This is Church

It’s a New Year. My friend J.R. Woodward (who recently released this article on possibly my favorite website on the internet) once shared with my GCM staff class that a survey showed that one of the top 3 things people at the end of their lives wish they would have done differently was take more time to reflect on life. I resonate strongly with this. I often feel like I’m  just always going, going, going, consumed with whatever is on my plate in the moment or day to come. Some of the greatest impact I’ve had in life has come from when I’ve disciplined myself to exit life’s craziness for a time and just sit down and reflect on who I am, what I truly care about, and how I really want to be living my life. Andy Stanley calls this prioritizing the important things over the urgent things. I’m really bad at this. My wife is excellent at it.

The new year seems to always provide a natural space for me to reflect a bit more than usual, so I try to take the opportunity to dream about the upcoming year. Ben Arment, a dreamer himself, has even gone to the extent of taking this concept and setting up a program where he tries to help you accomplish your dream in a year. Check out this teaser:

So if you haven’t taken time to reflect and dream yet, do it now. What dream do you want to see happen this year? One of mine is that I want to read through the whole Bible this year. I’ve never actually read through the whole Bible all at once, and I really missed having more structure and discipline to how I interacted with God’s word this last year. And I have one or two other (more secret) dreams for this year.

What will your dream year be about? Please share with a friend, and, if you dare, in the comments section!

I’ve now completed my first semester of full-time campus ministry (phew!), and as I unwind, reflecting on all that God has done, some questions regarding my leadership have surfaced in my heart. I think they’ve been there for quite some time, but now that I make a lot of decisions about how a house church is going to be run on a practical basis, I now have unprecedented space to explore possible answers and put them into practice in a ministry context.

You might notice that the title of this post recalls a series I had started in the summer. I started writing this post back then, but didn’t quite know what to do with it. Its content feels significantly more relevant to my life now than it did then, however. Let me start by telling you two things I really appreciate about Jesus.

1) He makes promises.
2) He doesn’t lie.

These two truths are some of the keys to the fact that Jesus is actually God, I think. Here’s a thought experiment for you: you have a (massive and unrealistic) school project whereby you’ve been charged with the mighty task of writing a holy book and forming a new religion that has to make it the distance. How do you create a system of beliefs that people will live (and die) by, all the while knowing that you’re nobody really special? You’re not God, and you haven’t even received divine revelation. What do you do? I have a few suggestions:

1) Claim divine revelation.
Elevate your own understanding in the minds of others in every way possible. This way, some weak-willed people might be motivated by fear to listen to what you have to say. An audience of scared people is a quick, efficient way to influence.

2) Make your wisdom vague and untestable.
Once you’ve laid the foundation of your special holyperson status on the fertile soil of fearful and insecure minds, you need to make sure they don’t get wise to you. If you give any advice or commands, don’t tell people what the results will be. Simply spin the world’s reaction to your beliefs to further verify your own wisdom and truth.

3) Create large barriers to ever leaving.
Threaten people with their worst fears if they leave the faith: torture, social ostracism, God’s wrath, death, etc. Then you’ve sealed the back door. Now you can perhaps build over time.

But whatever you do, don’t make any promises by which other people can test the veracity of your identity. What I love about Jesus, is that while he follows my first suggestion on how to start a religion and gain a following, he fails miserably at the second and third steps, which are vitally necessary to keep people in the dark. I already discussed in an earlier post in this series that Jesus is perfectly fine with letting people go (he fails #3), and now I want to skip to another passage in Mark that demonstrates his failure in point #2.

Take a look at Mark 10:29-31. Jesus makes promises. I think he’s referring here to the same quality of the life of a Christ-follower as in John 10:10 when he says, “I have come that they may have life, and have it to the full.” His promise is that, if we follow him, our lives will be full. Full of blessing and brotherhood, but also full of persecution and struggle. Not only that, but he promises that all of the above will be a hundredfold greater than whatever we would leave for his sake! For all the outrageous promises that corporations are willing to peddle via TV commercials, you don’t see anyone promising a hundredfold return on your investment. That’s because it’s crazy.

