this so that we may be one, just as he and the Father are one. “I in them and you in me,” he continues, “so that they may be brought to complete unity.”

Clearly, the “glory” Jesus refers to is the glorious loving unity of the triune God. And when his disciples reflect this glory, Jesus says to his heavenly Father, “the world will know that you sent me and have loved them even as you have loved me” (vs. 23, emphasis added). Jesus ends his prayer by telling the Father he will continue to make him known so that “the love you have for me may be in them and that I myself may be in them” (vs. 26).

What a dream! God’s vision for humanity is nothing less than for us to be participants in the perfect love that he is throughout eternity. He wants the love of the Trinity to be the replicated toward us, among us and through us to the whole world. God’s dream is for us to be in him, and he to be in us—in the same way the Father is in the Son and the Son is in the Father. The dream is for humanity to be loved by God, and to in turn love God, with one and the same love that is the eternal triune God.

I’m convinced this is what the Bible means when it says God makes us participants of the divine nature (1 Pet 1:4), for the divine nature is love (1 Jn 4:4). I’m also convinced this is why Paul repeatedly says that believers are placed “in Christ.” We don’t simply relate to God through Christ. We relate to God in Christ. We share in the Father’s relationship to the Son and the Son’s relationship to the Father. When we are saved, you might say, we are pulled into God and are eternally allowed to share in the ecstatic love that he eternally is.


I believe Paul is making the same basic point when he says that all things were created by Christ and for Christ. Christ was always intended to be the head of humanity, his “body,” and the means by which God united the cosmos together (Col. 1:15 -20). This is also why Paul taught that the grace that saves us was “given us in Christ Jesus before the beginning of time” (2 Tim. 1.9) and why Jesus said that the glory he gives to us was given him “before the foundation of the world” (Jn 17:24).

- Greg A Boyd

Religious Self-isms

The believers involved in the religious culture of the western world have been brainwashed into believing that in order to have value as a believer, we need to be religiously, self-sufficient, self-efficient, self-motivated, self-involved, self-reliant and self-dependent. This religious myth of the religious system praises this independence as spiritual maturity because we are thoroughly involved in religious disciplines and are working toward out full spiritual potential. All we have to do is work hard enough, read the bible more, pray more, attend the one hour Sunday-go-meeting, sing in the choir, serve on the board, believe the religious creeds and and adhere to the religious bylaws and all is spiritually well.

Religion has removed total dependance on God to total dependance on religion. It is as if admitting total dependance of the finished work of the cross and resurrection would imply that we are spiritually lazy, spiritually deficient, spiritually crippled, and worthless to God and His Gospel.

This is a lie of religion. God gave everything, did everything, to give maintain your salvation.

If God gave everything to save you, it naturally follows that you were worth it. Our value in God’s eyes is not based on self-sufficiency, or self-anything, but on the fact that we belong to God. To understand this we must understand “worth” as God does.

I have just become a granddad to a beautiful, adorable, little girl and I love her to the unconditionally. My grand-baby did not do one iota of a thing to gain my love and admiration, she did not do one thing to earn my love. She cannot do anything that will make me stop loving her. Her worth and value is intrinsic. As part of God’s family, you were created valuable, and don’t need to “earn” God’s love. In fact, there’s absolutely nothing you can say or do to make God love you more or any less. (This too is an area where we are dependent on God, for God loves us because of who we are not what we do.)

From the beginning, Adam and Eve were dependent on God. Through all eternity, we will be dependent on God. We were made to be forever dependent. The independence and self-sufficiency so fruitlessly sought after by religion doesn’t exist. Our lives are always empty without God.

Thus the emptiness of religion!

Preparing For Death

Ancient Greek philosophers -- or at least some of them -- understand their activity as philosophers to be a preparation for death. That is how Socrates describes philosophy in the Phaedo. Because the philosopher is concerned with the soul over the body, and seeks to perfect the soul by its knowledge of the truth about the universe, therefore the philosophical life is a preparation for death at which point the soul is separated from the body.

