Two Questions

The thief comes only to steal and kill and destroy; I have come that they may have life, and have it to the full.
John 10:10

As I've been going through the last few weeks of warfare and starting to live out everything God showed to me at boot camp, I've found myself returning again and again to John 10:10. If you were trying to sum up the entire story of the Bible in a single verse I don't think you could do much better than this one. Yes, there's much more to the Gospel and to the Christian life but when it comes right down to it, what is going behind all of that other stuff is Jesus trying to restore and the enemy trying to destroy us.

With that in mind, as I've been thinking about this verse I've found that God has been using it to ask me two questions: What is Christ doing to give me life to the full? How is the enemy trying to steal, kill and destroy it?

I've found this to be a fantastic way to reorient myself on Christ. It forces me to look at my thoughts, my actions, my desires and think about where they're coming from. It forces me to think about what the fruit of any thought or action is.

For example, I've been feeling worried about work the past couple days. In the past I would have brushed this off as normal human anxiety or maybe even God trying to force me to go find more work. Asking myself these two questions completely changed the way I looked at my situation. If I recognize that the enemy is constantly trying to steal, kill and destroy my life than attempting to paralyze me with fear seems like a pretty effective way to accomplish his goal. Add to that the fruit of my worry wasn't to help me find more work or do anything worthwhile but to make me feel miserable.

On the more positive side, when I am asking myself how God is trying to bring me a full life, it changes everything. It's so easy to simply blast through the day but when I recognize that one of God's goals for the day is to bring me life it changes how I approach everything. I slow down and take in what He has for me in the beauty of the day. I can trust Him more because I know that whatever He's up to, it includes bringing me a full life.

I've known the truth of John 10:10 for quite a while now but drawing these two questions out of it and asking myself them regularly has moved that knowledge into action. Give it a shot. You might be surprised how much God shows you through it.

"I'm On Aslan's Side"

I spent a few days this week under a pretty heavy cloud of warfare. It was the sort of stuff that just seems to cut you off from God. You try and pray and you have to fight tooth and nail just to get a glimpse of His presence. You try and read your Bible and it just seems dry. Those of you who've experienced this sort of warfare know exactly what I'm talking about.

Going through a few days of fighting this spiritual blockade is a brilliant reminder of how we need to daily fight for our freedom. We need to guard our hearts with the utmost vigilance and constantly be centering ourselves on God. In the middle of these spiritual storms it is very possible to walk on water but only if we keep our eyes fixed on Christ.

As I was in the middle of this, I kept thinking about C.S. Lewis's The Silver Chair. In that book Jill, Eustace and the eternally pessimistic marsh-wiggle Puddleglum are sent by Aslan to find the lost prince Rilian. Eventually, they do find him but he's held captive underground by a witch. As they try to escape with him, he puts a spell over them and begins to tell them that there is no such thing as Aslan, or the sun, or the trees, or any world besides her dark and miserable underground kingdom. Her magic is like a dark cloud cutting them off from the truth. And it almost works. Then Puddleglum, barely grasping to the last shred of truth he can find, gives this amazing speech:

Suppose this black pit of a kingdom of yours is the only world. Well, it strikes me as a pretty poor one. And that's a funny thing, when you come to think of it. We're just babies making up a game, if you're right. But four babies playing a game can make a play-world which licks your real world hollow. That's why I'm going to stand by the play-world. I'm on Aslan's side even if there isn't any Aslan to lead it. I'm going to live as like a Narnian as I can even if there isn't any Narnia.

How wonderful it is that our subjective experiences don't define reality. When I was battling earlier this week, there were a few times when everything I've learned from God recently felt untrue. It felt like make believe. But in my heart I knew that even if it was make believe, living as though it was true made for a better reality than the hell the enemy was trying to sell me on.

God will sometimes feel far away, or simply altogether not there. When that happens resolve yourself to be on Aslan's side even if Aslan doesn't exist. The rich and satisfying life Jesus promises in John 10:10 might seem like a naive dream and his kingdom like a fantasy. Live as a Narnian even if there isn't any Narnia. Fight for your freedom and remember the truth.

Remember.

The Constant Need

In my last post I talked about the challenge of living in the world even as Jesus calls us to be apart from it. There is a disconnect resulting from the rich joy Christ is filling me with and the deep desires He is awakening that feel so impossible to satisfy in this world. As I've been living with the disconnect, the paradox, over the last week I've discovered inside me a constant need for communion with God. It is something I cannot go without. I am entirely addicted and wholly dependent.

I've experienced something similar to this in my walk for a long time. For the past year I've made a point of beginning my mornings with prayer and for a long time before that I'd made an effort to read my Bible on a daily basis. Even then I noticed a difference in my life when I missed those daily times with God. Taking time each morning became an essential part of my day.

What I'm experiencing now is like that but about a hundred times more intense. It's not enough to offer up a brief prayer or two at the beginning of the day, I now need to prey with an intense passion to start my mornings. I need to read the Word because without it I feel lost. And it cannot be once a day anymore. It must be constantly throughout the day.

