Go Out and Fail Today

I’ve been thinking about how to fail the right way.

There is this half-hearted way that we tend to strive toward our objectives, whenever we set out to accomplish them by our own plans and power. We go forward, but we also brace for failure. In these goals we imagine, we are like little gods who conceive of new worlds for ourselves to inhabit. Yet we know we are too small, as gods, to be able to certainly make those worlds real.

As Psalm 127 says, “Unless the Lord builds the house, they labor in vain who build it.”

A person senses this even if he doesn’t have faith, even if she doesn’t have the Bible. We sense how vain our labor is. The innate tentativeness of nearly all our efforts is based upon this. We fear to break our own hearts by pinning too much hope upon those efforts, and upon our own plans.

But then there is the effort that is founded on the idea that fruitfulness comes from Christ—that success comes from the Son. We are joined in the work. Therefore, we submit to being joined in the imagining as well. As Jesus laid down his life for each of us, we are ready to lay down the “life” of whatever plans we have laid.

I have been reading this book, The Dream Giver by Bruce Wilkinson. The book’s message is that we strive with God, and persevere by God, to realize the dream that is written upon our own God-inspired heart.

I have been reading another book, What Now? by Ann Patchett. The point of this book is that the way ahead in any life is only clear in retrospect. Life’s journey doesn’t follow a map, and it tends to turn on decisions that didn’t seem significant at the time they were being made.

The books offer two different ideas. They offer two different compelling ideas—ideas that, taken alone, both seem right. I, and no doubt you as well, have encountered variations on each of these ideas before. Both books make their points well—I recommend them. Yet I have been looking to reconcile their disparate themes. Namely, to reconcile the idea that the success we dream is to be attained, versus the apparently competing idea that the success we did not dream is out there to be found.

Paul wrote this to the Corinthian church:

Do I plan according to the flesh, that with me there should be Yes, Yes, and No, No?

All the promises of God in him are Yes, and in him Amen, to the glory of God through us. —2 Corinthians 1:17 and 20 (emphasis mine)

In other words, the game is God’s to win.

But even more than that, the game is God’s to determine just what the game is.

God is glorified through us, said Paul. That means the manifold dreams of our own yearning hearts absolutely are important. Racing ahead to win the success that God placed upon our hearts is a vital component of how we trust in him, and how we bear fruit for him. It is a vital part of how we love him.

Yet at the same time, achieving precisely the success we imagined could be the very worst thing for us. He has such great use for us that he calls us to something even better.

In this world, the only success we can imagine for ourselves is the success defined and limited by this world’s rules and understanding. We are part of this world. Yet we are not of it. We think and work within this world, while our lives and the fullest part of our destinies belong to the eternal. Thus, the true success that we realize, in a moment of work or a lifetime, might intersect with the success we imagined—or it might not. Either way, we laugh.

We laugh in the way that I imagine Paul learned to laugh at his own “Yes, Yes” and “No, No.”

We laugh, and we stand with God wherever he puts us. Wherever! That spot might be in the place of the realization and fruition of all of our plans and strivings. Or, perhaps just as likely, God might put us where we get to see the colorful and instructive disruption of the many simple plans we originally drew.

There is this conversation we are having with God, and the title of that conversation is “Life on Earth.” Our daring to pursue plans or dream big dreams is the way that we speak to God within the reality he created around us. And when we do this, God speaks back.

Is God a Bully?

“The Lord takes pleasure in those who fear him,” says Psalm 147:11. We are to fear the Lord. And I do.

Still, somehow, this doesn’t seem right. Why would a good and loving God want us to fear him? Is he some kind of bully?

Intellectually, I have an answer. Fear is a form of worship. We make ourselves tiny before the things we fear, lowering and limiting ourselves until we are smaller than whatever the small thing is that rules us. The reason to turn our fear toward God is precisely because he is not a bully. If we acknowledge that we are humble and small before the infinite God, then that still leaves plenty of room for us to be great—to be fully the ones he created us to be.

But recently I discovered something more—another answer to the question of why to fear, a response that went beyond the intellectual. I discovered, in my heart, a full and genuine feeling of fear toward God. I find I don’t just have an argument anymore, I have an emotion.

Why?

I sat with this feeling and studied it. I sat with God over this fear toward God. And I found: This particular fear is not a fear like anxiety, not a fear like dread, and certainly not a fear like panic.

It is fear instead that flows from awe. The fear is a consequence, maybe an inescapable consequence, of being filled with the Spirit of God. The Spirit pushes closer to the skin as my resistance is slowly overcome, and I find that I am fed much less by my own attainment and effort. I find that much more of who I understand myself to be is built upon the loving enormity of that which is infinite, eternal, ultimate, and deeply personal all at once.

I have acknowledged Jesus for about three years. I have seen redemption over that time—an elegant reengineering of my heart and life in ways I never could have planned or chosen. I have also seen the reality of prayer—God faithfully showing answers to those things I trustingly bring before him, providing a tangible response to prayer far more often than he is silent.

God accompanies us. I need him. I always did need him, but now I know it.

And even now—particularly now—I feel fearful as I come before him. There is still a part of me that fears not honoring him or praying to him in a fitting way. I do fear God—I fear him indeed. I fear how lost and small I would be if he ever turned away.

The Tale of the Fountain and the Vessels

Once upon a time:

There was this fountain. It was a fountain that poured out abundant love. The fountain imagined vessels into existence to hold all of the love that was pouring out of it.

Every vessel the fountain imagined was different. Some were ceramic and some were crystal. Every bowl, cup, and decanter was made in the image of some particular shape of love that had shimmered within the fountain’s dancing patterns. And every ewer, flagon, and flask filled up with the love, sloshing with all that it contained. Each of the vessels glistened in the overflow, all of them radiating from the love cascading into and around them.

Then all of the vessels smashed themselves to pieces.

Why they did this—even just after it happened—was not clear. It was apparent at once that the act had been wantonly foolish and destructive. It was simply that smashing themselves had been the one choice forbidden to them by the fountain. Smashing themselves therefore became the one choice that was fascinating.

The fountain remained unchanged, but all of the vessels lay shattered. All the love that had been in them spilled away.

The vessels reformed themselves, sort of. Pieces were missing. The pieces that did still remain fit poorly together in the wake of the violence. For the sake of being whole at all, a vessel would graft its remaining pieces into a clumsy, awkward, mismatched assembly that at least managed to hold some small, meager, misshapen amount of space.

Most of the vessels did this. They now were porous and small, unable to hold much love at all. What love they did hold seeped out. These vessels would have been discarded—except that the fountain said no.

The fountain made a new vessel instead. The new vessel came out of the very heart of the fountain.

Look at this, said the fountain to the vessels. You can be like this.

Some began to try, rearranging their shards to be more like the perfect vessel. But even as they had just begun to do this, the new vessel itself was lost. The perfect vessel was smashed. The new vessel was the one discarded, while the ones that should have been discarded remained.

But something was happening. Even more of the broken ones bravely began to let go of their meager and malformed shapes. Even more of the damaged vessels strove to match the proportions of the perfect vessel about which they had heard.

All of them were still missing pieces. All of them were missing huge shards. Previously, they had patched and covered themselves to make due, to make themselves somehow whole. Now, as they stretched instead toward their fuller shapes, the gaps became fully evident. The vessels tried to hold love, and the love spilled out through the wide and open holes.

Yet the fountain still was abundant. It was as abundant as it ever had been, as abundant as it was from the beginning. Love poured out of the fountain so fast that it filled the vessels and kept them full, the overflow replacing all of the love in all of the vessels as quickly as it flowed out of even the widest holes in their sides. The fountain did this for every vessel that simply believed the fountain’s promise that a broken vessel could again be whole.

