Month: July 2017

It doesn’t matter to me anymore how much of the Bible a person can coordinate and recite in order to support their theological position; if what they are saying causes fear and despair instead of faith and hope, then it is bad. Poison is poison, no matter how dressed up in truth it may be. I have come to accept the simple fact that the enemy of all that is good knows the Word way better than I ever could. He is a much better lawyer than anyone else I could ever know.

Religious deception is the most dangerous kind, because it uses a formula containing a high percentage of nominal truth, but then reduces that truth to a terrible lie by distilling the love of God clean out of it, and presenting it as a cold, sterilized abomination…an utter mockery of all it was ever meant to be in the first place. I have almost been killed by that exact thing, and I hate it. My life’s mission is to see it rooted out of humanity to as great an extent as I possibly can.

Here in the midst of the debris,  I hold onto this one thing: The pure and unadulterated conviction that Jesus is all about rescuing, saving, helping, healing, repairing, restoring…leading, guiding, fulfilling… Those angry-seeming words of heaviness, those are not what Jesus is about. The Bible, presented as a cohesive whole, contains a story arc that speaks of one thing: the glory of God culminating in the redemption of mankind.

No matter how much scripture a person can line up in support of the idea of a heavy, austere, condescending Jesus, it does not alter reality. The reality of the overall situation is that God is Love, and the reality of the Bible is that it is his love letter to humanity.

Jesus said, “Straight is the gate, and narrow is the way that leads to life, and few there be that find it.”

He also said, “I am the way, and the truth, and the life,” and when asked by the disciples to show them the Father, he replied, “Dude, you guys. If you’ve seen me, you’ve seen the Father. Straight up. Dead serious.” (That last bit is paraphrased by me.)

So Jesus is God. And God is love. And Jesus is the straight and narrow way that leads to life. Thus it can be mathematically demonstrated that love is the straight and narrow way.

It is straight because it never changes. It is always compassionate and self-sacrificing. It is always patient. It is always kind. It is narrow because we must shed everything that we are carrying, in order to pass through it. Personal agendas must go. Ulterior motives must go. Everything of this world we attempt to bring with us on this road will be burnt up through the fiery trials along the way. They will be consumed in the flames that refine us like silver, and only that love will survive. This love lives in us by the faith of Jesus, who loved us perfectly, and gave each of us absolutely all of himself – in a way that goes far beyond our normal limits of comprehension – in order that we could be reunited with our Papa, our Daddy, and our ultimate Source, in whose mind we were created before material existence began.

He pines after us with unrelenting fervor. He loves us with an everlasting love. He never ceases to hope against hope for us to wake up to the realization that we are fearfully and wonderfully made, each of us uniquely fitted vessels for the expression of his indescribably awesome blessing.

Everything that does not line up with this, everything that discourages, and deters, and frustrates, and disappoints…all of those dark, heavy things are counterfeits and lies, whether they be obvious golden calves and altars of flesh worship, or seemingly holy ideals and modes of Biblical truth. The form that they take is irrelevant. You shall know a tree by its fruit. Period.

“…whatever is not prompted by faith is reduced to flesh, if faith does not inspire you; you miss the point.” ~ Romans 14:23b

I will keep holding onto you, Jesus, no matter what. I will not let this pain end my struggle. I will not lay down and die. I will choose to continue fighting, always, no matter what may come.

Only you can do this, though. It is your power that works in me. I can’t even want it without you. Let my words and thoughts line up with what you would choose for me. I relinquish control. I abandon rebellion. I take up trust as a garment, and I focus on the faith of the Son of God, who moved all his earthly life with single, steadfast purpose, towards the cross.

Help me to keep my eyes fixed on the joy that lies beyond, and help me to be about your business in the meantime. Nothing else. Let all this fleshen tangle die off and fall away, and led all else fade in the light of how unreasonably awesome you are in all your ways.

Deafen me to the enemies lies, Lord. Make it so that I cannot even hear the things he whispers. He is the worst. I repent for and renounce all previous and current (even unconscious) agreement with those lies. I choose you again, in every possible sense of the phrase, and at absolutely all times. Nothing else will happen here. Only agreement with you.

 

Jesus, you gave the Father your absolute trust. You believed him implicitly, even in the face of terrifying circumstances. You trusted him to the point of death. I find that I do not have this kind of trust dwelling within my own heart…when terrors encompass me, my natural reaction is to doubt your love, and to spin out into fearful imaginings and despair.

I ask here and now for access to your own perfect trust, Jesus. Help me to believe that you are for me, and not against me. Help me to see these kinds of things as being blindingly obvious. Help me to not even consider the lies of the enemy as having any sort of basis whatsoever in objective reality. Help me to see through those falsehoods.

Father, I want the assurance of your love to be the most real thing that I experience. Let me trust you like Jesus did. Holy Spirit, speak to me throughout each day, and open my ears to hear you. Open my eyes to see you. If there be anything in me that is out of alignment with you, God…let it dissolve and evaporate, that it might lose its hold upon my mind, that I might be free to flow in your ways, without inhibition.

Jesus, I am actually reaching the proverbial point, now, where the things of this world have grown strangely dim in contrast to what I feel you’ve created me for. Something in me just absolutely screams, when then flesh pulls me this way and that. My spiritual self – the real me – cannot stay silent anymore. This was also my experience early on in our walk together. I remember those days more fondly than anything else I can recall; we walked together and spoke freely. I was conscious mostly of your love. It overwhelmed me in a way that made all of the bad stuff eventually lose power altogether.

This is the point we’ve arrived at again now, you and I, and what I’m slowly coming to realize is that you never went anywhere. The devil, he threw everything he had at me (everything you’d let him throw, anyway) and yes, I was down for the count more times than I can even begin to imagine, but I am rising back up again now in such a way that makes the healing seem permanent. I’ve never experienced this before.

Perhaps it’s odd that such breakthrough would be experienced immediately before what I can only imagine will be the most difficult day of my life. I anticipate with unmitigated and utmost horror the experience that awaits me less than forty-eight hours from now, and yet also there wells up within my soul the most absolutely unquenchable fire of your presence. Truly, you are a God of miracles. You shall not suffer me to be moved. You have chastened me sore, but have not handed me over to death. It is good for me that I have been afflicted, that I might become intimately familiar with the very depth and meaning of your goodness. Before I was afflicted, I went astray, but now I have unshakable trust in your ways, and I know that unless you build the house then everything about it will be useless in the end.

All I have are words now, only words with you. Nothing else can matter. All the rest of life, and things, they chatter in my head, but I’m already dead, and it’s only an illusion at this point in time. I need you to help me break out of this place of oppression and pain, this place from which I pine for the fullness I’ve so far only tasted in small doses, and in between seasons of unfortunate complication.

I am facing now a trial without precedent. I’m up against some odds, and it looks for all the world like nothing could be more far-fetched than the idea that everything will be okay…and all I can do is just bring it to you, and sit down right there at your feet. I used to be obsessed, like Martha, with all the things I thought you would be mad at me for not doing, but all I can do to just be here now, and I am coming to the realization that this is exactly enough.

The concept of sufficiency is still foreign to my mind. I am yet only just getting used to the idea of the potentiality of you actually and genuinely being the fullness of all things, and of there being nothing I can lack in you. Even this uncertainty will pass, it seems, in time.