It takes all different forms. Sometimes it's earnest prayer that God will center me on Him again as I begin to feel the erosion of The Matrix. Sometimes it's a more specific request that God has laid it on my heart to fight for. Other times it's my heart crying out with whatever emotion is raging inside of it. Often I find myself just sitting outside and staring at the world God's created.

I suspect I'm beginning to understand what Paul meant when he talked about praying at all times in the spirit. I can only imagine how much more desperate the need must have been for someone like Paul. For him, no doubt, once a day, once an hour, even once a minute was not enough. For him the constant need was exactly that: constant. And when he said "all times" he meant it quite literally.

Praying for me is not a duty or a discipline, it is a breath of air. It is a need to unplug from The Matrix and remember that there is another reality. It is a desire to share my heart with The One who rescued it.

Not only is prayer not duty or discipline, it cannot be, it must not be. The constant need is only grown by Christ awakening our hearts and calling us further up and further in. No amount of striving or effort on our part will get us there. It is a path of grace and transformation. The only way to find that path is to begin to believe in just how good Jesus is, how much life He has for us right now and how much He desires to restore us to who we were meant to be.

My constant need, my deep desire for prayer and union with God, has been awakened by where God is leading me and where God is leading me I never could have found on my own. It's only by His grace and His love. It's always only by His grace and His love.

Back In The Matrix (but not of it)

It's been tough coming home. I suspect it always is in some ways after a "mountain top" experience but this is different. Boot Camp wasn't just an emotional and passionate high it was a time of real breakthrough and healing. It's hard to come home from that.

I don't mean that my home life is hard. Just the opposite in fact. I left camp fired up about my relationship with Annie and I can already see that what God did in my life last weekend is now taking our relationship to new heights and depths. It's wonderful. The same is true with my relationship with God. Boot Camp wasn't the high for my spiritual life, it was a starting point, a trailhead, letting my faith take off into new heights. What God did last weekend was wonderful. Watching Him continue it through this week is a deep answer to prayer.

But yet something in me is still struggling with being home. I feel a little bit like Neo in that scene in The Matrix when he's plugged back into the true Matrix for the first time driving to see the Oracle. He sits in the car staring out the window watching the scenes of his old life fly by. And there's a disconnect for him, not because his old life was terrible but because he's experienced something deeper, something truer, than that old reality ever was.

A few posts back I quoted C.S. Lewis in The Weight of Glory saying, "Our Lord finds our desires not too strong, but too weak. We are half-hearted creatures, fooling about with drink and sex and ambition when infinite joy is offered us, like an ignorant child who wants to go on making mud pies in a slum because he cannot imagine what is meant by the offer of a holiday at the sea. We are far too easily pleased."

I've found this week that this quote has become even more meaningful to me. God used Boot Camp to take me away from making mud pies and let me glimpse the holiday at the sea. This, I believe, is one of the true challenges of going further up and further in. It is hard to desire more. It is hard to no longer be satisfied by The Matrix.

I don't mean to make it sound like I'm depressed. In fact, I don't believe I've been less depressed my entire life. My heart is overwhelmed with joy at what God is doing in me and where He's taking me. I am learning to be content with where I'm at but at the same time I've never been less satisfied. Everything I said in my post on contentment and satisfaction has stopped being just words and theory. It has become a stark reality of every moment of my life. It's a strange disconnect but through it I think I'm beginning to understand how Jesus could be full of the joy of the Lord and still be called a man of sorrows.

The enemy is right there trying to use this disconnect, this dissatisfaction, to steal, kill and destroy what happened last weekend. He's whispering to me that Hobbes was right in Leviathan when he said life is "solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short." But it's not. Life is abundant and joyful. Life is passionate and heroic. Life is victorious and beautiful. Most of all life is available. Jesus is better than we think He is and there is far more life prepared for us in this life than we are ready to believe.

God is so gracious in this. No one understood living in the world, The Matrix, but not being of it better than Jesus did. He understood the paradox of feeling abundant joy mingled with the ache of our fallen world. We have not been left as orphans. He understands and He is with us.

Jesus has promised that He will make all things new. The whole of creation will one day be restored to what it was meant to be. But we don't have to wait until the second coming and the end of the world. The process can begin today. There is a cost to desiring more. It's difficult to abandon our mud pies not because we miss them but because we've glimpsed the sea and we know we're not there yet. But God has prepared even for that. He has not made us wait until we reach the sea to begin receiving our abundant life. He is offering it now. And even now as I struggle to plug back into The Matrix I can tell you it's worth it. It is worth it.

Wild at Heart Boot Camp Review

I've been home for almost two days now and I find that I'm still struggling with how to write about what happened this last weekend. How do you describe something that can really only be experienced? How do you speak publicly about that which is deeply personal? I don't have good answers to those questions but I know that I want to, need to, tell you at least some about what happened in Colorado this last weekend.

First off, thank you, thank you, thank you to everyone who prayed. This weekend was deeply opposed at every level. Our prayers were needed and they were effective. Sadly, I can also say that not everyone had the same kind of prayer coverage I did. There were guys who clearly got taken out for all or part of the weekend. I didn't and for that I thank you so much.

