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Waking from the Dead

Published on by dpatrickcollins3 Comments

But because of his great love for us, God, who is rich in mercy, made us alive with Christ even when we were dead in transgressions — it is by grace you have been saved.

Ephesians 2:4-5 (NIV)

As a young Christian, I walked through a season of realizing just how sinful I was. It was as if all my motives were exposed to the light of truth, and none of them were any good! I realized at that time that even my desire to be good was driven by an unhealthy need to be accepted by others. Which was a problem, of course, since being a Christian meant being willing to be despised and rejected by others for the sake of Jesus.

And so I did what anyone does who thinks he is a pretty good person and suddenly discoveries he is not: I hid. I hid by doing everything in my power to be a good Christian. I was constantly obsessed with the idea God requires radical obedience and tried to obey God in radical ways. Whether it was giving or sharing my faith or reading my Bible or attending church functions, I did so with my whole heart, ideally in a way that cost me something.

But my obedience was not really to God. it was my attempt to change who I was so that I might be pleasing to him. The knowledge of my sin was like a secret I carried; it weighed on my soul like a dark cloud. I felt dead inside.

The beautiful thing about the Cross is that Jesus died for the very thing I was hiding from. It is easy to think Jesus died for my sins or even think He died for my past sins only (and now it is my job not to sin any more presumably). But our problem runs much deeper than that. We are dead in our sin, by nature deserving of God’s wrath. The horror I felt about myself was real. But the remedy was not me trying harder. It was coming out into the light to allow Jesus to do what only He could do: make me into the very thing He desired me to become. And furthermore, recognize He alone has the power to do that. In short, Jesus died that He might raise me from the dead.

Once we are raised from the dead, we are new creations. And our new nature is unpunishable. Jesus has literally put to death the part of us that can be punished and given us a new nature than cannot be punished. This is how far He has separated us from our sin. Our new nature also has the power to do what pleases Jesus, and it is from this nature that we now operate.

But our new nature can only come fully online by us receiving the Good News. In my case, it was by actually realizing whatever I felt I deserved or did not deserve on the basis of my own conduct or even the content of my own heart no longer mattered. All that mattered was recognizing I had been raised to life — a life for whom guilt and punishment was literally impossible. In short, that I had been awakened from the dead.

And when you realize you have been awakened from the dead, all around you is life. And there is simply nothing the God of life will withhold from you.

The Limits of Faith

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We have different gifts, according to the grace given to each of us. If your gift is prophesying, then prophesy in accordance with your faith

Romans 12:6 (NIV)

As we have been discussing, faith is ultimately something God supplies. Not that we have no role in cultivating a lifestyle of faith, but recognizing faith is not something we can manufacture ourselves, and that it is ultimately a gift from God, will save us a lot of needless striving (and no small degree of emotional distress). The faith we need to move mountains and see answered prayer is ultimately a gift from God.

But why then does God tell us to have faith? For the same reason He tells us to be perfectly righteous. When Jesus says, “Unless your righteousness surpasses that of the Pharisees and the teachers of the law, you will certainly not enter the kingdom of heaven1,” He is in fact telling us to possess what He alone can provide. It is the same with faith. Our part is to cultivate both through relationship. By coming into relationship with Jesus by receiving His forgiveness purchased by His own death at the Cross, we become perfectly righteous. By cultivating a lifestyle of intimacy with Jesus, we become filled with faith to move the very mountains God is moving.

This distinction is really important because it means we are not ultimately in control of the level of faith we have: God is. Again, we are not trying to manufacture faith; we are learning to operate in the faith God has already given us. This is why the apostle Paul in the opening scripture (above) encourages us to operate in the grace given to us according to our faith. Where grace exists, faith is present. And God ultimately controls both: He gives us the faith to operate in the gifts He has given to us and to fulfill our God-given destiny. He also gives us the faith to cooperate with Him in the soul’s transformation. He is not in other words standing far off expecting us to muster up faith; rather, He leads us by faith.

And this means there are limits to faith. Not in the sense of what faith can accomplish, but in the sense of where faith can be found in our lives at any given point of our journey. That is, faith will always be present in the areas where God is at work in our lives. We do grow in faith, but not by trying to have more faith. We grow in faith by being faithful to partner with God with the faith He has already given to us.

In saying this, I am challenging the whole idea that faith is a super-power that lets us do whatever we want. That faith is an alternate path to perfection that does not require partnering with God at all, really: we just crank up the faith engine through our own effort and we are free to do whatever we want. This whole notion is in actuality a perception of faith from an orphan lens. In many ways it is an attempt to reap the benefits of faith without the cost involved, which is intimacy with God.

Which is not possible. Whether we are talking about romantic love or our relationship with God, intimacy costs you something. In fact, it ultimately costs you everything. But those who have participated in either know the cost is worth it. The path to life is limited by the narrow gate of intimacy. But once we enter, we find God and His goodness to be, well, quite limitless.2

  1. Matthew 5:20 ↩︎
  2. Matthew 7:13 ↩︎

Having Faith like a Child

Published on by dpatrickcollins1 Comment

And Jesus said: “Truly I tell you, unless you change and become like little children, you will never enter the kingdom of heaven.

Matthew 18:3 (NIV)

Yesterday I discussed the folly of trying to practice faith through a faith-factory lens in which we think Jesus is expecting us to generate faith through the raw materials of our intellect and human effort alone, instead of through the only thing that can, honestly, generate true faith: intimacy with God. It is our intimate connection with Him that reveals to us who He is and what He is doing, both of which supply us with the very faith we need for every situation.

