The Stories We Live In

We are all products of the stories we live in.  There is a story out there, believed by many that says we exist as a mere accident. It claims that everything we see, taste, touch, and experience exists by pure chance. If the start of that story wasn’t depressing enough, it’s version of how things end is even worse.  This story says at the end something will happen to destroy everything we see, like a meteor or the sun exploding, and nothing will exist anymore. An accidental beginning and a meaningless end.

I want to live my life in the story of the people of God.  This story says that we were created, formed intentionally by a loving God who made us in his own likeness.  We were made to resemble this loving creative God. This story goes on to say that, although we have failed at our central reasons for existing and filled the earth with all kinds of hells, that this story is not over and evil will not have the last laugh. This story says we are headed, not toward nothingness, but toward fullness.  This story says we are headed toward redemption, we are headed toward the world set to rights, we are headed toward new creation and a new heavens and new earth.  We are moving toward a kingdom that is working into the world like yeast that is worked into a large amount of dough until it works into all the dough… as our teacher and Rabbi described it. We live in a story of progression, one that starts in a garden and ends in what the scriptures describe as a city which comes from heaven and has gates that never close and a river of life that flows out of it where trees grow and on these trees are leaves for the healing of the nations.  This story ends with a beautiful picture of redemption.  When I hear this story I want to align my life to be part of that story.

That’s the big version of the story, but lets bring it a little closer to home. Something to for all of us to remember… we are largely the products of the stories we tell ourselves in our imaginations every day.  We live according to the stories we tell ourselves.  Here’s an example;

Picture a husband.  He pulls up to work and writes a note in frustration to stick on his dash as a reminder to buy milk on the way home.  He was supposed to yesterday and forgot which frustrated his wife and neither of them got to eat their cereal that morning and sat together in silence, except for crunching sound of chewing on toast. As he writes that note he remembers that he forgot to take out the kitchen trash which he couldn’t have pushed down any further and pictures his wife going over to throw out the junk mail and upon seeing the trash full… she rolls her eyes, closes the trash and sets the mail on top of the trash can.  As he walks through the front door he is warmly greeted by their young receptionist and thinks, “I wish my wife still greeted me like that instead of reminding me about the trash like she’ll probably do when I walk in the door tonight.” He sits at his desk and glances over at a picture the family had taken on vacation last year in the outer banks and remembers how he had forced the smile in that picture after he had noticed his wife’s eyes follow that super fit jogger for a couple seconds past “noticing.” Later when talking to a co-worker at lunch as they complained about something their teenager had done he let it slip out that it sounds like something his wife might do and she is supposed to be an adult.  He thinks to himself, “How did we get so far off track?”  How do you think he will relate to his wife when he gets home?

Now think of a different husband.  When he is sitting at work he looks over at a black and white picture of his wife he took last autumn. For a second he goes back to that beautiful moment with his wife and thinks of the things they laughed at that day and they way she smelled.  It makes him think about what life will be like when he gets off work and gets to eat the mango salsa chicken she promised to cook for dinner. Later, when talking to a co-worker over lunch he tells a story about the time he got to surprise his wife with a weekend trip to New York and how it made them feel like kids again right when they were having a hard week and feeling like they were in a slump.  On the way home he hears a song on the radio that was was playing in that little ice cream shop where he had taken his wife on that ever-so-awkward first date and chuckles to himself  as he thinks, “how did I get so lucky?”  How do you think he will relate to his wife when he walks in the door to see her?

How do you think the things they imagined through the day impacted the reality of the way they related to their wives as they got home? What if we do a similar thing in our relationship to God?