During the weekend, John Eldredge said a couple times, "Jesus is better than you think He is." If I was summing up what God had me realize this weekend in one sentence, that would be it. Jesus showed up in ways that I wouldn't have imagined. Before I left, God told me this weekend was about both Him caring for my heart and drawing me further up and further in. I didn't realize at the time just how closely connected those two things were. The second would not have happened without the first. God fiercely loved me this weekend. He drew out my true self in a way that I'd never experienced before. And it was good. It was very good.

I don't think we fully appreciate just how much life is available to us in this life. Yes, we're a work in process that, as Paul reminds us, won't be completed until the day of Christ. Yes, there are wounds that will not be healed until we see Heaven. Yes, the battle will continue to rage and evil will often seem dominant on the Earth. But there is an abundance that God has for us here and now and it would be an absolute tragedy if we missed that. Just how much is available? More than we think. A lot more. I tasted it this weekend. It was amazing but it was still only a taste of the riches God has for us here and now.

It was also a weekend of initiation and adventure. During the Friday morning session, John was talking about how when men speak of the best times of their lives the stories will often be stories of adventure. As he was speaking I found myself thinking that I have a few of those sort of stories but not a ton and it would sure be nice if God would provide opportunities for more. That afternoon, a group of guys and I went horseback riding. We were less than two minutes out on the trail when it started to hail. At first it was just a little and then it unleashed. The horses went nuts, running around in circles and getting ready to buck. Meanwhile, the coral had been left open slightly and a bunch of horses got out and started charging down the trail at us. The ranch hands came running down the trail screaming at us to get off the horses. Having not ridden more than a time or two I had no idea how to dismount. But I managed to half jump, half fall off the horse and get to shelter where I watched it hail so much it looked like it had snowed. Once it cleared up the ride was beautiful but my favorite part was the beginning. It was wild, it was scary and it was an absolute blast.

Another highlight from the weekend was the fellowship. You'll remember from my prayer requests that I mentioned that I was most nervous about going alone to a camp of 400 guys I didn't know. It was a complete non issue. I had so many wonderful conversations and made a lot of good friends over the weekend. One example that stands out was when I was going hiking Saturday and as I started out on one of the trails I ran into a guy I hadn't talked to before and didn't talk to after. He said hi and we proceeded to talk for the next 45 minutes about what God was doing in our lives through the weekend. It was awesome and such a gift from God.

There is so much more I could say, so many stories, so many ways God showed up in my life but there's very little that I could truly give justice to with my words. Something like this needs to be experienced and for the men reading this, I hope you do. This is not just another men's retreat or a Christian event that fades into memory as soon as it's over. What goes on at these retreats is deep restoration and healing. I watched men in their sixties and seventies find healing for wounds they have lived with their entire lives. That kind of healing, and the life God promises, is available and a Wild at Heart Boot Camp is a great place to start finding it. For the women, Ransomed Heart also does Captivating retreats a couple times a year that offer the same healing and life to the femine heart.

Remember, Jesus is better than you think He is. It's true and He is desperately waiting to prove it to you.

The First and Greatest Commandment

One of them, an expert in religious law, tried to trap him with this question: “Teacher, which is the most important commandment in the law of Moses?” Jesus replied, “‘You must love the Lord your God with all your heart, all your soul, and all your mind.’ This is the first and greatest commandment.

-Matthew 22:35-38

This week, as I've been preparing to go to Colorado, I've been spending some time asking God what He wants for me in this trip and what my role in that is. It's been a tough and busy week. Most weeks before a trip usually are, but this week has been different. There's been a ton of warfare raging around this trip (let me again say how desperately I need your prayers over these next four days). On one hand, the battle is encouraging because it tells me God has some awesome plans for the trip. It wouldn't be this opposed otherwise. But even with that hope in mind, I find myself getting buried in the battle. Like Peter walking on the water, my focus slowly drifts from the Master to the waves and I find myself adrift in moments when I need to be clinging to Jesus.

I intentionally took some time this afternoon both to take a break from the busyness and warfare and to just to spend time with God. As we were talking about the trip I heard God telling me that what He wanted from me this weekend was to honor Him and remain faithful and that what He wanted to do was care for my heart and lead me into a deeper life. As I began to think of how those things work together, this passage from Matthew came into my mind.

How easily we lose sight of what Jesus is trying to tell us in this passage. To really understand it we need to remember that the goal of all of God's commandments, of true holiness, is life. What Jesus is saying is that the first and foremost way we are to find life is by passionately loving God and entering into an intimate relationship with Him.

When I first God tell me to be faithful and honor Him, I immediately began to worry and wonder if those were areas I'm failing in. What I heard God say about that was that He wasn't telling me those things to point out failure but to let me know how He wants to be loved by me this weekend. So often I get words like that and I descend into shame and beating myself up in the ways I've fallen short of what God's telling me. And while there certainly is a place for God's gentle and loving correction when we steer of course, I believe that often times when He says these things He's not trying to point out a flaw but to draw us deeper into intimacy with Him.

Fulfilling this first and greatest commandment is not a one way street. It is not only me loving God with all of my heart, soul and mind; it is Him loving me with all of His heart, soul and mind. All of God's commandments are invitations into intimacy and this one above all. It is a command not only to be loved but to also receive love.

