Tag: Love

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.

Faith is a Lot Like Dating

Published on by dpatrickcollins4 Comments

Therefore I tell you, whatever you ask for in prayer, believe that you have received it, and it will be yours.

Mark 11:24 (NIV)

The claims Jesus makes about faith are astounding. But how exactly does one go about living a life of faith? How does one believe in a way that we receive what we ask for?

This is an important question because without a good answer, we can find ourselves tied up in all sorts of emotional knots. A visiting speaker at Elevation Church made the observation that the evangelical church in particular has created a culture where it is believed “bright and shiny” emotions – such as joy and hope – are the only ones God wants us to have, and this belief finds it roots in a poor understanding of faith. That if we are feeling hopeless and sorrowful, we are somehow denying God’s goodness and operating in unbelief. Which of course can only lead to a culture of people doing their best to hopelessly deny their emotions. And, as a part of what we might call a faith-based culture, I see this all the time.

But what then is faith if not controlling our emotions? Better yet, how does one have it? Here, it is helpful for us to have the right paradigm. When it comes to faith, most of us see ourselves as faith factories; that is, we think it is our job to produce faith by working with the raw materials we have at hand, like intellect and human effort. But faith is more like a woman on a first date. She may be hopeful, but she knows very little about the man on the other side of the table. And – here’s the rub – she has no idea whether he will come through for her till she gets to know him.

That is the true paradigm of faith. Faith is inescapably relational, and our ability to have faith in God for any situation is directly proportional to our intimate knowledge of Him. It is not something we can possess without knowing Him intimately any more than a woman can possess confidence in the man without getting to know him. Which is why cultivating a life of intimacy with God – one where we come into supernatural contact with His love – is so vital. God’s love is not just the fringe benefit of our salvation; it is the life force that empowers all else in the Christian life. As we come to know God’s love, our confidence He will come through for us in any situation we face will increase.

But this is not all there is to faith. For the life of faith is a relationship, just like a dating relationship, and our faith depends on what is going on in that relationship. For example, a woman who has gotten to know a man and who has earned her trust will believe him when he says, “I will meet you at the restaurant by the pier this Saturday at seven.” But her confidence will not only rest on what she knows about him. It will also rest on the simple if not obvious fact he has just told her what he intends to do. In the same way, our faith in God showing up in a way we expect is not simply based on what we know about Him. It is also based on Him revealing to us what He intends to do.

Many believers are driving themselves nuts trying to muster the faith God will show up in a specific way in their lives without God revealing to them what He intends to do. The reason for this is the faith-factory paradigm: when Jesus encourages us to have faith, we think He means from thin air. Granted, there are many instances in life where we can ask God for things with confidence on the basis of His character alone. But our tendency to think faith takes place outside relationship, as though God is requiring us to know precisely what He intends to do in any given situation without letting us draw close enough to Him to know what He is doing, is neither biblical nor rational. Nor relational, I would add: it is the breeding ground for emotional knots.

But if faith rests on God telling us in advance what he intends to do, doesn’t that defeat the whole purpose of faith? Not really. At least, Abraham, the father of faith, did not think so, who believed precisely because God told him what He was about to do. Nor did Jesus, who only did what He saw The Father doing. The endgame of faith, as with dating, is not control or wild predictions; it is relational 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. ↩︎

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.