The Sleep Insight

In the previous entry I wrote, “I continue to re-discover how much power simply having enough sleep gives me, when it comes to living in truth instead of succumbing to the whispers of lies.”

That sentence refers to something specific that happened, a particular insight that came to me.

There is this encounter I have been dreading. A person I don’t see very often will ask a question upon meeting me again. The only satisfying answer to that question will have to include the fact that faith is now real to me, and what I value has changed.

I expect the person to be shocked by this disclosure, and to be dismissive of it. As (not too long ago) I would have been dismissive. And I don’t want to see this. I don’t want the person I know to respond that way, or for that response to be part of our acquaintanceship.

I have not told anyone about this problem because I have not told myself about this problem. The dread was there, but I have just swallowed it and kept walking, allowing myself to be weakened by yet another unfaced fear.

But then one night recently, I got enough sleep. I didn’t plan to do that. I went to bed a little early and I didn’t set an alarm, and it just happened.

I woke up fresh, seeing something clearly, seeing something with strength and confidence.

I recalled that Jesus is the truth. “I am the way, the truth, and the life,” he said. Truth is his identity. To speak the truth in humility—which is the way he came into the world—is to speak Jesus into the situation.

Recognizing this changed the equation of the encounter I was dreading. I hadn’t factored in that God would be present.

The “humility” part is vital. The condition of “truth” is found not just in what is said, but also in the heart of the one who says it. Without humility, and without love, a merely true statement can be misused. It can be hurled like a rock instead of being set in place as a building stone. In the case of this encounter, that means I need to resist prejudging this person. I need to be open to the possibility that this person might also be hearing a call.

In fact, the dread I have felt—the fear—is itself a form of pride. Fear is the pride that says my own particular adversaries are too great for God to overcome them. Therefore, though I might feel afraid, I must not be afraid.

I should soften my heart. To whatever question is asked in this encounter, I should speak the truth simply, and see what comes.

Even better: I should speak the truth simply—and see who comes.

Learning to Rest (In Place of Idleness, Go Idol-less)

The Israelites in Exodus had their golden calf, and the idol I worship is my to-do list.

Through my obedience to this list, I can be productive—sometimes very productive, sometimes even severely so. I list out what I am determined to do and I map out when I will do it. Then, I force myself to follow each step of that plan whether there is joy in it or not. Where joy is absent, the work still gets done through the power of my striving, but the product is loveless and I am left drained by the effort.

This blog is an experiment in a different way.

According to any 2D snapshot of my life, I do not have time to do a blog. There is a family, a job, and so on. My faith therefore includes the expectation that the picture is 3D instead, with an additional dimension to the work that I don’t traditionally factor in. I felt led to begin this blog, by which I mean that I felt an unexplained sense that my doing this would bring me into greater harmony with my place in God’s plan. Perhaps that sense is incorrect. But if not, if it is true, then God will provide the means for me to do the work he has for me—endowing me with, among other things, sufficient enthusiasm to make abundant use of whatever time I have for this project. I am already doing as much as I can do through striving. Rather than being “productive,” therefore, I now need to be fruitful, which is something altogether different. And to be fruitful, I know I need to learn better how to rest.

God does have work for each of us to do. It is challenging work. But it is also natural work, tailored to each person’s individual gifts and potential. Each of us has his work cut out for him—cut out by God—and God is there to do it with us. That is why we go to him first.

There is a biblical model for the relationship between work and rest that is upside-down from the way we usually think. I am thankful to Pastor Denis Beausejour at MCC for teaching this. Look to the order of creation in Genesis, he says. We tend to think of rest as the reward and the luxury that comes only after the work is done, but this isn’t the way God created man. Man came on day six, and day seven was the day of rest. In other words, the very first thing man did (after seeing some animals and giving them names) was to rest in the presence of his Creator.

We rest first. We rest in order to fully begin the work. We do not fully work first, in order to be entitled to rest. I practice this biblical model, and I grow to appreciate how much sense it makes. However, one obstinate impediment has been my discovery that I don’t necessarily know what “rest” really means.