I've mentioned before that I really believe this weekend is going to be a milestone moment in my life. It's going to be a big step deeper into Aslan's Country. But the foundation of that has got to be this intimacy with God. The warfare is raging and it will continue to do so all weekend. I can't back down from that battle but I also can't afford to take my eyes off Jesus even (especially!) in the midst of a storm. God's invitation to love and be loved has brought me back to center and so long as I stay there my heart is ready for what He has for me this weekend. Please pray for me. I can't wait to get back and share what He's done!

Contentment and Satisfaction

How I praise the Lord that you are concerned about me again. I know you have always been concerned for me, but you didn’t have the chance to help me. Not that I was ever in need, for I have learned how to be content with whatever I have. I know how to live on almost nothing or with everything. I have learned the secret of living in every situation, whether it is with a full stomach or empty, with plenty or little.
Philippians 4:10-12

For a long time I found this passage out of Philippians to be perhaps the most frustrating in all of Scripture. My frustration was not because I doubted Paul's sincerity or honesty but because he seems to be implying that learning unconditional contentment is possible for any of us. Looking at my own life and the world around me, unconditional contentment seemed impossible. There was and is a lot of good in my life but there's plenty of bad too. That Paul was able to look past the fallen world and his own fallen state was all well and good for him but for the rest of us, who are not the giants of the faith he was, it seems an impossibility.

But I couldn't write the verse off that easily. I believe that all of Scripture is authoritative and divinely inspired. Therefore I could not ignore what God was using Paul to say. It was a paradox I could not resolve and so, for a long time, I remained frustrated.

Over the past several years God has led me back to this verse again and again, showing it to me in a new light and teaching me what Paul really meant when he spoke of this sort of contentment. Since that journey began, I've become convinced that the way to resolve this paradox is to realize that there is a significant difference between contentment and satisfaction.

We tend to use the two words as synonyms but they are not. Contentment is about acceptance and finding joy in the moment. Contentment does not demand perfection, it accepts everything as it is and where it is. It recognizes that because God works all for good for those who love Him, it is possible to find true joy in a fallen world. It is possible to be at peace even the most horrible of circumstances because we can trust in the goodness of God.

But yet, there is a hunger God has placed deep inside of all of us that will not be satisfied by this fallen world. We were not designed for the world around us but for Eden. Though our minds have forgotten it, there is a place in our hearts that has not. We attempt to meet this need in a million fallen ways but none of them does the trick.

In The Weight of Glory, C.S. Lewis writes "Our Lord finds our desires not too strong, but too weak. We are half-hearted creatures, fooling about with drink and sex and ambition when infinite joy is offered us, like an ignorant child who wants to go on making mud pies in a slum because he cannot imagine what is meant by the offer of a holiday at the sea. We are far too easily pleased."

A big part of my journey has been realizing just how much God cares for my heart's desires and wants to work in my life through them. We tend to think of desire as a bad thing but it is not bad, only fallen. God redeems it, as C.S. Lewis points out, by causing us to desire more than we could ever imagine. Even many of our desires that appear evil are actually good at the core. Is the man who enters into an affair's core desire for easy sex or is it for the joy, comfort and adventure to be found in life with God? The reason the affair doesn't work, or works only temporarily, is because he is trying to satisfy the deep desires of his heart in a way that can never come close to fulfilling his true want. His sin comes not from desiring but from desiring too little, by attempting to be satisfied by less than he was made for.

We must remember that we are dealing with an infinite God. Do we really believe that we can desire anything so much that He could not satisfy?

It is important to realize that contentment and satisfaction are not opposed to each other but work hand in hand to accomplish God's plan for us. Until you have come to a place of acceptance with life and the world around you, God cannot draw you into the deep life He has for you. Without contentment we'll still busy ourselves trying to make life work on our terms and satisfy ourselves through the world around us. Contentment is really a surrender of our deep desires to God so that they may be satisfied in Him.

On the other hand, until we recognize that God cares for our desires and that we can trust Him to satisfy us, we have no reason to be content. God placed those deep desires in our hearts and they're not going away. Until we surrender them to Him and allow Him to redeem them, they will forever be a roadblock standing in the way of our contentment.

Contentment and satisfaction are what allow us to be in the world but not of it. Contentment lets us be at peace and find joy so long as we live on Earth. Our deep desires are what draw us home to the Father. Without the first we shall live our lives in this fallen world miserable and depressed. Without the second we shall become too comfortable in a place that God never intended as our final destination. God wants to use both of them to restore us to the creation He intended us to be. I pray that we can open up our hearts and let Him.

Wild at Heart Boot Camp

One week from today I'll be heading to Crooked Creek Ranch in Fraser, Colorado to attend Wild At Heart Boot Camp. The retreat is put on by the Ransomed Heart ministry team and is based on John Eldredge's books Wild At Heart and The Way of the Wild Heart. It's tough to boil the content of two books down into a few sentences but let me give it a shot to try and give you a better idea of what I'll be experiencing next week.

