Month: July 2012

Our Lord calls us to be childlike in faith. What does that mean for an adult?

For one thing it means receiving rather than earning. By this I mean that we need to learn, really re-learn, how to take something for our good without always giving in to the compulsion to try to earn it. Normally young children do not try to pay for a gift someone has given them, especially if that someone happens to be a parent. In fact the idea of paying for what is clearly a gift does not even cross their minds. This is part of the innocence of childhood and it is a very good thing. We tend to lose that kind of “innocence in receiving” as we grow up and take our places in an often loveless world which tells us nothing is free. We especially lose it if certain people either unconsciously or purposefully teach us that love, itself, is not free.

But God is the original “no-strings-attached” Giver. He gives because it is in His nature to do so. God is love and love is never earned, it is only freely given and freely received. When a good parent gives his or her child a gift simply out of love it is a faint echo of what the Creator of the universe gives to all humankind. This kind of love that extends to all is what has been called common grace. To become His children in Christ we are to become the recipients not only of such common grace but of saving grace as well, the receiving of Jesus as our Lord and Savior. For this to happen we must somehow become like a “little child” again. (How exactly this happens in salvation is a mystery to me. God enables us to receive even the childlikeness that makes it possible to receive Him, but we must will to do so. Whether that will is ours alone, or somehow also the gift of God I will leave to the Calvinists and Arminians to debate)

But even after the miracle of salvation our sanctification requires us to remain childlike. For many of us this means continuing to seek to be that way. Perhaps the critical question now becomes how we can enjoy our salvation, and its earthly blessings, rather than trying to continue to justify why we should have both. Even Christians fall into the trap of attempting to earn the ongoing love of their God. Salvation may be free, but sanctification costs, or so we think.

The Christian life does “cost” in the sense that it requires us to progressively give up the worldly things we continue to cling to for our sense of security. But even that process is enabled by the completely unearned love of God and it, again, can only be received with the trust of an innocent child. We cannot “earn” that state of trust either. We can only ask for it, in the name of our Lord.

This may seem like a circular argument: “we cannot earn the trust of a child, but we must trust God enough to give us that trust”. Maybe this is true from a purely rational standpoint, as far as that goes. Ironically children do not ever ask such questions. Their trust is, to a large degree, both innate and trans-rational.

My position is this: if we have truly known salvation we can simply ask our Father in Heaven for the further restoration of a childlike spirit because our very salvation proves we have some of it back already. As Christians we do not have to worry if we have the faith that requires. This is because the same mustard seed of faith we somehow found ourselves having to put our trust in God for our salvation still exists to also help us with this aspect of our sanctification.

I suppose that position requires some childlike faith as well. I trust I have it. I hope you have it too.

In this place and time many of us who call ourselves believers have come to know very little of the greatness and majesty of God. Perhaps we have allowed ourselves, whether consciously or unconsciously, to become caught up in the shallow meaninglessness of our “culture of disrespect”. Many Christians are immersed in a popular culture that we dwell in like fish swimming in de-oxygenated water that will not sustain their lives. In our case the part of our lives being starved is the spiritual. This is, in a profound sense, the most important part and what we are starving for, among other things, is a reverential attitude towards the Sovereign of the Universe as He really is.

Today we often bring an unthinking levity to our services that, when not kept to a minimum, can prevent us from entering into true worship. It is hard to lose ourselves in the kind of deep respect and awe for our Creator that He requires, and we desperately need, when there is no sense of the sacred in the way we “do church”. Perhaps humor and informality has its place in certain contexts and times in a worship service, but not if it leads to a kind of flip casualness in our approach to a God (a casualness that, unfortunately, the author has not himself been guiltless of).