Regardless of the metaphysical and anthropological differences between the two, Christianity and ancient Greek philosophy are similar in this respect. Paul speaks of baptism, the beginning of the Christian life, as a sort of intentional death undergone through union with Christ's own death (Rom 6). Elsewhere he speaks of putting of the old self, which is effectively dying, and putting on a new self (Eph 4, Col 3). Of course the real perfection of the new self comes at the resurrection, so Christian life is a kind of training for death and resurrection.

Because death is an inevitable reality, it makes sense to prepare for it. To some extent we have to ignore the fact of our death and its unpredictability in order to go on in the world; many people, if they spent much time thinking about their own demise, would be too depressed and anxious to move forward. But for those who want fortitude of spirit, who want to face reality and adjust themselves to it, and especially those for whom (as Athanasius says in De Incarnatione) death is something dead because of the resurrection of Christ, meditation on and preparation for death are essential.

Meditation on and preparation for death are important for at least the following reason: they help us to understand well the finitude and preciousness of time. They help us to use our time wisely; in an interesting way, meditation about the imminence and inevitability of death can inspire a profound, ardent zeal to live and to live well. One of my favorite lines from The Imitation of Christ:

Many have died suddenly and without warning; for the Son of Man will come at an hour when you least expect Him (Lk 12:40). When the hour of death comes, you will begin to think differently about your past life and great will be your sorrow then that you have been so negligent and lazy in God's service.

How happy and wise are those who try now to become what they would want to be at the hour of death (I, 23, 3-4).

The Faith Way

Is our faith the way we get God to bless us by answering our prayers?...Or...Is our faith the way God comes to us bringing His blessings that are the answer to our prayers?

This verse in Rev. 3:20, although religion applies it to sinners, is in reality addressed to believers. "Behold, I stand at the door, and knock: if any man hear my voice, and open the door, I will come in to him, and will sup with him, and he with me."

The picture I see here is that believers have shut Jesus out of their heart by opening it to the vain philosophies of men. The faith door of their heart is closed. In their religiosity they try to muster up enough faith to open their hearts door and gain access to God's presence to make their demands of prayer and lay claim to being a person of great faith if they get an answer to that prayer, no matter if the answer is from God, natural healing, or deceiving spirits.

In the midst of all our religious activity God is gently knocking on the door of faith to our hearts so He can come in and sup with us and us with Him and in doing so, bring His blessings because "in him all the fullness of the Godhead dwells.

It is not that we get to God by our faith...it is that God gets to us by our faith! Faith's only role is to let God in, and when He is in, we have anything and everything we need!

We have simply to open the door and let the grace that has always been there, welling up, come flooding in, filling our hearts and lives with the presence of Christ and His blessing.

“If any man open the door, I will come into him.”

Ponder carefully every word here. There is nothing saying our praying is what draws Jesus into our hearts. Nor is it our prayer which moves Jesus to come into our hearts. All He needs is access. He enters of His own accord because He desires to come in. And He enters in wherever He is not denied admittance.

As air enters in quietly when we breath, and does its normal work in our lungs, so Jesus enters quietly into our hearts and does His blessed work there by opening the door of faith.

I trust that you can see now how you can pray continually,  prayer is nothing more involved than to let Jesus into our needs.

Faith is simply trusting Jesus by opening our hearts door of faith and supping with Him and He with us.

Both Wind and Tide to Forward Your Voyage

“Mark well the great advantages you have for the attainment of holiness by seeking it in a right gospel order.

You will have the advantage of the love God manifested towards you, in forgiving your sins, receiving you into favor, and giving you the spirit of adoption, and the hope of His glory freely through Christ, to persuade and constrain you by sweet allurements to love God again, who has so dearly loved you, and to love others for His sake, and to give up yourselves to the obedience of all His commands out of hearty love to Him.

You will also enjoy the help of the Spirit of God to incline you powerfully to obedience, and to strengthen you for the performance of it against all your corruptions and the temptations of Satan, so that you will have both wind and tide to forward your voyage in the practice of holiness."