In Wild At Heart, Eldredge lays out three core desires found in the heart of every man: A Battle to Fight, A Beauty to Rescue, and An Adventure to Live. He goes into the different ways these manifest themselves in a man's life and also how the enemy has assaulted those desires using both personal experiences and our culture.

The Way of the Wild Heart takes these themes at looks at how they apply at the various stages of a mans life. The book also goes deep into the process of masculine initiation and specifically how God wants to initiate every man. It's a powerful book and one that's fascinating to revisit regularly as I see new ways God is initiating me and leading me deeper into my masculine journey.

Wild At Heart is a book that has meant a ton to me over the last several years. The great irony is that when I first saw it, I had absolutely no desire whatsoever to read it. A friend of mine had been preparing to go on a short term missions trip to Poland and, based on someone's recommendation, he'd bought several copies as gifts to give away on the trip. He hadn't had time to read it and so, knowing that I love to read, he asked me to take a look and let him know what I thought. I really wasn't interested. At the time my reading of Christian books started and stopped with C.S. Lewis. But, as a favor to my friend, I gave it a shot.

Looking back on that I'm so thankful for how God cut through my cynicism and spoke to me through the book. It took a second reading before the message really began to take root but it was that initial reading when God really began to get ahold of my heart and lead me from being just a Christian to beginning to walk intimately with Him and live deeply from the heart. It's been a long process, in many ways the messages in Eldredge's books have really only begun to come to fruition in my life over the last year. But no matter how long it's taken for what God was trying to say to sink in, my journey to finding full life in Christ all began with Wild At Heart.

It's been about four or five years since then and now I couldn't be more excited to see what He's going to do next. I really believe that this retreat is going to be a major step for me on this journey.

I've been praying about the retreat for a while now and I'd like to ask anyone who is willing to join me in the last week leading up to it as well as in the four days I'll be gone. Here are a few of my prayer requests for the camp:

• Pray against fear: I'm a big time introvert and the idea of going to a camp with 400 guys who I don't know is a little intimidating. I don't want to get in the way of what God wants to do.
• Pray that I'd be sensitive to God's voice: Pray here that I would be willing to really enter into the weekend and leave my busy, noisy life behind. It's tough to hear God when the cares of every day life and playing through my head. Pray that I can surrender those to God for the weekend (and maybe even beyond that!)
• Pray for safety: By this I mean both for me and my travels but also for Annie back home. She's seven and a half months pregnant and well it's been a very smooth pregnancy I'm still a little worried about being in the middle of nowhere in Colorado.
  
• Pray for God's agenda: I've got a lot of stuff I'd love to see happen in my life during this trip. And while that's all God, I really want to be willing to set aside my agendas and listen to what God has for me.
  
• Pray against spiritual attack: The devil hates nothing more than watching the hearts of God's children come fully alive. What happens at this retreat will be opposed! Pray for victory
• Pray for the other men and the retreat as a whole: There will be about 400 other guys there. Include them in my requests.
  
• Pray for John Eldredge and the Ransomed Heart team: I know from reading his prayer letters and his blog that these events, well very worthwhile and full of blessings, are also draining for Eldredge and his team. They fight some pretty tough spiritual battles to bring this message. Please keep them in your prayers both leading up to the camp and throughout the weekend.
  

Moving Beyond Just Trying Harder

A couple of posts ago, I wrote about finding joy in holiness. As I've continued to think about that issue, I've come to see that one of the ways the devil has deceived the Church in that pursuit is by convincing us that the only way to gain real holiness is by simply trying harder. On the surface it sounds right, godly even. After all, spiritual discipline is an essential and important part of the Christian walk. Furthermore, when I read about how Jesus described walking with Him there is nothing easy about it. Every believer can share countless examples of life with Jesus requiring serious work and effort. Therefore, it seems perfectly logically that, when we're met with difficulties in our pursuit of genuine holiness we should simply try harder, keep striving, bear down and hope for breakthrough.

But the problem is, it doesn't work. Take a look at your own walk. Have you noticed that it seems the more you attempt to beat yourself into submission on a certain issue the more you seem to struggle with it? That sort of striving is worse than a dead end, it is a road that leads off the edge of a cliff. Our hearts can not endure a lifetime of that self abuse. They were never meant to.

In my previous post on holiness, I talked about the two wrongheaded ways we tend to approach pursuing holiness: legalism or moral relativism. If we approach the pursuit of holiness determined to beat ourselves into shape, to simply "try harder" until we see results, it's not hard to see how we wind up leaning in one of those two directions. Those who tend toward legalism have made the agreement that all it will take is bearing down a little more, being a little harsher on ourselves, and that somehow breakthrough will happen. Those who tend toward relativism see how brutal the legalist is with himself and decide they want no part in it, so they chuck the law out the window. Thus in many ways the legalist and the relativist are two sides of the same coin. They have each bought into the same lie, the only difference being that one lives enslaved to it and the other is terrified of finding himself in that same bondage.

The reason the "just try harder" approach doesn't work is because it drives deeper inside ourselves. On the outside it may look godly but it is the ultimate expression of humanism. It is the belief that transformation is not available from God but from ourselves. Jesus's death may be a free ticket into Heaven but beyond that "just try harder" denies the need for a savior. It lives under the belief that all the power of personal transformation is summed up in will power: that we as humans can force ourselves to become the new creation.

