6 Apr 2009

Stuck? Probably, but not what you think…

Stuck…trapped…frustrated…these words describe more of us than we like to admit.  Why is it so hard for us to break free and live the life we dream about?  Why is it so difficult to overcome?  Perhaps you have spent a lifetime trying to change, or you’ve only woken up recently to the need to deal with something.  Either way, you may have found change is not as easy as you had first hoped.  Why?  Because we skip the two most important steps in breaking free.  We start immediately trying to change the obvious.  Control your fear; stop eating so much; don’t let other people’s opinions control your sense of well-being.  The list is endless and common to the human journey.  Attack those frustrating behaviors, control those paralyzing emotions, and then try again tomorrow.  Unless you handle  the first two hurdles, all of your best attempts at change are likely to meet with frustration.  What hurdles?  Glad you asked.

The first is this:  Define the problem differently.  If you have been doing everything you can to change and things are not changing; or worse, things are getting worse, step back and consider that you may have defined this thing incorrectly.  The most clever answer to the question is still wrong, when the wrong question is being asked.  Consider that our your inherent drive towards Freedom will bring all your strength to focus on changing this thing.  It would be a shame if you brought all your strength to bear and spent years aiming your strength at the wrong target.  Like the wife who screamed at her husband for years in order to get him to be more sensitive, we must aim our efforts at a target that will actually produce the results we are after.

The Second hurdle is this; consider that part of what has you stuck is that you are stuck being you.  I hope this does not sound too harsh, but it is common to all of us.  If it is difficult for you to approach this second hurdle, try this simple experiment.  Reach down, grab the bottom of your feet, and lift yourself off the ground.  Airborn yet?  If not, you are beginning to come to grips with this trap.  You are stuck being you.   You need Someone bigger, Someone smarter, Someone not you who is capable of transforming you into someone different to throw their weight into your circumstances…for more on this thought see the post “C’mon in…” by my friend Alan. Don’t stay stuck being you.

Step back, re-define what’s wrong, and start with the gentle, but direct definition; something in you must change, before the things you do or think or feel will ever start to change.  Re-define, reconnect…

Think differently

Need some help  with this?  If you live near the Dallas Fort Worth area, tonight (Monday April 6) our class “Levels of Change” can help you make the shifts I am talking about.  Gateway Church, Southlake Texas  7:00 pm in the main auditorium.

3 Apr 2009

These are not the Droids…

“Why is that I keep hurting the people I love the most…”, He asked, as we set up an appointment for counseling.

“Why can’t I stop…I don’t really like doing it, I just can’t stop?” She said as we calendared her appointment.

The conversation took place hundreds of times, in hundreds of ways during my days in private practice.  People doing things they genuinely wish they could stop, but somehow…unable to stop…driven to act…How does this happen to us?  Let’s check it out…More important let’s see how to stop…or at least how to start stopping.

At some level we act because we choose.  Even if it is at the last second after we have tried to resist…we choose to act…to give in.   Why would we choose to do something that we are trying so hard to quit?  The answer is easier than you might think.  We choose because we desire.  Desire…not necessarily enjoyment but Desire.  An appetite…a drive.  Something in us that drives, propels, pushes us to act.  So is desire a bad thing?  Quite the contrary, desire is a GREAT thing.  It is a powerful thing.  Informed and aimed at the right target, desire pulls us toward the things we need.  Food, water, sleep, these are all needs that our desires pull us toward.  Desire aimed rightly keeps us alive.  So we act because we desire….why do we desire?

This one is easy too.  We desire because of perception.  Right or wrong, our perception stirs our desires.  Ask any good advertising executive.  The right perception will stir desire, desire will stir action.  Here’s why this matters.  If I want to affect your actions, I don’t want to start by telling you how to act.  I want to start by influencing your perceptions. Even if I create desire, and you don’t act…I am swaying your focus…I am swaying your heart.

