"Freedom" in Chinese

“What will you be teaching on your trip to China?” I was asked again and again.

“I only have one message,” I would respond, “Freedom; it’s the only thing I know!”

Still uncertain about the “Freedom” message, some people stay away. Let me tell you what I learned in China.  Our translator put the Chinese symbols for “Freedom” on our marker board.  A bit enamored by the uniqueness of seeing my life message in symbol, I inquired further.

“What do the symbols mean?”, I asked.

The answer still excites me.  They got it right!! It must be the wisdom of the ancients for which the Chinese are so renowned.  Whatever the reason, they got it right.  Here is what our translator said.

“These two symbols mean, The reason to become yourself”.

All the crazy definitions and expectations we conjure up for freedom and here it was all along.  The reason to become yourself.  For most Western christians, this definition stirs up a question.  We have been told to die to ourselves, and to deny self.  So to urge people to “become” themselves feels a little egocentric.  Is becoming myself freedom or selfishness?

The key is in our definition of “self”.   If we understand the implication of the Adam and Eve story, we may see a whole new picture of God’s intent and desire for our lives.  And in seeing this, we may see a whole new element of exactly what it is Jesus purchased for us with His death and resurrection.

God put His image in us and set us on the earth as His representative.  He was quite pleased with the “selves” he had made.  Plugged into the breath of life, we were to the Earth what He was to the Heavens.  He liked it, and He liked us.  When we unplugged He did not stop liking us.  He disliked the things that got in the way of the original design.

When we unplugged, disconnected from the Spirit of Life, we began to develop a “self” with another source.  This “self” was selfish and full of destruction.  God’s blueprint was not destroyed, but the power source was changed.  We could not become the “self” we were created to be as long as the Spirit of God was not present in our souls.

In scripture, we find two definitions for freedom. Both have to do with the reclaiming of the original “self”, or perhaps stated differently, the reason to become yourself.

First we see In John 8:32 Jesus tells the crowd, “If you continue in My word, then you are truly disciples of Mine;  and you will know the truth, and the truth will make you free.”

If Jesus meant we should finally get our doctrine straightened out, and get this religion thing right, then the Pharisees of Jesus’ day would have been His favorites.  They read scripture all the time and devoted themselves to trying to obey their understanding of it.

“Continue in my Word“, rather I believe, is more a picture of the constant connection to the breath of life that maintained Adam and Eve as the selves they were designed to be.  This brings us to our second Biblical definition of freedom.

Second Corinthinas 3:17 tells us, “Now the Lord is the Spirit, and where the Spirit of the Lord is, there is freedom.”

Do you see it again?  When we re-connect to the One who made us alive in the first place, His breath, His Word, we become again the self He designed us to be.

God did not make us broken and insist that we act whole.  He did not create us as a frustrating and unruly race, and demand that we act differently.  He created us the way He intended. That is who we were as long as we stayed connected to Him as our source of life.  When we disconnected, another nature, not the original design, began to grow in the place of the orginal design.  Die to that, and in that death you become alive.

The reason to become yourself is The One who made you yourself in the first place.  He wants to make you yourself again.  Plug in.  Breathe in the Breath of Life, in this you will find yourself.

Having just returned from an amazing experience, I am growing aware at a much deeper level of the way we are made for connection.  If my life were all about tasks, I think I would go insane.  As John Eldredge regularly reminds us our lives are about adventure.  But for some reason this trip has made me starkly aware that our lives are made for adventure together.

I enjoy my time alone.  I do not fear silence, or stillness.  Maybe if I had more of it I would, but I relish time by myself.  So this is not about a neurotic need to be validated by people.  I simply believe we were made for connectedness.  Something is inherently fulfilling about sharing.  In fact, as I thought about this trip.  Every step was deeply enriched by someone else’s role in the journey.

Preparation:

In getting ready for this trip, people asked me regularly, “Are you excited?”

In the busy-ness of my life, I was forgetting to be excited.  In fact, the adventure of a lifetime felt to me like another big chunk out of my schedule.  How could I fit this in, and, it was a stinking long airplane ride, and, was it really going to be worth my time?  Somehow I had this thing categorized in the wrong place in my heart.  Friends, without even trying kept urging me to think differently (wait…isn’t that my job?).

Finally over breakfast one day, a friend told me that God was up to something in China, and I was likely to see Him move in great ways.  What was this stirring in my soul?  Oh yeah; desire.  I felt desire about this trip for the first time.  I wanted, or maybe even needed to be where the action was.  Thanks friend.  It was not good for me to be alone, I was thinking wrongly about my journey.  I finally had an appetite to go, but I had not come up with this alone.  I was stirred up by a friend.

Experience:

The trip began and I met up with my companions.  Day by day the adventure unfolded.  Each one brought something with them that I did not have.  A thought.  A way of seeing things.  A sense of God’s direction.  The next step when I was unsure.  Left to my own, what richness I would have missed out on.  The perspective, the wisdom, the urging of the others made my trip fuller, deeper.

