From Pops' Workshop

Tag: Christian Living

  • Extreme Makeover: Soul Edition

    Extreme Makeover: Soul Edition

    Do you remember the TV show “Extreme Makeover: Home Edition?” Or perhaps you have seen the current revival. I am most familiar with the original version which ran back in the early 2000s. When the show first started, they would fix up and renovate some deserving person’s home, making it much more livable. After a few seasons, the “renovation” had escalated to tearing down the old home and building a completely new one. That reminds me of how Jesus deals with our run-down and barely livable souls.

    It is not a far stretch to imagine the carpenter Jesus being in the home renovation business. We might call him in for some much-needed repairs. But we don’t realize that he is not content to fix the one or two things we think are the problem; he will continue the work until the whole structure is perfect.1

    In response to our request for repairs, he says, “You do know that I will find other things that need correction and I will fix those as well, don’t you? We will likely end up touching everything from the top of the roof all the way down to the foundation. Okay?”

    With cavalier bravado, we respond, “Yeah. Sure. Whatever. Listen, I just need the bathroom plumbing fixed and some new lighting in the family room. You can do that, can’t you?” We are certain that we know the extent of the repairs needed, even more than Jesus does.

    Jesus might caution us, “Of course I can do that, but you don’t really know what you are asking for.”

    If we do not stop him, our request for repaired plumbing and new lighting will lead to a new house, from the foundation up.

    New Life or Better Sin Management?

    Of course, Jesus is interested in us, not our homes. And he does not offer to improve us; he offers to make us new. We are in much worse shape than we know. He takes our wounded, damaged, malformed souls and makes them new. Not just improved, new. He said we must be born again,2 and we must start over from the beginning if we are to have a full and abundant life.3

    We don’t really know what we are asking for, especially when we first realize our brokenness and turn to God for help with our damaged natures. Jesus is in the new life business, not the life improvement business. But when we come to him, we are not looking for a new life; we are looking for an improved version of our current life. We don’t want the whole thing torn down and rebuilt from scratch; we just want him to improve the parts that are giving us trouble, or that we are starting to find odious.

    We may come to him saying, “Jesus, I get too angry too often, and I drink too much. Can you help me be less angry and get my drinking under control?”

    Knowing our deeper need, Jesus says, “Let’s work on that anger and the wounding that leads you to drink too much. Oh, hey! Here is something else I’ve noticed. You know, you’re kind of greedy and judgmental, too. That is part of what makes you angry. Let’s make you someone who loves and loves properly; someone who loves others even more than you love yourself. Then everything else resolves so much more easily.” He will make us into people for whom anger and drunkenness are simply unnatural and unattractive. We can become the kind of people for whom sin is not attractive.

    Jesus asks us to let him remake us in his image. He wants to make us perfect, as our Father in heaven is perfect.4 We can say, “no.” God will not go where he is not welcome. He may well help us with the anger and the drinking, but if we don’t let him fix the deep roots of our sinfulness, the results will almost certainly be like someone who patches up gaping drywall cracks without addressing the foundation issues that caused the cracking — the cracks soon reappear.

    Many of us approach our sinfulness like someone who puts up wallpaper to cover cracked plaster. It may look better, at least for a while, but the real problem has not been addressed. We’ve prettied things up so that the problems are not obvious, but the problems are still there. We take scripture like the fruit of the spirit in Galatians 55 as a behavioral to-do list. If we exhibit those qualities, then we will have life in the spirit. The fruit of the spirit is fruit; it is the result of or sign of a spirit-filled life; it does not make us spirit-filled. It is a description of life that is aligned with and formed by God’s spirit.

    Repentance Means Turning Around

    The Fruit of the Spirit, along with other biblical descriptions of new life, is God’s promise to us – “Invite me in, let me do my work, and this is what you’ll get.” It is an invitation to take up our crosses, to die to the world, and to live in Christ and let Christ live in us. Yes, sin is important. It can block the work of God (not because he is not omnipotent, but because sin generates shame that causes us to withdraw from God). Feeling guilty or telling God we are sorry is important, but it is just the starting point; confession (and forgiveness) is the unlocking and opening of the door of our hearts to the Father. Repentance is turning around and going back to wherever we first got off track and starting anew. For most of us, that is a process we will repeat again and again and again. But as we position ourselves to allow the Holy Spirit to re-form us from the inside out, we can and will start to bear the good fruit. We can have an extreme soul makeover.