Something else happened, too. The love that spilled out of all of these large open holes was shaped by the jagged gaps. The shimmering patterns created by these shard-shaped openings intersected in intricate ways. As the vessels spread wide to reclaim the original dimensions that the fountain had given them, the fullness of each vessel’s damage was revealed. Love streamed out of the holes in crazy gushes, and the wounds became beautiful.

The Next Great Move Toward Him

Why do we not congratulate people who have suffered affliction or loss?

Why do we not praise God for the hand that takes instead of giving?

To do so, of course, would seem insensitive to say the least. It would even seem heartless. Affliction is painful. Loss hurts. When a brother or sister is frightened or agonizing, the sympathetic heart can do little except to look into those worrying eyes and say, “This isn’t right. God doesn’t want this for you. He wants to show you that he loves you by making this situation go away.”

Indeed, we want that sentiment to be true for our personal sakes as well. A little of our own fear enters into someone else’s sadness, because we know how readily our own circumstances might change. Tomorrow, it might be you or me who is weeping for relief from the affliction.

Yet this expectation that only pleasantness flows into our life out of God’s hand is, at best, questionable. The belief that the sources of pain in our lives are all errors that cry out for correction seems inconsistent with what we, the students and followers of Jesus, claim to believe.

God is a creator. He alone knows what each of us can become. He is the creator, along with each of us, of our own particular lives. God is the challenging and uplifting creator who calls each of us to a personal destiny that is profoundly greater than what we would otherwise accept for ourselves.

Jesus does make it clear: You will have trouble within this finite world (John 16:33).

He makes it clear: You will be pruned so that you can be more fruitful (John 15:2).

He makes it clear: He disciplines the ones he loves (Revelation 3:19).

For the sake of being left to have an unruffled life, would you rather be unfruitful? Would you rather not be loved by God?

Jesus also makes it clear that his way is the way of joy. But joy is eternal. Therefore, it cannot be that joy is linked to our material comfort, because everything about this current material world is going away. Indeed, the most basic choice each of us is called to make—the fundamental question of faith—is whether or not we too will go the way of the world. Joy is found on the other side of this choice. The choice keeps on presenting itself. We find joy, in every case, by embracing the eternal instead of the fleeting.

The believer is exhorted to give thanks in all things (1 Thessalonians 5:18). We do this not because of the “things,” not because “all things” are fun, but instead because of us—because we are being remade. We’re being recreated, in mind and in body. Through the teaching and events that transform us, we are becoming more like his Son, the one who sees clearly how much of the world we know is simply melting from existence.

The personal transformation is often gradual. In small increments, we find we are a little freer and a little more loving year by year. But then there are the times when the next step is decisive and large, the times when God moves his hand visibly and says: You are ready now. Leave your comfort even farther behind you, as you make your great move toward me.

Is He Really That Big? (“Ahistorical,” “Ascientific”—and Here’s Why)

The Bible is surprisingly practical.

Among other things, the book is a guide to transformation. The ultimate transformation, in fact—how we move from death to life, how we move out of the finite and futile state of settling for sparks of comfort, to know instead the eternal state of living and resting in joy. The eternal can be touched right here. And in many ways, the steps the Bible offers for making this contact and achieving this transformation are plainly and remarkably clear.

Take the question, for example, of how to know whether the Holy Spirit leads you, or whether you have been waylaid by some other spirit instead. We cannot know this by ourselves—not for sure. Our hearts are deceived (Jeremiah 17:9), while enemies masquerade as angels (2 Corinthians 11:14). Yet the Bible says there are nine clues, and the clues are quite specific. They are:

Love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control.

These are the fruits of the Holy Spirit, according to Galatians 5:22-23. A heart that is growing out of the Holy Spirit should manifest this fruit.

Another such litmus test that is even more strikingly clear is found in a passage from the First Letter of John. This passage also indicates something of the very reason why God engineered the world’s salvation in the way that he did.

John writes:

Every spirit that confesses that Jesus Christ has come in the flesh is of God, and every spirit that does not confess that Jesus Christ has come in the flesh is not of God. —1 John 4:2-3

The matter is apparently that simple. That is, when we try to measure whether we ourselves are of God—whether we are still proceeding in a way that is consistent with surrender to God’s loving will ... or whether instead we have given into whim, ego, convenience, obsession, or even something darker—whenever this is the question, the letter of John offers this basic test.

To state that test another way: Are we growing in our confidence that God has come in the flesh?

Perhaps not. We might find that we are (once again) dubious and constrained, snared within a thicket of doubt, uncomfortable with professing the relevance and reality of this truth. Recognizing that this is the case is valuable. Belief is the way to life.

Roman 10:9 states as much. We are to say Jesus is Lord, and we are to believe in our hearts he rose from the dead. Belief is the only route to this truth because logic alone can’t reach it. Nothing like the death and resurrection of God himself has ever happened before or since. Therefore, neither science nor history alone—both of which are built on precedent—can account for this occurrence. At the pinnacle of God’s plan, at the turning point of creation, is this ascienctific and ahistorical event.

That’s not to say the event is anti-scientific. Like a forensic examiner, the doubter Thomas was allowed to examine body (the risen body) in front of witnesses (John 20:27).

Nor was the event anti-historical. The historical record is marked by the impact of the event.

But the event was the assertion of God, in this case entering the world from beyond history and outside of science. That this God was born human by means of a virgin conception makes this very point. Here was a different sort of human being—a man transcending science by having no biological paternity, and transcending history by having no literal paternal ancestry. The skeptic says that nothing about the laws of science or the events of history can provide any basis for such an event. And the believer says: Amen.

Consider the distinction. We are to love God. If it is truly God we love, then the one we love is greater than the world. That same First Letter of John also says, “Do not love the world or the things in the world. If anyone loves the world, the love of the Father is not in him” (1 John 2:15).

Our temptation is to see the world as all there is, the world and nothing more—worshiping the world to the exclusion of the Father. But the resurrection of the Son brings this very matter into focus. To believe that science’s laws and history’s assumptions are inviolable even to God is to say that God is smaller than these things, and that God is not truly greater than the world.

Is God really greater? Is he really in moment-by-moment control? Can he really transcend science and history?

Without the resurrection, all we can say is, “In theory, yes.” The answer doesn’t lift or challenge. There is no consequence to this conception of God. It doesn’t change hearts.

The way of Jesus Christ says, “Can God really transcend science and history? Answer: Yes he can—because he did!”

Thus does the event of the resurrection provide a focus for our faith. God came into the world—the world that surrounds and defines us, the overwhelming world—and he left his teachings and his blood upon it. He died here. And he rose.

And in rising, he gave us something to touch that is nearly as tangible as the body that Thomas felt. He gave us a concrete reality and a discernable history that clarifies our faith. At the same time, he gave a direction for our hearts to go. He ascended, and our hearts took flight along with him.

Carry Your Mat

Then Jesus said to him, “Get up! Pick up your mat and walk.”
—John 5:8

There is a danger in being blessed too completely.

When Jesus healed an invalid at the pool, he did not just tell the man to rise and walk. He told him to rise, carry his mat, and walk.

Why did he include the mat?

This had to be more than just embellishment. Jesus knew there would be consequences. The day was the Sabbath, when carrying a load was considered a violation of the law. The man was soon cited for this very offense (John 5:10). The value of carrying that mat was apparently great enough to be worth the price.

Jesus even gave the same command elsewhere. One time, the crowds were so thick around him that a paralytic was lowered to him from the roof. When this man was healed, the Lord did not tell him just to walk, but to carry his mat all the way home (Mark 2:11).

I think Jesus must have known something about these men. He knows the same thing about me. All of us, these men and I, have a problem with forgetting how much we have been blessed. For these men, Jesus provided a reminder.

They would not have chosen it. Both of the former invalids must have known these mats too well. They must have lain upon them so helplessly, and for so long, that the mats would have seemed like prison cells, or cages. They might well have reeked. Once the men were free to walk, they would have leapt from those old mats if they could. They would have run from them. But Jesus made use of the mats. As long as the men carried them, lugging the slight weight along, they would see just what they were doing. That is: They were walking. Rather than being subject to the mats, now the mats were subject to them.