So The Lover of your soul and the enemy of your soul have something in common.  They both want you to see things their way.  One very important difference exists, one will manipulate, the Other will not.

Like Obi-Wan Kenobi in Star Wars, your adversary will use history and people and experiences to wave a a hand over your face…”These are not the droids you’re looking for” he says, and the inattentive mind looks the other way.  ”God does not love you”  he says, and our heart sinks. “Where was He when you needed Him”, he purrs   and we begin to grow angry at our perfect Father. “Your situation is hopeless…”  on and on, the lies lull our mind into agreement, perception becomes desire, and next thing we know, we do that thing we hate.

What if these really ARE the droids you’re looking for?   What if God is head over heels in love with you?  What if He was there in your worst moment and you just couldn’t see Him?  What if you could know the Truth and the Truth could set you free.

Think Differently

2 Apr 2009

Today I sat across from a child of God…

Today I sat across from a child of God.  They were hurt and afraid.  God talked to me about this child.

He told me that He loves them very much.  He told me that He sees them very differently than they have been seeing themself.  He told me that He hurts with them when they hurt.  He told me that He knows how to take care of them and that He will rebuild broken-ness.  He told me that He loves to make all things new.  This is how He talks to His children.

1 Apr 2009

C’mon in…

This is a post from my good friend Alan Smith…Very Tasty I might add

John 3:5-8

5 Jesus answered, “Most assuredly, I say to you, unless one is born of water and the Spirit, he cannot enter the kingdom of God.  6 That which is born of the flesh is flesh, and that which is born of the Spirit is spirit.  7 Do not marvel that I said to you, ‘You must be born again.’  8 The wind blows where it wishes, and you hear the sound of it, but cannot tell where it comes from and where it goes. So is everyone who is born of the Spirit.”

NKJV

 

Birth must be quite an experience. What must that be like? We leave the only reality we have ever known, a warm and cozy space about the size of a volley ball and emerge into a vast world completely outside of our capacity to understand. We are born into a reality for which we have absolutely no point of reference. We enter a world in which we are completely dependent and within which we must now learn to grow and mature. But this is not a learning defined simply in terms of the accumulation of new and additional data. This is a qualitatively new way of seeing and experiencing reality.

 

Jesus describes our entrance into God’s Kingdom in these precise terms. What is it like to enter the Kingdom of God? First, we must leave behind the only reality we’ve ever experienced. By the Spirit we emerge into a bigger, deeper reality – one for which we have no reference point. Entrance into the Kingdom is best described in terms of birth.

 

Faith in Christ is so much more than mental ascent to doctrine. Becoming a disciple of Jesus is far more than a commitment to identifying and implementing Biblical principles. Christianity isn’t simply our identification with a group or organization, nor is it a new set of ideas, even good, right, and true religious ideas. Saving faith is in fact an entirely different way of perceiving reality. It is an awakening from darkness to light, emerging into a new reality where none of the old rules apply and everything is somehow strangely different and upside down.

 

Like the wind, this new life surprises us and is difficult to tame or predict. When asked to explain we find ourselves stretching for a vocabulary that doesn’t quite exist yet. All we are able to describe is that the trees are blowing. The wind itself is beyond description for we are so new to this larger, deeper reality called the Kingdom. We are born. Again.

 

God has provided a way through Jesus for us to enter a new reality called the Kingdom of Heaven. Many long to be free – free from addictions, free from destructive behavior patterns, free from demonic oppression, free from anything in our life that hinders us from becoming all the Jesus created and died for us to be. Our first step to freedom is the new birth. This is not something we add on to our old life as an accessory. Being born radically alters our perception and definition of all we have every known to be true and real. You cannot be born and remain within the cozy reality you’ve occupied before. So the first thing God frees us from is all we have ever thought to be true and all the ways we have thought about truth.

31 Mar 2009

Take Advantage of Grace…Really!