Let’s look at a different angle. Picture a man in his late 30’s who has been a Christian for the last 15 years.  He really tries to live what he thinks is a godly life but has been having a really hard time with it.  One Wednesday morning he overslept and was rushing to get out the door.  He whispers a prayer under his breath for God to be with him through the day but pictures God looking at him like a disapproving father because he knows he was supposed to get up early enough to read his bible. When he gets to the first job of twelve that day where he is hooking up cable at a house he starts to feel guilty for the free cable he hooked up at his house. He thinks to himself, “I must be such a disappointment to you God.” As he says that he flashes back to that really mean, silver-haired sunday school teacher he had as a boy that told him bible stories and yelled at him about sharing. As he feeds a wire through the wall he catches his finger on a nail and swears to himself and imagines his organ playing aunt Millie telling him that God likes good little boys, so don’t rough house or say bad words in church. As he drives to the last job of the day he tries to swallow his medicine and listen to christian radio like he thinks he should, but gives up after half a song that strikes him as cliche and slips in his Metallica CD just to hear and emotion he can actually relate to. He thinks that this music probably falls into the “don’ts” categories of the do’s and don’ts he heard about in church but is so tired and angry from fighting all day that he just turns up the music and drowns out the world.
-What do you think is the nature of his relationship with God based on the way he pictures God looking at him?  If your minds eye pictures God as perpetually having a look of disappointment on his face when he sees you, how are you going to view your relationship with him?  The bigger question is, is God really like that?  Is that the right view of God or has a distortion been whispered in our ear?

So here is the big question.  What story is informing our lives? Because there is a reality to face here. We are all telling ourselves a story about ourselves and the world we live in. We are imagining what other people think of us and what God thinks of us and we are responding to the world as if those things are true. Are we informing our interior imagination with the truth?  Especially when it comes to how God thinks about us. We become what you see- we become like what we are focused on. We ascribe worth to something by dwelling on it. In that way, we become like what we worth-ship. (worship)  The story we rehearse in our inner monologue will inform our reality.  The story we practice in our imagination we end up publicizing in our actions.

Whether we realize it or not we primarily experience our world through our imaginations.  Think of the first time you sat behind the wheel of a car.  How old are you? Were you learning to drive or sitting on someones lap.  If you can’t remember think of the first time you got behind the wheel of your first car and what it smelled like and what it felt like to drive it home for the first time.  How do you know that was your experience?   You think you are remembering but what you are seeing is a re-experiencing.  All thought is recreating in our mind what we experience in the real world.  Imagination is bringing you back to the real world.  When you remember you are imagining it.  That’s how we experience the world.   If you think of what you are doing after this you are anticipating and imagining what you will be doing.   What you hope or fear leads you to act in certain ways-  that is and expression of faith.
- Have you ever disliked someone you never met because you were living out of the story someone else told you about them?
Have you ever gotten really mad at someone for a conversation that they weren’t even there for because the whole thing happened in your own head?

This has been quite the journey for me personally.  To a certain extent I think we all have distorted views of God, but I can only speak with much authority on my personal journey of trying to see into the heart of the true God.  To do that, I continue to sort through all the images of God that have been thrown at me in my lifetime to see God for who he really is.  When it comes down to it I want to see Jesus as he really is, and scripture says he is the image of the invisible God. Jesus is God with skin on so I want to know what he is like. Jesus is perfect theology.

I grew up in church and in a Christian home and for a while went to Christian school.  The impression I got of God, whether or not it was said out loud, was that God was very strict.  The way the story was told to me left me thinking God was watching my every move like a micro-manager waiting for you to screw up so he could teach you a lesson.  You could never be good enough and could never please God.  I understood that God was great, powerful, and to be feared but I really didn’t get the picture that he was loving, passionate about me, or had good things for me.  I knew the verses were there in the Bible but that wasn’t the experience of my most of the people I knew at that time.  I remember being about fifteen years old and being taken to lunch by a volunteer youth leader.  He talked about how he had seen a huge deer that morning in his backyard with a large rack of antlers. He was so in awe of it’s beauty and felt God whisper to him, “That’s how I see you.”  He told me the story through tears. I remember being so taken back because it was so opposite of how I had learned to view God.  I was just starting to lead worship at this time and, looking back now, I was very comfortable singing the “Holy is the Lord” type songs but I was uncomfortable singing things like, “Jesus You’re More Than a friend.”  The way I imagined God to be, the way I thought he looked at me influenced every area of my life.  The way I pictured God even informed the kinds of songs I was comfortable singing to him.  My picture of God at that point was more influenced by religious people than by the God revealed in Jesus Christ.  As I got a little older I began the process of looking for the God I knew had to be out there instead of the image of him I was handed.
The hard part in this season was that my image of God was more informed by other people explanation of him than my experience with him. At this point in my life I would say it’s pretty hard to have and accurate or healthy view of God if there isn’t time set aside to pursue him in a personal way. We have to go to Jesus daily and ask him the question, “Who are you?  What are you really like?”