Perhaps worse, this approach denies the love of God. Instead of running to the arms of the Father in all of our shame and sinfulness so that He may turn our filthy rags to robes of righteousness, "just try harder" would have us perfect ourselves before we even think of approaching the Father. In Unspoken Sermons, George MacDonald writes about this very issue:

"How the earthly father would love a child who would creep into his room with angry, troubled face, and sit down at his feet, saying when asked what he wanted: "I feel so naughty, papa, and I want to get good"! Would he say to his child: "How dare you! Go away, and be good, and then come to me?" And shall we dare to think God would send us away if we came thus, and would not be pleased that we came, even if we were angry as Jonah? "

But what about spiritual discipline and the genuine hard work of following Christ? Am I suggesting we abandon those parts of the Christian life in favor sitting back doing nothing well we wait on God's transforming power? Absolutely not! The pursuit of holiness is exactly that: a pursuit. It takes work on our part but it is work done at the guidance and direction of Christ. The Christian life is neither us leaving everything to God while we sit back and make no effort (spiritual laziness) nor trying to do everything on our own apart from God (just try harder). It is God inviting us into an adventure, an intimate relationship, a holy partnership. The problem with "just try harder" is not that it requires hard work. It is that it demands we do the hard work apart from God.

"Just try harder" exists in a place of nervous anxiety forever wondering if we've now done enough, if we're now good enough, to please God. The genuine pusuit of holiness exists in the knowledge that while we still struggle with sin, God sees as we will be through the power of the Cross. It recognizes that while we have to daily put off the old man, we have been given the heart of flesh and that we are free from our sins. "Just try harder" is a burden and one too great for us to bear. The pursuit of genuine holiness is an invitation to life and freedom and a promise that someday our sin will be long forgotten.

A good way to tell which method you are living out of is to examine the fruit in your own life. Is how you're handling your sin producing shame, guilt and condemnation? If so, that's not from God. There is no condemnation in Christ. None! Real holiness will never deny sin but it will produce genuine repentence, intimacy with God and a changed life.

I believe that moving away from "just try harder" is a daily struggle. Like so many of the enemy's lies it is very close to the truth. But it's fruit is the exact opposite of genuine holiness and transformation. "Just try harder" will forever leave us stuck in the mess of our sin. God's holiness calls us out of our sin and into real freedom. I pray we will have the courage to follow that call.

Does God Really Care About Our Hearts?

Does God really care about our hearts? I find myself needing to return to that question over and over again. I know what my head says. I can rattle off the verses and even give personal examples of ways in which I've seen God care for me. But to actually put it into practice is something else entirely.

In my previous post, I mentioned this quote from Ruthless Trust: "You will trust [God] to the degree that you know you are loved by Him."

As I've been playing that thought over in my head and praying through it, I've come to realize that it cuts to the heart of this issue. There are areas where I can trust God easily, where I truly believe that He does care about my heart and then there are areas that I struggle even to pray about. I want to seize control and leave God out. The difference is my view of God's love. When I look at the areas where trust comes easy, I can clearly see His love. I don't doubt it for a second. And when I look at the areas where I struggle for control I find that something inside of me isn't at all certain of God's love. Thus the way this question plays out in my life is, "Does God care about all of my heart or just the parts I feel measure up?"

It's important to remember the role of the heart in Christianity and to do that we need to revisit the history of our race. Adam and Eve were not created as fallen creatures. They were whole and perfect until they chose sin over God. Now we are all fallen but that was not what we were meant to be. There is a core to who we are that God is desperate to restore to it's unfallen state. The core is our hearts. It is God's craftsmanship and He loves it passionately.

With all that in mind, I still find I struggle with knowing God's love. He may love that core of me but I'm a long way from being restored to what I should have been. And so the question becomes, does God love our hearts even in their fallen state? I believe He does. It is here we see the power of the cross. The moment we accept the free gift of salvation we are committed to our restoration through the blood of Christ. He has now begun the good work and He will be faithful to complete it. Sin was not the beginning of the story and, thank God, it does not have to be the end.

None of this is to say that God approves of or turns a blind eye to our sin. How could He? If He did then either it would not be sin or He would not be God. But it is to say that He sees through our sin and to the core of who we are. The goal is not to ignore or deny sin, it is to be pulled out of it and into a place where our sin is a distant and forgotten nightmare, cast as far as the east is from the west.

Holding strong to the belief that God truly cares about our hearts is essential to joy. If you do not believe God loves you then what do you have to be joyful about? The reason we can rejoice in the Lord always is because we know that He is faithful to pull us out of our sinful, fallen state and into Aslan's Country.

Even when it is difficult or even impossible to see it, God is passionately in love with us. He cares for every part of our hearts and because of that He is trustworthy. To know this is to glimpse as much of the love of God as we can in this life. To know this is an essential step to knowing life and joy to the fullest. Walking with God in a way that recognizes these truths is not easy to have or to hold onto but it is available. I'm beginning to find it in my life and I pray you do too.