“I am just afraid that I am taking advantage of God’s grace…”

“Be careful…you’re presuming on Grace…”

Oh, the crazy things we say…I have heard people in fear, or in accusation, use this phrase, “taking advantage of Grace.  (Come to think of it, neither of those motives seem to be in agreement with the Kingdom of God.)

I have become firmly convinced; this thought that we might be able to “take advantage” of Grace must come from a fundamental misunderstanding of what Grace is.  Specifically, I think we confuse the adjective about Grace for the noun which is Grace.

Unmerited Favor.  Unmerited. Favor.  One adjective, and one Noun. One adjective, and really the noun could as easily be a verb.  Because we get caught up in the adjective;  the favor is unmerited, we think it would be unfair to continue to act in some unrighteous way, believing  that God does not put conditions on His favor.  It would be presumption to act in a premeditated way counting on the non-merit-seeking aspect of God’s love.  So …such motivation takes advantage…but is it Grace that is taken adavantage of?  Impossible.  “Unmerited” is simply an adjective, a descriptor of the noun, favor.  Let’s consider for a moment what Grace actually is instead of the impossibility of earning it.

Charis; the word we translate as Grace means Divine Influence.  The favor that come to us without merit is not favor, as in preference.  Favor, in this setting, is like doing a favor for another person.  If a friend gives you money, loans you their car, or gives you a ride to work.  They are doing you a favor.

Without merit, God does you a favor, and provides Divine influence, empowerment, strengthening…power.  Power to resist, power to change, power to be the somebody He has re-created you to be; POWER.  Please…Take advantage of the power of God.  Take advantage of the strength of God.  Take advantage of the available influence of the Divine.  How can you possibly presume on the power to be like Jesus?  Grace is the power to be changed.  Take full advantage of it.

The adjective, “unmerited” actually adds to the power of the noun.  How?  The fact that God gives His power to you without qualification means that you can receive it at the time you need it the most.  His willingness to give His influence to you without merit, means that you now have power over the shame that might prevent you from accessing God’s availability.

Imagine if God only offered His power to you when you earned it, when you “deserved” it because of meritorious behavior.  The strange irony here is that God would be giving His power to you, doing you a favor, at a time when you have no need of it.  Why would you need His power when you have already overcome?  Doesn’t make sense does it.

Hear the words of Jesus,”I did not come for the healthy, I came for the sick, I didn’t come to call the righteous, rather I came to call the sinner…”

As odd as it is to say, it seems that we have found a requirement for the unmerited favor of God.  The requirement is that you must actually need it.

Go ahead take advantage of Grace…Really!!

28 Mar 2009

Ways to think: Contact Lenses and Sausage Machines

Ways to think…processes…how things get into our mind and what we do with them once they get in.  Most of the time we don’t even think…about…well…how we think.  Yet nothing could affect us more than those two processes.  We so often want change in our lives, but generally consider only changing the content of our thoughts.  How did those thoughts get there?  How did they get to have such a powerful effect on us?

Ways to think #1:  Contact Lenses: How things get in.

Contact Lenses sit right in front of our eyes.  Anything that comes in must pass through  the lenses, and the lenses affect what comes in.  After a while we don’t even realize these lenses are present.  When this happens the effect they have simply becomes our new reality.  Below are two examples of Cognitive Contact Lenses.

Belief and doubt.  Have you ever noticed how easy it is to doubt the truth?  Why is it so difficult to doubt lies?  Belief and doubt are filters that either let things into our minds or keep things out of our minds.  Someone makes a statement, or describes for us how they perceive us.  If we already believe the thoughts they’ve shared; they gain instant entrance; the thoughts enter in and join up with similar thoughts we have already harbored.  If their opinions don’t match our own, they bounce off our mind, as if the door is locked…no entrance.  Many life changing truths remain locked outside our mind because we are pre-disposed to doubt.  For one day try doubting something besides true stuff.