It was sometime in my early twenties that I started having a daily time with God. I had various healthy and unhealthy motives for doing this but part of it was that I was tired of hearing everything second hand and I wanted to go to the source myself.  Although we are a community of believers I do still believe there is a very personal component to this faith that we each need to invest in.  I’ll share how this process has worked out for me and hopefully some of it will be helpful to you.  Whatever is helpful keep and whatever you don’t find helpful please feel free to ignore.

At first my daily discipline consisted of just getting up in the morning with coffee and reading the scripture before work. (Because I’m a morning person and I function well then) The first benefit I actually noticed from this was that it gave me an ear for truth.  We always have four voices coming at us, the voice of God, of ourselves, of others and of the enemy. The daily practice of ready scripture helped me sort through those voices to hear what was true.  It was easier for me to distinguish truth through the day as information came at me.

That was phase one of my devotional life and that worked really well for a few years. What I’m sharing here is my experience and in this part I’m trying to be descriptive of what I’ve done not prescriptive for what you should do. Ultimately follow God as he leads you not as he has led me… but I think this might be helpful.

I noticed after a few years of my primary practice revolving around daily bible reading that I was always reading things the same way and seeing the same things and I wasn’t really being challenged by the scripture in the way I used to be. The process of just reading a couple of chapters or a book of the bible and praying and meditating on it wasn’t producing the same results as it used to.  So, I decided to branch out at that point.  I asked some friends who had spiritual lives I respected what books they were reading and what sermons or lectures they were listening to. I wanted to know from people I admired what was influencing their lives and their stories. I took their recommendations and incorporated those books, podcasts, prayer or meditation methods… whatever into my morning ritual. Then after taking a break to do that stuff I would come back to the scripture and notice that I was able to see them in fresh ways again. It helped me be challenged in new ways and the scriptures came alive again but more than that, the person of Jesus who these scriptures and sermons were pointing to came alive to me in a fresh way.  I’ve been at this practice for about ten years now and would say this is one of the main things God has used to reveal himself to me.  This is one of thing main keys he has used to show me how wonderful he really is.  It has been a time to grow my relationship with God, it has been therapeutic, it has been healing, and nurturing, and exciting for me.  Of course there are times when I feel like I’m trudging through the mud and others when I’m soaring with the eagles but I don’t think I get one without the other and I really believe it’s worth it.

I believe my time alone with God each day is the second most important influence on my faith next to being in a community of faith. I always say there is sanity in community and I really believe the best thing you can do for your walk with God is to walk it with other people. It will change your life if you put yourself around people who seem to understand something about Jesus that you don’t. It has been one of the greatest blessings of my life to be around people who help me see God in fresh ways.

Sometimes when people tell me they feel like they’ve lost passion, they are frustrated and feeling alone and distant from God I’ll ask them, “What are you reading, what are you listening to, who are you talking to these days?”  What I’m really asking is, “What is informing the story of your life? What is informing the inner monologue you tell yourself every day? We have a million different things that inform our inner monologue, that imagination that governs the way we relate to our creator.  So I’m always asking myself what I’m letting in that influences the part of my brain that paints the image of the God I’m called to reflect.  What am I taking in to inform the way I think about God, the way I believe him to view me, the way I believe he feels about the people around me?  What is informing that story?

I used to want to go to God or the scriptures for answers.  I had questions and I wanted them answered.  I noticed something about Jesus.  He rarely answered a question when someone asked.  He usually would ask another question or tell a story.  For some reason though I wanted answers. Why? So I could live a better story with my life?  I have to put myself in the story to reflect the God of the story.  As I see and experience God’s love I become more loving, his joy I become more joyful, his peace and I become more peaceful.  As we behold attributes of God we reflect the attributes of God. We were made in the image of God and called to mirror his nature back into creation.  We are to re-present Jesus into this world because we will always reflect the world we are most aware of.  We want to be people who are aware of the presence of the king of hope.  I’m starting to believe that whatever part of me isn’t full of hope is under the influence of a lie and I want the truth of the King of hope to be reflected in me.

