Found

I wrote this post a year ago; 9 years to the day after the lights turned on.  I’m now celebrating my 10th anniversary, and hope that you will discover yourself deliciously found like I did.  Enjoy!

Stephen Fulton

September 19, 2016

Today is the 9 year anniversary of my awakening. It went something like this.

I was exhausted. I didn’t fully realize how tired I was, because when tired is a lifestyle….well, it seems normal. While circumstantially my life was pretty average, my soul and mind were under torment. I was in that special corner of hell described in Romans 7. I had great desires. I had a heart that wanted to know God. I wanted to be a good Christian. I wanted to “deny myself and follow Him”. These desires meant that throughout my childhood and teen years, I actually listened to the sermons in church. It meant that I actually read the bible for myself (though never having the self-discipline to achieve read-the-bible-in-a-year status), and perhaps most strange for my age, it meant that I devoured books on theology. But my actions failed me. I was…

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Where Sin Abounds

“but where sin increased, grace was carefully balanced with teachings of God’s judgment and fear of condemnation in order to ensure that repentance was genuine” – Romans 5:20…oh wait, that’s not what it says!

 

Romans 5:20 actually says, “…but where sin increased, grace abounded all the more…”

 

This is confusing to our way of thinking. As humans, most of us have learned to use whatever power we have in order to manipulate other people’s behavior. Parents withhold privileges from children, bosses threaten to fire employees, and friends threaten the relationship itself (“If you don’t _______ I’ll never talk to you again.”) all in the name of changing the other person’s behavior. And since God has all the power, we would assume that he would know how to use it to get what he wants. But that’s not God’s way!

 

John 13:3-5 (ESV) says,

 

“Jesus, knowing that the Father had given all things into his hands, and that he had come from God and was going back to God, rose from supper. He laid aside his outer garments, and taking a towel, tied it around his waist. Then he poured water into a basin and began to wash the disciples’ feet and to wipe them with the towel that was wrapped around him.” (emphasis my own)

 

It is exactly in the place of knowing who he is and how much power he has that Jesus chooses to be a servant. Rather than using his position to control our behavior, he loves us in our frailty. He humbly approaches even our most embarrassing weaknesses, not to condemn, but to wash away our shame.

 

This type of love offends. This type of love confuses. This type of love draws all of God’s children back to their loving Father — a Father who will never leverage their relationship in order to control, but who will always give of himself until you are made whole.

Risen!

We must embrace what the resurrection communicates. It is not an event that is best memorialized by a special Sunday service. It is an event that is best honored through lives that have internalized its message.

In the resurrection we learn that;

a) Even our worst sin (killing God in the flesh) can not derail God from his redemptive purpose.  In the crucifixion, we discovered that God loves us to death (see Romans 5:6-8)…but what hope is there in a kind but dead God?  While the cross revealed his love, the resurrection reveals his power.  Even a dead God cannot be stopped from returning to life and accomplishing his purposes!

b) The death of the body is not the end of hope, but only the beginning.  Everybody fears death.  Everybody!  But in the resurrection, we discover God’s mastery over death.  It proves that the eventual loss of our own lives is not the conclusion that it appears to be.  It shows that even the darkest of circumstances are no match for the power of God to work all things together for our good!

c) There is no need to fight evil with evil. Jesus chose the weak way of “not resisting those who are evil” (Matthew 5:39). When his more pragmatic disciple, Peter, attacked one of Jesus’ captors (no doubt hoping a little bit of force could salvage God’s failing plan) Jesus rebuked him and healed the soldier’s wound. Jesus chose goodness even when it proved impossibly weak; even when it meant surrendering all of the territory that could have been his. He trusted God to breathe new life into all of the things that his own unbending goodness required him to lay down. In the resurrection, Jesus proves all of our “necessary” evils to be utterly unnecessary. It turns out that we do not need swords and violence in order to build or maintain our foothold in the world. We only need hearts that trust our good, good Father to pick up all of the pieces that our love requires us to lay down.

Jesus finished work declares to us that we are loved, we are chosen, and we are in the care of the God for whom death is no match. What reason is there to remain in fear?  Let’s open our hearts to trust in his love, trust in his power, and trust in his ability to resurrect all of the good that has been left for dead.

He is risen!

Why the Cross?