So we see that Jesus makes incredibly lofty promises that many a Christian could easily deny by the end of their life: “Jesus promised me a life 100 times as full as the one before if I gave everything up for his sake, but I did that, and let me tell you, it was a lie. Don’ believe what he says.” But I have never actually found this sentiment scripturally or experientially. The apostle Paul, who would have as much reason as anyone to warn others of the disappointments of the Christian faith (2 Corinthians 6:4-10, 2 Corinthians 11:24-29), is not at all disappointed in the end. Rather, at the end of a life lived in utter devotion to Christ, he considers his life to have been worth every toil, and stresses all the more the need for others to keep the faith despite the fact that he dies in a state of loneliness and relative obscurity  (2 Timothy 4:5-8). Jesus doesn’t lie.

The only conclusion I can reach for a man (Jesus) who boasts a multitude of individuals who confirm that he has kept the most ridiculous of promises a man could make (without strong voices to the contrary) is that He was who he said he was. He was our God in human flesh. As G.K. Chesterton once wrote, “Christianity has not been tried and found wanting; it has been found difficult and not tried.”

This brings me around to the questions I’ve had surface surrounding my ministry. I desperately long to see students thriving in their faith; trusting God for miracles in their lives, and seeing Him come through in the most spectacular of ways, both in blessing and trials. But I struggle immensely to communicate the realities of the Christian life as Jesus does. I find myself at times a seemingly hopeless victim of an American consumer mentality that wants to lure others toward Jesus with promises of great wisdom, fulfilled wishes and general happiness. I find myself (often unconsciously) shying away from divulging freely the struggle, trial and anguish that accompany the normal Christian life to those who are beginning to seek it out. I sometimes feel more like a TV commercial than a “little Christ.”

And I know this affects everyone I lead. If I am not communicating the cost of following Jesus with my words and life, it can be hard to see or believe there is a cost. And if we believe there is no cost, then we are not actually following him, we are idle. And we lose out on all that he promised, because the promise of return is contingent on what we’ve given up. It is the economics of Kingdom investment.

I guess the long and short of it is this: I want to sell the Christian life as Jesus does. Up front, I want to communicate to each and every person I know that following Jesus necessarily costs something.

Scratch that.

It costs everything.

When I think of how I “share the Gospel,” I find that I have to first describe the character of God in order for Calvary to make any sense to the listener (and to me). And as I contemplate the character of God as revealed through the meta-narrative of the Bible, there is one theme that jumps out to me more  than any other:

God is a relentless pursuer of Man.

I just can’t get over it sometimes. It shocks me every time I read Genesis 1-3 that God doesn’t just call it quits forever after Adam and Eve eat the fruit. If God’s relationship with man were documented via reality TV show, I think I would find myself pleading with God (who can’t hear me because He’s inside of a TV) to get the hint that Man just isn’t into Him; He should just give it up already. But He doesn’t. This is crazy in and of itself, but it gets even crazier when I think of just how evil we can be and how heartbreaking our refusal is to God. The other morning, I was reading the Bible, and came across a passage that highlights this pretty vividly, and I thought I’d share it with you.

The passage I read was Jeremiah 2-3, and for the sake of storytelling, I’ve selected portions of Jeremiah 2 that specifically trace this metaphor of romance between God and his people and scrunched them all together into one chunk. Read God’s heart on this relationship and maybe you’ll begin to see what I’m talking about here:

“I remember the devotion of your youth, how as a bride you loved me
and followed me through the wilderness, through a land not sown…
I brought you into a fertile land to eat its fruit and rich produce.
But you came and defiled my land and made my inheritance detestable…
Long ago you broke off your yoke and tore off your bonds;
you said, ‘I will not serve you!’
Indeed, on every high hill and under every spreading tree
you lay down as a prostitute…
How can you say, ‘I am not defiled; I have not run after the Baals’?
See how you behaved in the valley; consider what you have done…
But you said, ‘It’s no use! I love foreign gods,
and I must go after them…’
Does a young woman forget her jewelry, a bride her wedding ornaments?
Yet my people have forgotten me, days without number.
How skilled you are at pursuing love!
Even the worst of women can learn from your ways…
Look up to the barren heights and see.
Is there any place where you have not been ravished?
By the roadside you sat waiting for lovers, sat like a nomad in the desert.
You have defiled the land with your prostitution and wickedness.”
- Jeremiah 2:2,7,20, 23, 25, 32-33, 3:2

Yahweh doesn’t pull any punches here; He abandons any Sunday School sense of propriety in how He speaks of Israel here. His zealousness for his Beloved does not permit Him to hide the plain, ugly truth of his Bride’s rebellion behind polite language. God is clearly hurt here. The following isn’t specifically stated in Scripture, but it’s my personal conviction that God experiences hurt more deeply than you or I ever will. Think about it: you and I have defense mechanisms we’ve developed over time to shield us from pain, because we’re vulnerable and we fear the ramifications pain may bring. We are weak and we are scared, so we insulate. Even if we don’t want to insulate, we often find ourselves slaves. But God has never experienced fear; He has no reason to fear because He has all the earth at His command. In other words,

God has no defense mechanisms.