Does rest consist of idleness, for example? My picture of rest has tended to emphasize this, as if rest demands idleness instead of merely permitting it.

Does rest consist of sleep? I continue to re-discover how much power simply having enough sleep gives me, when it comes to living in truth instead of succumbing to the whispers of lies.

However, idleness is drudgery during times when we wish to move—particularly when we are fresh with energy because we have been recharged with sleep.

As for the sleep, people who are prone to migraines know that too much of this can actually be painful.

Instead of inactivity alone, I am finally coming to the insight (forgive me if this is obvious to you) that rest can also include activity.

In fact, activity and inactivity are beside the point. The nature of rest is not to lay down activity in order to be idle, but to lay down idols in order to be free.

God is creative. He is endlessly so. God is the ever-creating inventor of all that is, and he is always up to something new.

By contrast, we have our agendas. We have our expectations and plans. We couldn’t function without them; they are the tools we use to make sense of the world. But within every one of these pre-defined purposes of ours lay the seeds of death. A plan, an agenda, a to-do list, or any other created thing becomes an idol—an object of lifeless worship—as soon as we place our obedience to that thing ahead of seeking the love and newness of God.

To rest, to fully be with God and draw upon his power, let go of these agendas for a time. Try shutting off the “shoulds.”

Not all of our obligations can be neglected at will. Jesus showed this very thing in the way he tended to needy and suffering people whether it was a day of rest or not. However, each of us can take a break from the more nagging obligations that weigh us down. For the span of a moment, a day, or a season of rest ... try to resist doing any of those things that you simply feel as thought you “ought” to do. A particular “ought” might come from the fear of falling behind, or from the worry that someone is expecting something and is prepared to judge you if you don’t deliver. Turn away from habits, too. Resist eating if you don’t feel hungry. Resist turning on the TV out of the expectation that you “ought” to fill the silence. In fact, resist opening the Bible, if the only reason for doing it is the idea that this is what a faithful person “ought” to want to do.

What do you really want to do? Take some time to find out.

Let the burdens drop away until you can get down to your own authentic sense of what might seem to be welcome, fresh, or fun in this moment right here and now.

It might be that you would like to sit still in the sunshine. In the slow accumulation of thoughts that this permits you, God might speak.

Or, you might wish to do something that—when viewed from a different perspective—would look like a chore. Maybe you want to clean the garage. If so, there is nothing wrong with that; ours is a God of order. When the Son of God rose from the dead, he didn’t leave the tomb without neatly folding his handkerchief (John 20:7). It is therefore fitting that you might be led to seek God and find him in the experience of putting things back where they belong.

Because: The garage itself is not the point.

Just as sitting still in the sunshine is not the point.

God is the point.

Rest consists of letting go of all of those things that we might be tempted to obey too desperately. By choice, we let them go—so that we can elect to make ourselves available to God instead, wherever he might meet us today.

And then—no small bonus—look at what might happen as well. In the example above, the garage got clean. During the time in the sunlight, those thoughts that came together might have provided the solution to a problem we’ve put off facing for several days. These outcomes weren’t planned and they didn’t come from striving, but instead they were the byproducts of the day’s encounter. Fruitfulness is found in this.

“I am the vine, you are the branches,” says Jesus—according to John 15:5.

Branches, it must be noted, do not make grapes according to their own plan. They do not make grapes through effort or striving. They make them according to their nature, as a result of being plugged into the vine and relying on its flow of nourishment.

I could kill this blog. More accurately, I could turn it into yet another instrument of death in my life. One way to do this would be to impose a to-do list over it. I could cage the blog and me both into a narrow plan for what the blog ought to be, instead of trusting God to reveal gradually what it might be instead.

But another way to bring death to the work would be to not let go of it. I had another draft of this very entry you are now reading. It was much different. I was trying to write about rest without resting, and the lines I was putting together weren’t working. I became frustrated. I tried to flog the lines into shape by lashing them with pencil edits, because I feared that time was running out. I feared, somehow, that I would be failing at this project if I didn’t manage to feed the blog with another entry soon.

Oswald Chambers wrote, “The greatest competitor of devotion to Jesus is service for him.” Just think of that!

