Breathing Jesus

Is there anything separating us, Lord? No. Your blood erased all boundaries. So why do I listen to the condemning thoughts that pretend to accuse and deride? All things considered, they are obviously from the enemy. So why give in to them, or give ear at all?

Because I am distracted. Because I am not focused on you. Because I carelessly allow my attention to be consumed with ungodly things. But why do I do this? Because I doubt the solidity of your commitment to me. Because I feel certain of my own impending failure, and because, ultimately, I believe that your faithfulness hinges on my own performance, which, though it has been tried, has been oft found untrue, and which therefore presents a foundation of sand.

Jesus, help me to until this knot. Help me to know first and foremost that you are with me, and that you are for me, and that the one who is against me is therefore not you. You have promised this in your Word.

Only with a confidence in these main, basic things can even the slightest actual progress be made. Anything outside the realm of this already-perfect love amounts to law, and law cannot cohabitate with faith. Any attempt at it will produce nothing but an awkward symbiosis, born of fear, and doomed to failure. The true Christian faith is based on faith alone; favor without merit or qualification. It is to this faith that the law and all the prophets always pointed; God, please open my eyes in every way to behold these wonderful things.

I will not be drawn aside, to the right hand or the left, to behold and absorb the characteristics of either extreme. Every place on the spectrum of this teeter-totter religion system is equally in error. It is all down here, based in Earth things, based in flesh. God, your system is up there, and in you, and through you, and therefore in me, but at a level beyond flesh, beyond fear and striving, beyond the fray of whatever this is that haunts us and keeps us here against the will of our spirit (our true self.)

I will be distracted by nothing and no one, nothing will stop me from diving in anymore. Here in the present moment — always here, no matter what or when it is in other terms, I am always here with you, I see that now. Nothing can separate me from this anymore.

Immediately, I deliberately choose to accept your love for me. I choose not to question it, but to simply let it be the primary truth. These other thoughts and qualms, they rise and swirl, and I choose to accept that this is simply the case, too, but I do not let that chaos override the primary truth. You are love. You orchestrated the single greatest act of love that the world has ever known, and you did it with me in mind. Nothing and no one can ever separate that from being the truth. Every accusing and condemning voice that would convince me otherwise, or that would work to cause me to doubt that this love is real, or valid, or applicable…all of those voices are nothing more than arguments that exalt themselves against the knowledge of God. I silence and dismantle them, and cast them down, and move forward from this place of peace and trust.

I lay everything else down. All of the cares and concerns, all of the worries and insecurities. All concern for self, and for what a day may bring forth, and every other thing in which there is fear, I put these things away and relinquish my grip upon them. I open my hands, and I let everything fall out of them, and I lift my hands to you in thanksgiving and praise. You have been so good to me. You have been better to me than I’ve been to myself (“well…been to myself…hey…”)

Okay, I’m done.

The enemy wants me to blame God for my pain. He wants me to view unfortunate circumstances as the deliberate orchestrations of a malicious and tyrannical deity, who plays favorites, and who stacks the deck, and who expects unreasonable things from the free moral agency of his creation. For much of my life, I found that thinking in this way just came so naturally. Everything appeared to me deliberately tainted by injustice and woe, and all claiming otherwise seemed crazy to me. This resulted in my having been driven to a level of spiritual frustration that I wouldn’t wish upon my worst enemy.

I have found, though, over past months and years, that by deliberately forcing myself to begin operating according to a different paradigm – one of faith, hope, and love – I have been able to actualize real and lasting change in my mental processes. My thought patterns, once so absolutely negative and out of control that they drove me to the brink of suicide on a somewhat daily basis, are now genuinely becoming subject to designs of my own choosing, and I find that I am finally able to “think positively” and apply optimism to my outlook in ways that have heretofore seemed quite literally impossible. Instead of my thoughts driving the car all by themselves, I have managed to move them to the back seat, and have taken the wheel myself.

It is a simple matter, really, of deciding to believe in the availability of something good in this life, despite the problem of there having been presented substantial amounts of very real evidence to the contrary. Being consistently stubborn in the repetition of this decision – to believe against the reality of my own perception that God is actively singing over me with love, and blessing, and hope – as it has applied to the various events and circumstances of life, has been the simple yet arduous catalyst for an absolutely ridiculous amount of personal growth as of late. In short, I choose to believe God is good, and that he has designed and destined me to experience victory and fulfillment, no matter what the circumstances look like in the present moment.