    1. I am standing on the shoulders of giants. C. S. Lewis used this analogy in Mere Christianity, and tells us he borrowed it from George MacDonald. ↩︎
    2. John 3:3 ↩︎
    3. See John 10:10 ↩︎
    4. Matthew 5:48. ↩︎
    5. “But the fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace, forbearance, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness and self-control.”
      Galatians 5:22-23 (NIV) ↩︎

  • When God Breaks In

    God will break in on your life. You may not understand it, you may not recognize it for what it is, but he will break in on your life. God is an ardent lover, and, as such, he pursues us relentlessly. He never tires of making himself known, in hopes that we will turn to him and be saved. When God’s love does break into our lives, when he gets in past the noise, clutter, hurry, and anxiety of our lives, what do we do? We usually respond in one of three ways. We can ignore it and simply carry on as before, acting as if there is nothing noteworthy happening; we can recognize God and try our best to accommodate him in our lives, trying to work out what it is we are to do in response; or we can embrace God with all we have, abandon all we have and all we are in our pursuit of him.

    Ignore

    If we ignore God’s action in our lives, we are on the easiest and least disruptive track. We will also have a lot of company. Winston Churchill once said of his opponent that he would sometimes stumble over the truth, pick himself up, and hurry off as if nothing had happened. That is an apt picture of how many of us react when the power and beauty of God’s love finds a chink in our armor and breaks through to us. We can brush it off, hurrying back to our “real” lives, convinced that nothing really happened. We can rationalize or explain away what does not fit into our understanding of how the world works. We are like Ebenezer Scrooge, who attributed his experience of Marley’s ghost to indigestion: “an undigested bit of beef, a blot of mustard, a crumb of cheese, a fragment of an underdone potato.”

    If we fail in our attempts to convince ourselves that nothing happened, we will tell ourselves that our experience of God has no lasting importance. Yes, something out of the ordinary happened, but it was a blip, an anomaly, a glitch in the matrix, if you will. Like the experience of deja vu, it is interesting and perhaps momentarily disconcerting, but it certainly has no bearing on real life.

    Our all-too-common response of hurrying past or explaining away God’s presence in our lives heads us down a dangerous path. If we repeatedly dismiss and ignore God’s invitations to us, we become numb to them over time, barely noticing them. If we do notice, we have become masters of rationalizing the experience and tossing it aside like the junk mail we don’t even bother to open. Eventually, we can become functionally blind and deaf — for all practical purposes, unable to see or hear God in any but the most extraordinary moments.

    God does not give up on us. He will continue trying to break in and break through with his love for us, no matter how often we brush him off and snub his overtures. But we may so harden ourselves that we are no longer awake to his activity.

    Accommodate

    The second choice is accommodation. When we experience God’s loving kindness, we recognize it for what it is: divine care and love breaking into our lives. We understand that this is not a flight of fancy and is not to be ignored. As we learn a bit more about God, perhaps from our friends or online resources, we realize that we have a part to play in this budding relationship. So we do our level best to accommodate God in our lives. We carve out a niche for God. Between friends and family, work and leisure, and social media and entertainment, we set aside some time for God. We work him into our busy lives as best as we can.

    This sounds like a hopeful direction, but it seldom turns out well. We give God his due, or at least we try our best. We become, as C. S. Lewis put it, like honest but reluctant taxpayers. We think of God’s call on our lives as a tax to be paid. We pay what we believe is required, and hold back everything else. We don’t want to cheat God; we will pay him what he is due and continue on with our “real” lives. We want to continue to enjoy the life we have been living. We do not realize that God is due everything.1 The divine tax rate is 100%. Our ignorance of this fact is the point on which this choice falters. We think we are on the right track, racing along to the end of the line. We may be on the right track, but we have not yet left the station.

    We acknowledge God, and we are genuinely grateful. But we continue on with our lives, consigning God to the slim margins of our overscheduled lives. Over time, our memory of what we once thought of as a life-changing God encounter fades. Any claim or call we might have felt God has on our lives becomes distant, smaller, and less important. Most of our time, passion, and energy remain devoted to the incessant demands of the world, and so any zeal or passion we may have felt fades away. God’s invitation to give ourselves to him fades into the background, drowned out by all the world demands and has to offer. At the worst, we may slip back to door number one and simply ignore what we originally sensed as important.