 

It doesn’t matter what culture you are from; the cross is strange and offensive. To those accustomed to the rigors of advancement under a religious hierarchy, the cross is offensive because it allows the people who DON’T EVEN CARE about holiness to have immediate access to God.

To those whose brand of spirituality is more abstract or philosophical, it is offensive for its violence and extreme measures. I mean, is it really necessary for God to suffer a violent death in order to redeem us? Surely we weren’t in such a terrible place as to warrant such extreme action! And surely the real God would have more self-respect than to humble himself to death on a cross…especially for people so ignorant as to hate him!

While the cross doesn’t cease to offend the thought patterns that dominate the world, it is only in the painful death of God that one thing could be made abundantly clear. God loves us.

He could have just let his voice boom from heaven and tell us that he loves us…but is that really enough for us to go on? Does humanity have a good track record for taking God at his word?  What if we miss heard him? What if he really loved only the people who were present to hear him? What if his love was just for a certain period of time? I’m sure you’ve seen enough debates over scripture to agree with me; when our faith is defined by words in human language, any number of scenarios could pop up to unravel our faith. Even if God made the perfect sermon to explain his heart towards us, in the process of time the meaning would be muddied enough to make room for doubt.

But while words can never be clear enough to erase all doubt, there is a language in which God speaks that does prove strong enough for our faith. It is the language of love. The fact remains, there is no scenario that is more disgusting or damning for mankind than for us to murder God in the flesh.  I know some people today are pretty disturbed by what they perceive to be the downward spiral of our society — but do we honestly think that sexual confusion and irreverent attitudes are a worse evil than killing God?

Jesus came giving us God’s best, healing the sick, welcoming the outcasts, and forgiving the wicked.  Then we murdered him!  There can be no greater crime, and therefore no better time for God to reveal his righteous judgment.  And reveal it he did.  He said, “forgive them, for they don’t know what they are doing”.  And when he finally breathed his last and the earth began to quake, it was not his murderers that were torn in two, but the temple curtains that were intended to keep God separate from a sinful world.  Our greatest crime ended in forgiveness and an outpouring of God’s presence.

If he could forgive the people who murdered God, what possible barrier could stop him from forgiving you?

The cross is God’s Good News to a confused world. It is not a theologically sophisticated act, but a declaration that there is no limit to his love for us. He is absolutely determined to absolve us of guilt. How offensive! But oh, how wonderful!

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For while we were still weak, at the right time Christ died for the ungodly.  For one will scarcely die for a righteous person—though perhaps for a good person one would dare even to die— but God shows his love for us in that while we were still sinners, Christ died for us. –Romans 5:6-8 (ESV)

Can The World Be Saved?

Take it from someone who has struggled with depression and anxiety for much of his life: There is SO MUCH HOPE!

The madness of our age is the blindness of our own eyes to see the potential in humanity. It is fashionable in Christian circles to look out on the masses and be overwhelmed by the sin and confusion and pain. Sad headshakes and weary “if only” statements are as commonplace as saying “amen” to end a prayer. Though rarely expressed in words, our pessimism would suggest that the victory of the cross is a loss-reduction strategy at best. As if the cross has no power to redeem and rescue, but merely to forestall the inevitable disappointment and destruction of all but a few. In our neutered gospel it would seem that the first Adam has retained his right to define humanity, while the second Adam has been commissioned to make a big show but little difference. This is a far cry from Romans 5, which portrays the new Adam as being of far greater consequence than the first Adam. In verses 17-18 it proclaims,

“For if, because of one man’s trespass, death reigned through that one man, MUCH MORE will those who receive the abundance of grace and the free gift of righteousness reign in life through the one man Jesus Christ.

Therefore, as one trespass led to condemnation for ALL MEN, so one act of righteousness leads to justification and life for ALL MEN.” (emphasis my own)

2 Corinthians 5:14-16a says,

“For the love of Christ controls us, because we have concluded this: that one has died for ALL, therefore ALL have died; and he died for ALL, that those who live might no longer live for themselves but for him who for their sake died and was raised.

From now on, therefore, we regard NO ONE according to the flesh…”

It’s time for us to stop predicting what only our natural eyes can see. Yes, there are dangers and there is darkness, but there is also something greater.

When the Israelites saw only a harsh desert, God saw the place where he would give water, food, provision, and direction to his people. When Jesus’ disciples saw only two small fish and five loaves of bread, God saw a feast that would feed the multitudes.

