Trust In Joy

Rudyard Kipling, in his poem “If,” asks a young man whether he can “meet with Triumph and Disaster and treat those two imposters just the same.” Happiness and unhappiness are like that. They could be thought of as synonyms for “Triumph” and “Disaster,” and like these twin imposters, they also deserve to be treated just the same.

In The Time Paradox, a book about psychology, authors Philip Zimbardo and John Boyd quote an authority on happiness as saying, “Happiness is not a static state that we attain. It is an elusive goal that we must constantly pursue.” The two authors leave the matter there, resigned to this constant pursuit—not questioning whether there may well be a beneficial static state that we can attain. There is such a state, and the word for this state is joy.

Joy is different from happiness. Turning toward joy can actually compromise happiness for a time. “Happiness” consists of all of the external sensations of satisfaction, excitement, pleasure, and relief that we obtain during our wending course through the material world. “Joy,” by contrast, is a fruit of the Spirit of God—one of the fruits listed in Galatians 5:22-23. That means joy is as constant as God is. While happiness is fleeting and recedes from our hand, it is we who move away from joy.

Joy is found on the mountaintops. That is, the figurative mountaintops—the heights of our surrender to God. Because we are human, we generally end up leaving these mountaintops and descending to the valleys again, the valleys where our doubts and anxieties swarm over us to obscure the light.

The way to have more joy is to trust. In the narrows of the valley, our temptation is to act as though the valley is all there is. We build a bunker in the valley and we continually forage around it for all of the scraps of happiness we can find to comfort us. Guarding this camp and gathering enough happiness to sustain some kind of fragile contentment can quickly grow to occupy all of our time and attention—all that we are. The alternative, to trust in joy, is to live the way we glimpsed within our hearts to live back when we had that experience on the mountaintop—that time when we were lit up with the Spirit and our joy was nearly complete.

We trust that this joy was true because we know that the Spirit is true. To trust this way means leaving the bunker behind. Doing this is scary, but eventually you pass through the valley to reach the mountain again.

Joyce Meyer has a wonderful way of expressing this. Her book Approval Addiction is about the fear of not pleasing other people, and how to get free of this fear. In the book, she offers this simple three-word motto: Do it afraid!

The fear is no reason not to proceed. All of us feel afraid—we can’t help that feeling. But we need not live as if the fear has authority and has to be obeyed. Keep going, even if only slowly and clumsily at first. Obey God rather than fear by following the call of joy—even if you have to carry fear with you like a burden as you go.

The fear is an imposter, too. It’s a coward—it will burn away.

Evaporating as readily as a mist, the fear dissolves in the sunlight you find when you get clear of the cover of the valley, to begin ascending toward the mountaintop once more.

Related post: A To-Do List for the Sanctified

The Self I Think I Am Vs. the Self I Can Fully Be

I mentioned in a previous post how we limit our minds in order to worship idols. An “idol” is any created thing to which we give obedience in preference to God. One such created thing we often obey is a self-image that is at odds with the person God created us to be.

If I am straining to be someone I am not, then I do need to limit my mind. There are potentially vast fields of aspiration, adventure, or fruitfulness that ought to be part of the person I think I am—if only I really was that person. I dare not try to enter these fields that I can’t really reach, for fear of revealing that the self-image I have been harboring for years is not true.

Then there are the vast potential fields of aspiration, adventure, and fruitfulness that are a natural part of my joy. I fail to discover these places because I am too busy trying to remain within the bounds of my false self-image.

As a result, I am trapped—forced to make my home in the small overlap between the self I think I am and the self I am actually able to be. As the drawing suggests, this can be a tight space indeed—more confining than the complete self I was created to have and to explore.

Why did I adopt this false image of myself? I don’t necessarily know. The origin of the idol is no doubt found in some previous era of my life, when I accepted someone else’s opinion about the person I could give myself permission to be.

It doesn’t matter. The task now is to turn away.

Jesus said, according to Matthew 16:24, that we are to deny ourselves before following him. This sounds so harsh. It sounds a little like suicide. But in fact it is simply the necessary precondition for getting free. Of course these selves have to be denied! When we come to Jesus, the only selves we bring at first are the false ones that we have grown accustomed to lugging along.

The promise of Jesus is life fully realized. Along the way of seeking God, we also search out the full extent of the person each of us was uniquely created to be. We give ourselves to Jesus—these cumbersome and ill-fitting things that we think of as “selves”—and he gives us our real selves right back in return.

Because It’s a Run, It’s OK to Stumble

A leap of faith should not be a leap of cluelessness, and a step of faith should not be a leap at all. One of the temptations of an insecure faith is the belief that it ratifies impulsiveness. Scripture is cooler than this. “Test all things,” it says (I Thessalonians 5:21), and also says that our hearts are routinely deceived (Jeremiah 17:9). The implication is that there is no sin in waiting. The God who speaks into our hearts can also speak through the ordering of events, the doors of opportunity that open for us, and the wise counsel of people he places in our lives. Though God does lead us just one step at a time, it is reasonable to seek corroboration outside our hearts for what we think he is saying, and to find confidence in what the next step ought to be. God does not call us to be rash.