— Walter Marshall

Why Can't I Feel God?

Question:
Greg, you’re always talking about how we need to keep our eyes fixed on the cross to see and experience God’s love for us. But I find myself arguing with God, asking him: “How am I to believe that you love us that much when you don’t love me enough to lift the veil over my mind and break me free with your love?” I have never felt any of God’s love, or presence or anything! The truth is that God feels distant, unloving, and even non-existent, and it angers me that my Father, who supposedly loves me, leaves me in this godless prison. Why doesn’t God lift the veil and make himself real to me?   B.

Answer:

Hi B,
I’m so sorry to hear your plight. I completely understand the anger you express. You feel like you’re helplessly imprisoned in a godless dungeon and naturally wonder why God doesn’t deliver you, especially if he truly loves you as much as he says he does.

Now, I can’t pretend to know all the reasons why you can’t seem to experience the reality of God. But I’ll share with you what little I do know and what I’ve found has worked for me and countless others.
All of our emotions are associated with videos and soundtracks and other experiences we automatically run in our brains. We think by replicating our real life experiences in our heads, with all five senses, and there is always an emotional component to our thought. We tend to think that people and events outside us cause us to be angry or happy or whatever, but actually the thing that produces our emotion is the way we interpret people and events outside of us. And we interpret them automatically by conjuring up videos and soundtracks and other experiences in response to the people and events outside of us.

This is why a person might say to two different people, “you are fat,” and one cries while the other laughs. To the first, the words perhaps evoked memories of being publicly humiliated on a bus in 6th grade, while to the other it conjured up the image of an insecure five-year-old insulting them as they attempt to impress their five-year-old peers, or something like that. We usually aren’t aware of the videos and soundtracks we run in our brain, because they occur at about 1/3000th of a second, much faster than our consciousness can attend to. But THIS is how all emotions operate.
So, if you change the mental pictures you run in your brain, you change your emotions.

All that is to say if you’re feeling like God is distant, unloving, non-existent, it’s because you are unwittingly running videos and soundtracks and other experiences in your brain of a distant, unloving and/or non-existent deity. Anyone who experienced what you experienced in your mind would feel the way you feel. This isn’t your fault B. Who knows how the crap in our brain got there? The important thing is to realize that the crap is there and that this crap is the source of our crappy emotional experience. Most importantly, you need to know there is something you can do about it.

Here’s what I recommend.
a) First, know the intellectual reasons why you believe Jesus is the definitive revelation of God. Some people base their faith on personal experiences they’ve had, but I find this to be far too fickle and subjective. I instead ground my faith in historical and philosophical considerations. If I actually experience God’s love or anything spiritually, that is great, but if I don’t, it doesn’t at all affect my faith that this is true. (If you’re uncertain about why you believe, I encourage you to study the matter, e.g. Letters from a Skeptic, by my dad and me or The Jesus Legend by Paul Eddy and me).

b) Once I’ve intellectually resolved that Jesus is the definitive revelation of God, I now try to get all my thinking to line up with this (2 Cor 10:3-5). And a major part of this is making regular time to imagine Jesus. I put on some beautiful music, turn out the lights, and then meet Jesus, listen to what he has to say to me (always the same wonderful stuff he says in the NT, but now it’s to me personally). I sometimes take walks with Jesus, and we sometimes go back into the past and redo wounding memories. I talk about this in my book Seeing Is Believing and also in Escaping the Matrix (with Al Larson), both of which I strongly recommend for you.

c) This imaginative exercise will probably initially feel like you’re “making this up” on your own. Any time we do something “new” in our imagination, it feels like WE are making it up. Don’t worry about this. Even if you were “just making it up,” you’re still bringing your mind in line with what is true (see “a”), and that’s a good thing. For example, if I imagine Jesus right next to me right now, who cares if I’m making it up? I have good reason to believe Jesus is right here next to me. So if I imagine him here, I just made my overall worldview more accurate. In fact, my perception of my room at any moment is inaccurate to the degree that I see the room without him.
But if you open your imagination to the Spirit, whose job it is to unite us more and more with Jesus, I think that over time you’ll sometimes become aware that you are not “making this up.” We encounter the real Jesus in our imagination. (BTW, this is a very traditional practice, called “cataphatic prayer,” and the imagination has been called “the inner sanctuary,” precisely because it was understood to be the place where we encounter Christ).