So today when we look at the challenges of our age, let’s see them through the lens of redemption. Let’s look at the world around us not as hopelessly lost, but as already found and included. Let’s learn to declare these unseen realities to our own souls, and let’s learn to declare them to the world. Redemption is not finished with us yet. Not by a long shot!

God’s Righteousness Revealed

What follows is an entry from my journal.  I delayed sharing it because I thought it might be too controversial.  It is hard enough for us to accept God’s forgiveness, but to accept ourselves as perfect (in biblical language: righteous) feels like dangerous heresy!  But as scandalous as it may appear, by his own actions, God has declared us righteous.

“For our sake he made him to be sin who knew no sin, so that in him we might become the righteousness of God.” -2 Corinthians 5:21

“For if, because of one man’s trespass, death reigned through that one man, much more will those who receive the abundance of grace and the free gift of righteousness reign in life through the one man Jesus Christ.  Therefore, as one trespass led to condemnation for all men, so one act of righteousness leads to justification and life for all men. For as by the one man’s disobedience the many were made sinners, so by the one man’s obedience the many will be made righteous.” -Romans 5:17-19

This is not a polished blog post, just honest thoughts. I hope it inspires your own mediation on your redeemed perfection!

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I am at home with who I am! Matters of the heart can take years to resolve, and the mind can have long since accepted something that the heart continues to ignore. I knew that I was forgiven. I got that. But now to see that I am perfect….wow! I am perfect. And so are you! There is no fatal flaw, no bug, no mistake in our beings. We are as we were meant to be, and we were meant to be godlike! I am safe because I am known and trusted. I’m trusted not based on my past behavior, but based on my true nature. Who I am is trustworthy! Who I am fits into who he is with perfect ease. There is no need to try to shove a square peg in a round hole, and no need for Jesus to pretend he’s us so that the Father can tolerate us. We are not righteous by a shell game, or by some substitutionary trick…we are righteous first by design, and second by redemption.

At creation, God made man and woman, and said that we were “very good”. He said that we were made in His image. We were his children. Yet at the fall we get this sense that there must be some mistake. The fact that Adam and Eve sinned means they must have had some flaw. Then Adam and Eve had children who had children who had children who had children, down through the line this sense of inadequacy continued. We believed ourselves to be inadequate, we acted badly, and then used our bad actions to prove our inadequacy, thus trapping us in the sinner’s catch-22. A good metaphor would be the common racist attitudes that many white people had (and perhaps still have) towards black people. We enslaved them because we decided they were subhuman, didn’t educate them because they weren’t worth it, and didn’t empower them because they were not smart enough. Then when these uneducated, unequipped people acted uneducated and unequipped, we used that as proof of the inferiority of their race. What many whites did to many blacks is what the cycle of sin has done to all of humanity. We sin because we believe we are damaged, imperfect, only human, then use the fact that we sinned as evidence of being damaged, imperfect, and only human. Our belief produces an action that proves the belief…but does that make it true?

With Jesus, we finally get some clarity! At the cross we see all of mankind failing Jesus.  In killing Jesus religion sacrificed love to maintain control, politics did the necessary evil to maintain the status quo, the crowds who worshiped a hero gladly crucified a villain, and the radicals — the Jesus lovers, the sold out believers — ran and hid for cover. At the cross is the utter failure of humanity to do anything right! Surely, if nothing else, it once again proves our belief that we are inadequate, imperfect, broken? Surely this proves God made a mistake? And yet in our worst showing of all time, when humanity condemned our hope to death on a cross, the words “forgive them” and “it is finished” preceded a resurrection from the dead! And what did the resurrected hope do? He found his friends, empowered them, and let them loose to declare the forgiveness of sins and redemption of mankind to the ends of the earth! It turns out that even at our worst, God counts us worthy of the precious blood of Jesus! It turns out that while the fall distorted our understanding and distanced us in our hearts from knowing God, sin did not have the same affect on God! Even while our hearts and minds were in hiding because of our guilt and shame, God was ever loving us and valuing us according to the incredible worth he gave us at creation! If we were perfect then, we are perfect now! Sin did not change our nature, it only darkened our understanding!