Truly—in the false view of rest that we continue to cling to, we perceive that whatever we have identified as “service to Jesus” should not be compromised for the “slacking” that we view rest to be.

But Jesus did not come to enslave us. He did not even come to employ us. He came to have us—to set us free into a relationship with him.

Mercifully, I gave up on lashing that previous draft. I quit and waited. I rested.

What you are reading is what came later, once the work became fun again. The words and the ideas that you read here are not perfect, because I am a flawed and foggy lens for the light of God.

However, the work did flow easily—naturally enough to be like ripening fruit. And in that ripening I find a clue that this project is, for now at least, work that he would continue to have me do.

Brokenness is the Beginning: The Third Sentence

In the gospel according to Luke, Jesus picked up on a song (a psalm) that was well-known to his audience. In the lyrics, the coming Messiah was likened to a stone. Jesus elaborates on the imagery in Luke 20:18, saying:

“Everyone who falls on that stone will be broken to pieces, but he on whom it falls will be crushed.”

Broken or crushed. Ouch.

Reading this verse as a non-believer, I saw little difference between the two outcomes. The stone wins either way.

But reading it now, through the lens of a different belief and a different set of experiences, I see the difference profoundly. Jesus lovingly and starkly contrasts a clear set of choices.

One choice that is available to all of us is to keep on living as if God is irrelevant—as if he is non-existent or else inconsequential to our lives. In the story of Genesis, humanity first got off track in precisely this way. The first offense human beings committed was to violate what would later be called the first commandment, Have no other gods before me. Since then, human beings have been losing their way by beginning with the same wrong step. We live as though we are somehow the source of our own lives. We refuse to seek God or even try to know him, giving worship instead to ourselves or to the people we want to please. But all of this “idle worship” is ultimately futile, because the stone is real.

The other choice is to seek the stone. To go to the stone. To anchor your life upon the stone. However, there is a cost.

Jesus is nothing but straightforward about this. Stating it simply: You will be broken.

Each of us who truly believes is broken. We stand before the Lord trapped within brittle lives, making us stunted and misshapen versions of ourselves. God breaks the old life in order to set you free. He reassembles the pieces to form a fully realized version of the person you were always meant to be.

Happiness and joy are two different things. The process of brokenness typically involves unhappiness, as we are transformed into vessels of greater joy. In perfect faith, we would have no fear of this. Because our faith is still incomplete, however, we do experience fear—or sadness, longing, or pain—during those times when God is remaking us. In fact, these very periods grow our faith as we reach for God more fervently. The stone is real, our worth is real, and that worth is too precious to remain bottled up beneath the burdens and barriers that have kept us for so long. The brokenness comes, and we discover that what is actually broken are our chains (Psalm 107:14).

I don’t know what your own personal brokenness will look like. It might look much different from anything I have heard of or known. What I can say is that the instruction will involve events. The greatest lessons God has in store for you personally will involve not just words you hear or ideas you read—but also happenings within your life. Your life is where your attention is, and God wants to get your attention.

I can also safely predict that there will be successive periods of brokenness. We are all works in progress, remade one step at a time.

Finally, I can say that God loves you, and knows you better than you know yourself. It is a common human failing to cling desperately to things we think we need, even as they drag us down. But God knows what you really need, including not only what to give you, but also what to take away.

The first entry I made on this blog spoke of the first recorded sentence of Jesus’ public ministry. A later entry spoke of Jesus’ second recorded sentence. I am almost done with that model now, because it’s not truly possible to know the order of all of the various events the gospels record. Matthew’s gospel itself might not be in chronological order. However—just for a moment—if we limit our view to the events of Matthew in the order Matthew presented them, then the third recorded sentence of Jesus Christ refers to the state of brokenness.

Matthew 5:3 has it:

“Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.”

That line captures the picture of a person low enough and humble enough that his own spirit is no longer sustaining him. He has the Spirit of God instead.

