Breathing Jesus

As I choose to deliberately forgive the sources of all pain, I bring my soul again into remembrance of how You are love, Jesus; everything about you is centered on this one, main truth that God is love. I know that there are many lessons which would pretend to lead me in the way You’ve instructed me to walk in…but some do not really belong in my life.

The test of their trueness is simple — do they spring up out of love? Do their characteristics line up with the fruit of the Spirit, or with the description of agape that You’ve included in your Word, in Paul’s first letter to the Corinthians? When I follow these lessons, do they result in me having flesh pruned off of me, that I may bear more of your spiritual fruits like peace, patience, and kindness?

This is the goodness of God that leads us to repentance. Repentance is waking up. It is realizing, like Scrooge on Christmas morning, that all is not lost, and that God is willing that none should perish, and that redeeming the time is not a thing done in vain. We do not serve You in vain, Jesus. Your yoke is easy, and Your burden is light. Serving you is a love thing.

You are inextricably infused into the very fabric and nature of my actual self, Jesus. At the core of who I am, You are with me. When the enemy speaks to me, he speaks to those parts of me that are used to the old nature. The question is, who do I think I am?

Jesus, You have been asking me to work on realizing that I belong to You, not based on my own choice, but on Yours. You have been asking me to cease from striving to understand this. You have been showing me how all of my failures have originated in pride, and in attempting to do this thing myself, without the intimacy that constitutes the very flow of lifeblood from vine to branch. I need Your help to come into obedience in these areas. Help me to let this mind be in me, which was also in You. Help me to rest in the simplicity of looking for You in each and every moment. Help me to let the other things die, so that I can really learn to live, and so that I can continue in the destiny You’ve laid out for me, before the world began.

…This is the only place I can begin from. When something ugly rears its head, and I begin to struggle, I cannot start fighting against it from a place of shame, or fear, or condemnation. Those things only give strength to the darkness. Real conviction does not look like that. Real conviction does not say, “If you were really a child of God, then this would not be happening to you.” It should be obvious to us that those kinds of words come only from the enemy. Somehow we forget, though.

Real conviction says things like, “My child, I love you! Come up higher! Come away with me, away from this noise, for the parts of you that resist Me are but dust; they are not the real you anymore, and that was never who I created you to be. Come with me now, today, and harden not your heart…pick up your instrument (which is your very self) and make music to me with everything you’ve got! That’s how we do battle against the darkness in this family.” Real conviction bids me remember that the only way I ever got free from anything in the first place was by basking in the love of a merciful God. Real conviction woos me back to that place.

It occurs to me, every time I come to You, Jesus, whether to pray in earnest, or just to talk, that I cannot accomplish either (or anything) without keeping, as the primary mechanic of my heart and mind, this faith that You have given me as a gift…

When I first arrived at your feet (I guess that sounds funny, but that’s kind of where I arrived) I did so by unconditional invitation to accept Your offer of friendship — the kind of friendship that we know, deep down, is the real meaning of life as far as it relates to interpersonal relationship. You used other believers to extend to me the good news that God had revealed Himself fully as a man who said, “I call you no longer servants, but friends.”

When this whole thing began, my love relationship with You, You communicated this to me in a way that left me with absolutely zero anxiety about the safety of choosing to believe that You had accomplished some incomprehensible metaphysical feat which forever completed the execution of justice upon every evil I would ever commit, and circumvented my flaws as a barrier, and left me with the pure and simple fact that You are Love, and that You love me, and that You came not into the world to condemn me, but to save me. At the same time, I was somehow convicted of my wanderings, and convinced that You were guiding me into the path of righteous destiny — Your original design. My natural mind had a tendency to become afraid, on account of my habitual waywardness, but You bid me no worries, and even chuckled at my concern.

As I began to walk with You, the road became clear, and even as things became difficult, I grew in my awareness that You would not leave me or forsake me, despite any struggles that would ensue…

All that is required is a humble desire to let love in.