For instance large segments of the Western Church in the early years of the 21st century have all but banished the word “fear” from the lexicon of words we apply to our daily relationship with our Lord. There are reasons for this, some of them resulting from a misunderstanding of what the word means in its deepest Christian sense. By “fear” we do not mean the terror inspired in a child by a cruel and vicious parent or other fallen human authority figure. Many of us have known such terror and the church has gone out of its way in recent years to explain that this is not the kind of fear the authors of Scripture had in mind. Unfortunately by only defining what the word isn’t in the biblical context, and not spending more time explaining what it is, the result has sometimes been a general disregard of the word and its not only proper, but necessary use.

We are to fear God in the sense of a deep reverential awe and sincere spirit of submission to the One who is Creator, Master, Judge, and Redeemer. We are to fear Him in the sense of understanding that He is infinitely greater than any created thing and the rightful, and righteous, master of every created thing. He is also the one Who, in dread sovereign power will determine the eternal destiny of all moral beings.

The men of the Bible knew this fear. In the Old Testament, when confronted with the Holy One of Israel, men like Daniel fell on their faces and cried out their unworthiness to stand in the presence of the Divine. When granted a vision of the resurrected Christ the New Testament saints had a similar reaction. Just ask Saul of Tarsus or John the Revelator.

One must come to the conclusion that many Post-Modern Christians in studiously informal and “relevant” churches have lost this kind of reverential submission, this “good fear”, of almighty God.

And why is this fear good? It is good because once a human soul becomes acquainted with its moral wretchedness relative to an absolutely holy and righteous God it can simultaneously become open to the love, grace and mercy of that very same God. God is perfectly holy, but He is also perfectly loving and His primary desire for the human race is its redemption, the permanent restoration of blessed communion with its Creator, not its condemnation. The cross of Jesus bears mute testimony to this ultimate truth. The paradox is that the fearsome God is also the tender and compassionate God, but you cannot know one without the other and come to a place of real repentance and true redemption.

We quite rightly decry “fire and brimstone” preaching if its only source is the self-righteous anger of the preacher. Yet there is a place for reminding Christians that our Lord is not mocked. If we want to approach God in a sort of casual moral informality marked by flippant treatment of holy things, and even the name of God, we may someday face the kind of hard discipline that can only restore a proper respect for that Name. Thanks be to Him that even such a severe mercy at the hands of the Father is indicative of His loving nature because, while it is severe, it is still a mercy.

What would be far better would be to examine ourselves now to see if we have a proper “God-fearingness” within our hearts and to ask for the conviction of the Holy Spirit if we sense we do not. By sincerely taking this initiative to become penitent and thus more reverentially related to the Sovereign King of the Universe we may come to have a newfound healthy fear of disrespecting Him, and that kind of holy fear is exactly what we are talking abo

It has been said that without an infinite reference point the finite has no meaning. This is why all the things in the world that human beings expect to provide them fulfillment in and of themselves ultimately fail to do so. That which is not attainable on a permanent basis in the deepest sense of the word, permanent, will never meet the ultimate need of creatures that have been endowed with eternal existence. Only the truly eternal both answers that need and provides a derived value for the things we continue to hold dear on Earth.

This is a reality that, sadly, even many professed Christians must learn today.

We do not need to turn to the experience of Solomon in the Book of Ecclesiastes to know that this is true. Today many citizens of affluent liberal democracies in the West search for real and enduring meaning in everything from material possessions, sexually and chemically-induced pleasure, and achievement to adventure travel, extreme physical activity, and even hobbies to try and attain to some sort of transcendence. Solomon did the same with the tools the throne of Israel afforded him 3,000 years ago. Whether then or now the final result was and is the same. Those whose existence is oriented only around the temporal possibilities this life affords must eventually cry out, with Solomon, “Meaningless, meaningless, all is meaningless!”

There is, of course, true meaning in the universe. If there wasn’t humankind would not have such a deeply ingrained longing for it. But such true meaning can only be found in the One who has created all things temporal from the depths of an eternal nature. Only the eternal God embodies, and thus provides for those who seek Him, anything that can be honestly called ultimately significant.

