Journey Post 39: The donkey understanding of Christianity and the Christian life, part 1: The parable of the 2×4

Preliminaries

I was once told this story of a farmer and his donkey:  One day a farmer needed to go to town.  So he hitched his donkey to the wagon.  Then the farmer and his friend climbed up into the seat.  The farmer flicked the reins, clicked his tongue, and said, “Giddup!”  But the donkey didn’t move.  He just sat down on his haunches.  The farmer flicked again, said “Giddup!” again, but still, no movement.  The farmer calmly climbed down, went to the back of the wagon, picked up a 2×4, and walked to the front: THWACK! upside the head went the 2×4.  The farmer calmly climbed back into the wagon and set down the 2×4.  The farmer flicked the reins and the donkey started on down the road. “What’d you do that for?” said his friend.  Came the reply, “Well, first you have to get his attention.”

“Donkey” is the family name given to me by the son of a Manjako chief in 1981 when we moved into his village in Senegal and began to learn his language.  “If you’re going to live with us,” he said, “you must have a Manjako name.”  The Manjako spelling of the name is different; nevertheless, it sounds nearly identical to our English ears.   I never learned the origin of the family name, but its meaning is not related to our English word.  And, for the past thirty-five years, “Donkey” has served as a sometime humorous reminder from God of how stubborn I am and slow to learn wisdom and other important stuff.  And the 2×4?  For now, let’s just say it represents measures taken by God to get my attention….

How I came to write this series of essays:

Our word “preliminary” is from French, or maybe from Latin.  Latin: prae, ‘before’ + limen, ‘threshold.’  Right this moment, we’re standing on a threshold, peering into a room where a tapestry hangs—the tapestry of my life.  The tapestry is incomplete, a design in progress, the patient, loving work of my adoptive father.  I’ve been a Christian since 1971, but I’ve had little appreciation for the nature of the love with which he has crafted that tapestry.  Most of my life has been lived on the backside among the confusing tangles of thread, zigging and zagging hither and thither.

Occasionally, my father showed me a glimpse of the front side.  Sometimes it took one of the 2x4s to get my attention long enough to look—and once in a while to actually see—what was going on.  There is something of great beauty happening, but I can’t tell you what it is because I don’t yet know the rest of the story.

Above:  an unfinished tapestry….

I have shared parts of this story before.  So please forgive me if some of it is repetitious to you: it won’t be to all my readers.  The story is critical to understanding why I’m compelled to write what appears in the next five posts.

For much of my Christian life, my view of God was distorted, one which saw him primarily as judge, the father figure who was never satisfied with my best efforts to please him.  I did not realize that’s what I really thought, so I couldn’t have told you.   This view is actually quite common, even among Christians and ministers.  It may not fit what we think we believe, but it’s often behind how we live.  I call it our “functional theology.”

I would have not realized that’s how I actually saw God had I not seen the same view full blown in a young friend, had I not seen it destroying his marriage, his ministry, his life.  It was a dramatic attention-getter (another 2×4) which would lead to my eventually knowing God’s father heart and knowing, too, what I meant to him.  It didn’t change everything all at once, but it brought a revolution in my life–and the life of Michelle–that is still unfolding….

Several things were coming together about the same period of time (2007 and after) that brought this revolution.  Michelle and I were involved in a church plant in Hollywood.  There, I was brought face to face with how loads and loads of people didn’t like Christians.  I’d been aware of it before, of course.  But when I heard how many considered us hypocrites, self-righteous, judgmental, etc., etc., I figured they were making an excuse for walking away from God.  I’ve had to reexamine that assumption.

Above:  Hope International Bible Fellowship in Hollywood where we first met to plant a church

Actually, I’ve found that there’s still a search going on across our land.  People are trying to understand spirituality, looking for some larger purpose.  Most still believe in God; they’re just not sure that those who claim to represent him know what they’re talking about.  I’ve quoted Gandhi and even many Christian leaders who recognize that the greatest hindrance to becoming Christian has been other Christians.

But, to paraphrase the Sara Lee jingle, “nobody doesn’t like Jesus.”  That isn’t strictly true, of course.  Most people seem to see Jesus as a great moral teacher, though they’re puzzled over the miracles and the deity thing.  Too many have come to see Christians as people they don’t want to be around.  A friend told me once that Christians are the only ones who shoot their wounded.  I have known that truth for myself.  And most people around us are wounded in some way.

About the same time as the church plant, I was coming face to face with the fact that my so-called Christian life wasn’t working so very well.  I’d been a missionary, a church leader, a Sunday school teacher, a counselor.  But I was questioning my faith and pondering the fact that God kept bringing me to the edge of failure in ministry, work, and marriage.

If you’d asked me, as a new Christian, what I expected my life to be like in thirty years, I would have answered: “An abundant, free life, filled with quiet joy as we walk with God and await our call home (i.e., to heaven).”  It hasn’t quite unfolded like that.

We’ve had a tumultuous marriage (mostly behind the scenes).  My dreams of being a great missionary and Bible translator foundered on the shoals of my self-protective life, and I resented that Michelle always seemed to know anything better than  I.  Our kids were seeing the hypocrisy, legalism, and even immorality at our mission school base.  Our oldest son was in near-open rebellion at this.  I struggled with my own suppressed rage over fear of exposure as a bad father, yet sensing a growing admiration for our son whose honesty and courage could no longer abide leaders who expected submission from kids while ignoring adult dirty laundry hanging in plain sight.

We left Africa in 1989 with me thinking God had pulled the rug out from under me.  Sacrilegious?  Yes.  But it reflected the reality of my still unrecognized view that God was distant, uninterested in me, uncaring and never-satisfied.  I couldn’t see just how insidious was my thinking:  I figured the problem was me, not God.  Only while counseling my young friend years later could I see how his distorted view of an unsatisfied and ever-demanding God was leading him in the paths of destruction.  He knew exactly how he saw God and could articulate it.  In his articulation I saw my own functional understanding, like looking in a mirror.  It scared me.  Had I missed something?

It was in shear desperation that I went home and cried out, “What do you really think of me, Lord?  I have to know!”  I just couldn’t play church any longer.  I’d felt the same way after my appointment with a mortar round in Vietnam.  But God really did hear my cry, and I now realized how he’d waited on me to pay attention so I could see he’d been there all the time.

If ever there was a “word from God,” I heard it that day.  The word was: “delight.”  His whisper told me to look at Proverbs 3:12, a verse I generally understood as, “Hey, pay attention to the 2×4, stupid!”  Instead, as I looked, my eyes traveled to the qualifying phrase after the statement that the Lord disciplines those he loves.  It said: “as a father the son in whom he delights.”  Wait … What?  Delights?  You delight in me, Lord?

I had never put that word in close proximity with God—or my dad, for that matter.  Even though I felt I didn’t ever matter to my own dad, I understood what a father was supposed to be like.  To hear that word “delight” made me feel like I’d died and gone to heaven. My performance treadmill life had been about seeking to please God and everybody.  But now, the finger of God pushed the stop button and told me it was time to get off.  To know a father’s delight removes the fear of the unsatisfied eye.  He had known all the worst about me and delighted in me, his child whom he was eager to adopt.

Eager?  Adopt?  We’ll look at that in due course.  You’ll just have to wait….

There is something about knowing you are truly deeply loved that is inexplicable.  It doesn’t yield to convenient analysis, and you can’t help but respond to it.  We love when we’re first loved.  Love is not something we do because we’re supposed to.  We learn it by the experience of being loved in relationship.  I’ve been learning to love because I now know I am loved.

This is what actually compels me to write these essays.  I wrote about love last post, about my captain in Vietnam and how he had given his life so that we might live that day.  His life and death was an illustration of that quality of genuine, self-giving love that is the essence of Christianity.  I didn’t get the point at the time—back then, I only knew I couldn’t do what he had done—but when I really saw the love of God, I connected the dots….

Christians talk about love all the time and non-Christians don’t put much stock in it.  They look at us and say, “What you do speaks so loudly, I can’t hear what you say.”  That’s why I want to focus on Jesus, what he taught, what he had to say about the Father, and how he put God on display by his life .