    However, most of the time, we end up going through the motions of honoring God, but nothing much has really changed. I used to live that way, and I was often in a cycle of being inspired, fixing my will on change, and failing. Eventually, I started to wonder if it wasn’t all a hoax. I would promise God, myself, and others that I was going to change. I was going to be a new man. I really intended to reform myself. I was that new man for weeks or sometimes only days before, without realizing that it was happening, I slipped back to my old ways. When we whip ourselves through this cycle enough times, it is easy to doubt the reality of God’s promised new, full life for those who love him.

    But there is good news here! We are not ignoring God, and he does not give up on us, even when our response to him turns out to be fleeting or half-hearted. He honors any attempt to respond to him. He does not wait for us to be perfect; perfecting us is the Holy Spirit’s job. Even as we struggle to accommodate God into our lives, the door is open for us to move from accommodating him to embracing him.

    Yet there are dangers here, too. We may be satisfied with whatever meager progress toward God we have been able to make, thinking that is all he wants of and for us. Then, when God breaks in and we again meet the love of God, we may reject it, thinking, “I go to church. I’ve (mostly) reined in (some of) my more egregious sins; I am not a bad person. I drank the Kool-Aid and said the prayer; I should now be free to live my life as I see fit.” Or, tragically, when God again breaks in, we may treat that as confirmation that we are doing “the right stuff,” and think God asks nothing more of us when, in fact, he is inviting us to go further up and farther in.

    Or, if we have been, as I was, in a sin-repent-repeat cycle, we may despair of even trying again. We have spent years trying to accommodate God in our lives, and we become frustrated by the lack of real change; we can become jaded. “I’ve been down this road before, and nothing is going to change. Yes, God. I hear you. I’ve tried and tried, but this just isn’t getting us anywhere.. Let’s just leave well enough alone and stay the course.”

    The truth is that where we are is not well enough, and God will not accept our attempts to break up with him. He loves us too much to leave us alone.

    It really isn’t possible to live with one foot in the Kingdom of the Heavens and the other in the kingdoms of the world. God’s soft and gentle call is too easily drowned out by the demanding din of the world. We can stay in this middle ground for a long, long time, or we can slip back into a “Nothing to See Here” posture.

    But there is a third way. It is both harder and easier.

    3. Embrace

    The third way is to go all in, giving up any claim to career, status, wealth, security, and even our very lives. To follow this third way, we must set aside our earthly, temporal desires and put our pursuit of God above all else. Ignatius of Loyola summed up this idea nearly five hundred years ago.

    We should not fix our desires on health or sickness, wealth or poverty, success or failure, a long life or a short one. For everything has the potential of calling forth in us a deeper response to
    our life in God. Our only desire and our one choice should be this: I want and I choose what better leads to God’s deepening his life
    in me.

    Ignatius of Loyola, First Principle and Foundation

    For those of us who nursed at the bosom of Western consumerism and self-determination, this sounds like folly. It also sounds impossible. Jesus knew how hard this would be even for his contemporaries. He used crucifixion, a horrible, brutal, shameful, and excruciating execution method, as a picture of what we must do, explaining that if we would live, we must give up our lives. He tells his followers to take up their crosses and follow him.2

    Following this way is extraordinarily hard to do, but it is also easy. It is certainly easier than trying to accommodate God while still clinging to the ways of the world and enduring the constant struggle of trying to balance between them. Imagine the difficulty of trying to keep one foot on the dock and the other on a boat that is pulling away. It is so much easier to just get both feet on the boat. It is tempting to think that the “ignore” option must be easier than casting everything aside for God, but it is not so. When we ignore God and cast our lot with the world, we find that the best the world has to offer is never enough; we are ever seeking the next thrill, the next affirmation, the next rung on the social or economic ladder. We are always seeking but never satisfied. God is the one thing that can satisfy us at the deepest levels of our being.