In beginning to see this and accept this, I am finding freedom from self-suspicion. While religion promotes ruthless self-analysis as a means of rooting out sin, it turns out that finding oneself forgiven and redeemed restores innocence, and innocence is a much stronger power than self-suspicion! Forgiveness frees us from guilt so that we can enjoy God instead of hiding….and this is good! Discovering that there is nothing wrong with you enables you to make no more excuses, and to no longer assume the worst of yourself. Sin is not a fruit of my nature, only a fruit of a darkened mindset! As I feast on my true nature and the perfect fellowship I share with Jesus, I am unwittingly inoculating myself from the dangers of temptation. Childlike innocence is the greatest defense!

Are We Caught in a Cycle?

Are we just caught in a cycle? Is the suffering of yesterday a prophesy about tomorrow? Can there be an end to the logic of war that decides it is worth the deaths of our young men and women, and their young men and women, and the countless civilians who get caught in the crossfire, and the displacement of people and widespread poverty…in order to protect us from danger? As if these countless deaths aren’t a danger worth avoiding…

Is there a path out of the distrust that leads to division that leads to conflict that leads to war and death? Are we, like generations past, destined to fight and kill our brothers and sisters, just because we were born in different places under different ruling powers who can’t find a way to coexist? Is that our future?

It is easy to understand why so many Christians are fatalistic on this point. If the people with all the money and political power can’t find a path to peace, what can we do? It is easier to prophesy peace for another time when Jesus comes back. But what if he’s already here? What if we are his hands and feet? What if his Spirit has been liberally poured out on us? What if Jesus told us that we would do even greater things than he did? What if we held keys that could unlock peace? What if we are the catalyst?

You don’t have control. But you do have influence. You have friends. You know people. And those people know people. And in one way or another you are connected to people who will be pulled to the opposite side and become your enemy if worst came to worst. You are not a spectator in humanity’s unfolding drama. You are an actor. The steps you take leave footprints for others to follow. So what can you do?

When the Facebook world becomes rife with political divisions, conspiracy theories, and excuses to disconnect, choose to engage positively. Find a reason for hope. Find laughter. Find the beauty in humanity, and share it with your friends. When our communities are in conflict and racial or religious tension builds, be a bridge builder. Make friends with people from the other side. Learn about their culture. Listen to their stories, and share your own. Find the person behind the stereotype, and tell others what you find. And when fear threatens to derail your own peace and make you a prisoner to your own protective instinct, remember Jesus, who “for the joy set before him” endured the cross. Remember the man who sacrificed his own life for people who didn’t even want him. Rejected, despised, brutally beaten and crucified, his words were “forgive them, they don’t know what they are doing”. Remember that the tragedy that begot our victory was the sacrificing of the one sinless life on behalf of the sinful, not the other way around. And remember that when perfect love was finally extinguished and all hope seemed gone, it was only the opening act to a reborn love and eternal hope!

We are not bound by the cycle. We’re are not helplessly being led to destruction. Church, we have a voice! We have hands and feet! let’s use them to show love and mercy. Let’s walk in the Spirit of the one who would rather die for the many than send others to their deaths, and let’s resurrect hope in the hopeless, and peace in the confusion! Let’s use the influence we do have to establish peace, allowing God to grow it!

“Every warrior’s boot used in battle and every garment rolled in blood will be destined for burning, will be fuel for the fire. For to us a child is born, to us a son is given, and the government will be on his shoulders. And he will be called Wonderful Counselor, Mighty God, Everlasting Father, Prince of Peace. Of the greatness of his government and peace there will be no end.” -Isaiah 9:5-7a

Seeing The Face of God

Jesus is not an anomaly in the nature of God. He is the revelation of who God really is. As John said in his gospel,

“No one has ever seen God; the only God, who is at the Father’s side, he [Jesus] has made him known.” – John 1:18 (ESV)

Keep in mind that John said this after the Old Testament had been completed and accepted as scripture. According to John, in the entire Old Testament era, no one had ever seen God. They may have heard his booming voice or seen miracles that he had accomplished, but the face of God remained veiled. Before Jesus, man inferred who God was from incomplete information. These inferences became doctrines, and these doctrines became the litmus test against which all other ideas about God were compared.