My plan for this series of essays is fairly straightforward, and much of it is already in draft form.  I may change some things, as per usual, but here is what I have in mind:

Part 2:  My personal understanding of Jesus, what Christianity is about, and what it means to live the Christian life.  This will give a quick overview and let Christian readers know I’m no raging heretic.

Part 3:  What Jesus actually taught: A summary look at the sermon on the mount

Part 4:  What Jesus actually taught: Looking at those troublesome parables

Part 5:  What Jesus actually taught: A look at other teachings, mostly from the Gospel of John

Part 6:  In Conclusion:  Additional notes and what it means to live as a disciple (apprentice) to Jesus

I think you’ll find that my beliefs are pretty standard Christian fare (orthodox with a small “o,” if you will).  I don’t like certain stereotypical terms used to classify Christians (“fundamentalist” and “evangelical”), and I don’t like to be pigeonholed.  I call myself a Christian, a believer, a follower of Jesus, a disciple.  Even “disciple” conveys weird things to some people, so I like the word “apprentice,” which still carries the same basic idea as what it meant to be a disciple in Jesus’s day.  More on that later.

In speaking about Christianity, I stress the word “relationship,” because what the disciples learned from Jesus was about how to live life in relationship to God and other people.  Being a Christian is not primarily about going to church, nor becoming a “better” person–though hopefully, that’s a result.  It’s not about going to heaven when you die, though that’s part of it.  Jesus said (John 17:3) that eternal life is knowing God.  The great privilege of the Christian is to know God as Father.

I hope you will find what I have to say to be informative, perhaps surprisingly enjoyable, and be challenged to really think.

Journey Post 36, Memorializing God: Oh Captain! My Relational Captain!

NOTE:  Some time ago, I promised a friend I’d write an essay explaining something of my understanding of Christianity and the Christian life.  This is that.  It’s not systematic nor exhaustive, but reflects where I am right now, particularly in light of our recent trip to Colorado….

In 1967, the year that Time published a cover story asking, “Is God dead?”  I was a young college student more concerned about getting my draft notice and going to Vietnam than about what might be happening with God.  My mind was on the “real” world, or so I thought.

A couple years later, my “real” world had an encounter with the God world in a dry rice field in Quang Ngai Province, South Vietnam.  While pondering and puzzling over my own mortality and God, a visitor to my hospital bed brought news that my C.O., Captain David Walsh, had been killed about the same time that I was wounded.  He had given his life for his men by seeking to flush out and kill some snipers who were targeting our perimeter.  Rather than send someone else, he led a few men out to find and eliminate the threat.  Capt. Walsh, after single-handedly charging in and killing two of the snipers, was finally brought down by a third.

Above:  Captain David Walsh             (Photo by Bob Kraft)

My captain left me that day with a legacy of love and an idea about what it means to value others above yourself.  His legacy was a seed in me that struggled most of my life even as it sprouted: the soil of my heart was hard, stubbornly so, a heart seeking at the same time freedom and self-protection, two goals so contradictory that one must suppress the other.  The safe route wins almost every time.  Left to itself, such a heart could never be set free.  Yet, for nearly fifty years, that seed has sprouted and grown, often imperceptibly—a still tender plant.  (You see, I really am a donkey.)

Two years after the rice field, I became a convinced Christian, a committed follower of Jesus Christ.  Like Peter, I was convinced that Jesus is the Christ, the Son of the living God, the only one who “has the words of eternal life” (John 6:68).

Two things had pushed me to acknowledge that God was still very much alive:  one was the changed life of a friend who displayed Jesus’ life to me in very real and relevant ways; the second was the resurrection.  Jesus really did rise from the dead: applying the tools and mindset of the historian to Jesus’ life took me down a path to confirm the central fact of all history.

I call my life—and this blog—a “zigzag journey.”  Some zigs and zags got more pronounced as Jesus’ life and teaching pushed against the boundaries of my self-protected soul.  My faith was real, but my following was incredibly hesitant.  If I ever resembled Peter, it was when he sat only feet from Jesus on trial and pulled back to safety.  I’m the guy in the Simon and Garfunkel world: I am a rock and I am an island, I have my books and my theology to protect me.  My fears made me wonder if I were real….

I’ve seen God’s hand evident in my life since I was little.  That day in the rice field, the hand held a 2×4 and it was banging on my steel pot, yelling “Walt!  Wake up!  Pay attention!”  He put my feet on the road to see he is alive.  It was also the narrow road to freedom, though I often preferred side trails….

Some thirty-five years after Nam, another 2×4 made me see, at the same time, the Father heart of God and how evil my own assumptions about him had been.  Gone was the idea that he was “out to get me” and didn’t care.  Like most, my view of God had been mostly determined by my relationship with my parents.   My folks were social, but not truly relational.  When my dad died, I had felt left alone and abandoned.  When I got to know my adoptive Father, I discovered that he wants to be with his children, that he values and wants to be with me.  I now knew my identity: I am a son of my Father.

In the nine years since, I’ve seen that his love—which I once routinely described in duty-bound terms as “doing the best” for me out of his wisdom and grace—is other-centered and self-sacrificial.  And that love is completely trustworthy.  We Christians speak often of faith, belief, and trust.  Trust can never be simply cognitive.  My initial faith in Christ had been very cerebral.  Trust grows in relationship.

We Christians also talk about being free.  Not only free from the condemnation of sin, but free to love in the way we were designed to within human relationship and community.  Knowing God’s love is steadily dissolving my self-protective impulse and freeing me to truly love him and others.

Other-centered love is risky and not safe.  I now understand the answer to Lucy’s question about Aslan in The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe:  “Is he—quite safe?” “…‘Course he isn’t safe.  But he’s good.”

Above:  Lucy and Aslan

“God is relational.”  I was deeply struck by the thought after our teacher in Colorado, Dr. Larry Crabb, voiced it.  I suppose most Christians would not disagree, though the term seems too touchy-feely to use regarding the majestic sovereign of the universe.  But that is precisely what it means that “God is love.”

Love is another word we Christians throw around with little thought.  Other-centered and self-sacrificial love is the kind that Jesus displayed on the cross; it’s the kind that exists within the Godhead among the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.  Captain David Walsh’s legacy is an indelible picture in my brain and heart of what it means to value others.  And this gets to the point of the whole essay.

His legacy did not arise from that one sacrificial act of valor alone; that was the culminating act consistent with the way he cared for us, his men.  It showed up often in the six months I spent there.  He would not put us in harm’s way unless necessary, nor use us as stepping stones to his own advancement, as some “leaders” do.  I didn’t appreciate it much at the time; I think of him often, now.

The point is that other-centered self-sacrificial love is not a one-time act.  Jesus’ love for and value of others was on display every day.  He is this way because this is how God is.  God intends for it to be a routine part of daily human life in relationship.  And we can’t pretend it is not difficult.

Please don’t think me presumptuous in saying what God intends.  A couple statements that Jesus made go to the very heart of what Christianity is all about.

The first says: “By this everyone will know that you are my disciples, if you love one another” (John 13:35, NIV).  A “disciple” or apprentice is one who learns from someone to be like them.  The disciples were not learning what to preach to others—had this been Jesus’ intention, he could’ve opened a seminary.  The disciples were learning to live life as the Father intended, and what that looked like in everyday relationships.  The preaching would come out of that—i.e., from their relationship with Jesus.

The second is also about being a disciple:  “Whoever wants to be my disciple must deny themselves and take up their cross and follow me” (Matthew 16:24, NIV).

When Jesus speaks of “denying self,” he’s not talking “self-denial,” like going without chocolate; he’s referring to denying the “self,” i.e., our own self-centered agendas and desires apart from God.  When he speaks of “taking up the cross,” he’s not talking principally about physical death:  it’s a stronger way to say “deny yourself.”  The natural out-flow of denying self is other-centered love on a daily basis.

Christians are not called on to live out “churchianity” or impose a system of morality; Christians are called upon to live life within the community of mankind in the way that God intended and, thereby, put on display what God is really like.  Jesus called it being “salt and light.”

