King in the Mud

It never gets old.  A King who acts like a Servant.  A God who loves the weakest.  A Saviour who welcomes children. 

An earthly person of importance thinks that they deserve to be treated with extra respect because they are important.  God lives out his importance by refusing the pedestal and staying down in the mud with his beloved.  The world thinks that the strong deserve control and dominance.  God uses his strength to empower the weak.

We could go around telling people, “God is really important!  He is worthy of your worship.  You must worship him because he is glorious!”  But our God’s glory is so humble!  His importance so practical!  He doesn’t mean for us to get caught up in abstractions and worship him because we know he is the biggest and the best.  He is too busy living out his nature by loving his children.  He is a comfort to the brokenhearted, hope to those in despair, a light to those who have lost their way.  Absolutely he is glorious, but it is his nearness and humility that display his glory better than a crown!

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“You know that the rulers of the Gentiles lord it over them, and their great ones exercise authority over them.  It shall not be so among you.  But whoever would be great among you must be your servant, and whoever would be first among you must be your slave, even as the Son of Man came not to be served but to serve, and to give his life as a ransom for many.”  Matthew 20:25-28

Always Food

I’m back!  I haven’t written in a long time…not since the birth of my youngest son who is now almost 10 months old!  The addition of my son has added a lot of joy, but also taken a lot of energy and focus away from writing.  I have been waiting for a return to normalcy (whatever that is) so that I can start writing again, but it finally dawned on me that that isn’t going to happen.  Instead, I’m going to embrace the new normal.  I’m going to write what I can as often as I can, and I’m going to give up my perfectionism and click the “publish” button whether I think it’s good enough for public consumption or not.  I don’t know what will come of it, but hopefully something real and beneficial to my readers.  I hope you enjoy!

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There is always nourishment in Jesus. I forget that sometimes. Especially when I let my mind wander for too long on theological problems and abstract questions. I will start getting bored of the technicalities spinning through my head and will project that boredom onto the underlying truth that all those words are trying to express. “Jesus loves me”.  I know. “He is always with me”.  I know that.  Blah, blah, blah.

What a beautiful escape it is to surrender the mental toil, the attempts to explain, the questions and paradoxes, and simply breathe the truth. Let it in. Let it out. This isn’t a mind game. The gospel is not a psychological theory. It isn’t a self-improvement seminar. It is a living, breathing reality. It is the image of the invisible God, made known to man. It is the revelation of Emanuel, God with us.

Something births in my soul every time I remember. Every time I drink of mercy. Every time I taste that He is here. Truly here. When I awaken to his realness, his invasive goodness. Jesus is good food. Jesus is good drink. He is hope. He is purpose. He is life.

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!

Mountains and Valleys

I usually hate “Mountain top – Valley” or “Desert – Promised Land” analogies, because I think they obscure more than they reveal. It is absolutely true that in life we walk through times when things are going our way and we feel unstoppable, and times when we feel unnoticed or trapped in impossible circumstances….thus the mountain top and the valley. While they can accurately describe the external reality, I feel like this metaphor can be used to normalize situations that are not supposed to be normal.

Did Israel’s desert season really have to be a desert? I mean, they were being led by God, he was miraculously providing for all of their needs and leading them into the promised land. Doesn’t sound like a desert to me! Sounds like a beautiful time to encounter God and enjoy his provision! Why do people hate deserts? Because they are cold at night, hot in the day, and it’s hard to find food and water. With the Israelites, God led them by a cloud in the day (providing shelter from the heat) a pillar of fire by night (warming them in the cool nights) and caused food to drop from heaven and water to spring up from rocks! So all of the reasons that people hate deserts were not actual factors in this desert. God had made this desert a place of provision, and if they had eyes to see it, a pleasant oasis even! The only desert that existed was in the minds of the people journeying!

In terms of feeling the presence of God, there can be valleys and mountain tops too.  In one particularly difficult season of my life, I had spent a long time in the valley and was doing everything I knew to get back to the mountain top (including going to a catholic hermitage for 5 days of solitude and prayer). It didn’t work.  In frustration and depression, I called out to God, saying “I can’t feel you!!!” Then I heard in my spirit (still void of any supernatural warmth) a voice that said, “but I’m here”. Suddenly it clicked for me that I was going by my feelings to determine if God was there or not….but in reality, he was there the whole time! This gave me a deep level of peace that freed me from all of my efforts to get back to the mountain top.

When God is silent, it doesn’t mean he is absent, or even that he is teaching us some hard lesson. Sometimes he is inviting us to be quiet with him. Sometimes he just wants for us to rest and enjoy that he is, and that we are. When we discover the God who is there even when we don’t feel like he is, suddenly there is no more valley or mountaintop, only times that have lots of communication and experience, and times that are about resting in silence and peace. Interestingly, the revelation that I don’t need to chase what I already have, and that I don’t need to search for encounters, ushered me into a lot of encounters!

There is no more desert and there is no more valley. When we learn that God is trustworthy beyond our immediate physical senses, we can find the mountaintop and the promised land wherever we are, because wherever we are, He is there too!

 

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!

Our Peace

The world doesn’t need our paranoia. The world needs our peace.

When Jesus boarded a boat that was about to sail into a vicious storm, he could have done a lot of things. He could have been a prophet of approaching doom and told the disciples that they were about to enter a dangerous tempest. He could have warned them that they would need a special level of trust if they wanted to survive the ferocious waves. He could have used it as an opportunity to encourage self-reflection, to ask the disciples, “If you die tonight, do you know where you’ll be?” If he was truly clever he would have used the fearful situation for something, anything! — because we all know that fear makes for an attentive (and easily manipulated) audience. But instead, he just rested.

He slept, perhaps soaking in his Father’s love, or maybe just enjoying the dreamless sleep of the untroubled. When he was finally shaken awake by his panicking disciples, he did not abandon his rest and succumb to a fight or flight instinct. He merely looked out on the turmoil of the crashing waves and said, “Quiet! Be still.” And the waves listened. As the storm melted into tranquil seas, then and only then did Jesus proceed to teach a lesson. “Why were you so afraid? Do you not yet have faith in me?” Still trembling at what they had just witnessed, his disciples began to wonder, “Who is this, that even the wind and sea obey his voice?”

It would seem that the outbreak of peace had gotten their attention at a depth that even the fear of death could not penetrate.

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Instead of looking at the confusion and fear around us and prophesying the doom that appears so inevitable, let’s try something different. Let’s remain at peace within the love of our Father. Let’s stay there, perhaps even ignoring the chaos as it builds. And when at last we are called into action and people are looking to us for answers, let’s act from our rest. Let’s confront the darkness with light, the fear with hope, and the confusion with the peace we have been cultivating all along!

“Peace I leave with you; my peace I give to you. I do not give to you as the world gives. Do not let your hearts be troubled, and do not be afraid.” John 14:27 (NIV)

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