Devotionals - Are you devoted to "doing" or to being with God.

Last Sunday at Jesus Culture Sacramento, Cody Williams spoke about being less focused on doing  and more focused on Jesus who will do the "doing" through you. It was a great message about putting relationship with Jesus first. After all, everything good flows out of that!

I've recently had a revelation along similar lines about how I approach "devotionals."

I've been turned off by the "doing" and religious nature of devotionals for a while now. When I hear the word "devotional" I immediately connect it to religious obligation. The word is loaded with expectations and visions of reading the Bible, reading a snippet from "Our Daily Bread," glancing through Oswald Chambers, My Utmost for His Highest (usually while, ummm, resting), or getting on my knees for a certain amount of time to petition God for a laundry list of request.

While I've known this approach wasn't working for me, I couldn't justify my experience with the need to spend time with God daily. If spending time with God each day didn't look like a devotional, what did it looked like? Did it mean spending more time praying? That sounded closer to the answer, but that still seemed to return me to a focus on some sort of "doing" again.

The encouraging conclusion I came to was that I just need to make space for my relationship with God. Once I starting making space for God, without specific expectations about the form, then I allowed myself to encounter God however he wanted to show up.

I had to learn, and am still learning, how to stop constantly talking or doing in order to just rest in God's presence. When I make space for God, one day I find myself resting in and meditating on his goodness. Another day, I'm praying for a friend. The next day, I'm journaling or writing a poem. The key I think is to

... just

...make

...the

...space.

The Meaning of Gathering Together, Part 3 | Embodied Celebration

The Church is a strange thing. It's like an electron, where it's here one moment and then another moment it's gone, but it's never actually gone. The church's ability to break paradigms, to show up in unexpected places, to show up in expected places, and to give hands and feet to a spiritual reality is its greatest strength.

Jesus said it this way, "The wind blows where it wishes and you hear the sound of it, but do not know where it comes from and where it is going; so is everyone who is born of the Spirit." (John 3:8)

Basically the Church has a spiritual existence, which isn't necessarily always visible, but it also has a physical presence. If I were stranded all alone on a desert island, I could be comforted by the fact that I was still part of the church, a part of the Body of Christ. I wouldn't be any less a member of the Church than when gathering with others on a Sunday morning. At the same time, the Church has the ability to take on this amazing and unpredictable embodiment whenever its members gather together in the Spirit. BOOM! It shows up suddenly, like an electron jumping from place to place around a nucleus, giving substance to the entire atom! Energy is present in a new way. The church becomes EMBODIED.

In our culture we tend to focus on knowledge, ideas, and beliefs – these concepts are usually differentiated, but have similar implications as far as how we live our lives. In the church this focus on mental ascent can lead us to frown upon or downplay bodily experiences – pleasure, feeling, sensation, joy, physical presence, or connection. We separate our existence into spiritual, mental, and physical realities, when being human entails a complex interaction between these realities. God himself testified to the importance of embodied truth when he sent Jesus Christ to the world, and the WORD became FLESH.

In my opinion (and personal experience) the emphasis placed by the mainstream church on having all the "right" beliefs is one of the reasons many people are abandoning institutional church and other Christian gatherings. After all, if having the "right" beliefs is more important than living meaningful and authentic lives of faith and community, then what's the point of going to church or gathering with others? As long as I have the right beliefs, then I have everything I need. Following the same logic, if I can't find a church that believes everything I believe, then what's the point of participating?

I think we underestimate and shy away from admitting how important experience is to living out meaningful human lives. We are physical and spiritual beings. Besides just knowing and believing things, we need to experience and feel things. The power of gathering on a Sunday morning is the experience of hearing the music, singing songs, seeing and participating in worship with other believers in unity, taking communion, listening to someone share their testimony, holding someone's hands in prayer, and sharing hugs with other brothers and sisters in Christ. These experiences are just as important as what we learn and know from books, sermons, and podcasts.

TASTE and SEE that the Lord is good.

As people, we crave experiences. This isn't a bad thing. We learn, remember, and hold on to embodied experiences. It is all about finding balance, learning and living what it means to be fully human. We experience God's love as we love others, we fully learn truth when we act it out, and faith becomes real when we make ourselves vulnerable to others.

Kierkegaard put it this way, "Take a thinker who erects a huge building, a system of thought, one that encompasses the whole of life and world history. Turn your attention to his personal life and you will discover to your astonishment, like among so many others, the appalling and ludicrous fact that he himself does not live in this huge, high-vaulted palace, but in a shack next door."