“…The faith-righteousness we receive speaks to us in these words of Moses:

‘ God’s living message is very close to you, as close as your own heart beating in your chest and as near as the tongue in your mouth ‘

And what is God’s ‘Living Message’? It is the revelation of faith for salvation, which is the message that we preach. For if you publicly declare with your mouth that Jesus is Lord and believe in your heart that God raised him from the dead, you will experience salvation.” Romans 10:8-9

The great lie of the enemy of our souls is that there is more than this that we must to, in order to ‘earn’ salvation, that we must be perfect in thought and in deed, here and now, but this stands in direct opposition to the idea of Jesus as Savior.

Friend, if you have asked Jesus to save you, you have already been made perfect in Him. Everything about your life that does not line up with the Word of God is just chaff, waiting to be removed from the wheat, and God will accomplish His purposes in you, in due time, as you trust and move forward in grace and peace.

All we have to do is let You spend time with us. Everything else will flow from that.

You just want to be with us. You are interested in us! You are the consciousness — the actual individual person — who has masterminded the universe. You literally are, yourself, the most interesting man alive, and you are interested in us.

You are SO interested in us.

This is actually all that we have ever been looking for. It is literally the one thing that we are most interested in, ourselves. Any person currently in possession of their right mind would be interested in reciprocation, to a degree beyond what is normal. Any person aware of reality would lunge at the opportunity to engage in this kind of friendship with God.

By and large, it would seem that our problem is basically that we are often not aware of reality. Not really.

There is literally nothing difficult involved here except letting go of whatever it is that would fight against You for our loyalty. Everything else done experientially with You is actually like an ethereal dance through heaven on Earth; even a painful, traumatizing life experience can crystalize into something beautiful, in the mind of one possessed by Grace, and the times and seasons which would normally be otherwise enjoyable, or even mundane, are, with You, a spiritual all-you-can-eat buffet of existential bliss.

But we must choose to let this mind be in us, which was also in Christ; we must allow Christ in us, the hope of glory, to have the final say in our moment-by-moment decision making process, or else we get involved in some kind of being-stuck activity, and this slows down our progress towards our destiny.

That is the great big conundrum of the gospel. This is the great offense. We have existing allegiances which contradict our love relationship with the Creator, and these must be chosen against…or they will slow us down.

I hear Your voice. Today I will not harden my heart. Today I will be still and know that You are God. I will listen and know that You are Love. I will hear with the ears of the new man. I will obey your commands, knowing that they are not difficult, heavy, or confusing. Your commands can be summed up in one word: Love.

Frustration comes from the enemy. Accusation comes from the enemy.

You have justified me by Your blood, and You call me up and forward. Your voice calls me up. It does not beat me down.

You are Love.

God, Your Word says that if I judge another, it’s like I’m despising the fact that Your goodness is what You actually use to lead people to repentance.

If I take the Law into my own hand at all — no matter whether to apply it to someone else, or to myself — I am putting the wrong things in the wrong places, and I’m not truly obeying Your Gospel.

The Law is a very specific thing, and it is for a very specific purpose…Your people have always had a tendency to become wrongly related to it. Me being one of Your people now, it’s understandable then, I suppose, how I came to have a wrong relationship with it myself.

Jesus, some of Your apostles were surprised that the Holy Spirit fell on Gentile believers, who had never known the Law, and who had lived all their life with a pagan understanding of this world. When they heard about You, and what You had done, they got hit with the Spirit, and it was off to the races. You welcomed them into the adventure of being born again, and living life in freedom with You as their patron, their benefactor, their Father in the highest sense of the word…

You didn’t run them through a boot camp first. You invited them into absolute intimacy, right off the bat. Then they had power to live the kind of life that You designed us for, and that was that!

It was You giving Yourself freely and fully, and giving all that You have, and it was the revelation that You are the kind of Person who would want, more than anything else, to do something like this (give themselves away for free) and that is what actually wins people’s hearts, and activates that real Gospel kind of faith in their lives.