Even more, He loves far more passionately than you or I ever could! Put these together, and I think it means that when God experiences betrayal, He feels it in all its truest fullness. Incomprehensibly more than you or I could ever imagine. Think of the worst betrayal you’ve ever experienced. Now multiply that by many times per day, multiplied by billions of people. For all of history. We just might be starting to scratch the surface now…

And we haven’t even gotten into His holiness yet. Think about how we humans respond to betrayal. I was thinking of posting some Jerry Springer clip here, but discernment got the better of me. But if you’ve even so much as “accidentally” come upon a talk show resulting from daytime boredom, you basically know the scene: girl accuses boyfriend of cheating. Boyfriend swears he’s never done it. Host brilliantly decides that the lie detector will reveal all. Lie detector reveals that boyfriend has cheated on girl with at least 20 other women. Girl goes irate, curses him out, and vows to never speak to him again. Lie detector then reveals that girl cheated on boyfriend even more times. Boyfriend vows similarly. Six months later, girl and boyfriend are back in a relationship (despite their extremely compelling vows on the last show), and are on the show wanting another lie detector test. Rinse and repeat.

Girl and boyfriend are not wife and husband; they have made no vows. They probably have  little understanding of what love actually is. Yet the result is screaming unforgiveness through profanities. But Yahweh doesn’t respond like humans on talk shows. Despite the fact that He feels betrayal infinitely more accutely than girl and boyfriend, and has loved His Bride perfectly (something that girl and boyfriend could never claim without uproarious laughter ensuing), He chooses to actually pursue his adultress. No temper tantrum. No profanities. No unforgiveness. Look at his own words:

“‘Return, faithless Israel,’ declares the LORD,
‘I will frown on you no longer, for I am faithful,’ declares the LORD,
‘I will not be angry forever.  Only acknowledge your guilt—
you have rebelled against the LORD your God,
you have scattered your favors to foreign gods under every spreading tree,
and have not obeyed me,’” declares the LORD.
“Return, faithless people,” declares the LORD, “for I am your husband. I will choose you—one from a town and two from a clan—and bring you to Zion. Then I will give you shepherds after my own heart, who will lead you with knowledge and understanding.
- Jeremiah 3:12-15

This is what I meant by holiness.  His ways are so much higher than our ways. It’s seriously incomprehensible. He who has never betrayed pursues the most vile of betrayers. This is the very essence of amazing grace. How can we but repent and worship Him in response?

Last week at our Southside New Life Team meeting, I led our students through an exercise I deemed “Uncovering the Real You.” By no means did I expect students to have fully “uncovered the real them” by the end, but I wanted to help lay a groundwork for how they might go about internalizing Ephesians 2:10 and exploring their inner knitting throughout their college years. I’ve included the exercise below in case you might want to do the same:

One of my greatest hopes and desires as a New Life Team leader is that when you’re here in our community, you feel 100% free to be yourself…the real you, with all your quirks, oddities, opinions and needs. I think God has uniquely put His image in each us; we each reveal His glory in a unique way by being “fully us,” as He’s made us to be. Satan uses everything at his disposal: media, popular culture, teachers, even friends and family, to accuse us and tell us we need to be someone else. Because he wants to kill the divine glory within us. I want to help us walk the path to reclaiming our glory from all the ways it’s been taken from us.

Take out a piece of paper. I want you to make some lists right now. At the top, I want you to write the phrase “What people have told me…” Below, you’re going to make three columns and finish that sentence in these ways:

1) I’m like (these are adjectives people have used to describe you, or people you’ve been compared to).

2) I’m good at.

3) I should do with my life.

Now take 10 minutes to fill these out.

Done?