The two statements of Jesus above should give you some idea of what he intended being a Christian to look like.  Loving others without regard to self lets others see God for who he is.  It puts the spotlight on him instead of me.  Love that is other-centered enables people to be genuinely relational (which I struggle with greatly); it attracts others to Christ and his community.  This lack of love and relationality has cost Christians their credibility and is the greatest hindrance to the spread of the gospel message.

Shortly before leaving his disciples, Jesus promised to send “another helper,” the Holy Spirit, to enable their life and service to him.  God had promised to send his Spirit in the Old Testament prophets.  There doesn’t seem much evidence for him in this world.  I wonder if we’ve substituted something else?

“Oh Captain! My Captain!” is a poem written by Walt Whitman about the death of Abraham Lincoln.  One line reads: “From fearful trip, the victor ship, comes in with object won;…” Whitman’s captain was dead, but the ship was safe.  I would love to tell my captain, David Walsh, that his men were safe.

Scripture refers to Jesus as “the captain of our salvation” (Hebrews 2:10, KJV).  He died, conquered death, and lives.  And I live.  Perhaps not always “safe” but now truly free.

Journey Post 35: Running With Horses

A note to readers:  I’ve begun writing more frequently …. I have something to say.  I hope you find it worth listening.

 

The world is filled with horse pucky.

Pucky?  We bought a piece of horse property years ago (2/3 acre), so I often ponder this profound word.

“Horse pucky” (or simply, “pucky”) is the word I use when terms like “BS” and “crap” are just a bit too crude for sensibilities.  Using “pucky” can put a lighter spin on realities that are too dark and heavy to drop on someone all at once. (“Spin” is a particular type of pucky that highlights certain positive or negative aspects—thereby distracting others away from the true smell.)  Often, the person putting out the pucky believes or wants to believe their own pucky.  (Sincerity can make them seem more credible or authoritative.)  Horse pucky can be spread around or conveniently contained in a crock.

Horse pucky can be figurative or literal, of course.  I don’t know if Pew Research has any stats on the topic, but production of the figurative type seems vastly more prolific than the literal.  Both types act as fertilizers, which might explain why the literal is not found piled so high and deep.  Literal pucky works its way into the land and enriches the soil.  The figurative kind seems definitely piled higher and deeper:  it works its way into the culture and despoils the soul.

Piled higher and deeper?  P, h, and d ….  I think I’m onto something.  Is there a school for this?

Yes, I’m enjoying this; and yes, it’s going somewhere.  I just didn’t realize that pucky has so many parallels and applications to real life!

Please pardon the vocabulary lesson.  This is really an excursus on speaking and/or seeking truth.  All my mention of pucky might lead you to think I’m writing another essay about American culture and politics or academia.  You’d only be partly right.  Actually I’m talking about American religious culture.  Please note that I didn’t use the word “Christian” or “evangelical” on purpose.  There’s nothing remotely Christian about pucky.

When I was a kid, there was a popular expression: “I got it straight from the horse’s mouth.”  I suspect we don’t hear the phrase much anymore because what comes out of the horse’s mouth these days is often readily dismissed as pucky.

The expression was so meaningful to me because I was deeply involved in digging into history, looking for evidence (starting with Davy Crockett and the Alamo as a pre-teen).  At the time, the culture was at least giving lip service to seeking truth.  Even in the 1960s, seeking truth was considered a lofty goal.

Back then, I prided myself on being a truth seeker.  When I came back from Vietnam disenchanted with my country, I directed my energies into serious study of history and political science so I could figure out truth.  Finding truth about America did little to restore my faith in our nation at that time, but finding truth about the resurrection of Jesus began to restore my faith in the living God.

For the past few years, I’ve been learning that there’s a big difference in being a truth seeker and a truth talker.  That’s what was behind my statement last post about being social but not often truly relational.  Genuine relationships are built on truth telling:  it’s not that I kept telling outright lies, but it was uncomfortable and threatening for me to reveal what’s truly going on inside, especially in my marriage.  It’s so much easier to say something to deflect Michelle away from the real me (another form of pucky).

I grew up thinking that I didn’t matter much, so, while I desperately wanted people to accept me because I was smart (or funny, or whatever), I don’t know that it ever occurred to me that they might do so just because I’m me.  Pretty bad, huh?  I’m not alone, of course.  If you consider what this does to communication, it’s a miracle (really) that Michelle and I have been married forty-five years.  Genuine honesty is just plain threatening.  Thinking this way left me with a nearly life-long impression of myself as one who lacks integrity and courage.

This thinking is what made understanding my adoption by God so liberating.  When I discovered that my Father was there delighting in me (Proverbs 3:12)—even when using the 2×4—I knew I no longer had to be afraid of him, though I still feared him like a child who fears displeasing a loving dad.  Therefore, I don’t have to be afraid of what others think, even though I push ‘play’ occasionally on that old tape.

No surprise, then, that it impresses me greatly when I find a truth teller.  I met one of those while I was in Colorado with Michelle last month.  During that week, I was pondering the correlation between integrity, courage, truth seeking, and truth telling (honesty).   And of course, I thought on that expression about the horse’s mouth quite a bit.  The “horse” kept demonstrating what it meant to be a truth teller in various ways as we listened, conversed, thought about some writings, etc.  I asked questions and watched, but could detect no pucky (my nose is pretty good).  This particular horse had been the subject of much pucky, both glibly spread out and contained in crocks packaged by people highly regarded.  He wasn’t trying to parade his non-puckiness; it was just there.

Since that week, as you might gather, I’ve been seeking to reexamine some assumptions.  (I shared a little last post.)  I thought about the questions of the Pharisees as they watched Jesus sitting eating with tax collectors and other “sinners” (their pigeonhole for these people):  “Why does he eat with such?”  They were so sure there was something wrong with these people; therefore, there must be something wrong with Jesus.

Meanwhile, those people sitting with Jesus were beginning to get a taste of eternal life.

I’ve been thinking about the minutes I spent talking with another person who sought to help me get direction from the Lord during our time there.  At one point, she said to me, “Walt, I see you as the man of integrity and courage that you long to be.”  I didn’t know what to think at first.  But I realized that in those moments I was getting a taste of the life Jesus brought to give, simply because that person sought to pay attention to what the Spirit was doing in my soul and listening to the godly desire I was expressing.  There was no pucky here, nothing despoiling my soul but enriching it in the best way.

Looking back, I recognized she was reiterating what the Holy Spirit had prompted the apostle Paul to say to his protégé Timothy: “God has not given us a spirit of fear and timidity, but of power, love, and self-discipline” (2^nd Timothy 1:7).  That same Spirit lives in me and in all God’s children, more realized as we seek to draw near to him, and listen to his invitation to keep running the race close to him.

That week I took a few steps out onto a track where horses run.  It’s not a very wide track.  Jesus called it narrow.  I encountered several other horses running the race—none of whom would we likely label thoroughbreds.  I hope they won’t mind being joined by a donkey.  I’ll keep going even if they do mind.

Journey Post 34: Completing the Trinity—Reflections on stepping out from behind the door

“Donkey” is my African name.  It’s a good Manjak (Senegal) family name—spelled differently but sounding much the same as this English word.  “I knew it all the time, Walt….  It fits!”  Okay, okay, but don’t laugh too much.  The son of the village chief gave me his family name to signify that the Manjak welcomed our becoming part of their people; we wanted to live with them and learn their language and their ways and tell them about God.

Getting the name was an unexpected honor.  Yet, the irony was not lost on me—a sort of private joke between me and God—a Christian missionary, slow to learn, stubborn, proud.

That was thirty-six years ago …  but the name still fits.  I own it.  It’s a reminder of who I am and my need to listen to God, I mean: really.  If you know the story of how I became a Christian, you may recall that I speak of my time in Vietnam and my appointment with a mortar round on June 10, 1969 as a 2×4 upside the head from God—a precursor to getting the Donkey name….  Up to that day, I had assumed I was a Christian.  I had gone to church most of my life, but now, I didn’t know what I believed….

It took two years from the day that mortar round exploded right next to me until I discovered that the resurrection of Jesus had actually occurred in history.  That changed everything.  I knew, then, that it was all true:  God is there (here), the Bible was his word, Jesus was God’s Son—not some cosmic Santa Claus; his teaching was more than good philosophy, and something called the “Holy Spirit”—or “Holy Ghost”—operated in the world, so that I was now saved, born again … or some such thing.