Thus the mat is an additional gift. It is the blessing of holding our blessings in mind. The “mat,” in whatever form it takes in the life of one who has been healed, serves as ballast against our selfishness and pride. The first human beings quickly forgot—disregarding the blessings of the garden. And we are prone to forgetting just as quickly.

Your own mat might be a debt that still lingers out of a difficult time—a time that, otherwise, is blessedly finished now.

Or the mat might be some familiar dark emotion that you still encounter from time to time—the emotion that once had you almost completely surrounded, back when you were in the prison from which the Lord has set you free.

If you feel that you are incompletely healed because you still carry some hurt, temptation, or remnant out the time when you were afflicted—then consider what purpose the weight might serve. Consider who you might be if you did not have this reminder, this connection to where you have been.

If you were completely blessed, is it possible you would completely forget?

Give thanks for the mat. Carry it humbly.

Give thanks for the God who wants to keep you this close, who wants to keep your heart aware—aware, that is, of how far you have come ... and how great is the load that you don’t have to carry anymore.

Past My Own Heart

I pray past my own heart. I do it all the time.

I hope I can continue to keep concealed from you what gets inside my heart. I experience envy. The dislike of people who seem to have things easier than I do rises within my heart, and I resent them for—I don’t know—just existing where I can see them.

I also delight in the misfortune of others. I feel relief when misfortune befalls someone—a sort of happiness, somehow—because when that particular spell of bad news entered the world, it didn’t land on me.

These things are in my heart. Selfishness, fear. They are pruned down sometimes, but the root still remains. You would not believe what is in my heart, what ugly things routinely blossom there. But then, that’s a lie, because I am hoping you would believe it. I am hoping that the hints I have heard are true—that everyone else has infected hearts, too.

I pray past my own heart because I know I am to pray for others—not just the ones I feel fondly about, but also enemies (Matthew 5:44), and also ones about whom no particular feeling rises.

I know I am to do this, because I believe. In addition to envy, anger, selfishness, and fear, I also have allowed belief into my heart. I have given my heart to belief—even though it is a broken heart over which weeds still flourish. The belief to which I’ve given it is very specific. In my heart, there is no single secret that better explains the universe and my own place within it than the resurrection of Christ. And there is no document that better explains Christ than the anthology of scriptures we call the Bible.

So I try as best as I am able to feed upon the Bible’s teachings. And some of the Bible’s teachings prove to be personal prophecies that I see fulfilled—as I watch the fruits of faith ripen in my own life, the fruits that come of finally surrendering to God’s easy and loving will instead of continuing to be hard on myself.

I also pray. And in prayer, I feel how much of my heart is still blackened, is still stone or ash. I feel it most of all in my attitudes toward other people. So as I am praying for one or another of these people, I sometimes must say: “Lord, ignore what my heart is saying about this person right now. Ignore it. I pray that you will comfort him and give him blessings, and that he will hear the voice of your love in his life and he will draw closer to you.”

Who Is This “Son” We Worship?

All things were made through him, and without him nothing was made that was
made. —John 1:3

Who is this Son we worship?

Thinking people naturally wrestle with the notion of an all-knowing God having “hopes” for human beings, and giving us free will. After all, the all-knowing God already knows all! He knows how his hopes will be realized. He knows what choices we will make.

Yet the identification of the Son in the verse above as the one through whom “all things were made” actually speaks to this apparent contradiction. The Son-God as the creative agent of the Father-God provides us with a precious insight—a picture, or perhaps just a glimpse, into the way that our God is simultaneously omnipotent and engaged.

The Son, also called the “Word,” was with the Father in the beginning. The start of John’s gospel says this (John 1:1-2), but the very beginning of the Bible says this as well. In Genesis, in the first three verses, all three members of the Trinity are present.

The Father is in Genesis 1:1. The Spirit is mentioned in 1:2. Then, in Genesis 1:3, God says “Let there be light” before any material sources of light have been created. The sun hasn’t been invented yet. Instead of the sun, this light is the Son. John’s gospel actually confirms this identity—calling the Son “the Light” just before repeating the essential point that the world was made through him (John 1:9-10).

Therefore, what we see in Genesis 1:3 is God sending in the Son—the one who is charged with making every part of the world according to the Father’s will. The Father is the author or designer of the world, while the Son is the craftsman. The Son is, if you will, the carpenter.

This is the one who gave us the Commandments. He identified himself to us in both the Old and New Testaments as “I AM.” Old Testament scripture refers to him as “Lord,” with New Testament scripture making the distinction that God is the Father while the Lord is Christ (I Thessalonians 1:1, for example). In other words, this “Son” has been active and near since well before Jesus. When the Son became human in order to return us to God, he simply embodied in the flesh the very same role he plays through every moment and molecule of the universe. In the flesh or beyond it, the Son is the loving link between God and his creation.

As scripture also puts it, the Son is the vine by which the fruit grows, while the Father is the keeper of the vineyard (John 15:1).

Of course, both are also God. Both are also one God—the same God. “Father” and “Son” are human terms that help humans hold onto these senses of the different ways that God is. Father-God and Son-God are simultaneously the same and separate, simultaneously integral and different.

What are the differences? One of them might be time.

The Father exists outside of time. Necessarily so. He created the linear phenomenon we think of as “time,” and he could not create anything to which he himself is subject. But the Son—while he, too, transcends time—somehow also descends into time to carry out his role. After all, we see the Son working in seasons and following plans that unfold in steps. The Son also pursues and communicates with beings who do live in time, such as you and me.

Another difference between Father and Son might relate to information or perspective. God the Father knows all. God the Son can know all, because the Father would deny him nothing. However, we see hints that the Son knowingly works with less than complete knowledge, leaving ultimate knowledge with the Father. (Mark 13:32 is significant.)

To be sure, the Son knows vastly more than we ever could. From our perspective, the Son is practically omniscient. From his perspective, though, there is one who knows more. Between “practically omniscient” and fully omniscient there lies a distance that, as far as we know, might be great indeed—as great as the distance between the vine and vine keeper. This is the distance before which the Son worshipfully bows to his Father.

The picture that develops from these glimpses shows us something so contrary to our expectations that we still have difficulty imagining it. Namely, ours is a humble god. The Son is as vast as the universe, but at the same time he is so close that we can barely conceive of his intimacy. Rather than standing above us as master, he wishes to stand beside us as friend (John 15:15). What we thought we saw as logical contradictions about the nature of God thus become resonant notes in Christ—harmonizing to voice the very song of his nature. The Son-God fulfills these two separate but complementary roles:

He is the king of all of the cosmos.

Yet he is also the workman, the reverential servant, the maker of creation. He is the one who is faithfully fulfilling every detail of his Father’s perfect plan.

Photo: Detail of MCC chapel courtesy of John Cowell.

The Way of the Scissors

“The teachings of Jesus are what matter. The rest was all made up.”

I heard that statement recently from a friend—someone I respect and admire. His belief that the divinity, miracles, and resurrection of Jesus were all fabrications places him in some distinguished company.

Thomas Jefferson, for example, held the same belief. He cut up a set of bibles, clipping out gospel passages and rearranging them to create a bible more to his liking.

H. G. Wells thought the same thing. The writer known for fiction also produced a wonderful, comprehensive work of historical non-fiction—The Outline of History. Jesus is treated admiringly in this book, but he is also held at arm’s length. Wells, too, insists that the account of the resurrection could only have been a fabrication that was added to the gospel account after Jesus’ life.