When the face of God came and revealed himself to those with the purest doctrine, they almost unanimously condemned him. Jesus failure to affirm their religious hierarchy, his insistence on doing good at religiously improper times (the Sabbath), and his willingness to associate with those deemed “unclean” all failed the litmus test of what God was supposed to be like, so those who most diligently looked for God ended up being the ones who most viciously opposed him.

Unfortunately, bad doctrines about God continue to obscure our understanding, even within the Christian faith. The most common failure has been in our attempt to reconcile the pre-Jesus concept of God with what Jesus revealed. Instead of recognizing that who Jesus is both precedes and supersedes all other ideas about God, we turn God into a divided character, with “God” still maintaining his wrathful distance and his inability to exist in the presence of sin. In order to fix God’s problem (This God has a real conundrum. “I love them so I want to rescue them, but I’m holy so I want to destroy them…”), Jesus came to stand in-between man and God, so that God wouldn’t see nasty people he wants to destroy, but Jesus who he loves.

Thank God (the real one!!) that the truth is much, much better than that! Because Jesus didn’t come to fix a confused God’s problem as if God was the one who needed saving!…He came to deal with man’s problem.

God has never had an issue with being around sinful men.  Do you remember in the Garden of Eden how God came out to walk with Adam and Eve, and it was Adam and Eve who hid from him?  It is mankind in our guilt who can’t stand to come before God. We just know that we’ve blown it, that we don’t measure up to all of the perfection that God represents, and the idea of approaching such perfection only reminds us of the areas that we have been imperfect. We are terrified to expose ourselves to the all-powerful God, so running and hiding is our only alternative. Believing that the intimacy we crave is hopelessly out of reach (and yet by design being incapable of being satisfied by anything less) we look for everything and anything else that promises to fulfill us. We are like a starving person who only has toxic garbage at his disposal.  He crams his mouth full with food that will alleviate his hunger for only a moment, but which leaves him vomiting, emaciated and even more desperate for food than he was before. In the self-hatred that we lavish on ourselves for being so weak as to be endlessly seduced by things that demean and never satisfy, we project our feelings onto God, imagining that he views us through the same lens that we view ourselves.

The Good News is that Jesus reveals what God is actually like…and it turns out that God values you entirely apart from your messed up behaviour! When confronted with sickness, old god would have said “you sinned, so you deserve to be sick”, but the God Jesus reveals says, “be healed!”. When a person is caught in adultery, the old god would publicly humiliate you and have you stoned to death, but the God Jesus reveals stands by you and says “I won’t condemn you. Now go and sin no more.”. When judgment time came and it was time to deal with all of the world’s sins, old god would have tortured and destroyed the guilty, but the God Jesus reveals says, “Forgive them, they don’t know what they are doing!”. And when old God would have gladly punished sin from a safe distance, the God Jesus reveals took all of mankind’s sin upon himself and died in our place! That’s what God is actually like! Jesus has shown us! He is not the magical potion that obscures us from God so that we can somehow get close, he is the Message God most urgently wants to communicate to humanity…that all of the wrong we have done has been utterly powerless to remove us from his heart. He loves us as much as he did when he first dreamed us up! While we have grown distant in our hearts and minds, he has never been far from us! We are, in fact, his temple…his favourite place to live! He is pleased to dwell in us!

I pray that your eyes will be opened to see Jesus as he is, and in seeing Jesus that your eyes will recognize the true nature of God himself! Then you will boldy approach him, enjoy him, and receive all the help you need!

Found

September 19, 2016

Today is the 9 year anniversary of my awakening. It went something like this.

I was exhausted. I didn’t fully realize how tired I was, because when tired is a lifestyle….well, it seems normal. While circumstantially my life was pretty average, my soul and mind were under torment. I was in that special corner of hell described in Romans 7. I had great desires. I had a heart that wanted to know God. I wanted to be a good Christian. I wanted to “deny myself and follow Him”. These desires meant that throughout my childhood and teen years, I actually listened to the sermons in church. It meant that I actually read the bible for myself (though never having the self-discipline to achieve read-the-bible-in-a-year status), and perhaps most strange for my age, it meant that I devoured books on theology. But my actions failed me. I was unable to live up to the standards I believed in, which led me often to “repentance”, meaning I confessed my sins a lot, asked for forgiveness, and tried to start fresh. But however pure the intentions of my heart, they still failed to bring me the victory I so needed. Instead, with every new failure, a layer was added to the condemnation that weighed heavily on my soul. Because now not only were my actions falling short of the standards I believed in, but I didn’t even believe my own repentance. How could I? I mean, it felt sincere when I was depressed, crying, begging for forgiveness, and waiting for some sense that God had forgiven me. It felt like real remorse and a real desire to change…but as I listened to preachers who had high standards for repentance, as well as the self-loathing voice that inhabited my thoughts, I decided that, however real my repentance felt, it clearly wasn’t real because no change happened. Which made me feel utterly hopeless. Not only did I fail the standard, but I also failed to take the proper steps to being forgiven. Sincerity be damned, I was clearly headed for hell.

