Field notes on life and mission with God after Christendom
We’ve all been there. When the diagnosis comes back positive. When your position doesn’t survive that latest round of downsizing. When your spouse gives up on the marriage. When your teenager calls from jail.
Because we live in a fallen world, bad things happen. But of course this doesn’t make it easier to deal with the bad things that happen to us! Often our response to bad things only compounds the problems! How can we respond in a way that opens the door to healing and redemption?
Disillusionment isn’t fun. You thought one thing and it turned out to be another. You had a perception that turned out to be untrue. You hoped… but your hopes were dashed against the cold, hard rocks of reality. Disillusionment doesn’t feel good. At all.
Nevertheless, disillusionment is a gift from God. Disillusionment means that illusions are being removed, and this is a good thing, because illusions are unhelpful. Illusions are unhelpful because they don’t reflect reality. That’s why they’re called illusions!
As he sat across from me in my office, I tried to listen patiently, but it was the third “great idea” he had presented to me in only a few months, and I knew it would never work because it was birthed in immature passion rather than a strong sense of God’s leading.
On the other hand, another person I had been working with at the time had such a clear, beautiful word from the Lord. A promise from God that she could rely on and step out into. But for some reason she wasn’t taking action on it, and simply kept coming back to talk more, uncertain of whether it was really God speaking to her or not.
One person was all too willing to take action, but couldn’t wait for a word from God. The other person had heard from God, but was unwilling to take action. Two people with very different kinds of problems, but ultimately they both got the same result: fruitlessness and frustration.
[Read more…] about Hearing God’s Promises and Possessing the Land
“This is the message we have heard from him and declare to you: God is light; in him there is no darkness at all. If we claim to have fellowship with him and yet walk in the darkness, we lie and do not live out the truth. But if we walk in the light, as he is in the light, we have fellowship with one another, and the blood of Jesus, his Son, purifies us from all sin.”
1 John 1:5-7
In the past, whenever I would come across this verse, the quiet, unexamined assumption of my heart was that “walking in the light” had something to do with behaving well. Correspondingly, walking in darkness had something to do with behaving badly.
But that’s not it at all.
Walking in the light has nothing to do with perfect behavior and everything to do with being known. Walking in the light means that we are willing to be known for who we really are (warts, sin, and all). It doesn’t mean we have perfected morality, just that we have stopped hiding.
There is a scene in Nehemiah 9 where the Israelites who have been brought back into the land after the exile confess their sins before the Lord. It’s a lengthy confession that details their unfaithfulness starting with Abram and continuing up until their current situation.
As I was thinking about it, I was struck by how different this confession is from some of the other ways we commonly respond to the consequences of our sin. And I thought it would make a good meditation for Good Friday.