Ok then, at the bottom of this page, I now want you to write in all caps: THIS IS NOT ME. Because it’s not. You aren’t the collective sum of what the world has told you you are. These people or influences might have had valuable observations or suggestions, and they might have had selfish observations and suggestions. Regardless, they don’t define you. God defines you.

This was an incredibly freeing insight for me the summer after my freshman year of college. One of the pastors in our church, Graig Austin, shared a story of a friend of his. Growing up, his friend was introverted and shy; he didn’t have many friends, he wasn’t the class clown, and didn’t particularly stand out in any way. But there was something he was excellent at: ventriloquism. He was nationally ranked and won all sorts of prizes and awards for his skill. He “knew” this was his calling in life, everyone told him so, and he was determined to use it to serve God.

When he sensed God calling him to be a missionary in Kenya, he was determined to spread the Gospel through his well-developed skill. But just months into ministering there, he realized a troubling fact: the Kenyans believed his dummy was demon-possessed, and there was no way to convince them otherwise.

Yikes.

So much for thinking you knew your calling. God had ripped away the one thing he was leaning on for success in life; the one thing he was truly exceptional at. But God knew more than he did. He stayed in Kenya, and eventually developed an incredibly successful prison ministry. Who would have thought the nerdy guy who just knew how to make a dummy talk would be exceptionally gifted in proclaiming the gospel to hardened criminals in a foreign country? But that’s our God. He gives life to the dead and calls into being things that were not. We’re foolish  to presume upon Him, especially when our presumptions have their origins in the wisdom of this world.

So how do we get there? How do we throw off what the world has told us, and then start down the path of finding out what God has actually put inside of us? I think there’s something to be said in having a sense for what brings us the joy of the Lord.

To help explore this, I want you to take another 10 minutes to fill in multiple answers to each of these questions:

1) I seem to get abnormally excited about __________. (situations and environments)
2) People just don’t understand the importance of ___________ enough. (topics)
3) When I _________, I get so caught up in it, I lose track of the time. (actions/verbs)

I hope these exercises can give you at least some direction in pursuing what God has made you to do; the reason He made you rather than another copy of someone else, to reveal His glory to the world. I want to finish with a few suggestions with where to go from here:

1) Ask yourself how you can make the answers to the above questions a bigger part of your life. Consider taking a Sabbath every week to enjoy these things that God has put a special passion in you for.

2) Explore ways you can incorporate these passions into your school/church/extracurricular/social life. Be innovative in starting a new ministry, going out-of-the-box for a class project, etc.

3) Consider how you could best invest your summer in developing the real you. College is a unique opportunity to invest your summers in your personal development; invest them according to your priorities. Do you want to be a better employee, parent, spouse, friend, leader, or servant? Then spend your time investing in the areas you consider most important.

Recently Charlotte, a beloved sister in the Southside New Life Team, gave her “slice of life” at New Life’s Sunday morning service. I’m continually amazed at the incredible power of God working in our students’ lives as they continually step out in faith. He deserves all the glory. In the past, I’ve posted written versions of people’s testimonies, but we have video for this one. Charlotte was generous enough to give me permission to post it. Enjoy!

I admit that I’m still a bit embarrassed to draft titles like this one that demonstrate a recognition of my own greatness, for fear that the world will point the finger and call me arrogant without bothering to ask what I mean by it. So I think my current policy is to only make such self-glorifying statements when I can claim to be directly applying a verse from the Bible (Ephesians 2:10 in this case). But this title would be no less true even if Paul decided to leave that verse out. Alas, our culture knows very little of true humility. What I mean by that is a Psalm 18:35 humility, one that equally acknowledges both my dignity (having been made in God’s image) and my depravity (having a highly active sinful nature resulting from the Fall).

I think the reason the world knows so little of this kind of humility is because Satan loves to twist the truth of our dignity into pride and the truth of our depravity into self-contempt. And there’s overwhelming evidence that he’s succeeded tremendously. There seems to have developed a cultural consciousness that people make poor judges of their own character, but great judges of the character of others. While I think there’s a grain of truth to this, I’ve seen how this grain of truth has itself been twisted in such a way that the spiritual forces of evil have once again convinced the world to be hyper-vigilant about the next guy’s righteousness, but oblivious to their own. Of course, this attitude leaves no room for personal growth in godliness; only judgment toward others. God has plenty to say about this (Matthew 7:1-5, Romans 2:1-3, Galatians 6:3-5).