The very planet we live on is not permanent. Neither are our lives here. The Bible teaches that this present fallen world is passing away and is, in fact, destined to be burned in a final cataclysm. As for us our time here it is finite. We will someday die and leave everything and everyone we have known behind. The temporal nature of both the world and our lives in their present form make it absolutely impossible to find lasting meaning in anything here today, at least anything that will not survive beyond our deaths and the coming end of this world.

Trying to find infinite meaning in the finite is perhaps the ultimate exercise in futility.

The good news is that we can find such meaning in our eternal and infinite God, though only through a saving relationship with His Son Jesus. Admittedly, while sojourning here on Earth, our grasp of this meaning will not be what it is destined to be once we meet our Lord face to face, but we can know it now at least in part. We can be touched by God and find our lives infused with purpose that we never dreamed of in our former existence when we were hopelessly wedded to that which does not last.

Beyond this even the things we once felt valuable in our present existence, but have grown disillusioned with, can also be infused with meaning when they are employed in the service of that which is eternal. This is what can happen when the finite acquires that infinite reference point. We may find a new and healthy love for things that were once only useless idols in our lives (if, of course, those idols were not in the form of something intrinsically sinful). Anything morally neutral in this life can be harnessed to the eternal purposes of God and thus find new meaning. They may even fulfill us in ways they could not when they were substitutes for Jesus Christ in our lives.

We are eternal beings whose destiny is only found in our eternal Creator. In Him both we and the finite things of our present find their meaning. God alone is our “Infinite Reference Point” and so much more….

Can we ever get anywhere worthwhile outside of relationship with God and with others? It is spiritual commonsense that we cannot, but for some of us it seems nearly impossible not to try. We stubbornly, if subconsciously, cling to self-effort to make us into the people we think we want to be. We rely on ourselves to pick ourselves up by our own bootstraps and ascend to a place of peace, confidence and joy even when we know from both the Bible and experience that it is a patently futile act.

Many of us “talk a good game” about our dependence on the Lord and our interdependence vis a vis other people. We talk of being saved by the grace of God and sustained by our human relationships, but we still are wracked by fear, doubt and depression. To the degree that this dichotomy is true we are deceiving both ourselves and others.

Of course no one can sustain their sanity for long living purely as an island. Those who are completely bereft of the company of both God and man, and persist in that condition, die emotionally, spiritually and often physically sooner rather than later. But such an extreme state is not what we are primarily speaking of.

The vast majority of Westerners today are people who have some degree of connection with other people. Western Christians add to that some degree of connection with God. But for far too many Christians both the horizontal and vertical relationships are kept at a manageably controllable level. We give ourselves partially over to relationships, but not so much that we consciously depend on them for both a full temporal life and for the changes we must allow ourselves to experience to attain to eternal life. What holds us back from full membership in “the Blessed Community” is a mixture of pride and fear.

The pride aspect of this unfortunate reality is inherent to fallen human beings and is exacerbated by the hyper-individualism of contemporary Post-Modern society which tells us we do not need to depend on anyone or anything. The fear component may have less to do with our flesh and more to do with wounds we have sustained from other people early in life, although it still reflects distrust for God’s ultimately redemptive purposes for those wounds. These pride and fear barriers to deeply sustaining and transformative relationships can, therefore, only be removed by a combination of profound repentance and healing.

In both cases it is only the loving grace of God that enables real change and our reception of that grace is, to at least some extent, dependent on our choice whether or not to accept it. Even once we do choose to accept it the process of change is just that, a process, and most likely will involve a slow movement towards authentically deepening relationships with both our Lord and our fellows. In the meantime it may feel like our relationships continue to be inadequate. This is not necessarily something to be alarmed about. The important thing is that we are finally moving in the right direction. Relational perfection is not fully obtainable on this side of Heaven. What matters is that we are no longer holding God and His human agents of growth in our lives at arm’s length. We are no longer a sinking island but, in increasing measure, part of a continent known as the Kingdom of God.