But more than this.  As the adventure unfolded and God began to move, it was good that I was not alone.  The excited glance, the eye contact as God’s Spirit snuck up on us.  My companions as well as new friends, all shared experiences, many with only a glance and no words.  In some cases words were impossible, because of language barriers, but there was no mistaking the deep look in the eye that said, “the two of us are one on the same journey, thank you for sharing it with me.”  We were all together part of something bigger than any one of us.  And sharing it together made us more aware of this. Thanks Alan, Sabrina and Dave.

I also have new friends.  Some I will never see again, but their stories are now part of my story.  Others I am certain I will see again.  Not only have our stories merged, our destinies have as well.  And my destiny is richer because it is now no longer mine alone.  Some people I will see in heaven forever, because our paths crossed once on earth.  How cool is that?

Sharing:

Now I am home.  The adventure is over.  Or is it?  Not at all, because I am living it again with the people with whom I live my life.  My wife, my kids, my friends, all listen to the stories.  The stories become richer again, because I share them.  Those who weren’t there, have their hearts stirred as they hear what God did.  Partly because He did stuff, and partly because it again reminds us that God still does stuff. 

Something about telling, completes the story.  I anticipated, and a friend stirred my heart.  I experienced, and friends shared the journey.  And now I tell the stories, and the look on friends faces makes it complete.  The re-telling is more than just re-living old things.  Something in the telling makes it whole, finished.  Like a radio, receiving is only a pre-cursor to the broadcast.  If we don’t tell the stories they are incomplete as they grow lifeless and dormant in our hearts.

Any time you think to yourself, “I can do this alone”, next ask yourself; why would you?  The statement “It is not good for man to be alone” is just another way to say, “Life rocks when you share it with others”

Have you ever noticed how much better food tastes when you are hungry?  It looks better, it smells better, and when the time for consumption draws near, your whole being prepares to take it in.

Alan Smith and I spent the last few days with some very hungry people.  Their lives and their ministries were at a point of growing frustration.  In the words of one of them, “We could really help people and they would stay helped for two weeks, and then everything would go back to the way it was.”

When they showed up for our time together, they were starving.  They took every morsel and got the maximum pleasure and sustenance from it.  The setting was a teachers dream.  Every word from our mouths was savored, processed, and applied in deep, life changing ways.  You could smell eternity in the room.

I think several factors had made them hungry.

1.  They had faced hardship just to choose Kingdom lives:  Nothing about the Gospel was socially easy or convenient for them.

2.  They were already practicing the gospel:  The Gospel is something you do not something you study.  They were already out there doing things, and therefore had immediate application for what they heard.

3.  They were tired, and needed rest:  need I say more?  Jesus said something about those who are tired and come to Him.

4.  They lived and understood they Gospel as a communal reality:  They were part of a family and they knew it.  This was no institution they were serving.

The atmosphere in this setting exploded in transformed hearts.  Their appetite for transformational truth that translated into action was compelling.  We in the USA live in an atmosphere that we would call religious freedom, but is it?  I began my time with this group saying that I have seen very free people behind bars, and very bound people living in expensive homes.  The prison that surrounds us all is not our circumstances, it is our perception of what is real and substantive and foundational to living.

From what will we draw a life that is truly life?  For what are we truly hungering? Less stress?  More stimulus? Less pressure?  More comfort?  What if we chase all those things and find that our attention to them has only increased the power these elusive pursuits have over us?

What if instead we begin our days and live them out with an ear and a heart toward the activity of God in the world around us?  Or better yet, with an ear toward His activity in the world within us.  Could five minutes of re-connecting to His life-giving Spirit actually bring more life than an hour of television?

A friend of mine told me this story….

In the early days of our nation a group of explorers hired some native Americans to guide them into the frontier.  In a rush to find their fortune in gold, these explorers would wake early and push hard all day.

Several days into the trip, they prepared again to depart, and to their dismay they found their Native American guides sitting still around the early morning fire. The men began to urge them to get up and get ready.  The leader of the guides turned to them, and spoke.

“We cannot leave yet,” he said,” We have been moving too fast, and have left our spirits behind.  We must wait here until our spirits catch up with us.”

Have a seat….I wonder how far behind you have left your Spirit?  No wonder you are so hungry.

We often think that the opposite of fear is courage.  If we want to get really spiritual, we say the opposite of fear is faith.  Ironically, neither of these is a truly biblical answer.

Here is what the Bible says:

1 John 4:  Perfect Love casts out fear

2 Timothy 1:7  God has not given us a spirit of Fear, but He has given us power and Love and a sound mind.

Catch it?  The opposite of fear is Love.  I would like to point out two things about this:

1.  This is true because if an all-powerful God loves us, what could possibly over-power Him to harm us.

2.  If the antidote for fear is faith, or courage, the antidote originates from us.  Since Love is the solution, it issues forth from Him.

next time you feel fear creeping in on you, instead of trying to work up your courage, or recite words of faith, ask God how He feels about you.

John 3:6 Flesh gives birth to flesh, but the Spirit gives birth to spirit.

Nicodemus, the one to whom Jesus spoke these words, could not have been more confused.  Jesus might as well have downloaded Nic’s brain into a computer program.  His head was spinning and this Rabbi was confusing him.  He recognized the words, but the meaning of the words seemed just out of reach.