And yet I think I have the opposite problem.

To act impulsively, to act rashly—to follow my own pride instead of God’s will—is indeed a danger for me. But the greater danger in my own case seems to be my inclination to give the final say to my doubts.

My brain is busy. I tend to overthink any unusual step I might take. I tend to over-anticipate the risks and potential failures, and I am imaginative enough that I can come up with plenty of these. Before I proceed, therefore, I wait until I am sure—but then I am never sure. And so I hold off indefinitely on taking the step that God is urging me to take, even as he fills me with enthusiasm to take it.

This blog is an example of a step of faith. Maybe it’s a small step by any absolute measure, but it’s a big step for me. I didn’t think I’d have the time. The lack of time seemed to suggest that I would simply fail at this project and soon abandon it, so why begin?

Still, the notion that I might find joy in quietly sustaining such a project seemed to keep coming at me in different ways, over the course of more than a year, even as I continued to brush the notion aside, until the day came when I simply got started.

I think what finally convinced me was a song.

Some musicians at our church got together to produce a CD. I was listening to one of the songs they recorded—“One Pure and Holy Passion” by Mark Altrogge, a song whose lyrics I had distractedly sung in services various times—when I finally, fully heard a line from the song for the first time.

“Lead me on and I will run after you,” the song says.

I realized: These steps we take toward God are running steps.

When we proceed with joy, we don’t walk, we run. We run toward God, meaning we can see the distant point toward which we are racing. Yet because it’s a run, it is natural to misstep and even natural to stumble. If a runner crossing unknown terrain hits a patch of loose ground and slips, that’s to be expected. We get up and laugh it off, and we run some more.

In other words, it’s OK to try to follow the will of the Lord in our lives and see our attempts and undertakings sometimes fail.

It’s OK that I will do this thing wrong sometimes—this whatever-it-is-that-I-do to follow God.

We don’t know perfectly how to proceed. We learn as we go, and in particular we learn through failure, so let’s take the failures as enthusiastically as we take the visible progress. Reimagining my journey as a run gives me confidence to keep on taking new steps.

That song hit me at a particular moment. It really helped. If you have a song within you, I hope you will share it. It might not be a song of music, but might instead be a song of nurturing, counsel, or craft. We refract the light of God in unique and individual ways. As implausible as it seems—as unworkable as it seems—God actually set up his kingdom to do his work on earth through us, with each of us channeling the love and light of God according to his or her own special sculpting and circumstances.

A person refracting this light touches the heart of the person whom God will illuminate next. We might never see the one we touch or know what role we played—except that there is a radiance that results.

There is a glow that keeps on warming a fallen world so long as the people who receive the light continue to pour it out according to their gifts, so that the next person can receive the light in turn, and pour out the light in turn, and on and on and on.

The God of Evidence, the God of Material Reality

Poor Thomas gets a bad rap. This is the apostle we call “Doubting Thomas” because he wasn’t ready to believe the news that Jesus, his brutally executed teacher, was alive again and walking the earth. Can you blame him?

All of the apostles doubted. They revealed the limits of their faith when they bolted as a group to leave Jesus to the authorities (Matthew 26:56). After Jesus rose from the dead and stood before them, some of them were still doubting (Matthew 28:17). “Doubting Thomas” was at least “Convincible Thomas,” because he was true to his word. He said he would believe if he saw the evidence, and later, when the risen Jesus came to show him this, he did. Chapter 20 of John’s gospel tells the story.

Ours is a God of material reality. He creates material reality, and he came into the reality we perceive. The most fundamental premise of the way of Christ—the fact that Jesus rose from the dead—is not only an audacious claim, but also a humbly testable one. God does not remain aloof in the heavens or in myth, but entered into linear history to meet us where we are. He therefore does not ask us to ignore any of the evidence we see or hear. He does not ask you to close off the capacity to reason that he himself gave you. He asks you instead to open your mind and think a new way. Specifically, God calls each one of us to stop giving our worship to things that are too small and petty to deserve the obedience.

All of us worship. We all give our reverential submission to something, usually many somethings, whether we choose to view this as worship or not. However, to worship any group, habit, person, worry, or self-image is to limit ourselves, because these small gods and idols trap us in a box. Consciously or not, we have to limit our own mind and our own reasoning in order to persuade ourselves that what little we have accepted for ourselves is satisfying and makes sense.

As a result, what we call “logic” often is not that. There is a heady reward for submitting to and ratifying the views that self-identified voices of reason label as correct. Testifying to the allegedly “logical” view is a way to give these voices worship, in return for the flattery of getting to wear the label of intelligent ourselves. I have made this transaction many times. But Jesus said, “Out of the overflow of the heart the mouth speaks.” The conclusions we proclaim are products of the heart as much as the mind—and ultimately it is the heart, with its fears and desires, that determines what we allow our minds to accept.

Thomas had to see and feel the evidence first. That’s fine. Jesus let him touch the open wounds that his regenerated body still bears. But Jesus also told him that people will be blessed if they believe without seeing the evidence (John 20:29). Indeed, the first step on the way of Christ, according to Romans 10:9, is to believe in your heart that Jesus rose from the dead. Give your heart to the fully infinite God first, and your mind has room to expand. Once your heart does begin to grow with belief, there is plenty of evidence to see.