What I Mean When I Use The Word…

There is an important lesson I’ve learned in talking to Christians the last couple years… so I thought I would pass on.  I’ve noticed that although we use a lot of the same words, biblical words, we mean very different things by them.  Often, after a conversation, I kick myself when I realize we were using words like, salvation, grace, faith but meaning very different things by them. When you combine these deep words, there can be even more confusion if you are defining them differently.  When I hear a phrase like “salvation by grace through faith in Jesus” I have to remember that people from different backgrounds mean very different things by the same sentence. Even when people ask me if I’m a Christian I have to ask them what that word means to them.  I’m not ashamed of my faith but I’m ashamed of what others have said and done (maybe to the person I’m talking to) while calling themselves by that title.

Anyway…

Many in the church translate these biblical words from a Western Evangelical mindset (for an easy title) and others are translating the word or phrase from an ancient Jewish context, a Greek mindset context, and Eastern Orthodox context, an Asian Orthodox context…The list goes on and on. I’m not saying it’s a bad thing that we understand them differently, but maybe we need to find out what each other means when they use these thick words.  These words are so deep that maybe when we understand what someone else means by them in their faith context, we can deepen our own faith.

Through my own experiences with faith, my faith community, my years of studying scripture and reading nerdy theology books, I have a lens through which I read these words.  I wanted to give some examples of some biblical words and how they are commonly understood (in the west) and how I understand them at this point in my faith journey. So these are my crude and short explanations of words from my experiences in conversations with people.

Believe:

Common- To intellectually accept something as true or fact

My Current Understanding- Implies trust as revealed by word and deed

Faith:

Common- The mental ascent to believe in something

My Current Understanding- The substance of what is hoped for

Gospel:

Common- Believe in Jesus and the bible so your soul can get into heaven when you die.

My Current Understanding- The crucified and risen Jesus is Israel’s Messiah and therefore the world’s true King. (Too short- read this from my friend Joe Boyd)

Salvation:

Common- Going to heaven when you die

My Current Understanding- Heaven invading earth to transform, renew and rescue

Soul:

Common- Some include Spirit in this definition and some say there is a body, soul, and spirit… three parts. (Word spirit and soul is interchangeable in most of the NT) This is the spiritual part of you that lives forever.

My Current Understanding- The word for soul in the New Testament is the word πσυχηε (psoo-khay) where we get our word psyche. Basic concept- breath of life.

Heaven:

Common- The place we escape to in death or at the end of time to get away from this place.  We don’t know what it’s like but it should be great.

My Current Understanding- Where God’s will is fully done and his reign is seen everywhere. Heaven is what is promised to come down like a city at the end of Revelation to the newly created heavens and earth.

Repent:

Common- Ask Jesus to forgive your sins and take away guilt

My Current Understanding- Change your mind and thus your behavior

Word of God:

Common- The Bible

My Current Understanding- 1. God speaking directly to someone. 2. Jesus the living Word of God.

Grace:

Common- God’s unmerited favor toward believers

My Current Understanding- God’s unmerited favor toward his creation

Election:

Common- Those chosen at the exclusion of others

My Current Understanding- Those chosen for the benefit of others, to be a city on a hill.  The first fruits of the coming redemption.

Regardless where we all land on a variety of words and beliefs, I want to come back to the place of remembering that we take the cup and bread and together, we remember who this is all supposed to be about.

 

To Take on Flesh

Incarnation- to take on flesh

The supernatural crossed into the natural

The intangible became concrete

 

As if force could become a hammer

Peace could become a stream

Anger could become a hurricane

Power could become an ocean

Tenderness could become a flower

 

This is how God came:

Love became man

The fire put on flesh

The invisible creator became part of the visible created

This is Jesus

The Best Relational Decision

About a year ago I made one of the best decisions of my life. It was a decision about how I wanted to interact in relationships. In some ways it was a response to a lot of relational conflicts going on around me, and even some that included me.  I was sure that most of these conflicts escalated beyond what was necessary.

So I made this decision:

I decided to always believe people’s intentions were good, but their ability to act on them wasn’t good.  I decided to assume people had the best at heart when they were communicating, but didn’t have the skills to pull off communicating their intentions.

I know that not everyone has the best intentions, it’s not universal, but I also know that most people aren’t walking around wanting to screw people over.  Most people don’t walk around with evil intentions and although I don’t want to be naive, I also don’t want to jump to assumptions about where people are coming from. This has really helped me get to the core of issues.