These were intelligent men. However, they were also religious men—in the specific sense that they insisted upon a particular religious understanding of the world. One of the precepts of this religion is that God is irrelevant if he exists at all, because any “God” is aloofly uninvolved in the human world. Thus, Jesus could not possibly have been God living as man, and there could not have been any resurrection. This is the default religion of most who claim to have no religion today. For Jefferson and Wells, trying to reconcile this religious outlook with the surviving documents and the surviving facts of the early church required feats of illogic. The “way of the scissors” as exemplified by Jefferson—that is, the scripture of convenience that insists that “only the teachings are true”—poses at least two great and striking logical problems.

One is that Jesus’ teachings actually include references to his own divinity. In perhaps the most wonderfully ungrammatical statement ever made, Jesus said, “Before Abraham was, I AM” (John 8:58). His audience certainly got the reference—“I AM” is the way God identified himself in the burning-bush encounter with Moses. Jesus identified himself the same way.

Jefferson chose to leave this quote out of his scissors-bible, along with various other quotes to the same effect. In other words, in trying to focus on “just the teachings,” Jefferson went so far as to exclude many of those teachings. Presumably, he could “just tell” which gospel quotes were really from Jesus and which were not.

The other logical problem is this: From a historical standpoint, it would actually be easier to defend the statement, “The resurrection of Jesus is what matters, and the teachings were all made up.”

For the early believers, there was little more than the resurrection. They did not yet have the teachings. The news of the resurrection was what ignited the spiritual movement in the lands surrounding Jerusalem two thousand years ago, and this spiritual movement lacks an explanation if the resurrection is dismissed.

Paul wrote a letter before any of the gospels were written that records the creed he heard when he first encountered other believers. This statement of shared belief spoke of several things. It spoke of Jesus dying for our sins, rising from the dead, and appearing in the resurrected flesh various times to various witnesses (I Corinthians 15:3-8). Yet it did not say anything about the beauty of Jesus’ wise teachings. Those teachings would not be circulated until years later, after the gospel writers compiled them.

Still, both of these logical arguments are, in a way, beside the point. The way of Jesus Christ extends into areas of our lives and souls that lie deeper than logic. That is why the very idea of “the teachings are all that matter” is in fact the precise opposite of what Jesus taught.

If the value of Jesus is to be found solely in his wisdom, then that would mean Jesus came to persuade. Salvation is external, in other words. We listen to the wisdom, accept various pieces of it here and there, and in this way we put on the “Jesus lifestyle”—and that’s all.

But this is not what Jesus taught. Salvation is internal. It is a matter of the heart. Read again the well-known verse, John 3:16. Jesus came because Jesus himself is the vehicle by which people can be saved. He is the door through reality that leads to freedom. We give him our hearts and those hearts are transformed, so that we can awaken from the perishing life into the eternal life—an eternal life that begins here and now.

This transformation is the factor that the religion of the world cannot accept. That is why no purely logical argument can save someone from the bondage of a perishing life. No one can be changed as a matter of reasoning alone, because the reasoning mind is not powerful enough. That mind is subject to what the heart believes. Rather, we give our hearts to Jesus—once we recognize that the burning we experience in our hearts (Luke 24:32) is God’s call.

Our minds change when our hearts do. We give our hearts, and we see what we never saw before ... at which point we discover—perhaps slowly, like a new sunrise—that now we truly have become receptive to what Jesus taught.

It Begins With Belief

The person who comes to God must believe that God is, and that he is a rewarder of those who diligently seek him. —Hebrews 11:6

The heart continues to be the location of the most profound personal discovery I have made through the walk of faith. The center of my self has changed. Before, I always thought I weighed evidence to get to my conclusions. I always thought that my belief began in my mind. My “heart,” the spiritual locus of who I am—to the extent that I considered such a thing—then followed along accordingly. So I thought.

The truth I discovered is that belief starts with the heart. The reasoning mind is a powerful instrument for reaching conclusions, but the very scope of its possible conclusions are shaped by what the heart reveres—and every heart reveres something. I discovered this only in retrospect. My heart changed and my mind changed with it. I saw what I had never seen before.

Yet God didn’t take that heart by force. He didn’t storm his way in, as of course he could have. We are small—yet somehow we are also significant, and our choices are significant. The hope of God is that we care enough about the existence in which he has invested us that we will peer intently into it, catching a glimmer of what is truly real. His hope is that we care enough about the hearts he has given us to lay them before him voluntarily.

The choice is necessary, because that same heart is where deception flourishes. Our hearts chase after what is corrosive, imprisoning, or poisonous—in each case calling it good. Jeremiah 17:9 expresses this. The deceived heart that shapes what we know is the very heart that must be redeemed. For this to be possible, it must be that a part of us remains unstained—a part that can make this choice. There is a locus of the self even deeper than the darkened heart. It is out of this hidden part of who we are that we still call to God, and it is within this hidden part of ourselves that we still can recognize the One who calls to us. It is the small and still-pure part of the self that declares I do have a heart and I do hear God, so that with these declarations the One can begin to heal the other.

In other words, you lead your own heart. You choose, and perhaps tremblingly, you stand with the choice. You believe—maybe even before your heart does.

We saw this with Saul, who was to become the Apostle Paul. Before his transformation began, he made his own decision to identify the One who met him on the road as Lord (Acts 9:5).

We saw this in a negative way with the other Saul. Saul in the Old Testament was a king chosen by God, but this Saul made the choice to turn away. He held his own pride before men in higher esteem than his humility before God. And God honored the choice—as God honors all our choices. Thus, it was God himself who sent the very darkening of the heart that Saul was seeking (I Samuel 16:14).

All of us have God. He is the One in whom, said Paul, we “live, move, and have our being.” We might lose the touch, feel, and communion with him over the course of a life in which we cage our spirits within cynical or protective shells. But God is still speaking, still calling, still trying to touch us where we are vulnerable, and still daring us to be vulnerable to him—still ready to lead us through the process of breaking those shells so that we can live joyously and free.

We choose.

Our hearts might not even be in it at first—but that’s OK. The important thing, the transformative thing, is what gets into our hearts.

Part 5: The Audacity of Identity

Click here for the first part of this series: How Do We Know God is Real?

The fact that I exist is scandalous.

We don’t know what to make of this fact. I think we live our entire earthly lives never quite coming to grips with it. On a daily basis, we set aside our shock over the fact that we exist in order to pretend to be like the other people we see who appear to be getting on with their lives.

But it’s not just that I exist—I have the ability to make my own decisions. I am someone. My own life, will, perspective, and choices are different from those of every other person. It is not just that “I think, therefore I am.” I think in a particular way, so therefore I am a particular person. This is the fact that is scandalous, and this, indeed, is what makes me distinct from God. At the same time that I am someone, I am also not someone else. I am finite. The statement “I am” therefore is truly complete only for God. I need a predicate. That is, “I am Pete,” or “I am a person.” God does not need a predicate, but I do.

Another way of saying this is that God is “identityless,” at least insofar as the nature of identity is defining and confining. The fuller name for God that the Bible also gives is “I AM THAT I AM.” This name and statement describes the way that the totality of God is accounted for entirely through the fact of God’s existence. His eternal nature means that no justification is needed or even applicable beyond this fact—a fact that we have recognized to be observable from all that is.

Note also that “I AM” is present tense. When Jesus accounted for his own identity this way, he forced the gospel account to violate the rules of grammar—“Most assuredly, I say to you, before Abraham was, I am” (John 8:58). This points to another aspect of the nature of God. Part of being eternal is being unchanging, and part of being unchanging is being ever-present.

By contrast, I am not like that. I am finite. I am moving through the world and changing as I go. I am making mistakes. I am getting older, and in some ways seeing my possibilities decline. It is true that “I am”—but it is also true that “I was” different than I am, and “I will be” different still. And one day, I won’t be any longer.

God is real, and I am a part of his creation. I don’t know why I exist, but he does. I have at least this much relationship to him. So what does a person do, any person, once he discovers God? This is the next fundamental question. We search out the impact, the meaning, and the direct personal consequences of our coming to realize that we live, move, and have our being within I AM.