    This giving up of our lives is anything but a “once and done” event. It is like a lifetime commitment to regular exercise and a healthy diet, not a crash diet. And if you ever try to genuinely change, to “put to death” the old life to take up the new, you will find it all but impossible. And by our own strength, cunning, and will, it is impossible. But with God, it is not only possible, it is all but certain, as long as we do what we can and trust in God for the real change. If we press into the Ignatian First Principle and Foundation, asking God to make it so with us, he will.

    Coda

    It was only after I was about half way through with this piece that I realized I was really just riffing on the Parable of the Sower (Mark 4:1-20): The seed that falls on the path is “Ignore;” the seed on stony soil and the seed among the thorns is “Accomodate;” land the seed in good soil is “Embrace.” If I am inspired (even without realizing it) by Jesus’ teaching, that can’t be a bad thing! “He who has ears, let him hear.”

    1. Neither do we realize that when we abandon our “old” life, we are given a life that is better in every dimension that matters. ↩︎
    2. Luke 9:23-24 ↩︎
  • The Unlooked-For Good

    The Unlooked-For Good

    Christmas is nearly here. This year, the approach of Christmas leaves me with mixed emotions. I long for a Norman Rockwell Christmas: a loving family gathering around a fragrant balsam, feasting, good-natured ribbing, games, laughter, making new memories, and sharing remembrances of Christmases past.

    That fantasized Christmas is rarely, if ever, anyone’s reality. I have come close to it a few times. But the truth is that our dream of the perfect family Christmas, a wistful melange of Rockwell, Hallmark, and Hollywood Christmas classics, is not likely to be realized. Nonetheless, we look for it, we hope for it, and we may even convince ourselves that it is”normal” and anything else is a letdown.

    This Christmas, it will be just my wife and me at home, as it was last year. This is not a bad thing. Our children are grown, with their own families and busy schedules. They should be building their own traditions and their own memories. But the truth remains: our Christmas will look nothing like my idealized version of the Holiday.

    The massive gap between what we expect and what we get can become a hazardous space. We can be like a child who had his heart set on a pony for Christmas and, when he doesn’t get it, angrily rejects the gifts he did receive, gifts which would have delighted him had he not been consumed by the wrath that came from not getting his desired pony.

    This phenomenon is not limited to our holiday experiences; it can infect our spiritual lives as well. We can set our hearts on one particular good, which we eagerly await, straining to discern its advent. Focused on that one Good, we run the risk of not noticing the good that God does offer us. Or even if we do notice it we may reject it because we are too busy chasing the good we want and expect or because we are sulking and angry that we didn’t get what we wanted.

    C. S. Lewis noted this tendency.

    “It seems to me that we often, almost sulkily, reject the good that God offers us because, at that moment, we expected some other good. Do you know what I mean? On every level of our life – in our religious experience, in our gastronomic, erotic, aesthetic, and social experience – we are always harking back to some occasion which seemed to us to reach perfection, setting that up as a norm, and depreciating all other occasions by comparison. But these other occasions, I now suspect, are often full of their own new blessing, if only we would lay ourselves open to it. God shows us a new facet of the glory, and we refuse to look at it because we’re still looking for the old one. And of course we don’t get that. You can’t, at the twentieth reading, get again the experience of reading Lycidas for the first time. But what you do get can be in its own way as good.”
    ― C.S. Lewis, Letters to Malcolm: Chiefly on Prayer

    The same sentiment found its way into Lewis’ novel “Perelandra,” where a pre-fall “Eve” contemplates the temptation of wanting what we expected and despising what we received.

    One goes into the forest to pick food and already the thought of one fruit rather than another has grown up in one’s mind. Then, it may be, one finds a different fruit and not the fruit one thought of. One joy was expected and another is given. But this I had never noticed before that at the very moment of the finding there is in the mind a kind of thrusting back, or a setting aside. The picture of the fruit you have not found is still, for a moment, before you. And if you wished—if it were possible to wish—you could keep it there. You could send your soul after the good you had expected, instead of turning it to the good you had got. You could refuse the real good; you could make the real fruit taste insipid by thinking of the other.”
    ― C.S. Lewis, Perelandra.

    I find myself in this state more often than I like to admit. I have decided what is good for me, what will make me happy, or how God will come through if he really loves me. And when I don’t get what I want or expect, I miss the good I am being given.