I couldn’t fall asleep. My normal was torment, and the only rest for the tormented comes when your brain is simply too tired to entertain another frenzied thought. The gaps grew longer between my attempts at repentance, cause I really couldn’t stand the added condemnation of another failure. Anxiety, depression, hopelessness. You get the picture.

Anyway, on September 19, 2007, I sat through a class about hearing the voice of God. In a last ditch effort to take hold of the God who seemed so impossible to wrangle, I had signed up for a 5-month Christian school with YWAM that I hoped would save my soul. As the teacher went on about a life of hearing from God directly, as well as the different things that obstruct our hearing, I still didn’t have much hope. Just a glimmer.

At the end of his talk, we all had an opportunity to spend some time alone to think of the areas in our lives where we had fallen short. Great. Sounds like every day of my life until that point! But this time, there was a subtle twist. We were to write down all of the areas that we had failed, all of the sins that continued to shame our souls, and then bring them to the “sin shredder” (really just a standard paper shredder…but I guess this one was multi-purpose). And here we each shredded our record of sins…hopefully to remember them no more. While this process had a more hopeful twist than my usual efforts at repentance, it would take more than a multi-purpose shredder to unchain my heart. As I went up for prayer after shredding my sins, I had the faintest question in my mind. Could I really hear from God?

Suddenly, in the span of about one second, everything changed. I instantly found myself standing at the foot of the cross. I saw the face of Jesus. And a loud voice boomed, “It is FINISHED!”. The vision ended as quickly as it had begun. And I was left a sobbing mess.

Words can’t possibly describe that experience. After nine years, I myself haven’t even come close to grasping it. It was not just an overwhelming experience for my senses. It wasn’t just the magic of being transported in a vision to another time and another place. It was the voice. It was those eyes. And it was everything they so perfectly communicated in the blink of an eye.

I cried for a long time. Not just normal crying, but the weeping of a thousand bottled-up tears from a thousand unanswered prayers. A tear for every time I felt abandoned, for every time I felt like I was an object of wrath, for every time I longed for heaven but seemed destined for hell. I cried it all away, as hope reclaimed a weary heart. I was found! Not in some generic way, but in the most meaningful, personal way possible. I saw him. I saw love. I saw grace. I saw a deep pool of mercy. A pool which I thought I had dried up with my endless failures, as if a person could drain the Pacific with a straw. I hadn’t even tested the depths of His mercy! I was not a disappointment, I was not living under the dark glare of the Judge. I was instead captivated by the eyes that held a fathomless, unchangeable, eternal love. In the reflection of those eyes, I found myself!

Needless to say, I cried a lot after that. For at least a month after seeing Jesus, random things would bring back the tears. Someone might say “love” in a conversation, and I would start bawling. I would hear the word “Jesus”, and again the tears would fall. When I wasn’t busy crying, my face was plastered with a stupid grin. The grin of someone who is completely overwhelmed with a goodness that he knows will never leave.

The years since that eternal moment have not been easy. It turns out that when Jesus said, “It is finished”, he didn’t mean that I would never fail again. There have been seasons where I’ve found myself right back in a familiar rut. At times I even thought that I had once again fallen too far for his mercy. Surely the guy who had such a vision should be on the fast track to perfect behavior, right? How could I so scorn the grace of God as to fail to fully embrace it at all times? The accuser is very crafty! But while I have endured trying seasons, times of doubt, and circumstances that I couldn’t easily make sense of, there is a voice that resonates in the depths of my soul. Deeper than knowledge, experience, or the unstable realm of emotions, there is a timeless place within me where I simply know. I am His. He is mine. I cannot possibly outrun his mercy. I have no hope of extracting myself from his love. He loves me. It’s who He is. I am loved.