God became a mortal man who died and rose from the dead. One of the challenges of this idea is that it was a one-time event. It is not a recurring event that happens from time to time in history, nor is it a repeatable and predictable event that happens according to scientific laws. It is instead the transcendence of these things. By definition, you have to believe in a God who is bigger than science and history before you can believe that God entered into science and history.

And yet part of the difficulty with the belief that Jesus of Nazareth did not rise from the dead is to explain what happened instead. Something did. Something caught fire. Around 30 A.D., in a backwater of the Roman Empire, a tiny mustard seed of a movement exploded to become lush fields of belief that overran and outlasted the Roman Empire itself. Something ignited all of this flourishing.

Here are a few of the details out of that time that particularly captivate me:

● The original deniers of the resurrection are interesting for what they did not say. They didn’t argue that Jesus went to his grave and stayed there like any other Roman execution victim. Rather, they advanced alternative explanations for why the tomb was found empty. In other words, the empty tomb was apparently a well-known and established fact that couldn’t be disputed.

● The Bible cites the various witnesses who saw the resurrected Jesus. It says that a crowd of at least 500 saw him as well. These claims were published and circulated while many of those witnesses, if not the majority of them, were still alive. If the resurrection was a hoax, then it would have been easy to disprove these assertions, and it would have been ludicrous for the hoaxers to include them.

● The hoaxers also went to a lot of trouble just to give themselves pain. If Jesus’ followers were corrupt enough that they would advance such a hoax, then why weren’t they corrupt enough to prop up their own power? They could have written the hoax to set themselves up with special privileges. Instead, the gospels portray Jesus’ inner circle as faithless, corruptible, and foolish. The gospels also make it clear that apostles are humble servants instead of rulers, and that no one needs an apostle or anyone else in order to come before God. Nevertheless, the apostles were so convinced of the truth of what had happened—that Jesus rose from the grave, showing definitively that there is something bigger than the material world going on—that they were willing to suffer poverty, torture, and execution within this world for the sake of what they now knew.

Are We Called To Be “Hunters” of Men?

My friend Jason had a Jesus rifle.

I’ve mentioned him before. Today he is the pastor of this church. But when he first found faith, he interpreted the Lord’s instruction to share the gospel as a prompting to witness uniformly to each person he met. “Jesus rifle” later became his term for this. Christ came into the conversation with an abruptness that was like a weapon discharging. People naturally put up their defenses. Today, Jason’s term for what he practices—and teaches others to practice—is sensitive witnessing.

Jesus was sensitive. The reason we get so many different facets of Jesus’ teaching throughout the gospels is that Jesus met so many different people. Different episodes in the gospels involve a ruler coming to him by night, a woman lost in thought at a well, sisters in conflict over housekeeping, a woman reviled for adultery, an afflicted man living among tombs, and others. In each case, Jesus looked into that person’s stance or circumstances in that moment, in order to offer the news that would best help that person to turn back toward the light. In each encounter—and throughout his entire time on earth—Jesus left unspoken most of what he could have said.

So how much Jesus is the right amount to give people?

Part of the answer is this:

Even a tiny bit might do. Even a hint might be enough. Jesus likens the kingdom of God to a mustard seed, a tiny kernel that can flourish relentlessly into an overwhelming bush. The Bible goes so far as to say that not even the Bible itself is necessary for people to know their Creator (Romans 1:20).

Another part of the answer is this:

No amount of God is sufficient—at least no amount that we can convey—so we have to count on God himself to provide the supply.

Our role is to find people where they are and help them. Our role is to make it easy for people to turn toward the light by focusing and reflecting that light as best we can.

Legend attributes a maxim to Francis of Assisi. “Preach the gospel always,” he said, “and if necessary, use words.”

We should be honest about who we are and what we believe. We should love others. We should be ready to give the reason for our hope in case anyone asks (I Peter 3:15). Those are three fundamental steps.

Ministering to others and making disciples does not consist of only this much, but just this much is a challenge. If we aren’t doing at least these three things, then securing these steps is the starting point.

When Jesus said, “Go and make disciples” (Matthew 28:29), he wasn’t telling us to go accost people on street corners. The word “go” in this commission is often construed as a forceful command, but an equally likely sense of the word is “as you go.” Jesus told his followers, in other words, “Go on from here, but as you are going, make disciples....”

A “rifle” is a tool for hunting. Jesus did not call us to be hunters, but instead to be fishers of men.

In fact, a rifle is a limited implement. It points at just one target at a time. The fishermen who followed Jesus caught with nets. A net, placed properly, will catch however many fish God directs into it—maybe one fish or maybe 153 (John 21:11).

Therefore, put out your net. The net is love. The net is faithfulness. Have the patience of a fisherman waiting on his catch, and while you wait, build up the strength that you might need to haul the net back in if it should happen that your catch is abundant.

Related post:

The blog UTM Sentiments has a great post on sharing the gospel and the Francis of Assisi quote. See Improving the Words of St. Francis.