Bob Hamp

The longer I am gone the more I want to look at my wife.  The more days I spend out of the country the more I want to see my kids.  Let me re-write that last sentence.  The more I am away, the more I want to look into the eyes of the ones I love.  I want to see them, and be seen by them.  What I am trying to say here is really impossible to say with words.  We have tried.  We exchanged texts, Faceboook and even a few phone conversations.  It’s just not the same.

Jesus met Peter and the Bible says “He looked at him, and told him that from that day forward he would be called Peter…”.  A rich young man came to Jesus and the Bible records these words, “Jesus looked at him and loved him…”  What is it about Jesus that allows Him to look in a man’s eyes and change his identity?  What is it about “looking” and “loving” that the two seem to go together inseparably?

I have always carried this idea of Jesus, that He would make long and intentional eye contact with men and women, and in so doing allow people to see God, and to be seen by God.  Shame would fall away, and life would be imparted.

We just spent three days making long and intentional eye contact with a roomful of strangers and now they are family.  We cried with a woman who has an unbelievable history of rejection and abandonment, and watched as love and acceptance overcame the lies of her past.  We rejoiced as three sisters looked again at one another through new eyes.  When they did they saw one another and were seen by one another in new ways, restoring and deepening old relationships.  We watched as an angry and wounded man, who had declared he would never again care about relationships, gazed into the eyes of his wife as if she were the most beautiful creation on the planet.  We watched a woman who had been “invisible” all her life, be “seen” by a room full of people.  She began to radiate with life and beauty as she was “known anew” by those who had known her for her entire life.

We didn’t just look at one another, we saw with new eyes, and discovered the power of being truly seen. Shame and fear melted away, love and acceptance took its place.

Jesus said the eyes are the lamp of the body, I wonder what all this means?

Today, look at someone you love.  I mean while they are looking at you.  Get uncomfortable.  On the other side of that is the great comfort of being known and accepted.  Look at a stranger as if they matter to God. Perhaps they have never seen themselves in that way.  Perhaps you can start something new in them without a word.

The disciples passed by a lame man on the side of the road.  When he asked for money they said, “we don’t have money but what we do have we give to you, LOOK AT US.”  And when he looked at them he was no longer lame.  I wonder if this still happens today?

He is risen.  He is risen indeed. Notice the sentence that changes everything doesn’t mention your name.  Not even a pronoun about you.   Because “He is risen indeed” is enough.  Before we turn this celebration of Easter into more knowledge of good, I want to point out a great sounding deception that has ensnared many followers of Jesus.  Here is how we say, or think this subtle trap.  “He died for me, I should live for Him.”  What if you shouldn’t?  What if God isn’t even asking for that?

Well meaning encouragement and admonition can often urge us deeply into one of the greatest traps that Jesus’ followers face;  the trap of self-effort on behalf of One who has given His life to free us from “self-anything”.  So often we try to “do for” God.  In my counseling practice my primary role was to help people change.  The challenge was to help people change the right thing in the right way.  The right way was the most difficult aspect of change.  The right change from the wrong source was destined for long-term failure.

It has been my observation that often “Christian Counsel” has strong roots in Humanism.  You know, humanism.  The ‘ism’ that says humans are the center of life and outcomes originate from and are completed by humans.  It sounds so contrary to the Christian faith right?  That is because it IS!.  The problem is we don’t always recognize humanism when it is wrapped in lots of Christian language.

Any change that is not empowered by the death, and resurrection of Jesus, and the movement of the Holy Spirit, is ultimately humanism. Another name for this is “our knowledge of good”.  The impulse and power source of our thought, our effort, our  emotional state must originate “from God”.  The only other option is that your thoughts, efforts and emotions originate from your soul, or from some other spiritual force.  Neither can produce life.

He is risen.  He is risen in you.

A friend of mine recently told me this story.  She was praying with friends, and one of them asked God what He wanted to do for this friend of mine.  As she relays the story, the eyes of her heart saw God, the Father, embrace her and pull her into a tight embrace.  He placed her heart against His and she suddenly felt like a defibrillator shocked her.   She describes that in that moment power filled her, emanating from her chest spreading through the rest of her being.  More than what she says…the way she tells the story is captivating.

Her eyes light up.  Her countenance relaxes and light seems to come from her features.  Her smile grows every time she tells someone else.  Something has changed in her since that moment.  Listen to her words.  “I was dead, and now I am alive”, she says.  I have heard her say it a few times now, and every time she says it I feel more alive.  Almost like overflow, from her experience.  Almost like she is now the recipient of Living Water, and people around her get wet.

God is not asking you to do something  for Him.  He is offering to do life through you.  Have you been wondering why your “Christian walk” seems un-fulfilling, or less than you had hoped for?  Perhaps it is because it has been your christian walk.  The significance of Easter is not simply that God brought Jesus back from the dead.  The significance of Easter is that He brings you and I back from the dead.  If you do not know that you are dead it will be difficult for you to receive life.  If you think your study, your rule following, your quiet times, your attendance or obedience are life then it will be unlikely that you will receive that which you believe you already have.

He is alive…how about you?

Yesterday we celebrated something which, at the time of the actual event, was not celebrated but mourned.  The death of Jesus was, to most, a shocking and devastating end to a soaring hope.   All the faith that His followers put in Him collapsed to the sound of a clanging hammer.  Tomorrow we celebrate the single most important day in human history, but also in God’s calendar. We celebrate the day the resurrection of One and the restoration of all God’s family took place in a garden outside Jerusalem. But what about today?  What about Saturday?  Is there anything we can commemorate today?