If you’ve read some of my blog posts, you’ll know that I like to refer to being adopted, though I was born and raised by my natural parents.  I am a son of my Father; I am adopted.  That’s how Paul referred to God making believers a part of his family—a son, a co-heir with Jesus.  I learned that shortly after I became a believer.  I knew that Jesus gave himself for my sin on the cross.  But somehow, God in heaven had some kind of dark side in my thinking.  He was distant, watching every step I made.  He just couldn’t be very pleased.  He took care of me and would take me to heaven one day—where I’d sit in the back with all the screw-ups and the children who never quite measured up to his expectations.

Jesus had said that eternal life was “knowing God.”  I figured that “knowing” must be a synonym for being saved, a sort of transaction where, in return for believing in Jesus, God promised me heaven.

From 1971 until 2007, that was my operating or functional assumption (theology).  I’d often puzzled over a statement by A.W. Tozer: “What comes to mind when you think of God is the most important thing about you.”  I began to see that truth when two different friends told me how they viewed God.

One told me how his life and jobs kept falling apart: “Walt, I’m convinced that God is out to get me.”  Another friend, who had been a closeted homosexual, related to me his view of God and his all-seeing eye that never smiled: both friends had fathers who were displeased or distant.  Another 2×4:  this time, times two.  God, what are you trying to tell me?  I was seeing a familiar pattern: my dad was distant, I was uncertain of his love, and he died when I was thirteen.  My life since had been spent on a performance treadmill, always looking over my shoulder for the smile of ___, but my paltry efforts to please him surely brought disappointment. Now I felt like I was playing church with people’s lives.  I cried out:  “Lord, what do you really think of me?  I have to know!”  In a moment, a verse came to mind from Proverbs, chapter three: “My son, despise not the discipline of the Lord.”  Now I was reading:  “for whom the Lord loves he disciplines, as a father the son in whom he delights.”  “Lord, you delight in me?”  I was dumbfounded.

It was like being born again—again.  I was getting to know God as my Father and his father heart.  Delight?  In me?  Yes!  Seeing his heart took nothing from his righteousness, or holiness, or majesty—it magnified it.  It was like my dad was President of the United States, and I was John-John playing under his desk.  You’ve seen those pictures, right?  Have you seen/read Ben-Hur?  A Jewish slave saves a Roman general, who makes him his son and heir.  It’s a picture of our adoption.  I have today a totally different view of God my Father—he’s the one Jesus taught his followers to call “Abba, Father,” (an intimate term similar to Papa or Daddy).  Remember the Lord’s Prayer?  To call God “Father” was radical.  New light, huh?  “Father” is not a title but a relationship.

Above:  JFK and John-John (JFK Jr.)                                                                                                                                                                         Below:  The slave, Judah Ben-Hur, soon to be adopted son of Quintus Arrius

I am a son of my Father.  That is my identity, who I am.  And he told me something that my soul had longed to hear from my earthly dad before he died, but never did.  My Father said, in a way similar to what he announced to the world about Jesus: “This is my beloved son; and I delight in him.”  He loves my soul.

So, now I know Jesus the Son, my savior, who self-sacrificially gave himself for my sin.  I know my Father, who self-sacrificially gave his Son in order to secure a relationship with me.  And now … what do I say of the Spirit?  I think I have all the correct “doctrine” concerning him.  But these last days have been, perhaps, another 2×4 upside the head of the Donkey—this time, with a 2×4 made of nerf board.

Michelle and I spent a week in a Colorado retreat center a couple weeks ago.  I was wrestling with several things:  the implications of God being “relational,” (I’m more social than genuinely relational.  My still present instinct is to fear letting you into my real life, to let you know me, to peer out from behind the door until I know it is safe to stand in front of it).  We were thinking about the Trinity and the relationship of love that exists in that divine community, knowing that, somehow, Christians share in that—but it doesn’t always seem real.  What does it mean to truly listen to the Spirit?  How can I hear his direction, how can I help others who want to draw near to God do the same?  I can’t really tell you what last week was all about, but, it will come out, as the witch said to Dorothy, “All in good time, my little pretty … all in good time.”

I didn’t hear anything “new” during the week, and yet everything was new: one of those uncomfortable paradigm shifts.  We weren’t seeking some method for generating or conjuring up a mystical Spirit.  No one controls God.

My doctrine of the Holy Spirit is very orthodox.  But there is something very much not real about my relationship with God the Spirit.  I don’t have far to look for reasons behind this.  My Father is teaching me to be honestly relational, starting with Michelle and a few others.  But most of my Christian involvement has been with churches peering from behind the door at the Spirit, churches I’ve heard characterized as holding to a “new evangelical Trinity” of Father, Son, and Holy Scripture.  God certainly speaks through his book—but he is not the book.

God promised Israel that he would send his Spirit to live in their hearts (the New Covenant, or New Testament).  In sending this Spirit, he would write his law in their hearts.  Jesus further elaborated when he spoke of a divine “comforter” or “counselor” (Greek paraclete) who had been “with” believers  and now would be “in” them as well.  It was he, the Spirit, who would empower us, ensure our fellowship and communion with the godhead, remind us who and whose we are, testifying with our own spirit that God is our “Abba, Father” that we might show God to the world.

A “close encounter” in Vietnam brought me to know that Jesus was real, not a crock.  Recognizing my evil view of God brought me to know the delighted love of my Father, not some intellectual construct (i.e., a crock).  Now, again, he has awakened my heart to find reality, to courageously pursue him where I’ve been afraid to, not inside the door but in community, to understand and live out the kind of deep genuine relationship I’ve missed in my human relationships.  Not to hear voices in the head, but to actually live by faith.

The Lake Avenue Essays, # 1: The Missing Picture … Who I Am

There is never a good time for a father to die.  I was thirteen when my dad died.  That was in 1961; he was forty-eight.  It was my dad, and it was the absolute worst time.

My brother had joined the Navy two months earlier, right out of high school.  He had always been my dad’s favorite.  Now, I thought, I would have my dad to myself.  But I didn’t, and wouldn’t … of course.

The previous fall, I had started junior high—you know, that time when boys wonder about being a man and are confused about girls.  I’d always had a crush on some girl, but now….  The guys would snicker, “Have you noticed Sue P.?”  My dad and I would never have those conversations.

The school tried to encourage the special closeness of fathers and sons by sponsoring a breakfast that was coming up soon.  All the guys would be there with their dads.  I couldn’t go, even when my mom suggested I ask my Uncle Bud.  I just wanted to hide, and there would be no escaping the shame.

Life moves on.  But deep hurts don’t often move on.  They’re just there, like some background dirge accompanying the good moments and happy times, like a void that refuses to be filled.

I became conscious of the void when I was six or seven, when I discovered the family pictures in a big drawer in the old secretary by the front door.  The drawer was so heavy that I had to ask my mom to take it out for me.  The pictures were mostly loose, mostly black and white, though some were sepia-toned.  There was a painted high school graduation photograph of my Aunt Dee.  She was beautiful.  There were pictures of family and friends.  What most caught my attention were those of my brother.

One picture had him standing by a coffee table with a huge birthday cake and one big candle.  In another, he was perhaps a year-and-a-half, sitting on my dad’s lap, pecking away for all the world as though intent on writing a composition.  My dad’s face was beaming, obviously proud.

But one picture was missing.  I remember more than once going back to look for it in that big drawer, but I never found it.  I never asked about it.  I was afraid of the answer.  The missing picture was the one I was sure had to be there, somewhere—the picture of just me and my dad.

The years moved on.  My life became a question whose answer was self-interpreted.  I began to conclude what a boy without guidance must:  I didn’t matter to my dad.  So, who am I?

1968 came.  Hope was assassinated and I got a letter from the president:  “Greeting….”  I knew where I was going (Vietnam), and I did.  Would I be a man?  When you don’t know who you are, such tests of manhood prove nothing.  I stood my ground, fought back, got wounded, came home.  The question was still there.

