Month: May 2012

There is a tendency among some Christians to link spiritual growth with forsaking all aspects of their past. They deeply desire profound change to happen; the kind of change that allows them to rapidly leave behind the old life they now consider worthless in the eyes of God. It seems forgetting all that is past in their experience is one of the most obvious and best ways to accomplish this goal.

The problem is that all of the experiences of that old life were not necessary inherently sinful. The sins of our past must not be allowed any place in our Christian life from the time of conversion onwards, this is true, but there are morally neutral and even morally positive aspects of our past. These aspects take many forms. They may be the enthusiasms, friendships, career goals or even the deep emotions and transcendent experiences we had before Christ came into our lives, but which might have pointed us towards Him. New believers often try to reject everything that made them who they were before their spiritual rebirth, assuming that nothing they were could possibly have been something their new Savior might have made them to be before they came to know Him.

Such rejection often seemed wise in the dramatic days of that rebirth. This is especially true for those of us who came to the end of ourselves only after effectively running our lives into the ground. In the deep desire to put our self-directed lives behind us we attempted to throw out everything that we felt was not “spiritual”. After all, aren’t we new creations? The cross is before us and the world behind us. Everything old must go.

Or so we think.

But years later we may begin to feel that we are not progressing in the faith, that we are not where we should be by this time. Accompanying that is a feeling that there is unfinished business in our lives. More disturbingly, we may have a sense of not knowing who we are, even in Christ. The Christian life does not seem to make sense anymore because all we assumed God would have accomplished in our lives “by now” has not come to pass.

When this happens the immediate temptation is to believe that some terrible sin harbored in our hearts is behind the spiritual malaise we experience. Sometimes this is true. A besetting sin can poison our relationship with God and remove us from His will. The result can be a terrible sense of being in the wrong place. Life cannot make sense when we are in the far country of the Prodigal.

There is, however, another possibility not related to sin. Could it be that, all those years before, we discarded part of who God made us to be? Our new and fervent zeal led some of us to try to erase nearly everything we once were in our pre-conversion life. Could it be possible we throw the proverbial babe out with the bathwater?

I have known of more than one believer who made the decision to go into “full-time ministry” only to find out after years of blood, sweat and tears that they make terrible pastors, evangelists, missionaries, etc. Sometimes the shock of failure has been enough to deeply shake their faith, putting them into a spiritual tailspin. Why would God “radically save” them if it was not His intention that they would be the next Billy Graham?

Yet perhaps these vocational shipwrecks are blessings in disguise. God is not above using the severe mercy of letting us bang our heads against the wall to show us the truth about who we are really meant to be in Him. Perhaps the childhood enthusiasm for becoming an artist, pilot or veterinarian when we grew up was God-given, even though we did not yet know that God personally as a Christian.

By the same token maybe some of the joyous or happy feelings we once knew as unbelievers were not sinful counterfeits, but blessed manifestations of God’s common grace being shed upon our lives. The wonders of childhood, for instance, can be experienced by all human beings, though they come in a time before many of us are even consciously aware of the concept of a transcendent God.

It could be that some of us need to stop fearing every aspect of our early pre-Christian lives and instead, with the help of the Spirit, begin to selectively re-embrace those things that once brought us some health and happiness during that time. It might even be that this is a necessary pre-cursor to God moving us on in our earthly pilgrimage if we find ourselves “stuck”. His loving plan for our future may well involve re-integrating some of our old loves into the new ones we have found as believers. Once we allow, and even pursue, this re-integration we may come to better know and embrace the totality of who our Lord always meant us to be. This comes with understanding and embracing what He may have always wanted for us, to let at least some of what was not inherently sinful in our pasts become a part of our future in Him

An appropriate caveat must be made before we travel further along this line of thought. Serving Jesus Christ with right motivation is truly a wonderful thing and an incredible privilege. It is also a mandate from our Father. One of the reasons we were created was to act as servants of the most high God. We are not living in His will if we are forever idle, “unprofitable” workers in the spiritual and physical vineyards God has left us to tend until His Son returns. That said we must still address an imbalance in much of the contemporary church between doing and being. Yes, believers have a high calling to do the work of the Lord, however the cart should not be put before the proverbial horse. Our highest calling is not working for God but knowing Him.