We all have this tendency when someone offends us to project motivations onto people they don’t really have.  We assume because they hurt us that they meant to hurt us or they have it out for us… even with people who have a history of showing us they care about us and have our best at heart.  We make the problem worse and deepen the injury because we add the assumption of evil motivations onto the hurtful experience.

The decision I made helped me confront the experience of being hurt without projecting intentions onto the other person which, 95% of the time, they didn’t have.  This has made the time between offense and reconciliation much shorter.   I don’t know if I have fully recovered and experienced healing from some experiences that happened before this decision, but I have stopped picking up as much relational baggage along the way.

I have been able to say, “When this happened it felt like (whatever).”  Almost every time they have come back with, “Wow, that wasn’t my heart at all.”  Or they realize they were acting out of their own assumptions and projecting motivations onto me that I didn’t have.

I don’t know if I’m explaining this well but I hope a piece of it comes across because it has helped me tremendously in my relationships… especially the ones where we have to interact on a daily basis where we are constantly rubbing up against each other’s issues.

So I’m going to keep believing that the people who I live with and work along side want good things for me and have the best heart toward me… even if they don’t always know how to communicate it, don’t always know how to show it, and don’t always act like it in stressful situations.  The last year of experimenting with it has been paying off.  I think I’ll keep it up.

Maybe I’m Supposed To Be This Way

I’m getting this sneaky feeling that God made me this way on purpose.  Maybe all that questioning about why I am the way I am and why I like the things I like isn’t all that helpful.  Maybe I’m supposed to be the way I am, maybe I was designed this way on purpose.   A recent experience revealed this to me in a new way.

Here it goes:

All of my life I have loved music.  As early as I can remember I would walk around the house making up songs.  I would hum melodies and make up words as I went.  It’s just something that has always been there.  As I got older I became more interested in musical instruments and started playing the piano.  Later I found the guitar and that’s when obsession set in.  No one had to tell me to practice.  I would get home and just sit with my dad’s old Martin acoustic for hours.   It was normal for me to spend about four hours a day playing instruments all through high school.  The more I played the more I wanted to do music as a career.  I loved playing instruments and writing songs and wanted to spend my life doing it.

I kept having a problem though that my other musician friends didn’t seem to have.  I never had a style.  There was never a certain musical style I gravitated toward.  This was completely foreign to everyone I knew who tended to listen to and play a particular style of music.  My musical collection and what I liked to listen to and sit around and play was so all over the map that I could never land on the “kind” of musician I wanted to be.  Even to this day if you flip through the CDs in my car you find Eminem right along side of Rachmaninoff, Muse, Billy Joel, Disturbed, Miles Davis, Smashing Pumpkins, Damien Rice, The Carpenters, AC/DC, Chicago, Ben Folds, Two Pac, The Beatles, Earth Wind and Fire, Matt Redman, Fred Hammond, Stevie Wonder, Brad Paisley and the list can go on for days.  Nothing has changed. Yesterday I drove to work listening to Kanye West and Jay-Z’s “Watch the Throne” album and today it was the Punch Brothers.  I love the thick heavy beats of hip-hop, the soaring strings of classical, the tearing sound of a heavy guitar.  To me there is nothing like the pluck of an acoustic guitar but I love the digital landscape that electronic music opens us up to.  I love a good horn section but I also love one guy sitting there along on a baby grand piano.

I’ve always had my musical passions all over the map and frankly… I felt bad about that.  I always felt inferior because I didn’t have a style that I liked enough to want to play all the time.  I thought I would never be able to pick a musical style and so I could never play in a band that knew what it wanted to be.  I’ve only ever been in one band and after a few months they kicked me out.  For a musician that was worse than getting dumped.  I wasn’t like any other musician and it didn’t seem like a good thing.

Just recently I had an experience that made me think this supposed weakness was a good thing.  One of our recent projects at the Vineyard has been to venture into the world of movies.  This started slow and has grown into something pretty exciting.  There has been little building blocks that have led up to this project but this was the project that brought it all home for me.

I spent the better part of the last two months scoring our first feature film called Fenced Off.  Since it was such a low budget project and we couldn’t buy songs for it, I had to do the whole soundtrack. With the exception of one song I wrote, recorded, produced, mixed and mastered every piece of music in that movie.  This scared me to death and I was majorly convinced I would fail miserably.  But, I think God had something else in mind and something else to show me.