Saturday is the “day in between”, the day we can celebrate what God has said, that has not yet come to pass.  Saturday, between the crucifixion and the resurrection is a day to remind us that much of life is lived between the seemingly impossible promises of God, and their final fulfillment.

“I will rise again” seems a hollow promise on the day when the lips from which the promise was uttered are cold and lifeless in a grave.

When hope is completely obliterated and no sign of God’s goodness is visible, Saturday reminds us that the feelings of fear, or hopelessness can be stifling simply because we do not yet see the end of the story.  Saturday reminds us that God comes through, even though today we may feel He has abandoned us.  Saturday reminds us that death has a power of it’s own, and sometimes is a necessary step to reach Sunday.

I think this year Saturday can speak to the season of the church today.  Old things are collapsing around us.  Systems and even leaders we once put our hope in are increasingly lifeless.  Could it be that these things are not dying because God gave up, bur because God works through resurrections.

Whether in your personal circumstances, or in the season of the world system.  Celebrate Saturday.  God loves to set us up for new life and overwhelming surprises.

Todays post can be found at Destiny in Bloom. Click on the link to get there now! Don’t miss it, see you there!

http://destinyinbloom.com/

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

Today the Ocean Spoke to me about God.

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

I heard it before I could see it.

When I followed what I heard, then I saw.

It was HUGE:  I could see all that I could see, and there was still much more that I could not see.

The sound was continuous, and continual.

It was constantly moving towards me, yet it waited for me to enter in.

It is miles deep, but I could wade in at my pace.  However, sometimes the surging waves got me more wet than I intended.

The waves were beautiful, and far more powerful than their beauty would indicate.

The deeper in I went, the less control I had.

It was exhilirating and a bit scary.

It was filled and surrounded with life.  Lots of life.

It was constantly the same, while never changing.

Romans 1:20

The invisible attributes and nature of God is made known in the creation…today, the ocean spoke to me about God.

It was really fun!!

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….

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.  When this meeting was held, God had not yet invented “places” as we understand them.

When we gather with colleagues and friends, or rendezvous with lovers, we name coordinates, which allow us to all meet up in a “place”   but “places” came with Creation, and this meeting, well, it was pre-creation. This meeting was pre-geographic.  Coordinates, altitude, addresses, neighborhoods, all are post creation experiences.

So if they gathered for a meeting, how did they know and “where” (still not an applicable question, but I can’t think of an alternative…) did they hook up?  Or, how about this, what was it like in their meeting “place”?  Colorful? Hot? Cold?  Just right?  Light? Dark? I think our tendency in thinking about pre-geography is to think “empty” or “void”.  This simply is not possible.  God lived, dwelt there.  No “place” has ever been more inhabited, or filled.  Eternity Himself, the Limitless One was in the house.  Empty would simply not be an option. But what was this locale, realm, area, filled with?

It was filled with God, and God-ness.  His Nature, yet unseen by human eyes (especially since human eyes had not yet been invented…) was no less present.  Our lack of observation or awareness in no way diminished His Fullness.  It just diminishes our capacity to “image” or “imagine” such a place.

Filled with God-ness, this place that He reigned over was a limitless of expanse of all that is still true about Him.

Love.

Life.

Power.

Joy.

Peace.

Imagine a tank filled with the highest intensity of such things.  Love in such a palpable, consuming concentration that nothing un-love, could oppose or withstand it. Life, (not yet living beings, just the Essence, Spirit, which would one day fill living beings…) flowed freely throughout.  Not just the absence of sickness, but the raw power of concentrated aliveness.   Put that in your Starbucks cup and drink it.

Such a “place” seems so foreign to us, such an atmosphere, incomprehensible. Our minds only know places.  Places and limits.  Places, limits and tiny droplets of the things named above.  What if those things were limitless, and we just didn’t know it.

We are so Geographic.

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.

“Repent for the Kingdom of Heaven is at hand.”  So simple, yet so many ways we can misunderstand.  I think the key to understanding this phrase, is understanding who it is is that spoke it and how He might be thinking.

Men and women who have spent a lifetime, (or even a day) in church are so bent towards connecting Scripture with behavior control, otherwise known as “The Knowledge of Good and Evil”, that almost all our experience and perception comes through that lens.

Repentance is much more about the blind seeing, than it is about bad people trying to be good.

Jesus never really met a man who was not blind.  At least not in light of His way of seeing.  Jesus could see all things, including the hearts and minds of men, and the swirling activity of the spiritual realm around us.  Because He saw clearly, He could look at every man in every situation and see every aspect of both.  Motives, hidden thoughts, fear, and even the spiritual forces lurking within each exchange, all were as visible to him, as traffic signs are to us.  Such was the vista in the Kingdom to which He was accustomed.

Crippled as we are, we try to perceive reality through a singular set of “senses”. Sight, sound, touch, taste, fragrance.  All these are senses which apprehend a single realm; the physical.  Perhaps within this arena we could perceive clues, signs and symptoms of other arenas, but we could not see them.  Like seeing tree branches move, while not seeing the wind that moved them.

Walking through a dark room, we would trip over furniture and obstacles we could not see.  Turn on the light, the natural result is a different set of responses. Step around the table, stop and turn when solid objects are in our path.

Repentance is about changing the way we see.  The natural result is a different set of responses.  Repentance is about using a set of senses beyond the physical.  Intuition, wisdom, revelation, faith (yeah, you remeber, the assurance of things NOT SEEN!) Operating by these senses, behavior change is a natural result of seeing clearly, as opposed to the application of will power.  When we try to produce behavior change without repentance (Seeing Differently; with different senses) this is called, “The Knowledge of Good and Evil”

Repent for the Kingdom of the Heavens is at arms reach.