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. ↩︎

Seeking the Kingdom

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From the days of John the Baptist until now the kingdom of heaven suffers violence, and the violent take it by force.

Matthew 11:12-13 (NKJV)

According to the Author of all life, life requires us taking the kingdom of heaven by force. All that is precious, sacred, eternal and of any worth requires intentionality and perseverance to possess. When it comes to the kingdom of heaven (that is, God), passivity simply will not do. Unlike other uses of force, however, the force required to apprehend the kingdom of heaven is not force used against others but rather against ourselves. For the thing that stands in the way of us and the kingdom is our own hearts.

The late theologian Dallas Willard argued the place of greatest darkness in all of creation is the human soul. Creation itself is filled with the glory of God, but not necessarily filled with the knowledge of the glory of God, for the human soul is the place where our knowledge of God’s glory is most absent. Granted, the darkness that inhabits the human soul has actually affected the rest of creation.1 But Willard’s comment underscores the point I am making here: the battleground for establishing what is right, just and good in this world begins and ends with the human heart.

But I must be quick to clarify the force I have in mind (that is, what I believe Jesus has in mind) is a gentle force. It is the force that chooses to seek Him. It is the force that chooses to lose one’s life for Him. It is the force that chooses to allow His Holy Spirit full control of our lives without condition, permitting Him to operate outside the box of our own making concerning what God can and cannot do, allowing him into the place we have learned to keep ourselves safe from all that He might wish to do. It is the force of humility and surrender, arguably the most powerful force in the world –– certainly the most powerful force we possess.

  1. Romans 8:20 ↩︎

Waiting on God

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Wait for the LORD;
be strong and take heart
and wait for the LORD.

Psalms 27:14 (NIV)

There is a story that circulates among church circles and takes various forms but goes something like this: A man who is unemployed has not applied for a job in months, nor has he made any other effort to find work. When asked why, he replies, “I am waiting on the Lord.”

This story is often used to suggest the folly of doing nothing and the importance of doing something in life to see things accomplished and otherwise live a productive and virtuous life. But it is rarely used to suggest or clarify the importance of waiting on God. In fact, when stories like this arise (in sermons or conversation), one is often left with the distinct impression there is little that is productive or virtuous in waiting on God, and that all that is virtuous as far as human enterprise is concerned can be summed up in Ben Franklin’s classic proverb, “God helps those who help themselves.”

But does God only help those who help themselves? Is this how the fabric of life, especially life in the Kingdom of God, works? God only does things if we do things?

There is a place no doubt for us to do things in life, and there are certainly times when we should do things and for a variety of reasons we do not and may even find ourselves blaming our idleness on God. But the idea God is only active in our lives to the degree we are actively doing stuff assumes a lot about our relationship with God. For one, it assumes staying busy and doing things on our own is God’s highest priority. I say “on our own” because if we truly believe God only helps us once we do something, by definition we are doing that something on our own, without first waiting on God to know what to do.

I have always been a firm believer in hard work, but I have come to question staying busy as the highest human virtue. I say this at a time when the American church is arguably busier than it ever has been, and yet failing to make a significant impact on culture. My criticism here is not against the church, but against the mandate of getting involved and staying busy that has arisen in many church cultures. We have celebrated this as what the Christian life is all about and therefore presumably what makes God most happy. I have my doubts. I am not suggesting being part of community has no value. But being really busy in church ministry is not the highest priority in the spiritual life, nor will it guarantee us a successful spiritual life. It will likely guarantee us burnout.

Failing to act is not the only folly that faces us as believers. Granted, we can fail to act for the wrong reasons. Many a believer has failed to step out and trust God in fulfilling their destiny out of fear and called it “just waiting on the Lord” (or “I just don’t have time” or “I am not quite ready” or a myriad of other excuses). Facing our fears is hard. But for every example of failing to act for the wrong reasons, there are at least ten examples of choosing to act for the wrong reasons, also. We can choose to be a part of the worship team for the attention it brings. We can choose to work tirelessly in the church because we are trying to impress God or others with our good works. We can choose to start a business for pure selfish ambition and greed. We can even choose to fill up our lives with activity because we are afraid of doing the one thing God has called us to do. Taking action may produce a lot of activity, but is no antidote against folly.

Which is why waiting on God is so vital. When we wait on God, we are choosing to give him space to speak into our lives concerning what we should be doing. I do not mean “should” in a heavy-handed obligatory sort of way. I mean God telling us everything from why he has created us and what he has called us to accomplish in this life all the way down to what he wants us to do to patch things up to our spouse. Or be a better husband and father or wife and mother or brother and friend and coworker. Or overcome anger or addiction or fear — even fear of doing what he is asking us to do. Knowing our hearts, God alone is in the position to tell us how to take the next indicated step.

I will end by saying waiting on God is not idleness. In a way, from God’s perspective, we are all unemployed and looking for a job. But waiting on Him is not doing something else with our time. It is refraining from doing anything else till He speaks and gives us the direction we need that puts us on the successful path of life. And we find ourselves employed again with the only job that matters.

Abounding in Hope

Published on by dpatrickcollins1 Comment

And hope does not disappoint, because the love of God has been poured out within our hearts through the Holy Spirit who was given to us.