At times teachers and preachers in the Western church seem to have missed the meaning of the story of Mary and Martha. When Mary did nothing but sit at the feet of Jesus we are told she was being more obedient to God than her apparently virtuous, hard working sister. His approval of a woman who simply sat before Him, drinking in both His presence and His wisdom, is instructive. Perhaps Martha was sincerely trying to serve Jesus in her busyness. She certainly felt she was being more “spiritual” then her sister in doing so. But when she tried pressing the point with her Lord and criticized her sister she received a rebuke, albeit a light and loving one. Jesus was more concerned about Martha knowing Him than her working for Him.

God’s greatest purpose in creating the human race was to give us the opportunity to be in intimate contact with Him. Relationship is bound up in the very nature of God. Within the Godhead the Trinity of Father, Son and Holy Spirit exist in perfect relationship with one another. When we were created we were designed to live in deep communion with the One who created us. Deep calls to deep between our Lord and ourselves because we were made for Him, to be with Him in the deepest, most profound way possible. As it has been written “to know God, and enjoy Him forever”, is our highest calling as Christians. It is the primary reason we exist and it is the fount of our greatest joy.

When we come to know and love Jesus Christ we then naturally want to do His will on Earth. All true servanthood flows out of a pre-existing love relationship with the One who loved us first. Such love is the right motivation for any labor we do in His name (and in work so motivated we truly can then come to know our Lord better) but the authenticity and effectiveness of our work in the Kingdom is proportional to how close our communion is with its King. When that communion is paramount the labor we are truly called to in this life becomes a labor of love.

Understanding and accepting that we do not deserve salvation is one of the most important factors in making our salvation real to us. It is impossible to fully come to this place as long as we harbor the idea, either consciously or unconsciously, that we have any worthiness in and of ourselves.

Today many human beings think themselves worthy of Heaven. Many others think that they are on their way to being worthy, through their own effort. To some degree we are all born with this lie embedded in our souls. It is part of the inordinate pride inherent in our fallen condition. Some might even say that this belief is the essence of the curse we have lived under since the Garden. Its only antidote is the hard remedy that comes with the conviction of our hearts by the Holy Spirit. We are confronted by a new knowledge of ourselves, the awareness that we are not good people and never have been. Accepting the truth of this is one of the most difficult experiences a person can go through but, paradoxically, it is also one of the greatest. For in this terrible new understanding is the potential bloom of certain knowledge that we need a Savior. Salvation often follows soon after an individual’s eyes are opened in this way.

But our initial salvation experience often does not completely erase our tendency to try to earn our way to the God we have entered into relationship with. We still have a sinful old nature to crucify, and part of this nature is made manifest in the voice that tries to burden us with an ongoing sense that we have to measure up to God if we hope to stay in His love. All too many Christians are still listening to this deception, often without conscious awareness that they are even doing so. The result is burnt-out, spiritual workaholics who fear they can easily lose their salvation. Obviously this is a prescription for despair.

As long as we are working in any way for God’s acceptance we will not be able to rest in the fact that we already have it through Jesus Christ. It was ours from the time we sincerely asked Him to forgive our sins and become our Redeemer. Only a progressive abandoning of the notion that we must earn our own way will usher us into the peace and joy we long to possess in our relationship with our Lord.

But often we must first bring our spiritual compulsivity into our conscious awareness. Many times our innate sinfulness in this area has been compounded by having parents and/or other people in our lives who withheld love from us if we displeased them. Because of this we may have emotional wounds that we do not deserve blame for. These wounds are often sublimated, with the result that they become deeply rooted in our subconscious. What we need here is healing, not an effort to crucify this part of who we are. When this happens our entire view of reality can be affected without our knowing it. This may be why some believers have a much harder time surrendering their lives to the grace of God than others.