It is vital that we come to know in our hearts that God is greater than anything we have ever experienced and therefore capable of changing that which we may have known for most of our time on earth. There are so many things in our lives that we have seen and felt, been and done, possessed and lost. All too often these things have crippled us spiritually, emotionally and psychologically, and may continue to do so long years into our Christian lives.

It is easy to forget, or simply to not fully believe in, some of the attributes of God that can give us the most hope for real personal transformation. For instance we forget that He is omnipotent, all-powerful. There is nothing in our damaged and sin-wracked hearts that His power cannot heal once we have repented in spirit and in truth. Even the very ability to give ourselves over to such repentance comes from His omnipotent kindness leading us there. We fail to remember that His capacity to transform is absolute. His arm is never too short to save no matter how bad we think our lives have been or how terrible and repetitive have been our sins. It is a matter of recognizing that God is not “almighty” in the abstract. He is almighty in our most intimate and guarded selves. He is almighty to us as individuals.

God is also omniscient. By this we mean that He is all-knowing. Sometimes, many times if those of us who struggle are honest with ourselves, we must admit that we do not really feel “known” by the One we call Lord. This is because we do not feel the intimacy with God that we assume would come with being so known. But God never promises that we will always sense His presence in the “knowing”. We must take it on faith that His very nature as God insures that nothing which continues to hurt and cripple us is not fully and intimately known and understood by Him. We must trust that the power He can wield in our lives for good is always guided by a personal knowledge of who we are that goes far beyond our own often flawed self-knowledge.

These two attributes, omnipotence and omniscience, are vital for us to apprehend and accept as absolute truth if we are to find the faith to believe in the potential of God’s transformative power for our lives. But they are not enough for us. We must also accept another eternal attribute of our Creator and Redeemer in Christ if we are to have real hope. That attribute is His absolute goodness. Our God is un-utterably good. There is nothing of the wicked to be found in Him….ever. Wickedness is a characteristic only of created beings that were given the divine gift of free-will and then used it to rebel against God. God Himself is purely good and therefore, by blessed extension, good to us. The aspect of this goodness that is most needful for we who struggle so hard in the Christian life to know is that it favorably disposes God towards us. He desires our good because He is good.

So these three aspects of God’s unchanging nature together can give us the hope we need for real and blessed change in who we are this very moment. His omnipotence supplies the power greater than any external power blocking our repentance and healing. His omniscience enables Him to know completely what inside of us is in desperate need of change. Finally God’s pure and infinite goodness motivates Him to use both of the other attributes to transform us according to what we most deeply need, and what He most deeply wants for us.

If you have found it difficult to believe that real and positive change is still possible in your life try meditating regularly on these three aspects of God’s perfect character. Beyond that, meditate on all the aspects of who God is. You may find yourself beginning to believe that since “nothing is impossible” for such a God maybe, just maybe, He can and will deliver you from the things you have felt helpless to change by yourself.

What is the greatest desire that can be harbored in the heart of a Christian? Is it not this: that the deepest part of us be defined by God….and owned by Him?

Twenty years ago I knew nothing of this desire, only a monstrous depression and the sense of living death. I felt alienated from all things and indeed was, insofar as I yet knew nothing of the Ground of all being, including my own. The consolations that, unknown to me, common grace had afforded in earlier years were utterly gone. Both my childhood share of natural happiness and my adolescent inklings of transcendence had been banished by an existential alienation that thoroughly lodged itself in my soul as I entered young adulthood. I was desperate for life, yet lost in a horror of despair.

In the admittedly hard struggles that have defined much of my Christian walk since my conversion in 1990 it has sometimes been all too easy to forget just how terrible my existence as an Atheist had become; or how nothing was the same the moment belief began.

Then, as the title of the biography of another converted Atheist, Joy Davidman Lewis put it, “God Came In”. God and Christ and light and life that I had never before known “came in”. It was, for me, fleeting as experienced in real time (in fact, to what seems to me too large an extent, it continues to be that way in my experiences of God even today), but it was real. The Lord of all did become a part of my being, I hope the core of my being, and nothing has ever been the same. The cross became my bottom-line, the One who once hung there my new and all-powerful reason to carry on.

