A love letter from a stranger
means an awkward nothing to us
Even a tiny note from my wife means a world of love to me
Most of our dislike for reading scripture is just not understanding not being in relationship with the Author the One from whom the letters were written
"Do for others what you want them to do for you; for this is the law and the prophets." - Matthew 7:12
Easy enough! The Golden Rule! I mean even non-Christians believe this one. We've been ingrained with this rule since we were all sitting on carpet squares and drinking chocolate milk from a small carton, right? Does our world look like one ingrained with this rule?
Not only do non-Christian people believe the Golden Rule, but most all religions will have something to its effect in their scripture. But there is commonly one difference in the Golden Rule as it is often portrayed in places other than the Christian Bible.
In most cases, the Golden Rule is written, read, or quoted as:
"Don't do to others what you don't want done to you."
There is a significant difference between this Golden Rule and the one Jesus gives us in Matthew.
What is the difference?
Jesus' Golden Rule is proactive. Most other examples of the Golden Rule are in a negative and defensive standpoint. That is not the Golden Rule Jesus has placed before us. In fact, it is almost entirely different. He certainly made it more difficult.
Its not all that hard to simply refrain from doing bad things to people, but it is often very difficult to take initiative to be intentional about doing something good for others. This is a foundational law God has give us, and it is not the Golden Rule you may have in your mind all the time.
Jesus' Golden Rule is proactive.
God does not NEED me to love him. I NEED God to love me.
I NEED to love God.
I have been thinking over these statements today and trying to allow the realities to sink in.
God is not going to sit around NEEDING me to love him so that he can function; so he can live the life He needs to live.
I, on the other hand, need a God who loves me. I need God to love me in order for me to live my life well. My life goes as it should because God loves me. My life is full of unloving circumstances and disappointments; I NEED God to love me.
I NEED to love God. My life operates as it should when I love God. I NEED to love Tonya. My life, as it should be, would fall apart if I did not love my wife. My marriage is a significant, indentifying part of my life; TONYA is almost the most important thing in my life. If I failed to love her, my world would fall apart; my life would not be as it should. I NEED to love Tonya.
I did say that Tonya was 'almost' the most important thing in my life. Of course, God is the most important thing in my life. I NEED to love God. I need to love God because my life would be destroyed if I did not. I NEED to love God because my life is identified and defined by my love for God.
God does not NEED me to love Him.
I NEED God to love me.
I NEED to love God.
A few months ago, someone had discovered my review of All is Grace, a memoir from one of my heros, Brennan Manning. Upon discovering it, a publishing partner from the UK wanted to post my review as part of their print magazine sent to all of their stores. They shared the PDF with me, and I wanted to share it with you all as well. Click below to get the PDF.
It truly is a bad thing to be satisfied spiritually, but I began thinking, "Isn't that exactly what we work so hard to accomplish though?" We want to be satisfied spiritually. We want not to be challenged or pressed. We want our spirituality, our faith to easy and satisfactory. We long to get to a point where our faith is not so much work. We want our minds and hearts to be at ease because we think that is when we will have "arrived" spiritually. But we forget that if we ever arrive at that place, our faith will have died. Our spirit must never be satisfied. Our soul and mind must never be satisfied. I must always need more. I have to need more understanding than I have. I must always be thirst for more. God must never make sense to me to an extent that I can rest in the knowledge I have. Every experience of God I have should leave me more thirsty...it should always leave me wanting more. Every experience of God, no matter how restful it may be, should never leave me wanting to just sit in satisfaction. I should always have more questions. God should always mystify me. God should never make sense to me for very long. I should never be satisfied spiritually. If I understood God for longer than necessary, I will have lost faith because God would have become containable, tame, and unworthy of my devotion.