Thoughts For This Week

These are a few of thoughts that God's brought to my mind for this week. I'm hoping to write about these at some point but for the moment I'm still in the process of thinking and praying through them.

1. I believe that in this world we are guilty of being discontented but at the same time are too easily satisfied. Contentment and satisfaction are not synonyms. Learning the difference is a key to finding life and to knowing true joy.

2. The more I pray about joy and examine it in my own life, the more I begin to realize that I treat joy as a guilty pleasure. How can we be, and what does it mean to be, joyful in a joyless and fallen world?

3. From Ruthless Trust, "You will trust [God] to the degree that you know you are loved by Him"

Busyness As a Substitute For Purpose

A couple of nights ago I was listening to the Ransomed Heart Podcast. One of the guys on the show, Craig McConnell, made the comment that he often times finds himself turning to busyness to make himself feel purposeful. Hearing that knocked me flat. It's so true and I don't think I've ever even considered it before.

I think this really ties in with a lot of the issues God's been speaking to me about, and I've been writing about, lately. If I don't trust God, if I don't having His joy, if I don't believe He has a purpose arranged for me, then I am invariably going to turn to other things to act as a cheap substitute for purpose.

This goes hand in hand with the post on purpose I made a couple weeks ago where I talked about how finding our purpose will require us to fight a multi-front battle with the enemy. If we do not trust God to lead us to our purpose, we will turn to busy distractions. If we feel overwhelmed by our purpose and decide it's our job to single-handedly right all wrongs, we'll collapse under the pressure and settle instead for busyness. Even if we know our purpose and are living in it, the lies of the enemy are constantly there telling us it's too hard, it's beyond us, that God isn't trustworthy. If we listen to them, even for a moment, it becomes so easy to abandon purpose and descend into distraction.

I don't want to live this way anymore. I don't want to waste a single second of my life hiding in distraction. God has so much more for me than that. Again I find myself asking, do I really trust God with my life and my purpose? Even when "no" seems to only possible answer to that question, God's grace is sufficent to pull us back out of busyness and into purpose if only we're willing to trust.

Joy Part 2

A couple of posts back I talked about how I feel God is beginning to lead my on a journey to discover what true joy really is and what that would look like in my life. It's a topic I'll probably be posting about a lot in the future. In my previous post I talked about how joy is different from both pleasure and happiness. What I want to do in this post is expand on that idea, specifically the differences between joy and happiness since I feel that is the more difficult of the two, and hopefully begin to get a better idea of what true joy is and how that can look in our lives.

Part of the difficulty in distinguishing happiness from joy is that we tend to use the words interchangeably. To an extent, I think that's fine. Human joy may actually look very similar to happiness in most cases. But at the same time, when the Bible talks about the joy of the Lord it clearly means something more than mere happiness. I used the example last time of Jesus being described both as a man of sorrows and as having joy. But it doesn't stop there. Philippians 4:4 tells us to "rejoice in the Lord always." Now the Bible has some tough commands but I don't believe it ever commands the impossible, and it certainly doesn't command us to do something that even Jesus was unable to do. Therefore, this verse must mean something more than be happy all the time.

As I've been working through these thoughts with God this week, I've found that one of the clearest ways for me to understand the difference between joy and happiness is to look at the difference between sadness and depression. I've struggled with depression throughout my life. God has brought me a lot of healing in this area but there was a time when I was depressed day in and day out. Now, I would not say that I never experienced happiness while I was depressed nor did I spend every moment feeling completely miserable. For me depression was a dark cloud that hung over every part of my life. It turned my sadness into despair and made my happiness muted and dull.

If we turn that view of depression on its head I believe we'll have a very good picture of what true joy, the joy of the Lord, looks like. When we live a life of joy, we do not spend every moment feeling happy or have lives devoid of sadness. But I believe it will make the happy moments better and allow us to feel sadness in a way that is far more authentic and sincere than the misery of depression. In the Sermon on the Mount, Jesus promises comfort to those who mourn. To me, that is a joyful view of sadness. To be joyful is to embrace mourning when it comes but to not be consumed by it. Joyful mourning recognizes that all sadness and pain leads directly to the arms of the Father. Therefore we can truly rejoice in suffering. It leads us to an intimacy with God we would not experience without it.

Joy also transforms the happy moments in a powerful way. If we are not joyful, not fully alive, then we will invariably look for joy and life elsewhere. I love how John Eldredge and Brent Curtis describe this in The Sacred Romance. They describe the process of looking for life in places other than God as chasing after "less wild lovers." We don't trust God to really bring us life and so we settle for second best. We all have a list of stuff we turn to when we decide not to trust God for life: TV, sex, money, adventure, books, food, and it goes on and on.

Most of the things on our lists are not bad in and of themselves. It's just that they can't bring us the joy and life we're really looking for. That's what's so neat about becoming truly alive and finding real joy. God doesn't want to deny us those things, He wants to redeem them. Once we start turning to Him, instead of the list, for life and joy He is then able to transform us so that we find true happiness in the things on the list. When we stop looking to TV for life we are then able to find more happiness in one half hour show than in an entire night spent zoning out flipping from channel to channel. One chapter in a good book brings more happiness than we would have before gotten from an entire library filled with stories. A little extra spending money to do something fun on the weekend brings more happiness than we would have had before as a multi-billionaire. We enter into one of the paradoxes of Christian happiness: less brings us more.