Admittedly, an institutional church gathering on a Sunday morning is only one way to gather and just the beginning of what it means live as the Body of Christ. Still, a Sunday gathering remains a valid and important way to gather when done so in faith. If we don't gather in faith, we inhibit our ability to experience goodness, because we return to a limited mental construct of what is possible.

Allow yourself to taste and see that the Lord is good. When you gather, expect the unexpected. Believe that anything is possible. Rest in God's love so that you can worship the one true King with others, free from comparisons or judgements. Look for God's image in everyone you meet, anywhere you go, and be prepared for God's love to show up in new ways.

Jesus said that true worshipers worship Him in spirit and in truth. Paradoxically, when we do so, we allow God to meet us in person, wherever we are. 

The Beauty of His Created Ones

We long to escape and revel in the beauty of God’s glorious creation: to hike through the majesty of mountains, to soak in the restorative power of the ocean. How many poems have been written, how many photos taken or memories savored of the nature that surrounds us? Are we not also His creation?

Jesus said the crux of following him is to love God and love others.  If I am honest, I find the first commandment much easier than the second. In fact, I find loving the Earth much easier than loving the other people who inhabit it.  I can usually find kindness in my heart for another person, but true, genuine love? I can’t remember the last time I sat in wonderment at the beauty and miracle of another human. (Other than my adorable one-year-old boy. When he’s sleeping. Let’s be real.)

Instead of finding that place in my spirit where I can truly praise God for another person, especially one who is not friend or family, I find myself in comparison and judgment.  Let me tell you, comparison and judgment are the opposite of love. Living in that place is awful. As I know God’s commandment and desire to love His created ones, I have tried to stop those thoughts.  I’ve listened to sermons on contentment, confidence, and killing comparison, but do you know how difficult it is to stop doing something you’re focusing on not doing?  Don’t eat that cookie; don’t eat that cookie. Dang it, I ate the cookie.  Don’t compare yourself to her, don’t.  Therefore, I instead have to focus on what I do want more of: love.

When I realized that I have more praise in my heart for the redwoods than for the person standing in front of me in line at the supermarket, I grieved. Yes, God created the redwoods for His glory and for our joy, but how much more than the redwoods does He love His child, the one who is standing in front of me at the supermarket? A parent’s heart is so happy when someone else also loves and celebrates her child.  Can we love and celebrate God’s created ones?  Can we revel in the glorious wonder of another human? Of another human who doesn’t look like we do?  Of another human who disagrees with our perspective? 

So now, I practice. I practice imagining how God thinks of His child, the one who is standing in front of me at the supermarket.  I imagine how her Father loves her smile, and I smile back.  I worship God for her uniqueness.  I ask her a question and listen intently to what she says because her voice is important and what she has to say reflects her beautiful mind.  I practice hiking through the majesty of humanity.  I practice soaking in the restorative power of another individual soul.  Through practice, I have a new palate to savor the most beautiful nature that surrounds me.

The Meaning of Gathering Together, Part 2 | Community Destroyer

"Those who love their dream of a Christian community more than they love the Christian community itself become destroyers of that Christian community even though their personal intentions may be ever so honest, earnest and sacrificial." - Dietrich Bonhoeffer

What is the best way to show someone love? It is to give them a gift? Maybe it's to share a meal together? I'm of the personal opinion that a good old fashioned bear hug is one of the better ways to show love. Also, if you brought me a cup of locally brewed coffee, I'd feel pretty loved as well.

What is the best way to seek God's kingdom? Some people say you should sell everything you have and give the proceeds to the poor. Another ideal is to serve as a missionary in a foreign country. Other people seem to think that posting controversial Facebook posts will brings God's Kingdom.

What is the best way to gather as the church? Is it the large Sunday church service with lights, smoke, and rock n' roll worship? Perhaps it's the small home church? Maybe you're convinced that meeting one on one with someone in a coffee shop is the most meaningful way to gather. Whatever the answer, I think coffee should be somewhere in the mix.

The difficulty with these questions though is that most of use would prefer a straight forward answer when there isn't one. If someone would just tell us what to do to best show love, it would make life so much easier! But love is mysterious. It's possible to give everything you have to someone without actually loving that person.