It's really no wonder that a lot of non-Christians, new Christians and others are uncomfortable prayer. They do not speak the native tongue of formalized prayer. That is why prayer seems like such a daunting task to so many people. There are so many unnecessary formalities to common prayer today. We use certain language that NOBODY actually uses in common communication. We pray like God is preoccupied with a foreign language; like he is preoccupied with our fine form and technique. We pray as if we have no personality. We pray as though we were robots programmed by some old English scientist.
Why would God give us a distinct personality and then require us to pray apart from it? Why would he make us unique and make us pray uniform and unnatural?
Prayer is only so awkward and daunting to people because they're afraid they'll mess it up; afraid they do not speak this language well enough.
Prayer is not a foreign language.
Endless, unbroken lives of prayer are very possible. Through some searching and with the help of some further reading, this is beginning to be clearer and clearer. We have such a Western Christianity that we have removed a lot of understanding from original Christianity, which happens to have its roots in the East. One large difference is in our understanding of heaven and God's presence.
Western Christianity has this understanding which prays things like, "God, please show up tonight. " "God, be with us tonight." "We prayed, and God just showed up that night." We have this understanding of God being in heaven somewhere above the clouds awaiting our demand to show up.
Eastern Christianity; historical, Biblical Christianity has a different understanding of heaven and God's presence. In Biblical accounts of God's presence, OT and NT, God calls out of heaven, but heaven is near. Heaven is "at hand"...this means heaven is present around them somehow. It was the very presence of God at hand, surrounding them. God inhabits the space surrounding us.
This means we are constantly in the presence of God. We do not actually need to ask for (or demand) that God "show up". This means we have only to grope out after God, or as Luis of Granada (an old century Christian) once said, "any raising of the heart to God."
It is possible at all moments of the day to focus our hearts on God and trust that he is always present. This means we no longer have to be preoccupied with making the sacred time, space, and words in order to really experience the presence of God. This means that we only need to be aware of God's presence with our hearts in order to experience God's presence. This means it is actually possible to experience god all times of the day, continually. This means we can experience God even in the mundane tasks of a day. This means we can join with Brother Lawrence in "Practicing the Presence of God". This means prayer for another person can be merely feeling what they feel (as best you are able) while "raising your heart to God". This means we may have been praying all along as long as we were placing ourselves before God.
We cannot put God into this pious little space and time and assume these are the only moments we experience the presence of God. We cannot dissolve God out of our every day experience. He is always present. We only hope to grope out for him and raise our heart out to him more continually.
One of the things which keeps us from being closer to the heart of God or from healing from the things that inhibit us is CONTROL. We are always running after and holding on to control. We desire to control everything. We want to control everyone. Then we realize we cannot control everything and everyone and it is devastating to our personal world. It is for this reason that we do not really want to be broken. It is for this reason we are unable to really be what God wants us to be: whole. It is for this reason we feel like our lives are actually "out of control".
It is a great irony.
In scripture, God is continually calling us into the desert place. There is healing in the desert; if we would only go. But the desert is terrifying. Some part of us knows if we go into the desert, we will be forced to journey, and in a journey you do not control what happens. You are alone in the desert, and that means you are your own company. Most of us could think of no worse company, because when we are alone we have nobody to impress or control. We have to look at ourselves and deal with things we typically avoid by directing our attention and focus on other people.
The desert has healing and peace that await us, but we do not really want desert healing because THAT healing requires us to relent our control of our world. We can no longer grasp on to the things we have always controlled (or tried to). In the desert, if we choose to go, we have to let go of all the things we try to control and look at ourselves.
The true control is that which those things within have over you. The hurt, the pain, the addictive behaviors, the selfishness, the anger, the bitterness, the fear, the jealousy. All of these things and more are within us, and in order not to feel or deal with those things we react...with control. As long as we can control our world around us, we will never have to look at or reveal those wounds within.
Then like a pathological liar, our life begins to get out of control as we attempt to control things we, in actuality, cannot control. The great irony!