d) Don’t enter into this imaginative exercise for the purpose of experiencing emotions. That will sabotage the whole thing. Rather, enter the imaginative exercise because you believe it’s true that Jesus is the definitive revelation of God. So don’t try to experience anything, and don’t get bugged if you don’t. But over time, if you are consistent with this, you’ll likely find that you begin to experience the feeling of being loved by him and begin to feel love toward him. Most of the time I spend in imaginative prayer I don’t feel much, but on occasion I get beautifully moved.

Finally, you might be wondering — why doesn’t God just “remove the veil” and cause me to experience him? There are always an unfathomable number of variables that affect the extent to which God can and can’t break through in our world (see my Is God to Blame?). But one important variable may be this. God wants us to be empowered to take back all that the enemy stole. And the first thing we need to learn to take back is our mind. We do have authority over what we think, and therefore over what we feel. It’s just that in our fallen state, we rarely use this. We thus allow our thoughts and feelings to be dictated to us by others — which is why most people feel they just are the way they are and can’t change. But Scripture everywhere tells us what to think (e.g. Phil.4:8), which presupposes we have power over what we think. And while God is always working to open us to as much of him as possible, I don’t think he ever wants to lobotomize us by controlling our brain for us.
Anyway, I hope you try this for a significant period of time and I hope you find it begins to make the truth of Jesus feel more real.

Blessings,

Greg

Religious Abracadabra

With the use of faith formulas and using the "religions abracadabra"...IN JESUS' NAME...it is easy to get caught up in the religious spiritual mystic of instant spiritual gratification.

Does the phrase "in Jesus' name" tacked on the end of a prayer assure your prayer will get answered and force God to give what was asked for in the prayer. Does ending a prayer with  "in Jesus name" give us a blank check or give the prayer a hocus-pocus, abracadabra instant gratification?

The confusion that religion has caused in this area stems from their ignorance of what faith is. Faith to the religionist is something we create within ourselves as payment to get God to do what we want done. If we can "muster" up enough faith the mountains will be moved into the sea.

In times of crisis we do forced faith exercises as an effort to believe, which adds more frustration and stress to the overwhelming circumstance.  This added weight called “faith,” instead of bringing us life, has added the yoke of guilt to our misery.

When faith is seen as a mysterious force which magically changes adverse circumstances and when the circumstance does not change people feel condemned, guilty and spiritually anemic because they don't seem to "have" it. When we have faith in a friend it simply means that we trust them. I have faith in my friends, but this doesn’t mean I possess some power that makes them respond in my favor. There is no inherent power in faith, faith is simply trusting God.

A.W. Tozer stated that, “faith is the gaze of the soul upon a loving God.”

God is here, ready, willing and able to help us. Our faith does not change God's mind or force Him to respond to our demands, faith changes us to totally trust that God has done it all like He says He has. When we don’t believe Him, we shut ourselves off from experiencing God’s power and limit His work through us. If we do not believe that Christ did it all, we will live trying to do what we think  He did not do and we will fail to see that it is already a done deal. God is present saying, “Listen, I love you!” yet by unbelief, we can shut the eyes of our heart...blinding us from seeing and experiencing our loving Father.

Praying in Jesus’ name really means to pray as His ambassador, and with His desire. It doesn’t give us a blank check to get what we want, when we want or how we want, it means having our prayer echo God’s heart, desire and will. His will is for us to trust Him 100% as did the man who said; "you don't have to come and heal my daughter, just speak the word and she will be healed". Such faith...(trust) in Jesus and who He was was not found in all of Israel.