When you are deciding what music to put over a scene in a movie there is a process called “spotting.”  When you spot a film you sit with the director and play different pieces of music under the scene to find what’s called a “temp track.”  The temp track is a piece of music that has the right feel to go along with the scene, so the director (Brad Wise) tells the composer (me) to go write and record him a song that has that basic sound and feel to it.   The opening scene needed to be a groovy 90′s hip hop track that was similar to a Jurassic 5 song.  Then we needed quirky instrumental music to help make fun of the main character.  We later got to a scene that had a Coldplay song for the temp track and a scene later a song that had a Mumford and Sons feel.  There was one scene where the main character figures out what he can do to fix the situation and for that it needed to have more classical strings, harps, and pianos to give it the right feel. Then the song needed to end with a quirky fun folky feel to it.  Sound like that would all come from one musical artist?  Well on our budget, it had to!

Suddenly the thing I had been insecure about as a musician, not having a style, seemed like a huge asset.  I had to be all over the map to do this film.  In a two-month span I used more of my musical gifts and interests than I ever had before. I’m super thankful for the opportunity but I’m even more thankful to God who seemed to wink at me that whole time and say, “See, I made you this way on purpose.”

Do you ever wonder, “Why did God make me this way? Why do I have this seemingly unrelated gift mix?  Why do I have these interests and what am I supposed to do with them?  How do make sense of how I’m made?  Am I this way on purpose?”

It might not make sense now, but I’m guessing you are the way you are with the gifts you have for a reason.  Maybe, just maybe you were made the way you are for reasons you can’t even see yet.

Fenced Off is showing at the Cincinnati Film Festival Oct 1st 2011 at 3pm.

A Different Look at the Fall

Genesis 3 is the description of the fall of man.  Let me explain it the way I was taught and see if it’s familiar to you.  It goes something like this:  In the beginning everything was perfect in the Garden of Eden. God told Adam and Eve they could eat of any tree in the garden.  The only exception was one tree, right in the middle of the garden; God put a tree there to test them.  He told them they couldn’t eat the fruit from that tree or they would die.  Even though they could eat from all the other trees, they decided to believe the serpent, disobey God, and eat the fruit from the one tree they were forbidden not to eat from.  Because they ate the fruit, all of us were born slaves to sin.

I feel like God has been whispering to me so much about his character that it has made me reevaluate the interpretation of many scriptures, including this story.  This version of the story that is so common makes me ask, “Why did God put the tree there at all? ” Why did God set man up to fail like a person who says, “don’t think of a pink elephant” (which of course you will immediately do)?  It makes God sound like someone who would put a cookie in front of a kid and say, “you can look but not touch.”  Also, did God put the fate of the downfall of all of human history in a juicy ancient pear? (Or apple if you prefer) Did God set them up to fail from the start? What does that say about God?  Is that consistent with the character of Jesus? (P.S. that last question is the most important theological question you can ask when looking at any doctrine.)

Let me propose that there might be a better way to understand this story and that a different way of viewing it might help.  This explanation has been helpful for me in understanding a bit more about the nature of God, man, and original sin.

First off, the picture in the Genesis story describes the tree as “the tree of the knowledge of good and evil.” This tree produces fruit.  Whenever scripture uses an image (like fruit), it’s helpful to ask where else that image is used.  How about the fruit of the spirit, or “you will know them by their fruit,” or “and tree that doesn’t bear good fruit will be cut down and thrown in the fire.” How about asking the question, what kind of fruit does the tree of the knowledge of good and evil bear?  Maybe we can tell from the story.

A common title for the “enemy” in scripture is “the accuser,” “the deceiver,” or “the satan.” Satan is actually the title of a role or office, not a proper name, but it is used that way at times even in the original language.  The titles of “the accuser” and “the deceiver” best apply to the role played by the serpent in this story.  It’s interesting that every statement out of the serpent’s mouth is deceptive, manipulative and judgmental.  He accuses God of lying to them and tries to get them into the judgment seat against the character of God.

If you want to know what the fruit of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil is, it’s stepping into the judgment seat against God and others.  It’s the decision to judge for one’s self what is good (me) and evil (others) instead of living by what God has said.  It’s taking upon ourselves the claim that we can decide what is good and what is evil.  It’s a claim to be like God as one who can define the good from the evil.  It’s believing that God resembles the distorted image being described by the whispers of the Accuser.