Thus, there has developed a cultural norm in which it is  acceptable to assess another’s dignity or depravity, but quite unacceptable to assess your own (this, of course, runs perfectly opposite of the biblical commands mentioned above). I’ve found that most people interpret statements of my dignity as arrogance and statements of my depravity as self-loathing, and make no hesitation to correct my “bad attitudes” in the moment because they have every cultural permission to do so. The message is that I’m allowed to neither be broken nor redeemed. I can see how both are terribly threatening to a world that would rather not acknowledge my need for God nor his lavish grace. So I have learned to choose my words quite carefully.

But all of this is actually a (passionate) digression. What I really wanted to do was tell you more about myself. I’m not a famous blogger in the least bit, and so the vast majority of the people reading this will be my close friends. Thus, I figured you might actually be interested in knowing what I’m learning about myself.

As a staff member of New Life Church, I’m required to go through an interview process by which I recount stories of when I felt that I was in my “sweet spot” in life; times when I felt like I was doing exactly what God made me to do. From this process, other staff help me discover my ideal Strengths, Topics, Optimal Conditions, Relationships, and “Yes! factor” (satisfaction). Cleverly enough, make this list an acronym and it spells STORY. We call this process Masterpiece, and owe much to Cure for the Common Life and SIMA International for helping us develop it.

The focal point of the Masterpiece process is to help us arrive at a Masterpiece “me” statement where we can incorporate all the elements of our personal STORY in a succinct way that can help us make decisions according to who we were made to be. I thought I’d share my “Me Statement” with you:

I would be in the center of my gifting where I could optimize and teach a highly competent staff team, where we’ve developed a well-defined strategy to revolutionize the world for good, and I’m operating as an autonomous visionary leader with trusted advisors, striving to continually reach an unprecedented level of team excellence and accomplishment.

Well, that’s all. Thanks for doing life with me. I’d love to hear your “me” statements some time.

The sad part about blogging while ministering on a college campus is that right when all the action happens, right when all of you want updates, I’m the least able to provide them for you due to the craziness of what’s going on. But since I know many of you are praying and cheering on New Life Church from a distance and thus don’t get to come to services, I thought I’d give you a taste of Sundays at NLC with this video we played on kickoff Sunday (and yes, I make a cameo in it):

A couple weeks ago, we at New Life Church wrapped up our Leadership Training program for the summer of 2010. I was so invested in the day-to-day life transformation, that I felt no great desire to take chunks of time away from it to blog. We had open mic testimonies at our closing ceremonies, and after 2 hours, had to cut off many of the additional students who wanted to share about what God had done that summer. It’s been an absolutely wild ride, and God is clearly raising up a new generation of leaders and world-changers at the University of Michigan.

And as I make plans for the fall semester, I still feel a great desire to be off the computer and in the trenches. So, rather than write extensively of all that God did this summer, I thought I’d show you a taste in video form from our weeklong LT kickoff retreat at Spring Arbor University:

There are certain things I deeply believe to be true about the world. One is that God created human beings with a perfect knowledge of what He was making. Nothing about us surprises Him; He knows what makes us elated, devastated, irate and terrified ["joy", "sadness", "anger" and "fear" are often dubbed "the four core emotions", I believe that the first three of them are elements of God's Image in us (Genesis 1:27), but that fear is a result of the Fall of Man (Genesis 3:10)]. God is not surprised by our reactions to life’s circumstances, for he knows our very inner knitting (because it started with His very inner knitting, and only later became corrupted); He has the comprehensive blueprint of our souls, if you will. (Psalm 139:1-16).

And His depth of understanding is way beyond what you or I think we might know about ourselves, or even what your most intimate friends or relatives know about your quirks, habits and peculiarities. He knows them better. He actually endowed you with them and it gave Him great pleasure to behold the unique “you” (Ephesians 2:10).

And just as physicians are required to study the human anatomy exhaustively before they are licensed to procure remedies for its ailments, so it is with soul work. We are only qualified to distribute applicable wisdom or healing care for the human soul to the extent that we know its landscape (as the Holy Spirit reveals to us). And in this trade, no one belongs in the same league as the Master Craftsman of us all. God knows perfectly what will bring you fullness of life, because he perfectly knows you. And this is why we can say that God’s commands are good (Nehemiah 9:13), or even more specifically, they are for our good (Deuteronomy 10:12-13, Matthew 19:17) and bring us freedom rather than constraint (Psalm 119:32, Psalm 119:45).