Life went tumbling on.  In the deep inner workings that seek to justify existence, I told myself I was better than my brother.  Everything proved it:  Michelle and I got married in 1970, we became Christians, went to Bible school and became missionaries, had three kids.  I was a teacher.  I was a church leader and counselor.  I was looked up to.  Yet, something was unsettling me.  As I counseled guys, I found them confused, struggling with a private picture of God as judge, never smiling, always demanding, never satisfied.  Their struggle was familiar, for I saw that same God.  I recalled what A.W. Tozer wrote, that what comes to mind when you think of God is the most important thing about you….  So how could I help people trust God when I saw him like they did?  I was playing church with these peoples’ lives.  Like them, I was spending my life on a performance treadmill, chasing the smile of God.

I reasoned that God loves me, right?  He always did what’s best.  I’m going to heaven—he promised.  But did God even like me, or just put up with me?  Did I really matter to him?  Did he value me at all?

In a moment of desperation, I got honest with God.  It was 2006 or 2007—I’m certain of the moment if not the date.  I sat at my desk and I cried out, “What do you really think of me, Lord?  I have to know!”

God’s timing is not often early—and never late.  With the words barely out of my mouth, a verse came to mind I had thought of only when doing church discipline:  “My son, despise not the Lord’s discipline.…  The Lord disciplines those he loves, as a father the son in whom he delights” (Proverbs 3:11,12).

Something was different.  What was that last part?  Delights?  “Lord, you delight in me?”  If ever in my life I received a “word from God,” this was it.  My Father delights in me!  Delight made love concrete.

How…?  God for me had seemed distant, not much involved in my life, just up there, always watching, probably tired of my failures.  I googled, “What does God think of his children?”  I kept seeing the word “adoption,” a term Paul used to describe God taking people into his family.  Adoption had meant little to me in Bible school.  But now I knew:  It’s not just a process, but a father’s perspective.  No wonder Jesus taught his followers to call God “Abba.”  Like a perfect earthly father, he had passionately anticipated the day he would adopt me.  (The “pleasure” he felt in Ephesians 1:5).  God wants to be with me!

We intuitively see God like our own parents, particularly our fathers.  My picture of God was my dad!  But God is not my dad.  God’s discipline, all the troubles and disappointments are simply the proof of his delight in me, a message the Spirit brought to my mind as surely as the sun rises to a new day.

In a moment, God lifted the veil that had kept his true face hidden, and I heard him:  “You saw only that missing picture.  But you are my son.  You are the man I delight in.  And you will always be in the picture with me.”

journey post 25–Honest to God, part 3: the quandary of a good God and the image of a good father

NOTE:  In these two posts (25 and 26), I try to explain that understanding the father heart of God is critical in understanding why there is evil in the world.  This post paints a fuller picture of what I mean when I talk about the “father heart” of God.

*****

April 20^th was Easter.  Christians around the world celebrated the resurrection of Jesus.  I became a Christian in 1971 on the strength of knowing it really happened.  The resurrection is the sine qua non of Christianity.  (We will look at that soon.)  If it didn’t happen, Christianity is a crock and we are its fools.

For some 35 years after I began following Jesus, there was a piece missing from my Christian life.  Last post dramatized that fact by pointing to the day I cried out—honest at last with myself and God—and discovered that God delights in me.  That day began a process that would bring me to find the missing part, a very big chunk:  knowing God’s father heart.  Knowing that heart would free me from a number of puzzles, including our question about how he can be good when he allows evil to fill his world.

Christians routinely call God “Father.”  I did.  But God’s father heart is not the same thing.  Each of us lives out the well-spring in our hearts, and God does the same.  That’s one reason Jesus put emphasis on the heart.  Knowing God’s father heart shows us who he is, how he sees people, what are his desires and intentions.  His father heart can be illustrated by thinking what we mean when we urge a man to be a “real father” to his children:  be responsible for them, be there for them, be strong for them, protect them, provide, teach, nurture, discipline, guide, inspire, care for them—and love them unconditionally—all that.  The God who invented parenthood and motherhood is himself all he intended fathers to be.

I was blinded from seeing this by be a couple things:  first, my own deeply entrenched performance mindset, which lay behind my functional theology; and secondly, teaching about God I’d received over the years, some of which portrayed him demanding holiness in a way that he could never be satisfied with.  Had you asked me, “Do you know God?” I would have responded, “Of course,” an assumption that Christians have: we equate knowing God with having eternal life, as Jesus said in John 17: “This is eternal life, that they may know you…”  Questions about his goodness and love remained.  “Delight” didn’t compute with “Judge.”  Jesus saved me from the wrath of God—or was it from God himself?

The day I heard the word “delight” (from Proverbs 3), you could’ve knocked me over with a feather, I was so thrilled and full of joy.  I also had questions, like:  How did I miss this so long?  I soon began a search like I did so many years before about the resurrection—only in those days we didn’t have Google.

Everything pointed to something I’d hardly thought about since Bible school: adoption by God.  That meant looking at God as a father—but how could that be important?  I didn’t realize then just how much my idea of God as a father was equated with my dad as a father.   The truth would change my thinking.

 

Above:  The slave of the General:   Judah Ben-Hur with Quintus Arrius

Below:  The adoption ceremony in Rome.  (Charlton Heston and Jack Hawkins)

Adoption was familiar to early Christians as a status of high privilege, honor, and responsibility as the heir.  If you’ve seen “Ben Hur,” that’s what happened to Judah when made a son by the general whose slave he was.  Paul used adoption to illustrate the relationship God intended to have with us.  Adoption showed an almost hidden side of God, unfamiliar to many, especially to me:  Paul spotlighted a passionately proud father who eagerly anticipated adopting male and female “sons.”  And to these sons, God would give his Spirit—in part, to lead them to recognize the majestic, holy God as “Abba, Father.”  Think of a young Caroline Kennedy running around the White House saying, “My daddy’s the President!”

This fuller picture of God as Father (as a father) didn’t change any of God’s “normal” attributes, e.g., sovereign ruler, majestic judge, etc.  But it changed the perspective through which I viewed him:  I am my Father’s son.  It changed the idea of “knowing God” from a synonym for salvation to a relationship, a journey of discovery in which I am now getting to know an adoptive father who has been there for me all the time—even when I doubted him.  The closer I got to him, the more I realized that this is not about me.   There is no ground for presumption here.  It is rather a reminder and teacher of grace.

About the same time I discovered adoption, I began immersing myself in the four Gospel accounts of Jesus.  As I did, I began to see his heart, a bigger picture of his agenda, and what was important to him.  What was important was his Father.  Jesus reintroduced his disciples to God—as his Father, their Father.

The disciples had bad functional theology that assumed God—and his Messiah–was going to kick Roman butt and set up his kingdom on their time table and they would sit on his right and left.  But Jesus taught them—as no one had—about who God is and what his real priorities are.  He taught them the importance of the heart, of loving others, of humility, and being a servant.  The disciples were denser donkeys than I, it seemed.  He was teaching them:  to know God, the purpose of eternal life.  Jesus was patient while they struggled with faith, debated who was greatest, even denied and deserted him.

Jesus didn’t use the word “adoption,” but he taught and modeled what it meant to be a son to his Father.  It was he who taught his disciples to address God as “Father.”  He used the word “Abba,” an intimate familial term.  This was new thought.  He taught them what the Father is like—a strong, loving, and trustworthy father, a king who would restore justice and love.  He called God “my Father and your Father.”  His followers were family, loyal and submissive to the Father and one another, loving one another and those without.  They learned (what a disciple does), and responded by loving and serving him as trust grew, abandoning their own agendas and self-focused will—even if it meant a cross.

God wants to be known and has made himself known.  He gave us all a clue in our own conscience, in creation, by how he led Israel, by the Scriptures he entrusted to them, and finally, in Jesus.  “Anyone who has seen me has seen the Father.”

I’m seeking here to cast a different light on the very old question about how God can be good and allow evil.  It cannot be answered by adding up all the evil and concluding thereby that a God who permits it must either be evil himself or powerless to stop it.  No, we must first see what is actually in his heart and mind; and the closest I can bring you to seeing this—whether you’re a Christian or not—is by analogy to a good father heart.  Jesus used that to teach about his Father, who is like a good father.