Then we have the Kingdom of God – what is it exactly? The disciples had their own ideas about the Kingdom when they asked Jesus to call down fire from heaven to destroy the Samaritans (Luke 9:54), and Jesus said, " You do not know what kind of spirit you are of!" Later we learn in Luke 17:21 that "the Kingdom of God is within you." It's not something you can say "there it is" or "here it is." It's not something you can set up with worldly power and draw borders around. The Kingdom of God powerfully affects our physical reality, but at the core is spiritual. It flows out of connectedness and relationship with God.

After a long journey of trying to figure out exactly what the church is and how it should gather, I recently came to the conclusion that the same mysterious and metaphysical qualities we see with "love" and "the Kingdom of God" hold true with the Church. There isn't one right way to do church or be the church, because it's not about knowing the right principles or building the right structure, it's about being part of the body of Christ. 

I believe the answer to the questions about what the church is and how the church meets is both/and, either/or. The church is defined by something that itself is difficult to define, namely love. John said, "The world shall know you are my disciples by your love for one another." In other words, it's not about what kind of gathering you participate in, but whether or not God's love is present between you and the people you are gathering with. To put it mathematically: x+y+Children of God+God's love=Church or x-y/a+Children of God+God's love=Church. The variables don't matter as long as the constants remain.

My personal experiences with what I knew to be "the church" led me to seek a better way to do church – well, not just a better way but the "best" way. I developed and acquired ideas about how leadership should be structured, what strategies should be used to empower people, and possible ways to prevent burn out among volunteers. At one point I also went the opposite direction and felt that since the church is just people gathering, everything else is unnecessary fluff and human meddling. I judged large and highly organized churches as false or fake and favored small "organic" churches as closer to the New Testament Church model.

What happened, though, is that as I sought to define the church, I created an idol out of it. I worshiped my own idea of the church and found myself cynical of other gatherings. I destroyed the possibility of God moving in my life through community unless the community fit my limited parameters (which frankly did not exist anywhere other than in my head!). But could Jesus really be pleased with churches that used the same principles to operate as large corporations? The answer I eventually came to was, "yes." If Jesus can show up at our broken houses church and "organic" church movements, he can also show up at our flawed mega-churches. If I'm not perfect and God still uses me, why shouldn't I expect him to work through any gathering of his imperfect people?

The conclusion I finally came to was that it's all about faith.

Whether I'm meeting a friend at coffee shop to discuss a book, having friends over for prayer, or attending a large Sunday worship service, what I experience at those gatherings is limited by my faith that God can and will do awesome things in spite of us, not because of us! The form or structure of the gathering isn't essential one way or the other. If I want to experience God's presence when I meet with my friend, I need to be expecting and believing that God will use us to minister to each other. If I want to get anything out of a large Sunday gathering, I have to be expecting that God will show up because He loves us, because we are gathering in faith, not because we created the perfect church structure.

The revelation that God can show up and wants to show up in any and all our gatherings freed me to receive the blessing of community! Prior to this revelation my judgement about what community should be destroyed my ability to give and receive, and it prevented me from being able to celebrate the goodness of God with my brothers and sisters. I DOUBTED that God could use an imperfect way of gathering.

The thing is, gathering with others always requires planning, organization, and people working together, and the result of people planning and creating things together will always be a beautiful mess.

Our gatherings won't be perfect. They don't need to be perfect. And, thankfully, God doesn't require me to be perfect either. Don't get me wrong, God is perfecting us, but it is through the challenge of working through imperfection. He is calling us to cling to him, to believe that He is enough, that He is the head of the body and the source of our life. We just have to put our faith in Him. In fact, according to the author of Hebrews, "Without faith it is impossible to please God." (Hebrews 11:6)

None of this means that we should stop trying to organize well or cease giving thought to our structures and gatherings. It's just that as we plan and as we gather, we do it all with the realization that it is God who takes our imperfect gift and makes it whole. It is his love flowing through us that makes us fruitful. There is grace for me, and there is grace for you. None of us have perfect knowledge, but we can't gain more knowledge without each other! We are a body and we need every member engaging in faith to become all we were created to be.

-Jared

In my next post I will share what I've learned about the power and purpose of celebrating God's love together. In our culture we tend to internalize our faith and make it a matter of belief or head knowledge. This can lead us to doubt the importance of worshiping, learning, or praying together. I've found myself attending church in the past simply because it was the "right" or "Christian" thing to do, without really understanding the purpose of it. If you can relate, I hope that what I share in my next post will help make gathering together more meaningful and relevant!