    When my Christmas does not meet the Norman Rockwell/Hallmark fantasy I carry in my imagination, can I set aside my disappointment and embrace the good I am being given? Or am I like those in Jesus’ day who were expecting and looking for a liberating King and so missed the presence of Love incarnate?1

    What are you looking for? What is the good you are expecting? How do you want God to show up in your life? Now, in the Christmas season, and always, when you expect a particular good, and when your cherished dreams don’t materialize, look for the good that is given, even as you lament the good you were expecting. Quiet your soul, take your lament to God in prayer, then ask him, “What is the real good you are giving me now?”

    1. Thanks to Torrie Sorge for this inspiration on Threads. ↩︎

  • The Trouble with Vows

    The Trouble with Vows

    Have you ever made a vow?  Most of us have.  If you are married you made vows to God and to your spouse.  If you have ever given legal testimony you made a vow to tell the truth.  If you served in the military you made a vow to protect and defend the constitution.  In a few days I will be commissioned into the ministry of Spiritual Direction in my church and will vows to God about how I will function in that ministry. These are a few simple examples, you may have others in mind.

    These vows are not bad things, when entered into soberly and intentionally.  Quite the contrary, they can be very good things. A vow to keep yourself “only unto” your spouse may make it easier for you to remain faithful in the face of temptation.  Our legal system would quickly fall apart if we couldn’t count on honest testimony.  My vows as a Spiritual Director can help keep me grounded and pointed in the right direction.

    But there are other vows we make, often without sober consideration and sometimes without realizing what we are vowing.

    I will never be like my father!
    I won’t treat my kids the way my mom treated me!
    I’ll never hurt anyone the way I’ve been hurt.
    I won’t let myself be hurt again!

    These are vows that we make to ourselves. We make them when we are angry, hurting, and vulnerable.  Often we make them when we are young, when we lack perspective and don’t realize the power these  vows can claim. We repeat them over and over to ourselves.  They become part of our internal wiring, exerting control over us long after we have forgotten we even made them.

    Still, you may be thinking, “what’s so bad?”  Indeed, if you are trying not to carry forward hurtful behaviors that is, on the surface, a good thing.  But here are a couple of reasons why they may be hurting you spiritually today.

    First, the enemy can use them against us.  The vows we make to ourselves are very hard to keep.  We will almost certainly fail in them, at least to some degree.  When we do, Satan, the enemy of our souls, is quick to jump in and remind us that we are failures and are doing the things we vowed we wouldn’t; we are failing ourselves and failing others.  If we are not well connected to the heart of the Father, Satan will likely be able to convince us that our failure to keep our vow is an affront to God, above and beyond any sin we may commit, even though the vow was one we made only to ourselves.  Those rashly made, often broken vows become needless sources of accusation and condemnation.

    Second, they cause us to limit ourselves. One of the threads that is common to many of the vows we make to ourselves is that vow what we are not going to do or become or allow to happen to us.  When those vows we’ve made, that have been entrenched in our psyches, they tell us only what not to do, not what to do.  We pay so much attention to what we don’t want to do and limit what we will do.  We fence ourselves in.

    In our spiritual growth terms, those vows limit our spiritual freedom.  Spiritual freedom, means that we desire nothing above knowing and following the Lord’s will.  The vows we make, ingrained as they are, become our primary focus, over knowing and following the Lord.

    An example from my own history of vows may help here.  My father had many good qualities but he also had some not so go qualities.  Like many people with challenging parents,  I vowed that I would never be like him.  Part of that meant that I vowed to not be manipulative.  My wife and children could easily attest that my failure to live up that vow was epic.  However, as I matured in my faith and became more aware of my own sinful adoption of my dad’s ways, those vows kicked in anew.  My vow to not be arrogant or manipulative to shape as a desire to melt into the background. I so wanted to not be arrogant I actively rejected much of what I was being called to do and become.  I was hesitant and reluctant to engage in the preaching and teaching I was called to.  Being in the background is not inherently bad, but it was not what I was being called to in this season.  My vows were limiting my spiritual freedom.

    What is the solution?  It is to learn to pay attention to your interior life, to learn what it is that motivates you.  Where you find vows that are not appropriate to your growth and freedom, take them to Jesus.  Acknowledge them, disavow them, and ask Jesus to guide you into the freedom he desires you have.

    This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.