Parenthood has much to teach us about how God operates.  It is part of how we are made in his image.  The parent-child relationship has much to tell us about how God relates with people.

More on this in part 4,  The terrible corollary to freedom: evil, real love, trust, and good.

journey post 24–Honest to God, part 2, Discovering the good father who is there

“It’s not what you look at that matters, it’s what you see.”                                                                                                                                     —Thoreau

The voice in my head was a not-so-gentle urging:  “Take another look, Donkey….”  Donkey: my African name.  A good Manjako family name.  And a private joke between me and God.

“I don’t need to look at it—I know what the verse says, ‘My son, despise not the chastening of the Lord, for whom the Lord loves, he disciplines.’”  I was ready for the woodshed because I had dared to dust off my doubts about God’s love and goodness.  I knew the woodshed well.  A 2×4 upside the head from God was standard-issue in my zigzag journey.

But this was no longer a joke.  I had been watching good people go through great pain and suffering—it just never seemed to stop.  One Christian friend had candidly shared: “God is out to get me.”

In the dark recesses of my own soul was a long-suppressed, haunting, but familiar question about evil, a question that wouldn’t go away.  Why this suffering?  So much pain … Can God truly be good and loving?  A similar question arose when leaving Africa:  did God dangle dreams in front of me just to take them away and show me my unworthiness?

Most of the time, like most people, I could find other things to think about. But now it wouldn’t stop:  Did he care?  About these people?  About me?  He seemed distant, like my own dad.  “What do you really think of me, Lord?  Do you really love me?  I have to know!  I can’t go on like this!”

I was determined to be honest with myself and with God, and not stop until I had an answer.  I was back on that hospital bed in Vietnam.  This time, it was not about the existence of God or Jesus, but about God’s character.  My own self-esteem was mixed in somehow, but, fundamentally, at the heart of my question was, Who is this God?  Is he really good?  Was “Donkey” a joke between us or was it on me?

I had asked, but this verse about love and discipline was all I got.  I opened the Bible, Proverbs 3:11, and read every word:  “My son, do not despise the Lord’s discipline and do not resent his rebuke, because the Lord disciplines those he loves, as a father the son he delights in.”

I did a double-take: that last part, about fathers delighting in their sons….  My dad died when I was 13.  I needed him more than tears could say.  He left … or, God took him.  Thinking of God as my “father” was irrelevant.  I’m sure my dad loved me, in his own way, but he was never there for me.  Love?

That last clause: God “as a father… delights.”  Aside from the discipline part, the verse was saying that God, like any good father, seeks to do what’s best for his children simply because he delights in them: that’s the norm.  God is, after all, the inventor of fatherhood and motherhood, and God is not like my dad.  That’s not a slam on my dad: I needed to make that distinction explicit so I could see how I had become so locked into a dysfunctional understanding of God in his role as Father.  The word “delight” gave substance to the nearly vacant meaning of “love.”  “Delight” is a very human word, and it made “love” throb and glow with life and passion.  I was literally dumbfounded: “Lord, you delight in me?”

“As a father delights ….”  God delights in me.  I, as a son, am the object of his delight….

I had expected the woodshed 2×4 reinforcing my donkeyness.  God came instead in grace, gently opening my eyes so I could see that there was something I had missed ever so long.

I’ve written before about this “bookend” to my zigzag journey, the day I discovered the delight of God in—dare I say it?—the Donkey.  I rediscovered adoption and the key to seeing the heart of God.  You’re thinking, “I know this … Walt’s rehashing an old story.”  That is precisely not so, because that day I began to understand God’s father heart, which became the key to unlocking an answer to our question.

I discovered how little I knew this one I routinely called “Father”:  that was just a title.  I could cite chapter and verse for all the things I knew about him.  But the point was not to reconcile facts on file about God with the painful reality of a world filled with evil.  My desperation led to determination to know him as completely as possible.  I had  to see his heart and know his character.  But how?  Looking back at how that unfolded made me realize that there now has to be a Part Three to this.

Knowing anyone, especially their character, involves a relationship over time.  The Scriptures tell us about God’s character, but knowing him requires time and the Spirit to make it real.  We know our parents not because of a book on “parentology,” but because we lived with them and watched them and so we know them and their heart.  Knowing our friends involved a similar process.

It’s the same with God.  Someone may come to saving faith, get their ticket to heaven, their fire insurance paid up against the judgment day.  But knowing him doesn’t come in one moment.  Eternal life is given, as Jesus prayed (John 17), “that they might know you, the only true God, and Jesus Christ.”

I have several theology books.  They reflect developed, logical, scholarly, even elegantly-constructed systems produced by humble men.  The systems differ widely, though based on the same Bible and are therefore “biblical.”  Each is written by men who see all through the filter of human fallibility.  And not one of them addresses the role of God as Father.  They are like those multiple frag wounds I received in Vietnam: they don’t penetrate the vital organ, the father heart of God.  Yet Jesus spoke of little else.

Jesus taught those who would be his apprentices to live their lives each day as him living it, to see life from the Father’s perspective, and so to live it with his agenda in view.  He portrayed God as analogous to an earthly father and mother who take care of, provide for, who teach, train, and protect a family.  He taught them to give up their “small ambitions” and trust their “Abba,” a term akin to English “Papa.”

I don’t know everything about God; I can say that I know him–because he answered my call, Donkey that I am. The name was no joke on me, after all.  Yesterday was Palm Sunday, the day Jesus entered Jerusalem on his way to the cross.  Every Gospel account reminds me:  he chose to enter on a donkey….

Next:  Part 3:  Knowing his Father heart answers the quandary of a good God and an evil world.  And just how  is that?

a meta journey post: Outside the Box, Inside Common Sense

I like to think outside the box.  For example, I love stories about time travel, especially those involving actual historical events.  One of my favorite things to do as a kid was to imagine myself at the Battle of the Alamo and how I would have changed the outcome.  (I didn’t think about how winning that battle might have cost Texans their war for independence.)   I was 15 when John F. Kennedy was gunned down, and I’ve often mused on the what ifs of that tragedy and our subsequent history.

Thinking outside the box of historical events is generally a safe fantasy that can teach valuable lessons about choice and consequences and the complicated elements that make up every life event.

Thinking outside the box when it comes to Christianity and the Bible feels unsafe and dangerous—and it can be.  If you think that Republicans and Democrats have trouble agreeing on anything, think about the number of different protestant denominations and independent churches there are.  I spent the summer of 1977 studying French in Quebec at a small Bible institute, and there I began to understand why there are so many different kinds of churches:  When I arrived, the atmosphere was obviously strained.  The faculty had recently split because of a disagreement over whether Jesus had taken his literal blood to heaven to show the Father.  (Don’t ask.)  I’ll never forget the palpable hurt, the human detritus strewn about by those who valued their own opinions over love.   My take-away from this then was great puzzlement as to how on earth people who love Jesus can’t tolerate those who also love Jesus but disagree with them.  I found no real answer for this until I rediscovered adoption.

I was introduced to such distorted and unChristian thinking when we began our Bible school training in 1972.  We were among Christian fundamentalists for the first time.  Fundamentalists get a bad rap for their biblical literalism, legalism, and reputation for shooting their wounded.  Yet these people loved Jesus and were excited about Scripture—but I soon figured out that any variation of thought or teaching was looked on with suspicion.  I felt I had gone back to the McCarthy era, focused now on doctrinal loyalty, not political loyalty.  I was overwhelmed and too fearful of the consequences to question it then. 

In the midst of this, a wise teacher told us that if we ever think we’ve discovered new truth, we need to carefully check out what the Church has taught over the centuries.  This was common sense.   He did leave us some wiggle room:  Luther, after all, rediscovered justification by faith, though few others thought that his thinking outside the box would get him any further than the executioner.

