Backwards Revolution

Beautiful Depression

2008-10-14T22:12:00.000-07:00

There is no guarantee that Jesus will make you happy right now. While you certainly could expect at least some happiness this side of heaven, unending euphoria is not a current experience of the average child of God. At least its not mine. In fact, I am often depressed, no matter how positive my thoughts. I can pray, seek the Lord, live in holiness (as best I can), live in the Church, think happy thoughts, and still feel sad. Yes, I am often depressed. But that's nothing to be depressed about...

I love the words of the old song...

O love that seekest me through pain

I shall not ask to hide from thee

I'll trace the rainbow through the rain

and find the promise is not vain

that morn shall tearless be.

We must be honest. Sorrow may last for the night. And before we triumphalistically declare that "!!!Joy comes in the morning!!!!" we should remember that the night is real. The night should not be dismissed or overlooked. We help the depressed best (I am speaking to myself) when we recognize the darkness but don't capitulate to it. We are not the slaves of our moods. Christ is powerful, even over depressions and heartaches and stress and disapointment. He hides himself just beyond view, not to trick us, but to offer the blessing of HOPE.

Even the scripture says that hope which is seen is not hope. You can't hope for something you can see (understand). It also says hope is an anchor to the soul. So that means that when we can't feel the joy of God, he must be just under the boat, strengthening our anchor, waiting to come up again when the darkness has strengthened us just enough.

Isn't depression a horrible, painful, devastating grace?

What a severe beauty...to grasp the invisible just long enough to be drawn into eternal joy.

Look and Live

2008-05-09T10:10:00.000-07:00

I preached a message from II Cor 3:18 last week and then wrote a song from what I learned. Here are the lyrics.

Verse 1
Faith sees the Christ of eternity
Brutally slain on a tree
Grasps that atonement for sin was made
And knows it was made there for me

Faith moves my heart to see deeper still
And seeing, more grace to receive…

CHORUS
Look upon Jesus, thirsty soul of mine
Look unto Jesus, drink deep of his love
Wells of mercy, tides of joy…
All for a look unto Jesus
Look unto Jesus
Look and live.

Verse 2
The Spirit of God moves within my life
To make all my heart like the Son
The more that I gaze upon Jesus’ face
The more like God’s Son I become

The more that I look the more that I long
For the day I’ll see face to face

A Workingman's Guide to Successful Doubting

2008-04-30T13:33:00.000-07:00

Doubting is Faith…if you doubt the truth with all your might.

I am convinced that doubt is one of the greatest helps to true faith that we run across in life. Conversely, running from doubt is the only way to strengthen doubt and quench faith.

Believing is not the blind acceptance of something your heart tells you is false.
True faith consists in hammering my doubts against what is true until my perception of reality aligns with the truth…or I realize what I believed was never true.

To strengthen faith I must doubt the truth with all my might and see if my beliefs can handle my doubts. If my beliefs are so wimpy they fall away at the first challenge, they weren’t worth holding to in the first place. Doubt everything, and only the truth will in the end commend itself to your heart and mind...so long as your doubts are strenuous and genuine.

Our problem is not the strength of our doubts, but their weakness. If we embraced our doubts and tested our faith we would find that our faith holds true. Instead we think our beliefs are so weak that they couldn’t withstand scrutiny, and consequently we never test our faith, fearing it will prove untrue. So we put scrutiny on the back burner, and meanwhile doubts grow unchecked. They grown and grow until we wonder why faith has eroded to nothing. We fed our doubts by fearing them. May it never be.

Here are some suggestions for successful doubting:

1. Pursue the Holy Spirit’s work in revealing the truth to you as you read the word, whether or not you are sure you believe it or not. Ask for illumination while positioning yourself to digest and obey what God reveals. The Holy Spirit is great at changing hearts to see and savor the truth.

2. Doubt in community. Shame and fear only breed further doubt. Be open and honest about your doubts. Be brutally honest. So many doubts have simple answers that others know, but we will never find the answers if we can’t admit we have questions. Sometimes doubt is more feeling-based than fact-based. So we run from God’s people (the place where God is pouring out his love) and wonder why God seems distant and unreal (no wonder, you ran away from him). God is most active in the church (read church as true believers organized biblically to fulfill God’s global mission locally) to display his glory and transform believers to be like his divine Son. So if you doubt God, go where God claims to be and you will be in a better position, long-term, to see if he’s really there.