Exception vs. Rule:  All of us have a filter I call the exception or the rule.  Because we are convinced that certain experiences are normal and certain experiences may happen occasionally our mind automatically categorizes experiences.  When people say they like us, we are sure that is the exception.  When we screw something up, surely that is the rule.  Again, we give no credit to anything we consider the “exception”  When we picture ourselves as fearful, any courageous behavior is immediately discounted.  What if we have our wires crossed?  What if we are wrong about the exceptions and rules of our lives?  We lose valuable credit when we act in accordance with our nature…if…we are wrong about our true nature.  Often we are.

 

Ways to Think #2:  Sausage Machines:  What happens to thoughts once they get in.

A sausage machine makes sausage.  That’s what it always does.  Put in beef, it makes beef sausage.  Put in venison, it makes deer sausage.  The processes of a suasage machine simply make the same thing out of anything that you put into it.  Put in aluminum foil…it will make aluminum sausage.  The machine does exactly the same thing with any input.  Our mind processes data: if we want things to change we must learn to do new things with the data that comes into our minds.  Here are a few examples of ways our minds process stuff.

Meditation:  It sounds so spiritual to meditate.  Meditate simply means to hold something constantly in your thoughts.  We use the term “dwell on”, to describe meditating.  Interesting phrase.  Dwell means to inhabit or reside…So to meditate means to inhabit a particular thought.  Bill Johnson, a teacher I admire, says if you know how to worry you know how to meditate.  Decide on purpose what you will meditate on.

Passivity:  We often assume that our minds run on auto pilot.  We simply allow pictures, imaginations etc.  to run around loose in our minds as if we cannot give orders to them. Try for one day to tell the thoughts in your mind what to do.  It is a little like parenting.  If we are going to be hands off, we should expect the thoughts to misbehave.

Focus:  I have heard it said that if you have difficulty remembering the names of people you meet, the problem is not your memory, it is your focus.  When Someone introduces themselves, if you are thinking several things at the same time, their name will not stick.  Not because of memory but because of focus.  Focus, as a cognitive process, is harder than ever in the days we live in.  Texting, E mail, Cell phones, Ipods… our current methods of communication lend us to unfocused communication, because we increasingly communicate on multiple channels simultaneously.  Focus…and choose wisely what you focus on.  You may have to let a few things go.

Surrender:  This word can mean many things.  For the purpose of this conversation, I mean that you can surrender your thoughts to someone else.  There are many ways we can give our thoughts away and give other people control or at least strong influence of our thoughts.  Jealousy, or wishing we were someone else, gives away a few acres of our minds.  Fantasy, in many forms, allows others to hold deeds to plots in our minds.  Resentment, or unresolved bitterness also allows people to hold territory in our minds.

It is difficult to recognize your own lenses.  Let God and others gently show you the ways you may have filtered input.   You will be amazed that as you take control of the processes of your thinking, how quickly you will find yourself thinking differently.

28 Mar 2009
What was it like before us?

3 Comments

What was it like before us?

My children enjoyed touring the homes in which they had grown up.  Each home held different kinds of memories for each of my kids.  The one that seemed to mean the least to them was the one in which only my wife and I had lived. Read more…

26 Mar 2009

Adjective or Adverb?: More important than you think!

Thinking Differently.  Thinking Different.  Thinking Differently

It seems like a small difference, but these phrases reflect much more than simply good or bad grammar.  The difference between the two is the difference between freedom and bondage.

An adjective (different) describes a person place or thing.  An adverb (differently) describes an action.  To think different, implies a change in the content of our thoughts.  The action would be described this way.

“Don’t think this…think that”…“don’t wear this outfit…wear that one”

The implication is to change the content, information, or data in your mind.  A woman’s perogative, right?

To think differently implies a change in the way we think.  The action would be desribed this way.

“Open the eyes of my heart that I might see the power you have extended to me, in Your Son, Jesus”

Now, using the adverb instead of the adjective,  we are not trying to change the thoughts in our mind, rather, we are making an overall change in the way that thoughts get in, and what we do with them once they are in.  Hmmmm.

