28 Mar 2010

Some stuff about me…

The Freedom Guy…yeah that’s me…normally I write stuff a little headier, a little ethereal…sometimes stuff that stirs me, or odd thoughts that I have. Today I want to just say some stuff about me.

You want to learn sports from someone who has played a lot, not from a beginner.  You want to learn any skill or topic from someone who has experience.  I hope I can teach freedom to people because God has freed me, but also because He continues to do so.

I don’t think it is helpful, as a leader, to tell people that you struggle all the time because we often assume that this is the norm, and that, therefore freedom is a myth.  I also don’t want to tell people I never struggle because well, I am just fed up with the presentation from leaders that says, “I have arrived, try to be like me…”

But the reality is that life is both joy and pain.  Abundant life includes both ends of the spectrum.  Honesty about both keeps us in honest contact with the One who made us.

This last Kairos (for those new to this blog, or Gateway’s Freedom Ministry, this is our three day event designed to facilitate an encounter with God) was very deeply helpful to me.  Though I was there to do my part and help others, I found myself greatly helped as God spoke to me throughout about the condition of my heart.  Amazingly, He never said a thing about what might be wrong with my heart.  Rather, the things He did say, evidenced places I was needing to hear more from Him.

Here is an example.  I am the Executive Pastor of Pastoral Care at a large church with a vision to help as many people as we can.  I oversee a staff of about 18 people whose mission is to help people to encounter God so that they might discover their true identity and purpose.  We are busy, and we are impacting a lot of lives.  At Kairos, God told me He did not rescue me so I could be an Executive Pastor of anything,  He said He just saved me because He loves me and wanted me to be His son.  A great weight lifted from my shoulders, as He came near and Fathered me.

One of our teachers was describing the depth of God’s love for us, when he said that He would rather go to Hell if the person he loved was going to hell.    This teacher said that in that moment God told him that this is how much He loves him.  At the same moment, as he spoke,  I received the positive equivalent of a punch in the gut.  It was like God pierced me with love.  He just reminded me “I love you Bob” in a sudden and visceral revelation. This seemed to me to reveal how much I had been functioning as an employee, not a beloved son.

Later in the weekend, during a teaching on Father and Mother wounds, our speaker was sharing on how a father, in loving his daughters, grants them the power of their feminine identity.  God softly whispered in my ear “You did good at that…”  I melted.  I didn’t even mind that His grammar was bad. I often struggle, as my kids grow close to leaving home, with whether or not I have given them what they need.  I hope they think so, but God told me I had.  Another weight from my shoulders.

Throughout the weekend it was like God was lancing little pockets of pain and self doubt that had festered outside of my consciousness. He was so nice to me!!  I am glad that He is my Dad.

For more about Kairos click here:  Kairos Testimonies

19 Mar 2010
Today the Ocean Spoke to me About God

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Today the Ocean Spoke to me About God

Today the Ocean Spoke to me about God.

 

There was a fragrance in the air, I knew it was near. Read more…

18 Mar 2010

Sin Mangement vs. Forming Jesus in Us

Dallas Willard has described our modern version of Christianity as the “Gospel of Sin-Management”, because of our propensity to think in terms of “what do I do about my sin?”.  How do I stop, it?  Is it sin if I…? What do I do when I do sin?  How do I control my “besetting sin”?  All these seem to be the central focus of christian practice.  If not preventing or managing bad behavior, we are trying to foster “good” behavior.  Read your Bible, Pray more.  All these things seem so different from what Jesus seemed to say and do for people.  How odd that the religion we named after Him promotes itself differently than He did.

It seems to me that when we go back to God’s original blueprint we might adjust (again) our view of the message and work of Jesus.

God had always intended to cover the creation with His nature, and He has always intended that His method be mankind, re-presenting, or presenting again His nature in the places we inhabit.  When Adam and his wife turned the keys over to God’s adversary, God was not confused, frustrated, or shocked.  This was all still part of His strategy to achieve His goal.

Part of His nature is that He is a Redeemer and and a Repairer, so to cover the creation with that, He would redeem and restore mankind.  In so doing, He could resume covering the earth with Himself.  As He re-forms His image in us, we re-present Him as we go.    Where confusion has been we can bring clarity.  Where fear has been we can deliver perfect love.  Where anxiety has been, we can step in and restore peace beyond understanding.