3. Remember, God is not concerned as much that we agree with the truth as that we love the truth and live it out. Agreement is only a first step. So do not content yourself with mind games and plausible arguments that may make the truth look untrue. Try living the truth and you will be in a position to see whether or not it works. Truth is living and vital and worth far more than just mental assent. To agree with a truth you do not love or live is to believe as the devil believes—he knows but does not trust. Likewise, to increase faith I should attempt living it…and I just may grow to love it.

An outline of unconditional

2008-04-23T13:11:00.000-07:00

It is sacred to be loved. To feel the aproval of another is wonderful; to be enjoyed without having to earn aproval is a sliver of heaven. The glorious truth of the gospel is that I can stop trying to earn God's aproval, and instead enjoy a God who sacrificed his Son to win my rebel heart, make me approvable, and then shower eternal love on me. God enjoys me, not because I am worthwhile, but because he created and is re-creating me to be worth his while. So I can rest. No more angry Father in the skies (and no doting grandfather in the skies, either) but an omnipotent lover of my unlovely soul. God loves us into becoming lovely.

Only when you see God's pure hands reaching into the muck to pull out your soul and set you (clean and restored) on a rock can you begin to feel the weighty sweetness of unconditional love. Not that God was't disgusted and angered by our sin (thank you, God, for being holy), but that his love cleanses and renews and accepts and forgives and re-creates (thank you, God, for loving me). The cross exposes the evil of my sin, and in so doing throws a million spotlights on the magnitude of divine love. Jesus...friend of sinners they called him, slightingly. I wonder if ever a cruel word could have been so enjoyed by our Savior as that mocking title of FRIEND. A friend of God through Jesus' blood...O yes, that's exactly what I am.

O brother or sister or skeptic or friend...rest and wrestle with God's difficult and glorious love. Explore what it means. Feel what if offers. Do what it demands. Indeed, love so amazing, so divine, demands my soul, my life, my all--so the hymn tells us.

And never was a gift so enjoyable to give, O Christ. I am overwhelmed that you would love me. Overwhelm me yet again till I remember in my heart that knowing you is eternal life and these present blessings are just shadows of a mountainous grace just across a near horizon. Green pastures and still waters are but premonitions of love-continents and love-oceans yet to be discovered in the mystery of eternity. May I experience the fullness of your love as I give myself away to you, becoming a walking, breathing, living sacrifice of daily dying, living, rejoicing and praise to the God/Lover who consumes my heart's capacity and ravishes me with daily kindnesses and love.

A brain-hurting worship reflection

2008-04-11T12:03:00.000-07:00

Think with me for just a moment...

Is God everywhere? Yes. But if so, what does that actually mean? When I say that I am here, I mean precisely that I am only here. I mean that I am here and not there...or anywhere else. My atoms and molecules occupy discrete locations in time-space. Even though my right hand is in one place, and my left in another, I cannot say that I am in two places at once. Part of me is here and part of me is there.

But not God. No, one part of God is not in Siberia and a different part in L.A. All of him is everywhere. And what's this business about God being anywhere anyway? He is spirit, which means he has no atoms or molecules that are in any particular place, anywhere. So what do we even mean when we say that God is everywhere? Can that even mean anything?

This is where my brain hurts just long enough to make me worship. How devious is the notion that knowing God means understanding him fully. Wonder and understanding are not enemies, but neither are they the same thing. The more we know, the more fully we behold the depths of our ignorance. As godly conviction increases, so should humility. God-knowledge ought to be specific and full and weighty, but the deeper we are in God, the more amazed we should be at the magnitude of his splendorous greatness. He is beyond our comprehension. Praise God, I cannot understand God! Thank you, Jesus, for dying that I might be brought near to a God far too wonderful to grasp in my puny hands. Thank you for being beyond my words.

And thank you for giving us your words, so that by the miracle of your Spirit's work we just might understand the incomprehensible mystery of your infinite divine worth. How wonderful is the word of God! How powerful the word that commands and the nothing obeys by becoming a universe. How powerful would it be, should God choose to shout timeless truth though a book, heralded by human lives. How powerful would it be, should the word become flesh and dwell among us. Perhaps then we could see glory full of grace and truth. Through the powerful Word I do understand, I do know, I can see the invisible God who is everywhere (even if I don't understand exactly what that means).

But does that Bible give us clues as to what this everywhereness is like? Well consider this...

God knows everything that happens in creation
God is active in every event and circumstance (even evil, think crucifixion)
God's children cannot escape his love
God's enemies cannot avoid his punishment

So...where can I flee from your presence, O God? Nowhere. The Spirit of God who is nowhere physically, is everywhere in power, direction, love, and justice. In all of my journeys God knows the journey's end before I get there...because he is already there, setting up shop, preparing my welcome party, and arranging opportunities to serve his kingdom and glorify his name. God's on the move...everywhere. O Lord, give me eyes to see you everywhere...and a brain that longs to ache in wonder.