Certain kinds of thoughts can only enter in through certain ways of thinking.  You cannot apprehend falling in love through objective reason and logical deduction.  You might be able to describe things that happen when you fall in love through those cognitive processes; but to actually experience it…well, cognition is simply not the channel upon which love is broadcast.  The irony is, that one who logically deducts the concepts of love may consider himself to know love.

Paul says that spiritual things are spiritually understood.  This means that the kinds of  things God is broadcasting may not be fully apprehended by observation, reason and deduction.  The irony is, that one who logically deducts things about God and theology may consider himself to know the things of God.

Jesus invites us to think differently when He says “Repent, for the Kingdom of Heaven is at hand”  The word repent, literally means “to think differently…”.  Sadly we often hear this as Jesus admonishment to think different.  We hear this as if He wants us to change the content of our minds.  ”Stop stealing, start praying, stop cursing, start giving”.  Exchange the bad content for good content.  Change the Knowledge of Evil for the Knowledge of Good.   If we think different, the best we can hope for is that, once again, we can try harder.

If we think differently, it is as if we change the lenses over our eyes, and the filters over our ears.  If we see things differently, it is almost impossible to do things the same.  Hear Jesus words differently:

“Repent for the Kingdom of God is at hand”…”Change the way you take in reality, because the realm of God, has come among men…”

Think differently. He is near.

24 Mar 2009

Time for Change

“Change really excites you doesn’t it?” I was asked today.  Change…it is inevitable.  I might as well be excited.  How about you?  I hope so, because it is time…time to change.

We live in a time of massive shift; shift in any arena you can imagine.  Economy?  Clearly.  Culture?  At multiple levels. Political Arena…try to keep up.  What about the religious culture world wide?  We are witnessing a migration world wide among church folk.  Every arena of life seems to be subject to a massive shake up.

We can fight it.  We can try to control it.  We can hunker down in fear and try to protect life as we know it.  Any of these would be natural responses to change.  And any of these may bring massive stress.  We might be better to remember; change is inevitable.  Watch, relax, learn…listen for the voice of God.    He is speaking loudly.

Change of this magnitude, in this many arenas, at these levels…I doubt God is surprised…I doubt He is even bothered.  In fact, I suspect He is the Prime Mover behind it all.  He is, after all, the Great Architect, and the Great Builder.  Every great builder knows how to clear the ground to build new foundations….I hope the new foundations can’t be shaken…our current foundations appear to be be pretty shake-able.

It is time to learn what it means to live by every Word that comes from the Mouth of God…take a breath…listen.

21 Mar 2009

Making All Things New

 

Making All Things New

      This story is not about you. It’s not about me either.  It is amazing how much it feels like it is about us, and it’s not entirely wrong to feel that way.  We are so like the One that it is about. Our true nature is so connected to His nature that when it’s about Him, it becomes about us automatically.  We are not first…because we are not the star of the story; but we are related.  You can’t tell the story of the Father without it also being about His children.  You can’t tell the story of the Healer without including those who are healed.  And you cannot tell the massive story of the One who takes a broken, deteriorating creation and makes everything new, without telling the story of the renewed.  Therefore, it is about us, as we receive from Him all that is true about Him.

God has been unfolding a plan since long before we were around.  It is His intent that those who have been born from the heavens will be around for the rest of the story.  The Kingdom of Heaven is like a certain King who threw a wedding feast for His Son.  As His story unfolds, throughout eternity, we will be in it—playing our role and eternally related to the Writer and Star of the story.

I don’t know how He does it but, from our perspective, He walks a tight rope.  It is entirely about Him; yet, in the midst of the story, He comes to us and tells us that our story—with all of its details—matters to Him. He has preserved our tears in a jar and wept with us.  He has numbered our days and the hairs on our head.  Meanwhile, He has been steering solar systems throughout the cosmos.  And He feels no stress. 

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