Abounding in Hope

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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 ↩︎

By His Spirit Alone

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Not by might nor by power, but by my Spirit, says the LORD Almighty.

Zechariah 4:6 (NIV)

One of the things I am learning in this season is just how powerless I am. I am a high-achiever by nature. I was voted most likely to succeed in high school and graduated valedictorian.1 I know how to get things done. And in life I have certainly done some things well. But there has been a sense of being unable to step into my true purpose and calling, a feeling I am arm’s-length away from what I was actually put on this planet to do.

I suspect this is true for many of us. We have yet to step into the fullness of our destiny. When we feel we are not quite where we want to be in life, the temptation is to push. It is to try to make something happen. This is especially true when we know God has called us to the thing we desire. Many of us in fact have been spiritually trained to do so. God wants what is best for us, He is for us, and He has delegated everything we need to make the life he has for us a reality. Such training has merit; it is much better than being completely unaware and unwilling to believe God has much of anything for us, much less prepared to partner with him in the adventure he has for us.

But there is a counterbalance to all this, and it is that nothing happens apart from His Spirit. It is only by His Spirit that anything lasting and worthwhile is accomplished. The line of demarcation between doing nothing and doing something with our lives is not defined by activity or inactivity per se, but by our responsiveness to His Spirit. In preparation for our calling, God often detours us and calls us to the deep places with Himself. It is not because He wishes to frustrate us or His own plans. It is because our destiny is much more than what we do: it is who we are. God is not just accomplishing destiny through us; He is building destiny in us. Our career path is not the destiny: we are. There is therefore purpose in the waiting. There is purpose in the delay. There is purpose even in the setback and moment and season of disappointment. There is purpose even and especially when things go horribly wrong and do not work out.

Some of us struggle with this. We do not believe God causes all things to work together for our good. Especially the things that blow up spectacularly in our faces, the things that seem to be the very opposite of all that we know is true about Him. We refuse to believe God could be behind some of the things that we walk through. We would rather believe God is in control of those moments of our lives that go well where His extravagant grace is undeniable. We choose to believe God is the God of revival only, not the God of all of our lives; we reason there is a small portion of life God occupies called His manifest presence, and in every other area of our lives, we are on our own. But this is not because we actually are. It is because we have refused to acknowledge Him as the God whose care embraces all that transpires in our lives.2 We have chosen unbelief over faith, and it has blinded us from seeing God in the moments He is often doing his best work.

And sometimes His best work is bringing us to a place of realizing just how powerless we really are. That we really can do nothing apart from Him. That everything rests on His ability to show up and make something of our present mess, and of our lives. And that we can trust Him to do so.

  1. Technically, co-valedictorian, a status I shared with two other students. ↩︎
  2. Matthew 10:29 ↩︎

Surrender

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Therefore, brothers and sisters, we have an obligation—but it is not to the flesh, to live according to it. For if you live according to the flesh, you will die; but if by the Spirit you put to death the misdeeds of the body, you will live.

Romans 8:12-13 (NIV)

I find myself in a season of deep surrender. By this I mean that in my prayer time with Jesus, there is a growing sense there is an area of my heart that has resisted His work.

I find we often do not have language for the work Jesus wants to do in us. Because we are unaware of our hearts and God’s desire to transform them, we assume the work God cares about amounts to Christian service or good behavior. We read passages like the one above and say, “putting to death the misdeeds of the body means not sinning and getting involved.” But if this were so, Paul would not have dedicated an entire chapter in his letter to the Romans explaining to us such an approach to live is not possible.

If you look back on Paul’s progression of thought leading up to this passage, you will see that trying to not sin and be good is part of our flesh. It exists in the domain of our soul that is separate from the Spirit. And because of this, it cannot do anything. The good it wants to do it fails to do, and the very bad it tries not to do it does. This is what life is like when we mistakenly think our job in the Christian life is to not sin and get involved. And it is why many Christian lives are characterized by defeat and not victory.