The Spirit Breathes Over the Deserts

2008-04-05T22:07:00.000-07:00

I too have seen the desert. I too have felt parched of soul. Sometimes I think that if my soul had a mouth, my tongue would be sticking dryly to the roof of it, yearning for just the smallest drop of relief. If I ever knew the God of abundance and blessing and joy, then I think he must reside in some sun-illuminated, green valley under the shade of a wise old pine tree. But wherever the heck he is, he is certainly not here. He doesn't see my groping along. He doesn't feel the weight of each lumbering step across the sand. Yes, I have seen the desert. But if I can offer one bit of truth, one lesson the desert taught me it would be this...

The Spirit breathes over the deserts.

I am often reminded in the difficult times--when my soul doubts its Maker, and all of my reality seems false--that God has tasted far worse thirstings and gropings than I can bear to imagine even in my darkest moments. I picture the blessed Lord Jesus lumbering toward Golgotha, cross in hand, thorns piercing his head. He stumbled. He thirsted. The great God of history, creative genius of the world's vast wonders, is walking in mind-bending pain towards a catasrophe far greater than any his body would endure. While his torn flesh dripped blood over his dying frame, while his genitals lay open to cruel exposure, and while the people he loved hurled insults at his holy face...the worst would come. For a succession of cosmic moments Jesus was alienated from God.

Now I see myself, hands and knees on the sand, and I wonder if something more than doubt and cynicism could be going on. Perhaps God is at work much like he was in the cross. Perhaps Jesus' desert (the cross) was a template for my own. Perhaps God is more concerned with the outcome of my alienation than in alleviating its pain. Perhaps God is wooing many to himself and restoring the cosmos in small ways through my time of distance from him. Perhaps when I am alienated from God I am most like Jesus on the cross. Perhaps God has a resurrection in mind.

So I try to take the desert like Jesus did; I try to take it in faith. If faith is the evidence of things unseen, then people of great faith are people who see little, but believe much. Jesus felt no closeness to God on the cross, yet still committed his soul to the Father. Can I still move forward pleading that God will receive each painful step as an act of worship, knowing all the while he may never keep the sand from blowing in my face and stinging my eyes with doubtful tears? Can I?

If I believe that the Spirit is blowing over the desert I can. If it is his loving breath that hurls the sand in my eyes, then I can trust and love and enjoy beyond feeling. For this same Spirit breathed out the words "weeping lasts for a night, but joy comes in the morning." You see, God is not in some hidden valley, removed from our wanderings and our aching numbness. No, he hides in the warm breezes of our deserts, brooding over a path he has taken before, coaxing our weak faith forward, increasing our panting after a new world of righteousness and peace. Trust his promise, believe his gospel, live out your doubts in the community of believers, and you will find it is true...joy really does come in the morning.

So for the anonymous person who prompted these thoughts...hang in there. My prayers are with you. God still has his children close at heart.

A not-so-uncertain shot in the dark...

2008-04-02T13:29:00.000-07:00

I am finally ready. If I was hesitant before, I am good and excited now. There is something so fundamental and intrinsic and glowing about life in God that it runs upstream in my blood and in my mind and possesses my interest until I am almost consumed with a passion for the act of living itself. It's been a long time coming, but I am ready for this blog.

We should handle theology like we handle dynamite. It should never read like a phone book. It should never smell like shoes you forgot and left outside in the rain. Deep theological reflection should never be separated from worship and wonder and spring and snow. If I care more for God as a precept than God as a person I am an idolator of the worst order; if I love God with all my heart, soul, mind, and strength then I am a theologian...at least a theologian like they should be.

I am convinced that we who lead God's people need to recapture people's attention with the wonder of specificity and clarity and authority. God has not left us without a witness, so our spiritual journeys are not a sightless wandering in an unfriendly dark. No, we are guided in the dimness by the light of God's candle (the Word) toward a seeable (though distant) event on the horizon of eternity. So our journey is vital and mystical but not without a guide. It is Beethoven as much as it is jazz--a strange juncture where my reason and my emotions refuse to be untangled as they challenge each other to greater joy in the Divine Reality that is the lover of my soul and the ground of all I know.

If you long for truth and love and something more than facts and more than feelings that is still both and yes and worth getting up for on the worst of mornings...then you may just be a friend. Check around for a few of the things God is teaching me. I'd love to hear your response.