This distinction between spirit and flesh still challenges each of us today.  As we learn to “live by the Spirit”  it can be like learning to speak  a foreign language, or learning to communicate with a member of the opposite sex.

Engaging God’s Spirit can cause strong emotions, but sometimes strong emotions come from our flesh, and prevent us from tuning into God.  Allowing God’s Spirit to speak through us can cause a great surge in confidence, but this very confidence can become dangerous pride.  Encountering God’s Spirit can result in powerful experiences.  These very experiences can later become a distraction from an ongoing experience of God’s presence.  Some of the things produced in us by His Spirit can be imitated without His presence,  as we fall again into self-reliance.

See the trap?   Measuring outward experience may not necessarily tell us anything at all about whether or not we are being moved by the Spirit.  In fact, measuring by outward experience can convince us wrongly that we are living by the Spirit.

When we are dependent on and guided by the Spirit of God, it is a strange partnership between our willingness to grow in dependence and familiarity and God’s willingness to be patient and train us. God makes a move, then it is our turn.  He initiates an engagement and watches to see what we do.  He wants to inform us, then empower us and then demonstrate Himself through us.  His goal is to get us to learn to walk out the whole process empowered by His working.

So we Hear God. Now what.  We heard because He spoke.  But we focus on our hearing.

“I’m pretty good at hearing God,” we think (or worse, say).

Then we proceed to tell others what we heard, and how we heard, and how cool it was.  At some point we diverge from God’s goal.  We think His goal is that we go now, and do what He said, regardless of whose energy we engage.  God is standing back at the starting line to see how far we will run before we realize He has not moved since He spoke.   Will we run ahead without Him?

Step by step Living by the Spirit starts to make sense.  Well, that’s not really the right way to say it.  We begin to understand.  Well, that’s not really the right way to say it either.  We grow in familiarity and surrender.  We become less willing to take another step without Him.  We become more sensitive to His impulse and the shifting of our wayward motives.  We grow familiar with the “groove” of being moved by Him.

It is a maturing process.  Can it be measured?  Sure it can; watch for these signs: love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, gentleness, meekness, mercy, and self-control.  If these qualities are not in you, and are not produced around you consider the source. Spirit or Flesh.

Walking down the road to Emmaus, we read that God restrained the eyes of the two disciples from seeing.  (Luke 24) They weren’t blind, they simply could not see the truth of Who was in front of them.  How does this happen?

We read in Genesis 2:9 a most amazing description of the Garden of Eden.

“And out of the ground the Lord caused to grow every tree that is pleasing to the sight and good for food; the tree of life also in the midst of the garden, and the tree of the knowledge of good and evil.”

Here is what is amazing about this description.  I know what trees look like.  I have no idea what “life” or “knowledge” look like.  Adam and Eve knew.  They knew because they saw every day.

The Hebrew word here for “pleasing to the sight” holds an important meaning for us.  It does not mean “pretty”.  It means “a spiritual appearance”.  It is the same word used in Exodus 3:3 when Moses turned to see “the sight” and beheld a bush that burned but was not consumed.  It was a visual register of a spiritual reality. Adam and Eve “saw” this way as a regular part of daily life in the Garden.  When they left the garden, in many ways the garden also left them.

Jesus said He came to seek and save “that which was lost” (Luke 19).  What if what was lost was more than just Zaccheus?  What if one of the things lost, was a way of seeing? Paul tells us that what we lost in Adam, Jesus returned to us…this makes me very curious about what else we lost.

Think Differently.

In the visible creation God has expressed His invisible attributes.  But you can look and miss it.

The sun came up today, to remind you that the God who never changes, still constantly renews all things.

The Planet hung suspended in space one more day, with a perfect balance of temperature, atmosphere, and stability in order to maintain human life.  God holds all things together by continuing to speak the same words that created all things.

The rain fell today in certain places to remind us that God sustains and nurtures out lives.

The rain did not fall in certain places to remind us that God Himself is enough when we are uncertain of our provision.

The wind blew gently today, reminding us that God is constantly in motion and interacting with His creation.

In some places the wind became violent and destroyed things.  In this we see that the immensity and intensity of God is beyond our comprehension, and must be held in wise regard.

A married couple walked together in sweet unity reminding us that God is a two-become-one God.

Another couple walked through difficulty as they tried to connect through their chaos.  In this we can see how different in nature man and God are.  Crossing the gap can be difficult, and requires our focus.

A butterfly came from a cocoon, while a polar bear died a cold and lonely death.  Trees grew and mountains fell.  Oceans fed the people living on their shores, and in other places the fierce oceans caused men to stay home instead of put out in their boats.

Nebulae are creating stars and Solar systems in every direction, while DNA is replicating the minute intricacies of a single family line.  Electricity flows, radio waves fill the air, Living creatures of amazing variety cover the surface of our planet.

A baby is born.

In these and countless infinite moments you can either see the Nature of the Invisible God, or you can walk through the middle of it, and think only of yourself.

Even the fact that you have this option tells us something about the Invisible God.

Think Bigger.