So what then is our job? It is to surrender to the work the Spirit of God is doing. I recently talked about the fact the purpose of the Christian life is to be conformed to the image of Jesus, and far from mere behavior modification, this involves transformation of who we are on the inside. It involves Jesus going to the deep places and bringing healing. And our job is to let him. This is what it means to “put to death the misdeeds of the body by the Spirit.”

Many of us are trying to be the fruits of the Spirit. We think our job is to be patient and kind and long-suffering and full of self-control and even joy. But all of these things are fruit of the Spirit. They are the result of the work of the Spirit in our lives. Our job is not to be fruit: it is to allow the Spirit to do the necessary work to produce the fruit only He can produce. It is this putting to death of the things within us by surrendering to the things in our hearts and lives he wants to heal.

This is where the rubber meets the road in the true Christian life. It really does not matter what you are doing as far as the Christian life is concerned. All that matters what He is doing. And more importantly, what you are allowing him to do. I find time and time again this makes the difference between a life going nowhere and an extravagantly abundant life.

Let us then do the most important thing we can with our lives this day: ask Jesus what he wants to do in us, and when he makes his will clear through a growing sense there is an area within us we have refused to surrender to him, surrender. There is certainly no. better way to live.

Why Faith?

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Everything is possible for one who believes.

Mark 9:23 (NKJV)

What hope the Word of God brings! The fact is: everything is possible. We may wonder how to believe in the manner Jesus commands, but the fact everything is possible means no situation is hopeless. Not one. Not even up to the bitter end. Even in our worst moments when things look hopeless, there is no telling what Jesus might do.

But have you ever asked yourself why faith is necessary? I mean, if God is as good as we believe he is, why does he require faith in order to make the seemingly impossible possible? Why does God require that we believe it in order for him to do it? Especially when one considers the difference between him doing it can be the difference between suffering and not suffering, between us seeing a young man demonized and being delivered from a demon? Between us suffering under the weight of whatever impossible situation we find ourselves in, and being liberated from it? If God is so good, why faith?

I mean, is faith nothing more than God making us jump through hoops in order to experience the fullness of his blessings?

I do not believe so. God requires faith because faith itself is far more sacred and far more central to the overall scheme of things than we might realize. It is not just “the thing we must do to get God to do the thing we want him to do.” It is something that reflects what it means to be fully human.

In a previous post I mentioned God’s commitment to conform us to His own image is really a commitment to restore us to the fullness of our true humanity. In other words, God, though he is good and desires to deliver us from suffering, is more concerned with delivering us from everything in our lives that has distorted and compromised what He has called and created us to be. In other words, he is doing more than just delivering us from the effects of evil; he is delivering us from evil itself. And unbelief is the greatest form of evil. It is everything in us that prevents us from seeing God as he truly is in relation to who we truly are. And that true picture of God and us can be summed up in these words: Everything is possible for one who believes. This is the true nature of how things are between God and us, indeed the true nature of reality itself.

Which means faith is more than the means by which we get God to move. Rather, faith is the thing God is restoring in every area of our lives. To be like Jesus is to be full of faith, because being full of faith means being aligned with what is really true about our situation from heaven’s perspective. The truth is: all things are possible with God. The truth is: we are unfathomably loved. The truth is: God’s hand is not too short. The truth is: God will never leave us. The truth is: we are sons and daughters of the Most High God. The truth is: we are more than overcomers. The truth is: God is for us. The truth is: we are the righteousness of God. All of these things represent the faith Jesus is in the process of perfecting in us.

And I will part with one last thought: knowing this liberates us from being responsible for whatever outcome we hope to achieve in whatever situation we are in. When we realize faith is not a means to an end but really an end in itself, we are free to allow God to perfect faith in whatever situation we are in and leave the outcome up to him. Every situation we face is really an opportunity to believe; the rest is up to him.