Part 4: Welcome to the Nulliverse

Click here for the first part of this series: How Do We Know God is Real?

So what does that tribesman see? We are back to the illiterate tribesman of Part 1 (see link above), who has no need of the Bible to find God. Somehow, wherever he is and whatever faculties he is equipped with, he has enough information to infer that God is real. What is this information?

Again, we are all “without excuse”—meaning the information pointing to God must be so plain that every human being, without exception, could be counted on to face it and experience it, no matter how limited her life, health, senses, or circumstances might be. The evidence for God must be inescapable within our lives.

What are the inescapable realities that every human can experience? We might be able to list several, but the full list includes at least these two:

1. Existence exists. There is something instead of nothing, and we are part of that something.

2. Things change. Everything we experience in the world has a beginning and an end.

These two facts about earthly human life are so basic that we have forgotten there was ever a time that we learned them. They were certainly among the very first truths we learned, long before we even had spoken words with which to define our thoughts. Neither of these truths would necessarily have to be true, given that it is not difficult to at least abstractly conceive of a universe (perhaps “nulliverse” would be a better word for it) in which neither of these facts is true.

Yet these two facts are indeed observable characteristics of our world—pointing to a series of conclusions not only about the nature of our world, but also about the nature of God.

* * *

Existence exists. Everything in the world had a beginning. From these two observations, one of the conclusions is that there must have been a time when the very first thing, or the very first set of things, came into existence.

If this never happened, then there would be non-existence instead of existence, and this is not what we have. Existence must have begun with the first thing in the world that existed. And this in turn points to God, because for something to come into existence, there must be something outside the material world to cause this existence to begin.

After all, it couldn’t have been something inside the material world that caused this first thing, because then this cause would have been the “first thing” instead.

You might still be inclined to say that “chance” caused existence to begin—as in, some wrinkle in the fabric of nothingness that is theoretically possible but so vastly unlikely that the odds against it are something like one in ten quintillion raised to its own power. That is why existence feels so special and unique.

However, what then caused or created this “wrinkle”? Or what created “chance” itself? What created the march of time proceeding in such a way that it allowed enough duration for this vastly unlikely event to occur? All of these things must have their beginnings, too—or else they would be eternal.

You might say instead that creation occurred because of energy leaking in from some other world, some other dimension of reality. But how did the other dimension begin? This hypothesis does nothing except expand the borders of the material world to let them include other dimensions. In fact, for this very reason, we know that the Creator does have to be eternal. If not, then he is simply an extradimensional entity, and we would have to ask what it was that caused the Creator to begin.

Here then is where reason begins to show us the nature of the Creator. Not only is he eternal, but there are other things that we can know about him as well.

* * *

For example, we know that the Creator must be entirely self-contained. He is able to exist independently, without relying on anything else. If this was not true, then something else would have had to exist eternally alongside the Creator, and what would have created this other thing?

We also know by observation that the Creator has the ability to create. Since existence exists, he apparently exercised this ability. Furthermore, the Creator is alive and conscious, and has the ability to choose to create. If this was not so, if the Creator was somehow nonliving or unthinking, then only random chance could be responsible for directing where its creative energies went—and we would be stuck again with asking where this random chance came from.

So it turns out that we can recognize quite a bit about the nature of God from some of the most basic facts about the world. The facts that (1) our world exists, and (2) everything in it has a beginning, together point to all of these conclusions:

A. The world began with the very first thing or set of things.

B. Something outside the world created this first thing.

C. That Creator is eternal.

D. That Creator is independent.

E. The Creator is powerful enough to create the world.

F. The Creator has a will and makes choices.

All of this can be seen and known by the tribesman—not from the words of any person or scripture, but from the implications that are written upon reality.

And there is even more. There is still more that the tribesman can know, thanks to an additional truth that is also apparent in every human life. Points 1 and 2 were among the first truths we learned as self-aware beings, but before these came a “point 0” that was the very first thing that each newborn human being experiences. It was a shock to experience it for the first time, and I am convinced that it continues to be a shock for us in the first subconscious millisecond of each new day when we awaken to it again. The simplest statement of this most fundamental experience is also a name we have already cited, a name the Creator gives for himself. That is: I am.

Next: The Audacity of Identity

Part 3: The End of All Continuums

Click here for the first part of this series: How Do We Know God is Real?

What does “better” mean?

The better of two competing entities, objects, or proposals is the one that comes closer to some particular ideal. “Better” implies a “best”—even if the best is something we have never seen and cannot name. To illustrate using an everyday object, a washing machine that meets our capacity requirements is better than one that does not, but one that meets our capacity requirements and features styling we find attractive is better still. All of the movement from good to better to better still implies a “perfect” washing machine toward which this continuum is oriented, even if that ideal can only be approached but not attained.

Living is better than not living along just such a continuum, because one’s sense of what is highest includes the dynamism that comes with life. Truth is also better than falsehood, because the highest-quality thing would be unencumbered by lies. Each reasoning human being has ideals of what is good and right that extrapolate toward “highestness” in this way—that is, toward a model for what is perfect or best. We don’t think about this ideal directly, and we cannot imagine it because we ourselves are imperfect. However, the ideal, or at least our sense of its direction, serves as the yardstick by which we make our determinations.

This is true even of seemingly subjective points such as our favorite color. We might all have different favorite colors and we might each change our favorite colors according to our moods, but each of us nevertheless agrees that certain colors touch us in ways that are better than certain other colors. Measurements such as these could not be made unless there was some standard for comparing life vs. unlife, truth vs. falsehood, or my reaction to one color vs. my reaction to another. There is a model, in our thoughts or in our spirits, that we use in order to judge—in order to favor certain things and avoid or discourage other things.

One might argue that this standard for determination is actually something mundane. We human beings simply seek our own happiness, or our own physical comfort. This is true as far as it goes. However, even if all of human life and human choices were this simple, still these conditions would point toward ideals. There is some “perfect” happiness. There is some “perfect” comfort. It would be impossible to make relative measurements of “better” along these continua as well, unless there was a “best” to use as yardstick. And these “bests” surely exist. We use them, after all. So given that the ideals exist, where do they exist?

The answer is that the ideal, any ideal—an ideal of perfect justice, beauty, truth, or even happiness—must exist outside of the material world. It cannot be found in the material world, because nothing perfect can be found here. Everything we find in the material world could still be better than it is. That is, everything here falls somehow short of an ideal that, as we have already seen, is also real.

So (to build on the arguments in Part 2): Assume that somehow you do think thoughts. Assume, furthermore, that this act of thinking actually is just random, and you are entirely comfortable with the notion that selfhood is an illusion—that in fact we have no autonomy and our thought life is just the result of cascading collisions. If so, these cascading collisions seem to be making evaluations with reference to a standard that does not exist in the material world.

The problem with this should be clear. The material world is all that there is—or so goes the argument. The argument further asserts that all that we see and all that we experience are fully self-created, the result of meaningless random events. So how could random collisions give rise to something immaterial? Specifically, how could colliding particles create referential standards of value that do not exist in the realm of colliding particles?

Plenty of people try to assert that there is no ultimate perfect being. But they undermine their argument through the very premise of arguing. Is the notion of the absence of God a “better” intellectual construct? Atheists would say yes! But if so, then what does “better” mean—and what does that meaning imply? All of us are leaning in the direction of something that is ultimate and perfect during every single instant through which we are aware and making choices in the world.

Next: Welcome to the Nulliverse

Part 2: A Finger In My I

Click here for the first part of this series: How Do We Know God is Real?

Even though our condition might truly be as “ego-bound” as Part 1 described it (see link above), we still manage to speak of God. We all do this.