This whole experience of radical change was precipitated by my spouse of fifteen years abruptly abandoning the marriage, and by the imperative of either continuing to deal with life according to those old negative patterns of habit, or to make a seemingly impossible (and, of necessity, oft repeated) decision to do otherwise. It was a classic sink-or-swim thing, as allowing the latter to take place would most definitely have killed me, under those circumstances, my history of chemical dependency being what it is.

In practice, I have found that, even in the microcosm of day-to-day life, negative perspective and expectation become a sort of self fulfilling prophecy, whereas choosing to exercise unconditional faith in God’s goodness results not only in the inner assurance of having sown good seed, but is always coupled, as well and in time, with there being clearly demonstrable fruit from these efforts. It’s like when someone says something bad about a family member or a friend of yours – someone you know from personal experience to in fact be a person of good character and strong integrity. The accuser may be basing their claims on a truly damning set of evidences, and as such you are unavoidably presented with a dilemma: stand up for the person in question, using what you’ve learned about them through personal relationship as your reason for defending them in good faith…or give ear to the other person’s description of events, and to their opinions on the matter, and then side with them against your ally. Framed in this way, the former course would seem a foregone conclusion, but when bad things are actually happening to you, and it’s your own little world in which the sky seems to be falling, it becomes very difficult to see the forest for the trees (and especially so if you are already prone to worry and rumination.)

It’s something you just have to do, though. Faith. Trust. You have to choose it, or this world will inevitably eat you alive. We need to forgive, not for the sake of the other person, necessarily, but because if we do not then we create an obstruction in our ability to enjoy God on a personal level. We should interact with others in a way that is based on love, because by the very mechanics of the universe itself we reap what we sow, and which of us doesn’t ultimately desire love to find us in this life? We have to move forward in a way indicating trust in the goodness of God, otherwise we move in the opposite direction by default, and, as a wise man once said, “If we do not change the direction we are going, then we will end up where we are headed.”

And that was the best decision I ever made. To change the direction I was heading, and, more specifically, to stop blaming God for everything bad, and to stop feeling as though I were doomed to go on simply reacting to circumstances as they were hurled at me, and to instead take responsibility for my own life and begin to exercise stewardship over it as though it were a gift, and not some terrible curse. This didn’t happen overnight, and it wasn’t something I mastered all at once, and it’s still not something that I exactly have the best handle on some days, but there was definitely a pivotal moment where I sensed the necessity of making a conscious choice to trust that God is good, and to do it with all of my heart, and that was the crucial first step. Without having obeyed in that moment, I would still be going around in circles. Friend, whoever you are and whatever you are going through, thank you for reading this. Please choose to know that you matter.

“For to be carnally minded is death, but to be spiritually minded is life and peace.” ~ Saint Paul

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.

Here in this place, I draw breath; here in this place of confusion and pain. But this is not the finality that I choose to accept. I will not lay down and die. I will remain standing, and I will fight on, through anything and everything. I can’t do it alone, Jesus. You have to help me. You know you do.

Make me to keep my eyes fixed on you, and make me to regard you as the embodiment of love that you are. Make those old, darkened lies to dry up and burn away in this fire I find all around and within me. Make everything new about me to come forth into the fruition of my here-and-now daily walk. Correct me with gentleness, lest your hand upon my life become too much, for I am weak, my God. I am pure weakness in and of myself. Only with you helping me am I strong.

All of that old, evil strength that I learned to use, and all of those things which I thought kept me safe — they are poison to me now. Let me hate them. Renew the parts of my mind that learned to love them. Make me to be like a child again, and let me behold those abominations with the same kind of repulsion that you do, Holy Spirit.

I focus on these things just for right now, and I choose not to worry about what another day may bring forth. I choose to abide here with you, for this moment, in this day, and to appreciate that for what it is, without allowing fear to speak or hold sway. Thank you for your strength which lives in me, and makes this all possible.

Lord, I am in utter dependence upon you. I am unable even to draw breath without your grace. How much less am I able to do so comfortably, unless conscious of your favor upon me. This does not diminish from the nobility of what I was created to do. Rather, it hints at its imminent fulfillment. It means I am becoming more aware of the true nature of this universe, and how it works. For, even to begin with, it is in you that all things consist.

Let me rest in this dependence, God. Let me become so enthralled with your glory that I am unable even to see the distractions of this world. I have been so foolish in the past. Allow me to see, with new spiritual eyes, the goodness and compassion that you have as a father. Allow me to see that this is your nature. Allow me to see you as the father of the prodigal — the parent who leaves (running!) as I return from a distance, and who races out to meet me, and sweeps me up in his arms, and who offers me all that you have, without condition. I ask you to allow me this because it is only by your power that human beings are capable of desiring something that is so contrary to the only life they have ever known…and I am so very human.

Let peace like a river overwhelm me this day.