Sure, these things don’t work as well when we are arm-wrestling our own behavior patterns, but winning the behavioral struggle was not the ultimate goal of the death and resurrection of Jesus.  The cross allows us to be reconciled again to God, so that He, in us might fill the world with love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, gentleness, meekness, mercy and self-control.

In other words God’s goal was not to straighten out a bunch of mis-behaving miscreants, it was to bring sons and daughters back into a relationship in which His life flows through us to the creation around us.

Try hard to be good if you want, but you could just yield to a very effective transformation process, in which God Himself is making you again into the person He designed you to be.  Would it make any sense at all for God to make you, and then expect you to be someone other than who He made you to be? Become Yourself….

10 Mar 2010
Pre-Geographic

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Pre-Geographic

Where was the meeting between God the Father, The Son and His Holy Spirit held? You know the one where they decided “Let Us create…”  The likelihood that we could really comprehend such a “place” is slim.  Read more…

2 Mar 2010

The Kingdom of Heaven is Within You

Today my friend Marcus read the following words out loud to a large group of us.  As I listened something larger than me groaned deeply in my chest, and tears came involuntarily to my eyes.

Rev 21:1-8
21:1 Then I saw a new heaven and a new earth, for the first heaven and the first earth had passed away, and there was no longer any sea. 2 I saw the Holy City, the new Jerusalem, coming down out of heaven from God, prepared as a bride beautifully dressed for her husband. 3 And I heard a loud voice from the throne saying, “Now the dwelling of God is with men, and he will live with them. They will be his people, and God himself will be with them and be their God. 4 He will wipe every tear from their eyes. There will be no more death or mourning or crying or pain, for the old order of things has passed away.”

5 He who was seated on the throne said, “I am making everything new!” Then he said, “Write this down, for these words are trustworthy and true.”

6 He said to me: “It is done. I am the Alpha and the Omega, the Beginning and the End. To him who is thirsty I will give to drink without cost from the spring of the water of life. 7 He who overcomes will inherit all this, and I will be his God and he will be my son.

These words come from John the Revelator, as his eyes are given a view to the moment of the redemption of all things.  A day we know lies ahead.  A day none of us can really imagine, because to imagine this moment would require some kind of framework in our minds in which we could categorize this event.  Matter and reality as we know it, being completely consumed and replaced by something none of us can know; this is what John saw.

But I was taken by the thing that stirred in me as I listened to Marcus today.

This world makes me tired.  Don’t read too much into that.  I like my life.  I have and expect to have some amazing adventures.  I get to particpate in supernatural exchanges.  A Lot!!  I love people and I am loved by people.

But this world makes me tired.  In the midst of the richest of experiences, people I love die.  People loved by people I love die.  Sickness, anger, perversion, all seem to have a lot of influence under the old order.  For every life I see radically changed, ten more line up, overwhelmed by their journey through this world, and seeking relief.

I cry.  I grieve.  I strain against the tide of pain.

I laugh, I celebrate, I dance with those set free and restored.

Then I cry again.  This world makes me tired.

And something inside of me, daily screams that there is more.  There is more than we see.  There is more than we access.  There is more to who we are than we can possibly harness with the limitations of “right now”.  I felt it stir today.  In my chest is a noble, eternal prince, destined to ride the universe with the Creator of all things and see creation in a way we can NOT currently envision. In my spirit is a deep connection to the Source of all Things, filled with love for the broken and the beautiful, and overflowing with Rivers of Living Water.  I know it is there, but most days, I struggle to access it for myself, much less pass it on to others.  Today I felt that man stir in me.  Grieving for the old order, but longing, no, starving for the New.

I long for no more suffering.  I strain for the day of the wiping away of every tear.  The passing of the old order sounds like relief overwhelming.  Undressing from this world sounds like coming home from a long century of hard labor and peeling off the work clothes covered with sweat, and dirt, preparing to wash off the clinging grime of the day.  What a relief.

But really…what sounds better than any thing…it is not so much what I will leave behind.  It is what I will pick up.  Shedding the weight of a troubled world, and the healing of my pain, and the pain of others borne in my soul sounds great.  But here is what I really want.

I want to be a son.  I want to feel like a son.  I want to receive like a son.  I will be His son and He will be my God.  To know that, to drink that in, to feel sonship in every cell of my body.  That sounds like life to me.

Those words from the book of Revelation stir in me more than I can say.  But I want to try.