Man was created to love God and remain close to him, love each other, and care for the world around us, but when man decided to be in the seat of judge against God he sealed his fate.  When mankind believed the voice of the Accuser and joined in the accusation, he gave permission for that voice to gain power instead of silencing it.  When we believe the lie, we empower the liar.

Look what happens as soon as they take the fruit… they are known by their fruit.  Adam immediately accuses God and Eve in one breath. “The woman you put here with me—she gave me some fruit from the tree, and I ate it.” Eve immediately jumps on board and joins the voice of the accuser by saying, “The serpent deceived me, and I ate.”  They put down love for God and each other in one breath and built a relational wall against God and each other by their judgment. Sin entered the world then the same way it does now… by our permission and will.

What Adam and Eve did was ignore the image of God revealed to them as they walked with him “in the cool of the day,” and instead, bought into a false image of God.  The words of the serpent came and they didn’t say, “That isn’t consistent with the God we know.”  Instead they bought into a false image the deceiver presented.

I think we all do this to a certain extent and have to continually refocus and look again at the God revealed in Jesus.  When I was in the middle of a lot of health problems, I remember wondering if God was doing it to me for some reason and thinking maybe it was because of something I did.  I have now repented of that way of thinking and it hurts me to think I could’ve looked at Jesus through such a distorted lens.  Satan comes to kill, steal, and destroy and I had to repent of thinking Jesus (who came that we may have life to the full) had taken Satan’s job and inflicted me.  I had to remember again, “how God anointed Jesus of Nazareth with the Holy Spirit and power, and how he went around doing good and healing all who were under the power of the devil, because God was with him.”

People would tell me that I wasn’t getting healed because I didn’t have enough faith.  I started recognizing that as the voice of the accuser and not that of Jesus who healed when the man said, “I do believe, help me in my unbelief.”  People said, “Maybe you did something to bring this on yourself and you need to pray and ask what it is so you can repent of it.”  So my good Father in heaven would punish me and not even tell me why?  What kind of good God would do that?  We who are evil give good gifts to our children, “how much more will your Father in heaven give good gifts to those who ask him!”

Or, ever heard something like this? A drunk driver hits and kills a teenager and someone says, “God must have allowed it for a reason.”  That teenager was killed because the drunk driver chose to get in his car impaired, not because God allowed it.  It happened as a result of the driver’s free will, not “God’s mysterious plan.”  Even statements like that sound like a distortion of God’s character to my ears now.

Maybe it’s not so much that a “good God allows bad things to happen.” Maybe when it comes down to it, we’ve allowed all of it.

Recently, so much of the way I’ve been hearing people describe God makes me say, “That isn’t like the God I know. That isn’t consistent with the God revealed in Jesus.”

For years I thought that God was disappointed in me, constantly waiting for me to mess up, that he was basically a vindictive God that I should be afraid of but also be passionately in love with.  All this time I wondered why I wasn’t passionate about a God I didn’t think really wanted to be around me.   I didn’t understand how hard it is to get passionate about a God who’s image has been distorted by the Accuser.

In the last few years I’ve really been repenting of that distorted view of God and learning to see God as he is revealed in Jesus.  Jesus is nothing like the distorted picture the serpent paints of him in Genesis 3.  Jesus bring healing and life. Jesus brings life to the full.  Jesus has good things for us.

P.S. Just a side note, the Bible never actually calls what happened “the Fall.”  That description was added later as a title over Genesis 3.  Maybe it is fitting and maybe not.  I haven’t really decided.

Genesis 2:8- 3:14

I Don’t Believe in a Bi-polar God

Is it just me, or are people talking about God these days in a way that makes him sound bi-polar, maybe even schizophrenic.  One group starts talking about how loving God is and the other starts reacting in talking about the wrath of God.  Love and wrath gets pitted against each other.  The loving God we see in Jesus gets pitted against the wrathful God of judgment at the end of time. (A misunderstanding of end times)  Or, New Testament Jesus gets goes up against the God of the Old Testament.  Love, wrath, love, wrath, love, wrath, back and forth and back and forth as if God can’t decide what to be or he is one thing one moment and another thing the next moment.