Luther posting his “95 Theses”

Some six years ago, I made my rediscovery of spiritual adoption, and along with it, the father heart of God.  I was seeing red warning lights flashing, but Scripture does teach adoption—we’d been taught it in Bible school from Romans, Galatians, and Ephesians.  But the picture I was now forming from the Gospels of a father who wanted me to know how special I was to him, seemed like wishful thinking.  I couldn’t reconcile this with the sovereign, holy, righteous God angry with sin that I heard about week by week.  Yet Jesus likened God’s care to an earthly father’s and called him “Abba” (akin to “Papa”).  Paul (Eph 1:5) seemed to say that God anticipated adopting children with great pleasure and passion.

Among conservative churches, one hears warnings against teaching that emerged in the 19^th century about the “fatherhood of God,” presenting God as a kindly, grandfatherly type, complete with long white beard, who loves everyone the same and overlooks sin.  As I studied adoption and God’s role as father, I realized that there was no serious theological writing about God in this role.  There was plenty on his role as creator and judge, but no one ever mentioned the “fatherhood of God,” perhaps out of fear.  It occurred to me that spiritual McCarthyism was still alive and well.

In my study I found theologians consciously focused on the aspects of God that promoted his “glory”—his majesty, sovereignty, holiness, and righteousness—in order to counter the other teaching and protect God’s reputation.  (Protect God?  As if!)  Their books are still used in seminaries to train pastors.

The unfortunate result of this was that the Church (that’s people, by the way) was left in the dark about what it means to call God “Father.”  Left to their own, people imagine a God like a bad parent—and God comes out as judge, as demonstrated in one survey that shows ¾ of Americans, including Christians, view God in a negative light.  The truth about God’s father heart got swallowed up in erudite discussions and tomes that give adoption little space.  In many churches, what is communicated about God is a picture that leaves congregants running on the performance treadmill.  I call this the “ministry of condemnation.”  It leads to the very legalism and lack of tolerance that left me so puzzled in Quebec.

As you might suspect, when I started looking into adoption, I went with fear and trembling—quietly at first—searching out anything that would indicate I was not chasing after something to bolster my self-esteem or find a friendly God.  But I was spurred on by a promise in the prophet Jeremiah (29:13):  “You will seek me and find me when you seek me with all your heart.”  Long story short, one day in the library (where else?) I came upon a tape which linked me to some books which linked to some respected theologians and teachers who were also rediscovering adoption.  These people were seeing and teaching his father heart without neglecting his great holiness and majesty and all that gives him glory.

I’ve been around long enough, and I’ve been in leadership enough, to know how easy it is to play church and give out “authoritative” pronouncements about God that scare rather than attract.  I’ve seen enough destructive thinking about God and the wrong teaching that promotes it.  I want to promote good—and accurate—thinking about God through these blog posts.  That is what drives them (I hope). What we think of when we think of God is the most important thing about us.  If we think of him only as a judge or worse, we run from him or run to keep him “happy.” If we know him as Father, we run to him and with him.

If you’d like to explore for yourself, here are some resources I treasure that aided my search and helped  turn me from fear (by knowing his love) to freedom in a relationship with God my Father in the way I believe he intended:

Children of the Living God: Delighting in the Father’s Love, by Sinclair Ferguson, especially his chapter “The Spirit of Adoption.”  Ferguson is a pastor and teacher whose perspective on God changed radically as he explored and realized what it meant to be a son of God.

Sinclair Ferguson

Knowing God by J.I. Packer, a popular theologian and teacher now old as dirt, was first published in 1973.  Two chapters, “The Heart of the Gospel,” and “Sons of God,” are worth the price of the book.

J. I. Packer

A sermon series on adoption was given by Tim Keller, Pastor of Redeemer Presbyterian Church in Manhattan.  Keller’s sermons are engaging and thought provoking.  Sermons are available for download ($2.50 for mp3) at: http://www.redeemer.com.  Go to the “Sermon Store.”  Messages I have found particularly helpful are: “The Experience of Adoption.” February 8, 1998; “Witness of the Spirit,” April 6, 1997.

Tim Keller

Now, (hopefully), back to C.S. Lewis in the next post.

journey post 17: Radical Freedom

(Part III-b, CONCLUSION: The grammar school of freedom)

The word “radical” is an attention-getter.  It should be, for it includes the following ideas: ”far-reaching or thorough;  an inherent or fundamental part of the nature of someone or something; departure from tradition, innovative or progressive.”* All of these could describe true freedom.

“Freedom” implies freedom from restraint, obstacle, compulsion.  This was what my generation wanted so much in the 1960s, and we have now reaped its fruit:  a cultural buy-in to a more individualistic, ego centric, personal freedom.  If you doubt that, look at our governing elite: we used to call them “public servants”; look at a generation of young men who are still “adolescents” well into their twenties .

Christians speak of freedom with caveats attached.  We speak of being “free from sin,” (i.e., the penalty of hell and sin’s continuing hold in a life), “free from the law” (e.g., from the Mosaic law or a variety of legalistic expectations).  Thinking about some “radical” freedom seems dangerous, beyond the bounds of safety, so “freedom” generally comes with a “but…”: “I am free, but freedom has limits….”  The idea of being “free” feels good, and keeps us from seeing the performance treadmill where we try to make sure of our acceptance, never mind that we are becoming increasingly captive to fear.

At some point I recognized my own lip service to the idea of freedom.  If pressed, I could not have told you what it was.  That is so ironic, since Jesus’ statement about being set free by him was one of the first things that ever captivated me and drew me to him like nothing else.  It is ironic that I spent about 35 years on a “Christian” performance treadmill, never really sure of my acceptance.  I longed to be “free to…” and I knew from Scripture that there must be this “free to,” but it remained elusive.

That “free to” crystallized for me the day I wrote the essay about my relationship with my dad called, “The Missing Picture.”  Many things came together:  My growing understanding of what it meant to be an adopted son of Abba Father had nearly deleted the picture of “my old man in the sky”—and my trust was growing.  I was gaining a perspective on the nature of discipleship to Jesus (I call it “apprenticeship”) that seems to have largely disappeared from churches.  My earliest take on discipleship was that it meant learning the basic doctrines of salvation, the inspiration of the Bible, how to witness for Jesus, etc.  Once in a while as I read the Gospels, I pictured those first disciples traipsing around the country with Jesus—but to do what they did was certainly fantasy.  One day I was challenged to immerse myself in the Gospels, to apprentice myself to Jesus, the speaker explaining discipleship as “spending time with Jesus, learning from him to be like him.” The disciples did that.  I was now getting to know Jesus in a very personal way, watching him walk and talk and love people, hearing from his lips not simply Bible doctrine, but a way of seeing and thinking: it was his perspective I was gaining.  That was indeed radical.

In the passage (John 8) where Jesus says, “If the Son sets you free…” he had been speaking with some Jews (the physical descendants of Abraham) who believed him in some way, yet also wanted to kill him.  To these, he said: “If you hold to my teaching, you are really my disciples.  Then you will know the truth, and the truth will set you free” (John 8:31,32, NIV).  They were incensed, arguing that they had never been slaves.  But Jesus pointed out that, since they wanted to kill him, they were in fact slaves to sin, chasing after their own agenda.  “Now a slave has no place in the family, but a son belongs to it forever.  So if the Son sets you free, you will be free indeed” (John 8:35,36).  Jesus was modeling life as a son and apprenticing people to learn to live out their sonship to God in the community of a family.

Another thing came together for me that day.  While I would never find the missing picture of just me and my dad, I knew that I would in fact always be in the picture with my Father as a son in whom he delights.  I had been learning about spiritual adoption for a couple years, and it suddenly became reality:  My search for identity was over.  I knew who I was:  I am my Father’s son, and I am free.  That is radical.

All the dysfunctional reality of my relationship with my own dad (and my mom) suddenly fell away when I realized the ultimate father analogy was that of God as Father whose heart is with me.  To see the analogy, picture a fully functional family (which may be difficult), where the mother and father deeply love and are committed to each other.  They love and accept their children unconditionally.  They train them for life and responsibility in the world (and yes, that includes discipline).  They encourage the children in their individuality to develop their gifts and talents and potentiality—the things they like to do, not for some vicarious wish fulfillment of the parents.  They even allow them the freedom to fail…well, you get the idea: these are children who as adults will be free to exercise their individuality in the community, whether it’s the small family unit or the larger.  They will be free, not because they took their independence, but because they were raised in the environment of honest, loyal, giving and sacrificial, self-forgetful love and set free—given independence—to do the same.