Simply consider how common it is to hear the phrase shruggingly spoken, “God only knows,” for example. As in, God only knows how long this warm weather’s going to last. What is this phrase, if not a shorthand for expressing our shared perception that the uncertain is somehow certain after all, and that everything unknown is still ordered and guided by some kind of greater will? The frequency with which people use and accept this and similar phrases suggests that the meaning of the phrase is held to be at least plausible, if not self-evidently true.

But the words we speak casually are symptomatic of something deeper. More significant than what our outward verbal expressions reveal is the way that all of us rely upon God for the very foundation of our thinking. The most basic premises that underlie the ways we think about ourselves and think about the world are based on the expectation that God exists.

An old saying goes: “It takes a lot of faith to be an atheist.” The truth of this is found in the fact that the atheist—the one who believes that the world and his own self came into existence and keeps on existing without God—must then by extension believe that certain assumptions are wrong that his own mind seemingly cannot help but to embrace.

* * *

For example, we have ideas. A person gets a concept, picture, or connection within her mind that wasn’t there before. This is an idea. Few of us doubt that we have experienced this phenomenon. Similarly, we have thoughts. We make decisions through reasoned analysis. Sometimes, we even make decisions based upon ideas that have come to mind. We mentally choose—each one of us does this. We compare competing alternatives by using our reasoning and our imagination to forecast which choice will lead to the outcome we like best. We make up our minds and then we change our minds. We all do these things, and we all are aware that others do these things, too.

So where does all of this thinking come from?

It’s not an idle question. If there is no conscious will that created the universe, then everything in the universe happens without anything willing it. By default, everything happens because of unwilled or “random” events. Subatomic particles collide with other particles at random, or waves intersect other waves, and the result sometimes is that the collisions and intersections produce events that can lead to other events.

A waterfall, for example, could be seen as the product of random events in this way. The waterfall might seem like something distinct and singular, but in fact it is just the result of various sorts of collisions. Random interactions over time produced the planets, produced the landscape of a particular continent, produced the rainfall, produced the rocks as well as the earthquake that left a sharp cliff, and then produced the course of the river that sends the water cascading over this cliff. The waterfall is the result of an uncountably vast number of random events in this way, and to believe that there is no supreme being creating the universe is to believe that everything in the universe—including you and all your thinking—was produced exactly the same way.

That is, random electronic firings in your parents’ brains mixed with whatever experiences they had randomly encountered up to that point in order to generate the belief that they should have you. The random events surrounding you have then produced your life and your experiences so far. In fact, random collisions of electrons in your own brain even produced the most recent thought you had, perhaps the thought to continue reading to the end of this sentence. Precisely like the waterfall, your own self—or the thing you think of as a “self”—is just an undirected end product that is cascading along on collisions.

But no, you might say, there is something more than that. There is a will in the universe, and it is my own will. Though the waterfall is not conscious, I am. I do have a self. I make decisions. Randomness does result in what is—but one of the things that randomness has produced is human consciousness. Human beings have this consciousness, and each human being exercises a will.

The basis of this argument is that the waterfall is different from the human being. More specifically, the waterfall is different from “consciousness.” That waterfall, as complex as it is, cannot take credit for having decided to do anything that it does. It is the product of external events and external events still drive everything about it. But the “consciousness,” by this argument, can take credit for what it does. It arose from randomness, yes—but randomness no longer drives it, because a self is in control.

How, then, did the randomness take this leap into selfhood?

To assume that consciousness arose out of random events is to assume that somewhere, sometime, there occurred the very first conscious thought. What were the circumstances that led to this thought? Presumably there had been nothing in the world up to that point except random collisions and their results. If so, then this random cascade created the first thought.

But wait! If this thought was only the latest result of the latest random collision, then it could not be considered a “conscious” thought at all. A “self” must have thought the thought in order for it to be a conscious thought. So where, again, did this “self” come from?

You might finally say, “I have no problem with the contradiction. I fully acknowledge that the universe we perceive is not all there is. Our ‘selves’ are greater than the material world. I am a spiritual person—I certainly have a sense of this. However, that does not mean I believe in a single great ruling ‘God’ per se.”

This is the belief in the transcendent self. It is a compelling belief, given the way our time-bound linear lives seem too small to contain the totality of all that we feel ourselves to be. This provision of ample space for a more abundant view of the other self therefore feels like it answers the puzzle of consciousness—but the answer is incomplete.

This “ample space”—where is it? The transcendent self has a different existence from the way we understand existence, yet still is must exist (for lack of a better word) “somewhere.” That is, it exists in some “place” (again, lacking a better word), in that it emerges from and remains connected to some different sort of realm that also transcends the material world.

If so—if the above description at least partially and crudely expresses the nature of the transcendent self—then what is the origin of this transcendent realm?

Specifically, did a conscious will create the transcendent realm? If not, if the transcendent self is instead just the result of an ongoing series of unwilled “random” transcendent events, then one cannot take credit for having a conscious transcendent self either.

In short, no matter where you put the “I,” the “I” does not exist. This is true whether the universe is random or whether heaven and earth are random together. Either way, the randomness means that you speak falsely whenever you say that “I” decided something, because there is no “I” that is able to decide. All of your thoughts and ideas instead just come from collisions. Every opinion you hold comes from the same thing—ultimately the opinion is just the product of electrons among your neurons happening to go one way instead of another. Even this very feeling of being a self, this feeling you carry with you all the time, is also a result of electronic collisions. You are not a self—not really. You just feel that way. You feel like you decide things, but in fact you have no autonomy. Instead you are just flowing downstream on the course of random interactions that have never been consciously influenced by you or anyone else.

* * *

This idea is more than just disquieting, more than just dispiriting. Part of the horror of this idea is that it implies that a living human being is no better than a corpse. Neither one is conscious, after all—and both are equally subject to random events.

We seem viscerally opposed to this idea.

And in fact, the reason we object relates to a second basic assumption that our minds seemingly cannot help but to embrace. We have already seen that we believe we think thoughts. In addition, we also believe that some things are better than other things.

A human being is inherently “better” than a corpse, for example. A living organism is inherently “better” than a thing that does not live. Some monster might disagree with those statements, but that monster would still share the premise that there are things that are “better.” And like the idea that I am an autonomous self, this idea also is incompatible with a universe that has no creator.

Next: The End of All Continuums

How Do We Know God Is Real? Part 1

You don’t need a bible in order to know God. The Bible itself says this.

“What may be known of God is manifest,” reads chapter 1 of Paul’s letter to the Romans. In other words, the evidence is already plain. “God’s invisible attributes are clearly seen, being understood by the things that are made.” Thus, not only can we infer that God exists, we can also learn about his nature from what we perceive around us. Creation testifies about its Creator.

In fact, creation itself provides enough information about God, somehow, that human beings who disregard God anyway are, in Paul’s word, “without excuse.”

So: Those of us who have bibles do not necessarily have an advantage.

Those of us who know the word “Jesus” do not necessarily have an advantage either— because presumably an illiterate tribesman in the most distant wilderness somewhere might speak an obscure syllable for the being he is seeking and coming to know, but cannot explain. God knows when his name is called.

These verses from Romans 1 (specifically vv. 19-20) represent a remarkably confident passage of scripture. Confident, that is, in the universality of our awareness that we live in the presence of God. The implication of Romans 1 is that even this remote tribesman has access to at least enough insight about the God we all share to be able to piece together a sufficient framework for how to experience this being and how to conform to him. I do not know precisely how this insight comes, and doubtless it can be different for every individual. It might involve dreams in some cases. In other cases it might involve the words of missionaries reaching the most remote tribesman third- or fourth-hand. In still other cases, the tribesman might intellectually build this insight out of the clues that are manifest in the material world.