God Himself is the answer. Sometimes the Spirit directly enables us to see what is driving our impulse to try to earn the Father’s love. Other times He uses counselors, pastors or close friends to help bring these subconscious tendencies to light in us. As this takes place (often progressively, rather than instantly) we can use this new awareness to enable us to surrender this part of who we are to the cleansing, healing and transforming power of God. Then our increasing understanding of His character, as opposed to our own, begins to free us from the impossible burden of “self-redemption.” We then find ourselves on the way to a new destination, a blessed place where we deeply drink from the ocean of acceptance and belonging that we were made for and desperately need, an ocean that can only be found in the One who loves us beyond our wildest dreams.

Our sense of limit, of “finiteness” needs to go when it comes to our contemplation of the attributes of God. He is limitless and thus, by definition, so are the qualities of His Being. As finite creatures our unconscious limiting of the attributes of God comes naturally to us. We live in a world of scarcity and so we have trouble apprehending a God who is both eternal and infinite in every aspect of Who He is.

Entering into a deeper grasp of the endless deeps of the divine character is a call to all His children from more than just the standpoint of “head-knowledge”. It is also needful to our very sanity. We live in a world of imperfection. We, ourselves, embody this imperfection, especially in our pre-conversion nature, but even now as believers living on this side of Heaven. This is why coming into contact with the unbounded nature of God is vital to our very spiritual life. We need to know in our hearts that nothing is impossible for our Lord because the transformation we recognize we need in order to truly live is totally impossible for us. If we are to grasp the reality of the power of God to redeem us we must have a growing belief in the attributes of His character and the fact that they are, as He is, without limit.

What are some of these attributes? They include His faithfulness, goodness, justice, mercy, grace, love, wisdom, and sovereignty. There are many more than these (A.W. Tozer, in fact, lists 19 separate divine qualities in his classic little book, The Knowledge of the Holy.) God might even, as Tozer at one point suggests, have attributes we cannot perceive in our current state of existence. But the ones for which we need to have some comprehension of limitlessness are those which are vital to us in this life. For instance one prime example of such a crucial knowledge is the true conviction that God is omnipotent, in other words all-powerful. This is “a must” if we are to even begin to believe that He, in Christ, is capable of securing our salvation. The sense of the vastness of our own sin makes knowledge of the infinitude of our Lord’s power to eliminate it essential.

Another example of a “need to know” in our Christian walk is the unlimited nature of God’s love. This is because it is one thing to recognize He has the power to save us and quite another to believe He also has the desire to do so. Infinite love points towards the absolute reality of such a desire because he who loves something inherently wants the highest good for that something…or someone. If God loves us He wants to do us good and, because he is God, he wants to do us good beyond all limits. Infinite love supplies the desire, infinite power the means.

The other divine attributes also meet some absolute need in us. Because we live in a sometimes unfair world we need to know that our Lord is infinitely just and will eternally remedy that unfairness someday. Because we live in a place of uncertainty and change we need to know our God is immutable and will soon usher in a perfect and unchanging place for us to inhabit. In each case we need to know more than the fact that the quality exists in our Redeemer, we also need to know it exists in such quantity as to forever secure the remedy to the particular thing that ails us.

Like nearly everything else in the life of a believer, coming to viscerally know the truth of the eternal infinitude of God’s attributes will only happen over time. In His perfection He has ordained that we human beings learn things in such a way. For this reason patience with ourselves is an important part of coming into the knowledge of the all-sufficiency of God to remake us in the image of His Son. It does us no good to fruitlessly fret about not having what we would consider to be an adequate knowledge of these things by a certain point in our lives. That said we would do well to always be looking to the divine attribute of all-sufficiency to put our minds and hearts at ease in the process. He is more than able to give us such knowledge at just the right moment in our lives. After all His timing is infinitely perfect too.