I believe joy is the assurance that we can trust God with our happiness and therefore do not need to worry about arranging for it ourselves. We can be sad because He is faithful to bring us back from the brink of despair and into His love. We can be happy because we know our happiness comes from God's provision and is therefore holy. Joy not only allows for all emotions in the range of sadness to happiness but redeems them and puts them in the place they were always meant to have in our lives.

I write all this at the beginning of my journey into joy knowing I have not even scratched the surface of what God has to show me here. As I mentioned in my first post, finding true joy will change every aspect of our lives. I'm excited to see where God will bring me in this and I'm looking forward to sharing at least some of that experience here.

Joy

Over the past year of my life I have learned a lot about walking with God and what it means to have authentic intimacy with Him. It's been an amazing experience and one I hope and believe will continue for the rest of my life. Lately, however, I've felt God guiding me to slow down on learning new things and start finding life in what He has already shown me. A few weeks back I was praying and God spoke to me clearer than I am usually able to hear. His message to me was simple: "Remember that life is the goal." I wrote it in my journal and I've spent the last few weeks turning that over in my head. I am only at the beginning of exploring that message in my life but I want to begin sharing what I've learned. For this post, I want to talk about what I believe is one of the things at the heart of true life in Christ: joy.

As I've thought about joy recently I've realized just how badly I've misconceived it. I tend to think of joy as something small, a nice bonus at the end of day but not an essential part of the Christian life. But it has become clear to me that my view of joy could not be further from God's. When I open the Bible and read in Nehemiah 8 "The joy of the Lord is your strength" I can see plain as day the disconnect between my personal philosophy and God's truth. To God joy is not optional; it is essential.

Let's consider that verse again. "The joy of the Lord is your strength." I think that's the sort of verse we tend to gloss over and treat as an empty platitude. It seems like a nice thought but do we ever stop and think of all that it implies? If our strength is directly tied to and related to our joy, then if we are not joyful we are setting ourselves up as easy targets for the enemy and the battle for our hearts is lost. Joy is not a platitude; it is a strategy. Joy is not happy thoughts; it is a weapon. If we truly put this verse, with all it's implications, into practice it would start a revolution.

I think part of the struggle I have with joy comes from my confusing it with two things that sound similar but are actually quite different: happiness and pleasure. Let's start with pleasure. To say, "I shall spend my life being joyful" could be easily confused with saying "I will spend my life seeking pleasure." Now I do not believe pleasure is wrong. In fact, I believe God intends for us to have a great deal of it. But it does not take a deep psychoanalysis to realize that we do not experience pleasure every moment of the day. Pleasure exists at the circumference, joy is at the center. Pleasure demands external circumstances be put right. Joy is indifferent.

Let me illustrate this with a silly but, I hope, helpful example. When I went to see The Dark Knight I experienced pleasure. If Annie decided that tonight we are going to go see Mama Mia I doubt I would find very much pleasure in the experience. But I could find joy in it. I could find joy in spending time with my wife and in doing something that brings her pleasure. My joy need not be affected by external circumstances.

Happiness is even more difficult to separate because it is not entirely external. It does exist at a level deeper than pleasure but clearly not at the level of joy. I know this because Isaiah speaks of The Messiah as a man of sorrows. Yet if the joy of the Lord is our strength, Jesus must have been very joyful indeed since He was spiritually the strongest man to ever live. Therefore, joy must go beyond mere emotion. In this way it is like contentment. To be content does not mean to be satisfied. I doubt Paul was satisfied with the weather conditions during his shipwrecks but he was content in all circumstances (more on contentment another time).

Once we realize that joy is neither pleasure nor happiness we begin to see just how powerful it really is. If joy is not affected by either physical, external circumstances or by emotions then it would seem to be untouchable. And if we found it, if our hearts were transformed so that they were truly joyful, we also would be untouchable. I do not mean untouchable in a way that is closed off and defensive but in a way that is able to be open and loving because we are no longer dependent on pleasure and happiness to take the place of joy in our lives. This is why the verse specifies the joy of the Lord. Clearly there is something supernatural about this. The only way to get there is through relationship with God and through being transformed by Him. This is also why I say that truly living that verse could start a revolution. To find this level of joy would leave no part of our lives untouched.

I believe a word of caution is needed here. The contemporary church is not very fond of talking about the cost of following Christ but it exists nonetheless. I believe there is also a cost to finding true joy. To become untouchable is to become hated. To become truly alive in Christ, even in just one area such as joy, is to become the world's enemy. I cannot be more specific because I am still so far away from real joy and life in my own walk but the stories of martyrs are easy to find. Even in a "tolerant" society such as ours, the cost may not be death but it will still exist. Jesus promised this. When He said He came with us a sword, this is at least part of what He meant.

But I believe it's worth it. This place of joy is where I want to go and I believe it is where God is leading me. It's time to move beyond platitudes and happy thoughts. Joy matters and it is worth pursuing.