Which, coming from a faith-based culture, seems a bit wrong-headed. We may believe God speaks, and that He often tells us what He is doing. But isn’t the task of having enough faith our responsibility? To suggest God is ultimately the one who supplies us the very faith we need sounds a lot like God doing our job for us. Doesn’t it?

Well, it does – if we are viewing Christianity from an orphan mindset. If we think God’s ultimate objective is to make us independent creatures who rely on our own abilities to accomplish great things on our own and forge our own destiny, then God supplying the faith we need will sound a lot like God doing our job for us. But if God’s real objective is a life of intimacy, characterized by our utter dependence on Him (like a child has with a Father or a Bride with a Bridegroom) then God being the one to supply the faith we need, indeed the One to supply all we need, is not God doing our job for us but instead His job description. He longs to be our everything.

When Jesus says “Have faith in God,” He is not telling us to try harder: He’s telling us to go deeper. He is not giving us a job; He is inviting us into a life of such close intimacy with Himself that we find ourselves commanding the very mountains He Himself is moving, being moved by the very compassion and hope He Himself is feeling, even the very anger at the injustice the Evil One has unleashed upon the world.

The endgame is a life of intimacy. Anything short of this will not only tie us in emotional knots but also lead to a whole lot of spiritual striving. The tragedy in all of this is not just that we are unhappy or unproductive, but rather we are not ourselves. We are alienated from who we truly are. For like a child or a Bride, we were created for intimacy.

My Champion

Published on by dpatrickcollins1 Comment

When you were dead in your sins and in the uncircumcision of your flesh, God made you alive with Christ. He forgave us all our sins, having canceled the charge of our legal indebtedness, which stood against us and condemned us; he has taken it away, nailing it to the cross.

Colossians 2:13-14 (NIV)

Last Sunday during church our pastor mentioned he felt there were many who had made Jesus their Savior but not necessarily their Lord, and he welcome those who felt God speaking to them about this to come to the front for prayer. But as soon as he said it, I felt God say to me, “There are also many who have made Me their Lord but not their Savior. Because they believe it is their job to save themselves.”

This was relevant to me. Earlier that week, I found myself praying a well-known passage from Revelation (I often “pray” the Bible): “Here I am! I stand at the door and knock. If anyone hears my voice and opens the door, I will come in and eat with that person, and they with me.”1 As I asked God to come in and eat with me, I immediately got this impression of Jesus trying to make His way through my doorway but something getting in the way. When I asked the Lord about this, I felt Him say to me, “I can only come as your Savior. But you are trying to save yourself.”2

And then I had one of those “life flash before my eyes” moments in which I saw myself trying so hard to be a good person in order to please Him. I saw how I learned from an early age that it was my job to be good and led to believe I actually was capable of being good. God was putting his finger on these things, showing me how they made me resistant to the idea I needed a Savior, not just for my eternal destiny but also for life. Ironically, God also showed me in that moment all my moral and relational failures throughout life, clearly undermining the idea I was capable of being truly good at anything! I felt in that moment there was nothing good in me.3

We do not mean to save ourselves; it is just normal to think we owe God something, and that something is our own goodness. But the kingdom of God does not work that way. Instead, we bring him the worst part of ourselves and say, “This is all I got. Please help!” We bring Him our crisis, and He becomes our intervention. We bring Him our ashes, and He becomes our beauty. We bring Him our heaviness, and He becomes our joy. We bring Him our desert, and He becomes our streams of living water. We bring Him our nakedness and He clothes us in white. And He does it again and again and again.

Another name for Savior is Champion. Jesus is the one who fights for me. May I learn to be vulnerable enough to bring to Him the battles worth fighting for — that is, the ones I could not possible fight on my own.

Photo by Wesley Tingey on Unsplash

  1. Revelation 3:20 (NIV) ↩︎
  2. I should probably do a blog post on hearing God’s voice at some point, but suffice it to say: God is really good at speaking to us in a variety of ways when we set our hearts to listen. ↩︎
  3. Romans 7:18. God has a way of showing us these things without any condemnation, which was the case here. ↩︎

Peace Like a River

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During pre-service prayer at the church I attend in the heart of Los Angeles, the theme last Sunday was rest. One of the members present shared a well-known verse:

Romans 8:28-29 (NIV) And we know that in all things God works for the good of those who love him, who have been called according to his purpose. For those God foreknew he also predestined to be conformed to the image of his Son

It occurred to me that, although this “sovereignty verse” is often understood to mean our justification* is secure, it means much more than this: that our purpose, calling and destiny are secure as well. God is telling us he has predestined the perfection of our faith and with it our destiny as well.

I know this passage and others like it have been used by some to suggest our part in life is nothing at all (since presumably everything has been predetermined**), but this is not, in my humble opinion, what this passage is saying. To assume so is to mistake God’s sovereignty for God violating our free will, an idea that is neither suggested nor taught anywhere in Scripture. But what it is saying is that the fulfillment of God’s plans and purposes are as readily available to us as salvation itself. In every moment, God has everything we need to fulfill the amazing life God has for us. We do not need to fear we are missing out.

Which on this particular morning was meaningful to me. I suddenly felt as if I had spent my entire life frantically navigating life as though I would miss out, first by failing to be acceptable to God, then by failing to “position” myself to be blessed by him. It was clear in that moment both of these attitudes were the very thing Jesus had come to deliver me from. That the image he desired to conform me to was that of a son who knew in each moment his Father had everything he needed to share in the fullness of the abundant life He had dreamed for him. And in that stillness I found peace flowing like a river.

*That is, our righteousness before God on account of what Jesus has done for us at the Cross
**A traditionally Calvinist perspective