Perhaps the very drama of that change two decades ago is what haunts my Christian life now and brings me back to the question I began this essay with; the question of what the deepest desire should be for a person who professes to be a follower of Christ.

You see the greatest sin I feel in myself these days is the same one I have felt consistently for my entire time as a believer. It is the deep resistance to God that haunts my days and nights, the unbelief, the fear of real surrender and absolute commitment. It seems to me that I almost always keep Him at wretched arm’s length rarely, oh so rarely, letting down my self-centered guard. What am I guarding against exactly, you ask? It is God’s claim as Lord above all else in my life, as Lord not only of that “all”, but of me.

Maybe this is what accounts for the continued fleetingness of my times of sensed communion with God.

Of course I suppose all of us who are believers, but who remain in this world, have felt this resistance to some degree. We are told in the Scriptures that, even now, we must struggle against our, hopefully dying, flesh. The new nature is ours, but the old nature in some form remains and competes for our attention. At times we even hug this unquiet spiritual corpse, this cadaverous “old man” who still masquerades as our deepest identity and has no intention of allowing himself to be quietly crucified. We do this even as we remain aware that the old man was the core of our once hopeless condition, and even though we know that Christ has given us new life.

But deep down hopefully we also know that to be defined and owned by the perfect God of love is the thing we truly want the most. At the least let us, let me, in Jesus name “desire the desire” and wait for He who died for us all to supply the thing itself. Then we can all make that leap of surrender and commitment, though perhaps having to make it over and over again, until our union with our Lord and Savior is well and truly on the road to being experientially absolute.

Nothing we have seen, nothing we have known, nothing we have suffered, nothing we have lost, nothing we have done and nothing we have been is greater than God. God’s ultimate reality, His ultimate Being is still capable of possessing our eternal future, and we who have truly put our ongoing trust in the Lord Jesus Christ need not be afraid of our past.

This truth is not just a good thing about the authentic Christian life. It is one of the best things.

But, as the Christian mystic A.W. Tozer said, “There is more”. There is always more with our heavenly Father and this is also a “best thing”. Yes, this world, this life, no matter how abundant it may sometimes be or seem to be, is not enough, not nearly enough. The finite and the fallen, the passing and the ending, all which remains trapped in time, is not nearly enough. These are truly aspects of our existence here, but not there, on earth, but not in Heaven.

Yet we exist in this world for now, so I offer a prayer for all God’s children for our earthly past, present and future.

Oh, Lord of both time and eternity, take our past, what we have been and grant that what was always of You in those times will be ours again. Take that which was blessed of Heaven, from our earliest childhood memories to just yesterday, and restore them to our consciousness, our consciousness in you. Grant us to know both the happiness of common grace and the joy of saving grace to the extent we can in the here and now.

Beyond this, help us to come to know a sublime blending of all that has been good in our past, all that has truly come from your merciful and loving hand, to put a realization within us that is greater than the sum of its parts up until this point in our lives. Grant us to know the healing and integration of all that we experienced and thought was for evil, but that you have somehow transformed into our good, to the glory of your Name. In this way give us an abundant future on earth until the day you return or take us home.

All of us who believe on you, Jesus, somewhere deep within want to accept the sublime plan you have for our lives in You. We long to accept the love, mercy and care You have for us so that we will progressively come to consistently know the joy, peace and love You perfectly embody, to know You, even in sweet mystery.

So if it pleases You to answer this prayer may we who, once apart from You, were ignoble, a embodiment of disgrace and darkness, in short people of no good account in and of ourselves, begin to see ourselves as we now truly are in salvation and sanctification. We are princes and princesses in the making, beings of dignity and meaning, nobility and light, in and through You and You alone.

In Your Name, amen….