This third recorded sentence was actually the first sentence of the Sermon on the Mount. If you have never seriously read it before, then you are in for a treat. It is a long, colorful, radical dissertation on the ways that the kingdom of heaven and the life of joy are different from the world that we have been hypnotized to accept. I suggest reading it aloud, and listening to what you hear.

The Sermon on the Mount is where Jesus gets down to teaching us in detail. He clears his throat, draws a breath, then begins that teaching by saying, “Blessed are the poor in spirit.”

Being broken, in other words, is the beginning of instruction.

Happiness and Joy are Two Different Things

These things I have spoken to you, that my joy may remain in you, and that your joy may be full. —John 15:11

Jesus cites joy—our joy, your joy—as one of the reasons for his teaching. Live the way he says to live, rest in the confidence that God is in control, and your joy will be full. You’ll be joyful.

But Jesus also made it clear that you will have trouble in this world. See John 16:33. “Trouble,” to me, sounds a lot like unhappiness.

In fact, turning to the way of Jesus can actually increase the unhappiness. That has certainly been my experience. I wrote previously about how a key word at the beginning of Jesus’ ministry—metanoeo—translates to more than repent. However, experiencing the kingdom of God does involve repentance, and as C. S. Lewis profoundly wrote in Mere Christianity, “Repentance is no fun at all.”

Turning the page is difficult. Abandoning the sin, slavery, false gods, and idols that once made a person “happy” might entail shining a light into corners that no one but God wants illuminated. It might also throw the believer’s life off course and disrupt the lives of people close to him. There might be loss and pain.

All of this points to why I think Jesus must have meant something other than what we call “happiness” when he promised that we would have joy. Happiness and joy are two different things, in other words—and joy is better.

I live in the United States. Here, happiness is something to be pursued. The “pursuit of happiness” is written into one of our founding documents. We look for happiness in achievement, attainment, comfort, and relief. We seek happiness in the pleasant turn of events.

The problem is, the events keep on turning. Once happiness is obtained, it can’t be held for long. This is the reason for the maxim, “Money can’t buy happiness.” If you try to purchase happiness, the expenditures can never stop!

Joy, on the other hand, can be bought once and for all. Jesus bought it on the cross.

* * *

I have a friend named Jason who has faced trials. He is now a pastor at the Foursquare Church in Mansfield, Ohio. I hope you find yourself there one Sunday and get to hear him speak.

In his early years of ministry, he says he did people the disservice of telling them how wonderful everything would be if they gave their lives to Christ.

Looking back truthfully upon his own years as a Christian, he says that not everything has been wonderful.

With God or without God, you will have trouble in this world. But facing the trials with God gives those trials a radically different meaning.

* * *

In that verse where he spoke of troubles, Jesus added something more.

“I have overcome the world,” he said.

Join with Christ and follow his way, and you have overcome the world along with him.

That is, you have overcome your life, your house, your money, your family, your body—even your dreams—and even all of your difficulties. All of it. All of these things are temporary possessions that God gave us for a reason. We outlast all of them. For now, you have each of these things within this world for a purpose that God will reveal to you, step by step, over the course of your walk with him.

Part of that purpose is our own instruction. The world is a training ground. At some point you will be released, liberated into some service that is tailored to you within a realm that is bigger than this one. Our stay in this time of troubles is brief.

And after a while of trusting the Lord, you do get a sense of this—a sense of belonging to something vaster and fuller than the earth.

I am such a new believer that my own sense of belonging is still less constant than I would like. I drop back frequently into the worries of the world. Yet there is a new awareness that is growing beneath my feet. I fall less far each time. This awareness is an energetic lightness, a perspective of skirting above the world and free of its events. It is a feeling like walking on water.

This is my joy. It is a piece of God’s perfect joy. And it comes not from pursuing, but instead from giving in. Not from obtaining, but instead from letting go.

I want more of this joy, and with more trust in God and more of his work in me, I believe I will have it. And as I do get this joy, I discover something else: The joy is a secure foundation on which to build my happiness as well.

Now What? The Second Sentence of Jesus Christ

What is the point of a life on earth? What are we supposed to do with the lives we have?