Family is the ideal environment in which freedom is learned (and ultimately given), and love is the “environment” in which we were designed to live out that freedom in community, where it can flourish.  True freedom is a matter of the heart, and the heart can be free no matter the external circumstances.  Because the heart is designed to grow up loved within a community, that is where freedom will thrive.  That is where meaning and significance and satisfaction lie.  The contradictory desires of the heart I mentioned last post will be arbitrated in the environment of love.

As for defining freedom:  true freedom doesn’t yield to easy definition.  Basically, it is this:  I am truly free when I live out my identity in the environment for which I was designed, the environment I must have, in fact.  The apostle made this radical statement, that the only thing that truly counts in Christ is “faith expressing  itself through love” (Galatians 5:6).

It was this freedom I discovered on that day at the writer’s conference.  After 35+ years of running on the performance treadmill as a “legalist,” there is still a lot of baggage, but it is getting unpacked and sorted.  God my Father, the perfect parent (he invented the concept, after all), is teaching me how to live out the freedom that I have as a son.  I love because he first loved me, (see 1 John 4:13-19).  I am free, but some of this “free” still feels like untested theory, and residual fear is sometimes palpable.

An eternity ago—or was it yesterday?—I crouched behind a mud hootch in a rice field in South Vietnam, waiting for the mortar fire to stop so I could make a break to safety.  I didn’t make it.  Laying on my back and helpless, I saw the Chaplain break through the bush some 20 meters away coming for me like an angel of God.  And he was, quite literally, an angel, for the word “angel” means messenger.  The message at the time was a question:  Is God really there?  Today there’s no angel, and there’s no question.  My Father stands there at the edge of the field, beckoning.  “Come on, son.  I’m here.  Even if you don’t make it across the clearing, it will be okay.  I’m not going anywhere.”  He smiles.  I see his eyes, so I’m poised to run….

*New Oxford American Dictionary

journey post 16: A Son’s Heart Set Free

(Part III-a , on The grammar school of freedom)

“If the Son sets you free, then you will be really free”  (John 8:36).

The first time I remember reading those words was 1970 or ‘71.  I had this little paperback New Testament, a new, contemporary English version that I was reading so much it was falling apart.

But the verse puzzled me.  Free?  Close by was another verse that people quote a lot:  “You shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you free.”  Jesus didn’t seem to be talking about being free from hell.

Freedom was on everyone’s lips in the 60s.  It was the time when our nation, free from the Nazi menace, was getting schooled in what we thought freedom meant, nationally, racially, personally.  Having “survived” Vietnam, I felt very alive and free.  But I would soon be stepping into a religious world beset by legalism, and would not recognize it because I did know how legalistic and performance-minded I already was.  The speed of the performance treadmill in my new world would be considerably faster.  It took 35 years for me to finally get off the treadmill and understand Jesus’ words, “really free.”

I had been confused by all the personal freedom that people were claiming for themselves in the 60s.  I thought there was something wrong with it, but I was unsure why.  Back then, it was likely due to my legalistic sense of self-righteousness:  I was okay, they were not.  They were just selfish and sinful.  I was to be reinforced in that condemnatory view by the new religious milieu into which I was about to enter.

But there was more to  that view than selfishness, which most would agree is wrong.  The 60s thinking went something like this:  “I am free when I am free from all hindrances and obstacles to do what I want.”  The idea wasn’t new by any means; what was new was its wide acceptance.  Within a few years, it would become the unconscious working assumption of the shapers and movers of our nation:  parents, teachers, lawyers, business people, politicians, et al.

So what could have been wrong with that?  Did we not experience a “new birth of freedom,” becoming more tolerant, more accepting and encouraging to people pursuing their individual dreams?  Yes, we did.  But the idea of individualistic freedom is not wrong just because it is selfish.  It is wrong, I now realize, because it does not take account of the complex nature and contradictory desires of the human heart.  (More on this in the next post.)

If there is one thing I have learned in forty-odd years as a Christian, it is that the important things of life come from the heart.  From the heart comes the “ask not what your country can do for you,” the sacrifices on Normandy Beach, the countless acts of charity and love, the routine kindness of friends; and from it also comes cheating on tests, fathers walking away from families, Auschwitz and My Lai.  We puzzle over evil in our world, but in our hearts, we know the answer because we sense what our own conscience says is our inability to consistently do the right.  History is a mirror that we ignore at our peril, a mirror which tells us not to trust in the “basic goodness” of mankind.  Individualistic freedom has become so important that we are unable to evaluate the larger society around us and understand just what is being sucked away from us.  It is being sucked away from our hearts, and we are blind to it.

I was as blind as anyone as long as I was on that treadmill.  Scripture says we cannot evaluate and help someone else as long as we have a log in our own eye (Matthew 7).  In my case, the log was a treadmill….

Here now is a foretaste of the freedom that was to come into my life at the end of the zigzag….

By 2006, I had not solved the underlying problem of what made me a people-pleaser or performance minded.  I was just becoming aware of my thinking, how wrong it was, how self-destructive.  Our church put a premium on pursuing personal holiness such that those who failed were suspect—which set some to running even faster on the treadmill without prospect of being acceptable.

I finally got honest with myself the same as I did on a hospital bed in Vietnam long ago.  I admitted that I did not know if God cared about me at all.  So I asked him:  “Lord, what do you really think of me?  I must know.  I can’t go on like this!”  Sitting in my despair, a verse from Proverbs came to mind, (3:12), that I’d only ever heard when our church disciplined errant members:  “…the Lord disciplines those he loves, as a father the son he delights in.”  Delights?  “Lord,” I said, “you delight in me??”  It was one of those moments when the dawning light changes everything.  Delight?  How could it be?

I Googled my question, and was shocked but intrigued to see links referencing the teaching we had once received in Bible school about our spiritual adoption, that God the Father has adopted those who trust in Jesus as his children.  Back then, it had bounced off my emotional baggage.  I remembered something my friend Andy told me when they adopted a son.  I asked him (this was 1973), “Are you going to tell him he’s adopted?”  “Of course,” came the reply.  “I want him to know just how special he is.”

I began in earnest, exploring “adoption” in Scripture, reading everything I could get my hands on in theology books (not much there) and the personal experiences of various other Christians.  (My reflection and research eventually led to a thesis that I called, “God is out to get you.”)  What did it mean that God is my “Father.”  Wasn’t it merely a title used in prayer?

Long story short, my thinking was getting revised by what I was learning.  I began to focus my Bible reading on the Gospel accounts to find out if Jesus said anything about it.  I read the Gospels so much I began to feel as though I were one of those disciples walking around with Jesus, spending time with him, watching and listening, learning from him to think like him, to know his agenda and what was important to God.  What I was learning was all about what it meant to be an adopted son of the Father.  Jesus didn’t use the word “adoption,” but his teaching was all about a relationship with God and what the Father is like.  Jesus’ confrontations with the leaders were about their legalism  and their distorted view of God:  Christian writer A.W. Tozer once commented, “What comes into our minds when we think about God is the most important thing about us.”*  I began to see how distorted my own picture of God truly was so I set out to get to know him as I had never before.  Jesus taught his disciples to call God their “Abba,” a familiar, intimate name like “Papa.”  He taught them that the Father (Abba) is like the perfect earthly father who always loves, always gives, always protects and provides, who loves unconditionally and never pulls away.  He showed them God by his life: “If you have seen me you have seen the Father.”  Much fell into place for me as I read Jesus, learned all over again to be his disciple, an “apprentice.”

On the day at that writer’s conference that I realized I would never be in the picture with my earthly dad, I also found something greater:  the identity and the key to the freedom I had searched for all my life.  I am my Father’s son.  I am adopted.  This is my identity.  I am loved and delighted in simply because I now belong to him.  Being a son was the key to my freedom.  And I still almost hear the quiet voice of my Father in heaven saying to me, “My son, you will always be in the picture with me.”

Free at last.

_____

* The Knowledge of the Holy, The Attributes of God: Their Meaning in the Christian Life (San Francisco, CA: HarperCollins, 1961), 1.