So if we believe that God actually longs for our healing and wholeness (John 10:10), and knows perfectly what affirmations will bring it to us, it begs the question:

What kinds of things does he say to us?

If we can answer this question, I think we will similarly be able to bring healing to those around us if we can just learn to imitate him (Ephesians 5:1). And who doesn’t want that?

So now I’m going to let the Scriptures answer the above bolded question (from the book of Mark, in case you were still confused by the title).

God the Father talks audibly to Jesus twice in the gospel of Mark. I want to look deeply into these two Father-Son interactions to help discern what the Father finds to be the most healing words in light of his perfect knowledge of his son (and the rest of us). The first of these audible interactions is found at Jesus’s baptism in Mark 1:11, where the Father says:

“You are my Son, whom I love; with you I am well pleased.”(NIV)

The second interaction happens on the Mountain of Transfiguration in Mark 9:7, where the Father says:

“This is my Son, whom I love. Listen to him!” (NIV)

If you’re simple like me, you look at that and say “Hmmm. They’re kinda the same. But they’re also kinda different.” I hope to distill some actual wisdom from that simple observation.

Let’s start with their similarity: “You are my Son, whom I love.” In both instances, the Father finds it of primary importance to affirm his love for his son. It’s the first and most common thing out of his mouth here. I think that’s because an assertion of love is both the most fundamental and the most essential thing a son needs from his father. It’s worth noting that the Greek form of “love” here is agape, a form of love that goes beyond mere companionship and carries heavy connotations of self-sacrifice. I’ll call this declaration of love The First Affirmation.

But God doesn’t stop there. In the first situation, the Father goes on to add “With you I am well pleased.” I don’t know of many fathers who talk like that nowadays, so I prefer the New Living Translation (“You bring me great joy.”) and The Message (“You are the pride of my life.”) for this part. It helps me connect with and begin to hear the immense satisfaction in the Father’s voice (and see the huge smile on his face). The Father is intentional to assure Jesus that not only does He love him, but he actually LIKES him. He absolutely enjoys him and takes incredible pleasure simply in who he is. I’ll call this declaration of enjoyment The Second Affirmation.

Let’s now turn our focus to the third unique declaration, found on the Mount of Transfiguration. The last thing the Father says to Jesus in these interactions (again, following The First Affirmation), is “Listen to him!” Imagine how you’d feel if your Father saw you in a crowd of people and exclaimed at the top of his voice that they absolutely MUST listen to what you have to say. I’d feel so incredibly honored, that I’d probably assume (even in all my arrogance) that my dad is way overestimating my capabilities. Being believed in like that is a pretty uncomfortable thing. In so many words, the Father communicates once more that He is proud of his son, that He thinks he is a powerful and respectable man, worthy of the utmost honor and consideration. I’ll call this declaration of respect The Third Affirmation.

Let’s recap/rephrase the Three Central Affirmations:

1st:  “I love you.” / “I am committed to you.” / “I would lay down my life for you.”
2nd:  “I like you.” / “You bring me incredible joy.” / “You delight me.”
3rd:  “I respect you.” / “I’m proud of you.” / “You have what it takes.” / “I believe in you.”

I believe that in the two direct interactions between the Father and Jesus where we see the Father speak, we are given the three most fundamental affirmations for a healthy relationship between father and son. But I think it applies much more broadly; I believe these affirmations are the three most central affirmations for any relationship where one person (the Son role) looks to another (the Father role) to hear and know their identity. And though none of us can bestow identity (because God has already determined it), we can communicate it to one another as his ambassadors and Body. I truly believe that these simple but profound affirmations enable and encourage the “Son” to become all that he/she can be more than any others. They’re the precious few the Father chose to audibly declare to his beloved Son.

So I have some questions for you.

Where in your life do you find yourself in a “Father” role, where others are looking up to you?
Do you regularly give your “sons” these affirmations?
Do you dare to begin affirming them in this way?

Where do you find yourself in a “Son” role, where you are looking up to another person?
Have you acknowledged your desire for these affirmations?
Are you grounded and secure in them?
Do you dare to begin asking for how your “Father” sees you?