Romans 5:5 (NASB 2020)

After reading my last post, a family member reached out to me to ask if I was all right. He read I was in tears and feared the worst. I assured him all was well and, laughing at myself, confessed I had not made myself perfectly clear on my last post. So much for attempting to be vulnerable in four paragraphs or less! But it got me thinking about how we process tears as well as navigate disappointment in the Christian life, so as a way of issuing a correction to the previous post, here goes.

First, generally speaking, tears are a good thing in the Christian life. Jesus wept on several occasions1 and not necessarily because the world was coming to an end. Rather, as we become more alive in Christ and our hearts are softened and able to process emotion in a broken world, tears are often the result. This at least has been my experience. The more time I spend with Jesus, the more I weep, not necessarily because I have just experienced something tragic, but more often because something that has been bottled up inside me for years has been unlocked by the deep work of the Holy Spirit. This is what I was describing in my last post: I was troubled and did not know why, but once I spent time in God’s presence, He showed me the cause of my unrest (fear of being disappointed), and with tears, the power of that fear was broken off me.

Of course, it is also true the more I spend with Jesus, the more I laugh. During a time of worship recently, a friend grabbed my hand and began to pray for me, and I found myself instantly filled with an inexpressible joy causing me to burst into laughter.2

But I wish to address the topic of disappointment, since I realize the relationship a Christian has to disappointment and how he or she navigates it is vastly different from one who is not. Outside of Christ, our joy or sorrow is based on our circumstances. If things go well, we are happy. If things do not go well, we are sad. One might say as far as joy and sorrow goes, we are enslaved to our circumstances, wholly dependent on them being favorable in order to be joyful and furthermore hopeful, since hope is the expectation of joyful circumstances in the future. Because of this relationship, we are, before long, rendered hopeless, since we grow fearful of getting our hopes up, and even begin developing an expectation of bad things happening.

But when we meet Jesus, something fundamentally changes. We find both hope and joy independent of our circumstances. I am not suggesting God does not bring joyful circumstances into our lives; certainly He does. But our relationship to circumstances changes. The love of God Paul describes as being poured out in our hearts simultaneously gives us a joy despite our circumstances and also a hopeful expectation of favorable circumstances in the future. After all: God loves us, and the deeper we come to know God’s love, the more certain we are there is no good thing He will withhold from us.

This is what gives the Christian (I am speaking of the best examples) unshakeable joy and hope in the midst of hardship and difficulty. Simply put, neither is a product of their circumstances: it comes from someplace beyond, namely God’s love. And if the joy and hope are genuine, it is a testimony of God to those around them, because it is really hard to fake either when you are going through it!

Lastly, when we talk about cultivating an expectation of good things happening in our lives, we aren’t doing so in order to simply be positive people or make ourselves happy. What we are really doing is aligning ourselves with the Kingdom of God, which Jesus is establishing in us and through us. My wife Catherine used to say, “Everything is going to be all right.” This is comforting no matter who you are, but it is profound because for those who are in Christ, it is fundamentally true, both now and for all eternity.

Courage to Believe

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Love always protects, always trusts, always hopes, always perseveres.

Corinthians 13:7 (NIV)

I find myself in tears this afternoon because I am really afraid something I am hoping for will not come to pass. I spent the greater part of the past several days doing everything in my power to protect myself from the disappointment, not even aware that was what I was actually doing. But the moment I entered God’s presence, it became clear. And in that moment, it became clear how costly faith really is.

We often talk about the power of faith, but we do not always talk about the cost of faith. Granted, a life of faith is beautiful; I would not change it for the world. But every time we choose faith, it costs us something. We are giving up all that we can rely on and often all we can control with our own faculties. Like Abraham, we are setting out, leaving the comfort and safety of all that is familiar. We are placing ourselves entirely in the hands of another, namely God.

Many view faith as their ticket to remaining in control. They think faith gives them the power to ensure their own happiness and destiny. But this is mistaking faith in God for faith in ourselves. True faith comes from God: He is the source of the substance of things hoped for and the evidence of things not seen.1 Abraham did not wake up one day and say, “I think I am going to be the father of many nations,” and then set out on a mission to convince himself of this reality. No, God was the one who did the convincing. And Abraham is our example. Just as his life demonstrates, faith always begins with God: He reveals his plans and intentions, inviting us to follow.

This has a few implications. One is that faith is deeply personal. God knows you just as he knew Abraham.2 He has a unique purpose for your life. The second, accordingly, is that faith is specific and unique in nature. We are not willy-nilly trying to think positive thoughts about the circumstances of our lives to get outrageous things to happen. Rather, we are responding to and partnering with the God who is speaking outrageous things over our lives. Again, faith is deeply personal. When we practice faith, we are not cultivating a relationship with our imagination; we are cultivating a relationship with the God of all creation, the God of all hope, with whom all things are possible.

And God will often take us into the places of our hearts long-dead from pain, fear, and disappointment. He will go into those places where we have made a home for ourselves, where things are familiar. And in that place, he will call us out to leave all that is familiar with a promise of an extravagantly abundant life. Here is where courage is most needed, for he is asking us to hope again, and often everything in us just wants to stay small. In the final analysis, faith costs us everything.

But then, is there really any other way to live?

  1. Hebrews 11 ↩︎
  2. Technically, he still knows Abraham ↩︎