Seriously?  Maybe God is consistent and our understanding is off.  Do we believe his wrath will win out when it comes to some people and his love will win out with others?  I thought “His anger lasts only a moment, but his favor lasts a lifetime” but some are saying that, in the case of most people, His love lasts for a moment and his anger and wrath for all eternity.  What’s up with that?  How is it that people use “Jesus saying, ‘No one comes to the Father but by me’” as if to say Jesus was the bouncer that keeps us from God, who they believe to be a God of wrath?  Getting confused yet?  I am.  I thought “mercy triumphs over judgment” but it seems there are those teaching that judgment wins for most people.

There are tensions in scripture that have to be dealt with and I’m ok with that.  I just don’t think this is one of them.  I think when there seems to be two sides of something, the answer is not to put the ideas against each other in a King Kong VS Godzilla type death match.  I don’t think God is confused about his nature and isn’t in a battle with himself to see which side will win.   I think Jesus went to the cross as the Holy God and that says it all.

What does God’s judgment look like?   All through the Old Testament there is this image of a cup of God’s wrath poured out in judgment on the nations.  In the garden Jesus prays that, “if it is possible take this cup from me.”  On the cross the wrath of God was poured out on God.  The judgment of God was poured out on God.   God did this out of love but to also demonstrate love.  What kind of love is this?  This is an extreme love, an all-consuming love, and dare I say it… a fiery love.  It is a love that demands a response because it is un-ignorable.  It is jarring and ridiculous.

I believe the same love that Jesus demonstrated on the cross will confront all of human history at some point.   Maybe God’s love and wrath are one in the same thing.  It is an all-consuming fire, a purifying fire that burns up whatever is chaff and weeds but purifies whatever is good.  Maybe when that burning love, that some of us will embrace and celebrate, comes into contact with whatever is filthy, unholy and destructive, it is burned up and destroyed.  Maybe when all that is despicable in the world is confronted by such a holy love it is dealt with permanently.  That moment is eternal or final in its affect.  All that is wrong is burned up with no chance of returning because the result is final, permanent and eternal.

When we surrender our lives to the imitation of Jesus, he works into us things of eternal value, things that are reflective of his character, which can never be destroyed.  It’s like gold in the core of our beings.  Although I did nothing to earn this free gift from him, he freely gave of himself to invite us into the process of becoming like him.

This is how my imagination does it.  I picture coming before the loving, all consuming love of God.  When that fiery love of God comes into contact with me, it will purify me and removes every part of me that is contrary to his nature.  I look forward to that and embrace it because I don’t want to keep stuff in me that doesn’t look like Jesus.  I picture it like a blast of light that hits me and takes away all sickness, death, anger, pride, greed and everything else that cannot exist in the New Heavens and the New Earth.  However, the worship, peace, love, adoration and fascination with this God will grow and expand.

I don’t think coming into contact with that love will be wonderful for everyone.  If someone has centered their life around the hatred of a particular people group, if they have centered their life on being religiously superior and correct, if they have spent their life in the pursuit of idols that can’t bring life… there will not be much left when they come into contact with the all consuming love of God.  The love that purifies, also destroys with a finality or eternity everything that is reflective of the gods of this age.  The same fire that purifies what is good destroys what is evil in a permanent, eternal and final way.  This is why scripture uses this image of the “refiner’s fires.”  We were made in the image of God, and when people spend their lives pulling away from everything good at a deep and fundamental level, they are distorting the last good thing in them.  In fact, at that point they no longer want to be in God’s presence or want anything that reflects his goodness. One of the saddest pictures in my mind is a shriveled and depleted life that looks like one who used to be human but has rejected the image bearer and is now in the terrible state of being and ex-human… or maybe even worse for those whose it will be “as if they had never been.”

P.S.  I know some of you are thinking about all the verses that talk about “eternal punishment.”  Scripture also talks about “eternal salvation.”  I don’t believe that we are perpetually getting saved all over again for all of time. It isn’t eternal in process but in affect.   It’s easy to read something and accept or reject it based on what you have believed or want to believe.  We should go beyond that as those called to be wrestlers and diggers of truth.   This, like most of what I write comes out of a whole lot of digging.

PPS.  Thanks again for letting me continue my theological education in public and in this case… just thinking out loud.