I know that, in my case, Jesus, I was very lost and confused, and I wasn’t perfect, and I made a lot of mistakes, and I was sitting in the middle of some pretty severe consequences to a lot of these mistakes when You invited me into this thing. That kind of blew my mind, but I believed at face value the idea that Jesus Christ, the God of the Universe, was reaching out to me, and all I had to do was say, “Okay.”

Once I believed it, that was it. You showed up in my life in just the right way, at just the right time. You met me where I was, and you said, “Okay, son, I’m going to help you now.”

I didn’t have to do anything to earn it, and You didn’t make it so that I had to do anything to keep it. I just had to keep remembering that it was true, and that was it.

I’m not sure how exactly it was that the Enemy was able to send his people in, and get my ear, and actually make me forget…but he did, that bozo. A while after we’d already been on this road together, I began to fall in with a crowd who convinced me that I needed to be afraid that You would leave me, and forsake me, and that I needed to have a certain behavioral quota met, in order to be fairly certain that You probably wouldn’t.

They told me that the Gospel was a little bit different than the way You’d told it to me through Your Jesus people, and that I’d do best to forget all that grace nonsense, because it was “false” grace, anyway, and that I needed to study Your Law. The Law, they said, contained the true key to holiness. They told me that any true Gospel experience had to be founded on the Law first, and then on Jesus after that (once the Law was understood properly.)

I was to be assured of my salvation only as it was a byproduct of my obedience, and the legitimacy of my obedience was basically for them to discern, and then treat me one way or the other about.

It was weird. The whole thing was so weird. And then I got lost again.

I wandered around for such a long time. I was so angry. You were with me the whole time, and I was acutely conscious of this, at times, but so much of the time, all I could hear were those old words of fear, and all I could see were those disappointed, accusing expressions…

I started to make some bad choices. This went on for some time, until I least expected Your grace. Then you hit me with a tidal wave of it, and here I am. Unreasonably blessed.

Biblical grace is bestowed on humble, believing sinners, and this is the only way their hearts are won, and they turn from their self-wrapped ways — not because they fear, but because they love.

We love You because You first loved us.

Jesus, help me to always remember this. Help me to never forget Your love.

“Here’s what David says: What happy fulfillment is ahead for those whose rebellion has been forgiven, and whose sins are covered by blood.”

Romans 4:7 [TPT]

Whatever my rebellion was, whatever it has been, whatever it is right now, I thank God that He is presently telling me (and you) through His Word that I am living in a day where it has been forgiven. David, who knew the low down, and was way ahead of his time (e.g. produced phat beats in like 1000 BC) looked up to God and said these things…

And Paul the Apostle wrote to the Christians in Rome in 57 AD about how David’s lyrics had been a prophecy and a promise over everyone (anyone throughout all of human history) who believes God and has their belief accredited to them as righteousness.

We’re not talking about that high-and-mighty act that comes to mind for most of us when we hear someone talk about ‘righteousness’. We’re talking about everything in a person’s heart and mind getting somehow miraculously restored to the “right” places (right in the sense of the opposite of what we feel when we think a little bit too hard about the world, and lament on the way so many things seem to be somehow so terribly wrong.)

I think it’s important for modern readers to remember the bits about things like “covered by blood” and whatnot — not because they have any semblance of an actual cultural point of reference for them, or can possibly relate to them in any sort of real, experiential way, but precisely because they (we) cannot, and this keeps them (us) also remembering that there are things about God about which we [by virtue of our culture of origin being what it now is] are so absolutely out of touch that staying humble and teachable is an absolute must for someone interested in choosing this life again and again, new each moment, which is the way it really has to be chosen, due to the unrealistically foolish number of times a day we are, for some reason, confronted with the necessity of choosing it over some type of offense (pain, outrage, difficulty) which might cross our path.

Sorry, that was random!

…What happy progress comes to them
    when they hear the Lord speak over them,
    “I will never hold your sins against you!”

Our progress comes when we hear God tell us how He sees us, what his plans are for us. It has to start with us hearing Him tell us about those things. Everything flows out of that place. We cannot put any of our particular carts before that exact horse, or we end up all turned around.