Real healing...real peace will happen when we give up thinking we can or trying to control things and people around us, and begin to live a life of trust and healing. Our worry is only an attempt to control our world and those things within it. We cannot control things and people which is why our lives seem so out of control.
Who do you know who struggles to trust anything or anyone? We all struggle with trust, because trust is not natural. But who do you know, even if it is you, who struggles with trusting anyone or anything?
We struggle with trusting anyone or anything because our culture misperceives trust. Our culture...our heart...our bones tell us that trusting is weakness. We are convinced that trusting someone is only something weak people do. Our heart has learned to tell ourselves that.
But we also know our heart...something within us wants to trust, right? Something within us would like to trust someone...something. We want to, but we know how risky it would be to trust anything. We know how risky it would be to trust someone.
We know this because we have been hurt before, right? People have let us down in the past. People have hurt us in the past. So we know that trust is risky. Too many people who are supposed to love us have hurt us. So even though something deep within us would absolutely love to trust, we don't because we know how risky it is.
But...
BUT... There is another voice within us. It is faint.....it is distant for most of us. There is a voice which says...
I am here..... ....I am with you....
I love you...... ......even now..... .............even here.......
I am with you..... ......and I will be with you....... ..........when all things come and go.......
We all hear this voice if we really listen. There is something within all of us; the broken and hurt, that speaks this love to us.
But we spend so much of our lives, no matter how long you may or may NOT have been a Christian, hoping.
It does not matter whether you are a Christian or not; we ALL want that voice to be true. We ALL want that voice to be real.
I am not one to ask many things of God. I fear making him into some sort of cosmic santa claus at my beckon call. My heart resonates more with David in Psalm 27. "ONE THING I ASK of the Lord, this is what I seek: that I may dwell in the house of the Lord all the days of my life; to gaze upon the beauty of the Lord." Of all the things I could ask God for, my heart constantly only desires one thing. I only ask that I may be with God and know Him more and seek Him. I do not ask many things of God, but I certainly ask this one thing. My heart leaps within myself and it seems to always scream, "Seek his Face! Seek God still! Be with God again!" (27:8) It is interesting that David is in the midst of great turmoil when he wrote this Psalm. He was being attacked by several armies; he was in a great struggle, and he had needs. There were, in these circumstances, all sorts of things he could have rightfully asked God for. But he still came to God and said, "ONE THING I ASK of the Lord..." Of all the things he could have asked God for, he was only concerned with one. "My heart says of you, 'Seek His face!' Your face, Lord, I will seek."
My life is chaotic to say the least right now. Life gets more and more crazy, and I cannot keep up with it. There are so many things I could ask of God right now, but my heart truly desires only ONE THING. I only ask one thing; that I may be connected to the heart of God for the rest of my life, to see and notice God's phenomenal love for me each day. To "gaze at the beauty of the Lord", to simply rest.
How interesting that we so often call one sin an abomination, and it is for that reason we view it as different from any other sin! How interesting indeed!
A study of the word "abomination" in the original Hebrew reveals the original word "toeva". This word literally means "abomination" or "hatred". Homosexuality is, indeed, an abomination; scripture tells us that pretty clearly. But still, how interesting that we say homosexuality is not "just sin", its an "abomination"; a toeva! How interesting!
A search for the word abomination; or, that is, a search for the word "toeva" in the Hebrew scripture also brings you to Proverbs 6:16-19.
"There are six things the Lord hates (toeva), seven that are detestable to him. ("What! Seven??) haughty, proud, snobbish, arrogant eyes ("oh..") a lying tongue ("What's this!?") hands that shed innocent blood ("oh okay, well yeah!") a heart that devises wicked schemes ("you mean that time I...?") a false witness who pours out lies ("lying again...worth hating TWICE??") a man who stirs up dissension among brothers ("What! You mean the whole Church?")
How interesting! How quickly we make one sin an abomination without looking at our sin! How quickly we congratulate ourselves because we aren't gay!