Whatever the case, the being he comes to recognize is living, constant, and true in a way that is distinct from the trinkets of worship that are scattered around him. A missionary might find this person and teach him the story of the cross, but the tribesman is receptive to this message only because of the way it ratifies, intensifies, and “fleshes out” the picture of the one he has already come to appreciate. He speaks a syllable, perhaps, and this is his own private name for the “I AM” of the Bible and the One-through-whom-all-things-were-made who was born on earth as Jesus Christ.

* * *

Don’t get me wrong, though. The Bible is, to say the least, extraordinary. The Bible is, among other things, food.

I have seen the truth of this. The Bible characterizes itself as nourishment, and I have come to recognize the ways that I go hungry when I try to live without its instruction. Yet the Bible derives its authority from God, and the Bible is all but meaningless if God is not real. Therefore, to address the question of whether God exists, we should begin by setting the Bible aside.

Indeed, one might wonder why we in the modern, developed, wealthy, “industrialized” portion of the world have been given this particular blessing—bibles—in such abundance. The book is available in libraries, stores, churches, and almost every hotel room. Plus it is easily accessible in every English version through all of our Internet connections. We are tempted to think of ourselves as special because we have this special document in such an array, but could it be that we are just especially in need of it? Given the hyperbusy, fretting, intellectual minds that our culture produces, perhaps we need to have God’s insight—God’s food—arranged for us in these sequential verses on which we can focus our thoughts. In the Western world, perhaps that is the only avenue left by which to reach the gut where we are starving. Perhaps our culture leaves us so sealed with an ego-bound shell, and therefore so oblivious to God around us, that God has to parachute literature into our midst just to get through. I mentioned that I do not know exactly how the illiterate tribesman pieces together the way of God, but it could just as well be that the tribesman doesn’t understand how I am not able to see it.

Next: A Finger in My I

I Think I’m Getting the Hang of Walking on Water

I think I’m getting the hang of walking on water.

Jesus walking on water was a different sort of miracle. It was different from all the other miracles he did. With every other miracle, Jesus simply showcased something prominently that the Father was already doing with less recognition. Jesus turned water into wine, for example—but the Father turns water into wine as well. The Father simply uses such mechanisms as rainfall, grapes, and fermentation. In the same way, Jesus turned scarcity into plenty (Mark 6:41-44), just as the Father routinely turns a few seeds into an abundant harvest of crops. Jesus even said (see John 5:19) that he does only what his Father shows him to do.

But then there is the apparent miracle of walking on water, which arguably is not presented in the Gospels as a miracle at all. Jesus seems to do it casually, striding across the water when no boat is present (Matthew 14:24). The naturalness with which he does this seems to imply that this sort of capability is part of the character of the surrendered life. We haven’t heard of another believer since Jesus’ time who has replicated precisely this act—but perhaps there is more going on here that just water. I Thessalonians 5:19 says we are not to “quench” the Spirit. The Spirit, in other words, gets extinguished as if through drowning. In doing the best we can at what our Savior shows us to do, we follow his model of walking on water by gliding lightly across any of the things of this world that would submerge us.

In the case of one episode involving Peter, that “water” was literally water. Peter is the one other person in the Bible to pace across a lake. He did this one time, at the direct urging of Jesus, for only for a few steps before sinking. Becoming free enough that we relax gravity’s hold on us is thus possible—but apparently it requires such faith that few human beings do it and even fewer do it for long.

Yet other forces besides gravity also pull us down, and more than just water threatens to wash over us.

In our modern busy lives, for example, there is just so much to do.

Indeed, the pace, possibilities, and convenience of the modern world seem to make it easier than ever to succumb to a life of spiritually drowning. Most of us end up angry much of the time, and we don’t know why.

I have been angry. Only slowly have I begun to see why. I find that I have insisted on tidy appearances because I am ashamed of what others might say about the mess. I pursue distant goals because I fear having only meager success by which to let other people measure my worth in the end. I even do nonsensical and unnecessary things that others tell me to do, simply because I fear their pointing a finger of criticism at me if I don’t do them. In each of these cases, I am not worshiping God or submitting to God, but instead submitting in worship to other human beings. No breath of life can come of this, so no wonder I am angry. More accurately, I am panicked—thrashing at anyone close to me in my desperate groping for air.

The way of Christ is not like this. We still submit to other people. We serve them and regard them as treasures—this is the most vital thing we do in the world. But we do not worship them. We do not fear them, and we submit to them not out of insecurity or shame, but out of love.

I am still tidy, though. Nothing about that is inconsistent with a life in Christ. I still aspire—and I also still do many things simply because other people ask me to do them. The life of surrender is not free from pleasing other people, and not even free from chores.

Before I do any of these things, however, I breathe. The way of Christ is to pray continually (I Thessalonians 5:17). This includes praying for God to work through us and with us, recognizing that he provides the time, energy, and opportunity for all that he would have us do.

It is therefore pointless to get frustrated. It’s pointless to get frazzled. The gift I have right now is the present. “I AM,” the name of God, consists of only the present tense. God is here now, and God comes first—followed closely by the people God has put into my present life.

I breathe before taking the next steps in a full day. I remind myself that the expansiveness of the air of God is the medium through which I wish to move and live, rather than yet again making myself heavy by taking the things of this world too seriously. One of the simpler messages I derive from that picture of Jesus walking on the water is this—that all of us, by his power and grace, can discover the ability to decide not to sink.

The King James Punctuation

Dallas Willard wrote in The Divine Conspiracy that, “when trials are permitted, it only means that [God] has something better in mind for us than freedom from trials.” Earthly trials are the specific implements God uses to reshape us in his image, and to set us free from prisons we hadn’t even seen confining us.

I noticed, in that spirit, that the King James rendition of I Thessalonians 5:18 adds a semicolon. This might not seem like much. However, it is a striking mark of punctuation, given the way it transforms the meaning of the whole passage.

Here is how the New International Version treats I Thess. 5:16-18. It puts semicolons instead after verses 16 and 17:

“Be joyful always; pray continually; give thanks in all circumstances, for this is God's will for you in Christ Jesus.”

Now here it is in the KJV:

“Rejoice always, pray without ceasing, in everything give thanks; for this is the will of God in Christ Jesus for you.”

The significance of the semicolon in the NIV is that it separates away the last part, and frames this last part together. It says that because all circumstances flow from God’s will, we are to give thanks within those circumstances as part of our recognition that God is in control. The thanks, in the NIV, is the one fundamental response.

By contrast, the King James Version uses the semicolon to separate off the phrase, “for this is the will of God in Christ Jesus for you.” Thanks to the KJV’s ordering of the punctuation, this version says that there is more for us to do in recognition of God’s will than just to give thanks. The thankfulness is part of a threefold response.

I had been more accustomed to the NIV rendition. Yet seeing the difference in the KJV treatment has me rethinking the way I understand this set of verses.

Neither punctuation could claim to be authoritative. The original text presumably had no marks to indicate which of the readings is right. However, if we believe that God wishes a relationship with us and speaks to us by means of the ways he crafts our lives, then the King James punctuation stands as more compelling.

It says that we have a greater role to play. Experiencing the will of God at work in ways that challenge us, we have more to offer—and more to bring to bear—than just thanks. We can also derive value from those trials and resist being submerged in our reactions to them through a set of interrelated responses. Namely, we are to...

1. “Be” joyful—being ruled by joy, which comes from the Spirit, and not being ruled by bitterness or fear;

2. Pray continually—asking in particular for the wisdom (see James 1:5) by which we can receive the instruction that God would have us learn from this challenge; and

3. Give thanks—not for the difficult circumstances but for God himself, the one who loves and safeguards us eternally, and the one who chose us in particular to be transformed by these trials.

The Most Fundamental Fact of the Universe

I heard a radio program recently that included a conversation between a man well-known for his faith and a woman whose cherished friend had died at a young age. If God is real, the grieving woman wanted to know, then why did this happen?