Just after Jesus began his public ministry, he was walking along the seashore. He saw Andrew and Simon Peter, brothers who were fishermen. The two were engaged in the most practical, commonplace, understandable thing we can imagine anyone doing—making money. That is, they were plying their trade and doing their day jobs. They were catching fish.

I wrote about the first recorded sentence of Jesus’ ministry. Now, in the scene in which Jesus encounters these men, he speaks what would appear to be the second recorded sentence. According to Matthew 4:19, Jesus said, “Follow me and I will make you fishers of men.”

* * *

How practical is it really, what Andrew and Peter were doing when they heard this call?

That is, how practical is it that we focus so much of our mind, time, attention, and planning on our efforts to obtain income or wealth?

These efforts are consuming. To a great extent, they define us. Our sense of how successful, fruitful, or secure we are is rooted in this pursuit.

P.J. O’Rourke is a political writer. His writings wouldn’t seem to have much in common with a study of the gospels, but stay with me a moment. O’Rourke, in one of his books, offered this critique of controlled, centrally planned economies. One of the challenges in these regimes, he said, is to figure out just what the economy is for. A market economy has the mechanism of supply and demand guiding resources to where they will realize the most value. This effect has been called “the invisible hand.” But when authorities determine for themselves what to make and what work people should do, one of the frequent results is great loops of production that don’t add up to a purpose. Ore is mined to meet steel quotas, steel quotas are set by mining machine manufacturing, mining machines are built to meet the ore requirements, and on and on and on.

Here is my point:

In our own lives, how easy is it to settle into the same kind of huge, purposeless loops that don’t go anywhere?

We allow ourselves to become busy without considering what we’re busy about. For example, I might pour my energy into pursuing ever more income so I can afford a big house with shiny luxuries and distant vacations—simply because these comforts are what I need to console myself against the weariness of pouring so much energy into pursuing an income. One pursuit compels another, and I am stuck in the loop. All of this happens because I have ignored a different sort of “invisible hand.”

Jesus, in that first sentence of his ministry (Matthew 4:17), refers to a greater realm that is right here at hand. The comforts and successes of this world are fleeting and temporary, but your life does not have to be like that. By connecting to this greater realm, you can surpass this world and outlast it. What, then, is the point of this world?

What is worth pursuing?

There is something. This second sentence of Jesus’ ministry, the call to the fishermen, is a logical extension of the first sentence. The one other thing we do encounter in this world that also has the potential to surpass the world and outlast it is the life of another person.

Service to people is worth doing, and the hearts of people are treasures worth pursuing.

* * *

So does that mean you quit your day job to pursue them?

Do you leave your nets behind to follow Jesus, in the way that Andrew and Peter did?

In a few cases, yes. Some people do find themselves led away from their current work into entirely different callings.

But as a general rule: No. Quitting your day job would entirely miss the point of the good news of the kingdom of God.

We do not experience the kingdom through a career change. We experience it through a heart change.

Jesus teaches us to get free of our circumstances where those circumstances lead us to sin. Beyond that, however, there is no particular set of circumstances that might not be right—that might not provide the opportunity to build up some other person who is also, like you, adored by God.

Indeed, God may have planted you in precisely these circumstances to fulfill some purpose that you are precisely equipped to fulfill.

My friend Zeke is an elder at MCC. He offers a take on the “fishers of men” verse that richly expands its applicability. Jesus did not call us all to be “fishers,” he said. Rather, in this call to the brothers, we see Jesus speaking to the men from within their own particular background and profession. Part of who these men were included the skill, patience, and discipline they applied to gather fish into nets. Now, these same parts of who they were would obtain even greater value in the work of gathering people into the “net” of God’s love.

Each of us has our own particular background, profession, and life experiences—much different from those of a couple of fishermen in Galilee. We should listen for the distinct and individual way that God will make use of each of us.

To an architect, he might say: “You will now design spaces for love in people’s lives.”

To a paramedic: “You will be a first-responder during times of spiritual trauma.”

To a marketing manager: “You will raise the awareness of what is eternal.”

To a dental hygienist: “You will fight the decay of my people’s hearts.”


Related post:
Brokenness is the Beginning: The Third Sentence

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