If nothing else, I think I could use to seriously examine that first set of questions by asking how much I resemble God the Father in my leadership of others, and examine the second set of questions by asking how much I’m actually hearing what God is already saying about me. Because He also calls me his Son (Romans 8:14).

I recently listened through the book of Mark on my awesome audio Bible (The Bible Experience). I think there’s something I get by listening through a whole book in one sitting that I don’t quite get when I read it piece-by-piece or even the whole way through. So the next series of posts is going to be about things I picked up as I listened through Mark that struck me in ways I hadn’t experienced before. The first is on the power and limitations of Jesus.

The Scripture makes it pretty clear that Jesus was incredibly powerful. Meditate on his own words (from Matthew 28:18):

“All authority in heaven and on earth has been given to me.”

The stretches of his earthly authority are incredible: He has authority over chemical phenomena (John 2:1-11), biological phenomena (Mark 5:39-42 and countless others), and physical phenomena (Mark 4:37-41, Mark 6:41-44, Mark 6:48). His disciples saw his power to perform miracles, and knew He was someone to be followed.

And his “authority in heaven” is apparent in his ability to rebuke demons and their absolute powerlessness against him (Mark 5:6-13). But I was struck by some inherent tension in a very short passage in Mark’s gospel. Take a close look at Mark 1:40-45 and see if you find anything strange there. A man comes to Jesus and wants to be healed. Jesus has compassion on him, desires to heal him, and so he needs only to say “Be clean!” and the leprosy leaves the man immediately.

That’s power.

But here’s what I found a bit odd: Jesus doesn’t want the guy to go and tell people about what he’s experienced, so he tells him not to tell anyone, but the guy does it anyway. If it’s still unclear to you what I found strange, let me state it plainly:

Apparently leprosy has to obey Jesus, but people don’t.

Apparently Jesus’s “all authority in heaven and on earth” doesn’t include Jedi mindtricks to keep people from sharing information. It’s clear that Jesus doesn’t want the man to tell others, but he can’t force him not to. When I read the passage, I was just struck by the immediacy with which I was shown Jesus’ incredible power over disease starkly contrasted with his lack of power to control a human being. Now, I realize that pretty much anyone gets into trouble when they begin sentences with “Jesus can’t…” and I’ve read plenty of the philosophical papers on things that the Trinity can’t do because it would contradict their character, but I’m not so interested in all that. Whether this situation of a man disobeying Jesus’s desires is more a matter of “Jesus can’t” or “Jesus doesn’t” isn’t particularly important to me.

What is important to me is how God sees me, and what that means for who I am to be in this world. Like I mentioned earlier, Jesus has all authority in heaven, and passages like Mark 5:6-13 speak a similar truth to the one outlined above:

Apparently demons have to obey Jesus, but people don’t.

Jesus exercises authority over demons (heavenly beings), making them do things they don’t want to do, but there isn’t a single biblical story I can think of where God does the same to a human being, who are his unique image-bearers. It seems that he honors our desires and wills immensely, to the point where he would never exercise his earthly and heavenly authority to make us violate our will, even if it violates his. This is why we can even claim we have choice. God is sovereign; I believe he knows the future perfectly, and yet he allows us to do things that He doesn’t like, which is why Jesus can pray in Matthew 6:10 that God’s will would be done on earth as it is in heaven (meaning that it isn’t already).

Unlike some, I don’t believe God is evil for allowing us to disobey Him, as this healed man did in Mark’s gospel. To disallow it would mean we would no longer be creatures in His image; we would be like demons or like leprosy, under his control, coerced for his glory.

But He does not coerce us, because it would not bring Him glory.

We bring Him glory as we bear His image to this world, making choices freely to incarnate His essence, creating goodness and spreading love. This is something a choiceless being cannot reveal to the world about God. A choiceless being cannot create good as God does (in fact, he cannot create anything), and we know that creating good was God’s first (and in some ways, trademark) act (Genesis 1:3-4).

So live your life knowing that God honors you. He honors your ability to choose between Him and darkness. And He does it in the hopes that you might choose Him, and thus fulfill your purpose in life to make his character known to this world, bringing it back into reconciled relationship with Him. May your goal be that the world witnesses a God who creates goodness out of darkness by the way you do the same thing here on this earth.