The man’s response was earnest and tender, but it was built from elements that would best make sense to a Christian. He spoke of sin resulting in a fallen world. The woman was neither satisfied nor comforted. The host of the radio program—himself sharing the woman’s lack of faith in God—observed that the difficulty in communication between people with and without this faith is that the two groups seem to hold such profoundly different premises.

That difference in premises seems crystallized in the list of exhortations toward the end of Paul’s first letter to the Thessalonians. One of the items on that list says, “In everything give thanks [emphasis mine], for this is the will of God in Christ Jesus for you.” A person of faith interpreting this might say that, in God’s plan, everything ultimately makes sense—so we are to find a way within our hearts to give thanks for what occurs. My understanding of this verse used to stop there. But the grieving woman would likely respond, “No way! My friend died. Everyone who knew her and everyone who might have known her has suffered a loss. I won’t give thanks for that!” And the woman would be right.

The preposition is important. We are to give thanks “in” everything, not “for” everything. Awful things do happen. Jesus never promised happiness, and he did say there would be trouble (John 16:33). We do not have to be thankful for the awful things. But in the midst of them, we can give thanks for the God who is in control of everything and does have a plan that is fuller, more glorious, and more elaborate than what we can understand. Over the sweep of sufficient time and from the vantage of sufficient perspective, what seemed to be bad or evil—indeed, what was bad or evil—can also be seen to flower, by God’s love and grace, so that it becomes integral to the wholeness of a vastly greater good. This was the truth that the Joseph of the Old Testament glimpsed in the face of the brothers who had treated him cruelly. See Genesis 50:20. This, indeed, was truth of the execution of Jesus Christ.

To the grieving woman, this is not necessarily satisfying either. But the grieving woman’s question is phrased in a way that it cannot be satisfied. Perhaps the most fundamental fact of the universe is this: God is God. He announced this fact just before he gave the Ten Commandments (Exodus 20:2), and he gave his name to Moses as “I Am That I Am” (Exodus 3:14). When we say to God, if you are real then why do you allow X, we place ourselves higher than God. That is, we set ourselves up as the judge of God’s plan. To do this is not only spiritually rebellious, but also illogical. He is the Creator and I am not. I might find myself in pain because of trouble I find in this world. Even so, nothing true can proceed from the false premise that he must explain himself to me.

The freedom comes in finding that we can give up constantly trying to be God. When Jesus promises that his way is freer and easier than what we are accustomed to (Matthew 11:30), I think part of what he is saying is that we don’t have to respond to what happens in our lives anymore as if we were little gods and goddesses. We don’t have to try to carry everything on our own. God is real, and his reality becomes increasingly apparent as we turn our hearts to him. With or without Jesus, we will have trouble, but with Jesus the burden is lighter because he shares it. It’s all true.

In the midst of sorrow, it can be hard to give thanks. In a different way, it can also be hard to give thanks in the midst of happiness, because we get so full of what we have. The beginning of all things is God, and in the midst of all things we give thanks—including thanks for the fullness of all he understands, and thanks for what he is going to do that we couldn’t possibly do on our own. That is, he is going to see us all the way through.

Praying Beyond Words

Walking outside, I noticed a weathervane.

I didn’t have a reason to be out. I had just felt a stirring to leave the house for a bit, and I answered as best I could. Not knowing quite what to do, I waited in the air, I drifted up and down the block with my hands in my pockets, and I let everything slow down to as slow as I could get it to go. I leaned for a while, looking at whatever I happened to see. And at some point, I was moved to fully regard and appreciate a weathervane on a nearby roof.

I don’t necessarily have the words for what it means.

Jesus often retreated into silent places to pray (Luke 5:16). I wonder what he said in those prayers. Indeed, I wonder if he “said” much of anything at all.

We are to pray continually, or pray without ceasing—or so says I Thessalonians 5:17. If prayer consists only of speaking to God in word or thought, then we have a problem. We can’t do that continually.

One obvious answer is that prayer is not just speaking. It’s also listening. The communication is two-way. You know the old saw: We have two ears to hear versus one mouth with which to speak, so respect the ratio. Does that ratio look anything like the way we pray—listening twice as much as we speak? “Listening,” that is, to all that he might be saying into our hearts, our moments, and our lives?

But there is more. When we speak with an omniscient creator who already knows us better than we know ourselves, there is the question of language. Jesus might not always have “said” formal words and sentences when praying because human speech is limited. He was God the Son speaking to God the Father, so they could be expected to wordlessly understand one another. Yet we are the people of God. We who believe have God’s spirit, meaning that we can expect some portion of this same understanding. Indeed, the Bible says that he hears our prayers even when we don’t know precisely what to pray to him (Romans 8:26).

We do pray using the words of our own human language, and we must pray this way. We are created in God’s image, and like God, our word has power. But prayer—communicating with the infinite—must also consist of more than finite language.

There is something musical about this. When we surrender lovingly to an instrumental piece of music, we recognize the order and meaning of the movements and melodies, even though the nature of that meaning is emotional instead of intellectual. We let go of our insistence on our own mood in order to resonate with the mood of the music.

In the same way, our praying involves not just bowing our heads and folding our hands on our own terms, but also submitting ourselves to resonate with the “music” whose meaning is spiritual.

What kind of music is this? Well: one might rightly say ... wind instruments. In both of two very different books of the Bible (John 3:8, Acts 2:2), the Holy Spirit is associated with the wind. Our prayer seeks any and all ways of understanding God, including this one. We do pray to lay specific thanks and specific appeals before him, and we do pray to listen for instruction that we might be able to translate into thought or deed. But then there is this other realm of prayer, perhaps the greatest realm of all. Over and above everything else, our prayer also includes the quiet seeking—in our hearts, in patience and stillness—for a renewed and wordless awareness of which way the wind is blowing.

A To-Do List for the Sanctified

There are all kinds of ways to take the light burden that Jesus promised in Matthew 11:30 and turn this into something heavy.

One of the ways I have found is by searching for the particular and specific will of God in my life.

Turns out, I didn’t have to search. God’s will for me is the same as God’s will for you. In the first letter to the Thessalonians—which is perhaps the earliest document in the New Testament—Paul states it this plainly:

“For this is the will of God, your sanctification”
—I Thessalonians 4:3.

That is, in the same way that certain dwellings, rocks, or spots of ground have been sacred because of the way people encountered God in those places ... now it is people themselves who are sacred. And the way to become a “living temple” in this way is to encounter God in your heart. (I am grateful to a sharp little book that highlights this I Thessalonians verse, Just Do Something by Kevin DeYoung.)

“Fine,” you might say. OK—I am to be sanctified. But what does that mean? “Sanctified” is a state that comes from God’s grace. Meanwhile, I am still here on earth. I have a life to live. What am I supposed to do with it? What am I supposed to do with my energies, resources, attention, and time in order to make sure that I helping carry out God’s plan?

The answer—in a great many of the choices that we make—is that it really does not matter what we do.

That answer might be less than satisfying, but there it is.

In fact, it’s possible to become lost in the preoccupation with what to do. The teachings of Jesus focus on attitudes of the heart. If our heart is with Christ, then we will tend to make choices that further our capacity to bear good fruit (Matthew 7:16). The branches of the vine do not know the precise size, quantity, and color of the fruit they will produce. In the same way, we do not know precisely how our lives are supposed to proceed, but if we make choices day by day that are based upon faith and love, then over time we may see the result of those choices in various forms of fruit that Christ produces through us.

But even if that answer still feels unsatisfying, that’s all right. Paul seemed to anticipate this. We are people of action, after all, and so he closed that same early letter with a list of action items. I hope to explore some of these items in future posts. Here they are—a to-do list for the sanctified:

● Be joyful always
● Pray without ceasing
● In everything give thanks
● (For this is the will of God in Christ Jesus for you)
● Do not quench the Spirit
● Do not despise prophecies
● Test all things
● Hold fast what is good
● Abstain from every form of evil
—I Thessalonians 5:16-22