Whatever is going on around me, and whatever the status of my performance (are we still doing that? Are will still performing as if God doesn’t value us for who we are? Are we still measuring each other as if our judgment carries any weight?), I have a home. I have a place from which I will never be evicted. I have sanctuary in the heart of God, even as he makes his home in a deep part of mine. What bliss! I do not know what the rest of this life will look like, but of one thing I am certain.

“surely goodness and mercy will follow me all the days of my life, and I will dwell in the house of God forever” –Psalm 23: 8

Hyper-Grace?

I am always saddened when I see attacks on “hyper-grace” or “radical grace”. If there are people teaching that we should go out and sin because of grace, they are wrong!…but that is not the message that I have heard from hyper-grace preachers (and it is not what I believe, and I’m as “hyper-grace” as they come!).  No, we are going through a grace revolution because we are finally waking up to the reality of our own weakness in changing ourselves.  We don’t preach “the law is bad”, we preach “the law is ineffective”!  We don’t believe that Jesus is an example of what we can do when we try to follow the law; He is the bridge that unites us once again with our loving Father, and if an example, then an example of what a person in perfect union with the Father looks like!

The reality is that both sin and attempts at self-perfection are rooted in the same lie.  Sin says, “Do _____, then you’ll be happy”, and self effort says “Do ______, then God will be pleased with you.”  Both are rooted in the lie that God is withholding good things from us.  Both believe that we ourselves can fix our unhappiness or lack with effort.  What the Self Effort crowd doesn’t understand is that it is the freedom of being loved and rescued entirely separate from our behavior (grace!) that uproots the powerful lie that holds us captive to sin and religion.  We find that happiness isn’t found in sinning, and it’s not found in trying not to sin; it is found in communion with Jesus!  Even more surprising, we discover that genuine love is not a fruit of trying to love.  Genuine love springs up in our souls when we aren’t even looking for it — when we are lost in the eyes of Love Himself and discover that we are 100 percent free from every law and burden.  It is exactly the freedom and unconditional love that the Legalists so fear that is the birthplace of genuine, unadulterated love!  It is this love that will produce beautiful fruit in our lives…we just may be to busy enjoying Jesus to realise it!

Think about.  How would you respond if someone pointed out a girl that you had never met before and told you, “You must fall in love with her!”  Does that commandment actually produce any love whatsoever?  You may out of fear ACT like you love her, or TRY to love her — but no amount of effort will create a genuine heart response of love.  Then how do we get people to love God?  Just like with meeting a girl you don’t know, the only way to genuinely fall in love is to get to know the person.  The reality is that Jesus is shockingly, overwhelmingly, heart-meltingly BEAUTIFUL.  I don’t love Him because I have to.  I don’t try to love Him at all.  Seeing who He is, is enough to draw me in!  The reality is that Jesus is the sum total of all our hearts desires!  We have searched for love, intimacy, affirmation, pleasure, security, hope, excitement, meaning, etc. in so many places, not realizing that our hearts were made to find all fulfillment in Him!  It is totally possible to find the religion of Christianity without experiencing who Christ is for you, but when you actually discover Jesus Himself…you will find a home for your soul, and the true source and fulfilment of all your passions and desires.  So don’t listen to anyone who is trying to burden you down with rules as a way to please God, and don’t listen to that voice that says “If only I do _____ then I’ll be happy!”.  Listen to the voice of your heavenly Father, experience his abundance of grace (you might even say “hyper-grace”!) that meets you exactly where you’re at, and discover the Substance, the Person, the Hope that you’ve always dreamt about but never thought possible!

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In closing, this is my prayer for you!

“For this reason I bow my knees before the Father, from whom every family in heaven and on earth is named, that according to the riches of his glory he may grant you to be strengthened with power through his Spirit in your inner being, so that Christ may dwell in your hearts through faith—that you, being rooted and grounded in love, may have strength to comprehend with all the saints what is the breadth and length and height and depth, and to know the love of Christ that surpasses knowledge, that you may be filled with all the fullness of God. Now to him who is able to do far more abundantly than all that we ask or think, according to the power at work within us, to him be glory in the church and in Christ Jesus throughout all generations, forever and ever. Amen.” -Ephesians 3:14-21 (ESV)