Serving Brings Healing in Her Wings (Service & Kingdom, Part 2)

Hopefully Part 1 didn’t scare you off. It was not meant with a spirit of criticism but rather I am just processing a lesson I’m going through right now! It all started on the eve of my birthday this year. I turned 25. Besides all the other trite things I could say about turning 25, one thing I wanted to know of myself is, WHAT DO I WANT TO DO DIFFERENTLY THIS YEAR? So here goes, this is what I’ve been pondering.

Lately, I've been going through a phase involving just the quieting down of my own voice and passions, and opening myself up to a ‘download’ from God. One of the greatest ways of doing this has been through prayer and worship (‘DUH’, is what some of you might be saying!), and it’s been a blessing to be doing life with a bunch of people that also have a similar heart for radical breakthrough through prayer and worship! On one of the nights recently when we were gathered together to do just that, I had a bit of a shake-up.

Here I was, completely looking forward to a night of just resting and soaking up some time with God, and instead as things progressed I was increasingly restless and dissatisfied. The image of a lady who was roaming and sleeping on the streets of Humble kept coming to mind, and I felt so hypocritical for sitting there, signing songs about having ‘a fire burn within’ and ‘being filled’ and ‘loving God’ when just 1 block away I knew a woman was sleeping on the streets. I started questioning: is this really all this is going to add up to? Do we sit here and just pray and worship for a few hours, hoping for some revelation of GOD and His presence, and then go home? Is this really the kind of prayer and worship God wants from us? What are we about here? And it all started feeling quite selfish and empty.

And yet, I knew that prayer and worship have to be the foundation of all things we do, right?

But the image of this woman and her need were not leaving me, so I set out to do something about it.

Well fast-forward a few hours, and I was in my car, driving home. For a variety of reasons, the woman had not been helped, and I was going back to the comfort of my own bed. Why I was feeling all this sudden discomfort and need to help kept nagging me, well into the next day. And I realized a few things, one of them being that it was simply time to move on into the next phase. And it has truly made me wonder what I have been about, and how that fits into God building His Kingdom!

Now, in light of all I’ve said previously about us missing out on the message of the Kingdom and how to let that flow through us, maybe I’m the one missing something, maybe I’m the one who’s not right with God. I don’t know. What I do know is, that if the aforementioned is what the Church is, is that is what Christianity amounts to, it greatly saddens and disillusions me. I’m not seeing the Jesus I know and love growing in me, or in those around me as I believe He can and should.

I no longer want to serve me, or my plans, my desires, my wants and needs. I don't want to pump myself full of self-made morality. I don’t want to serve God so I can gain something from Him. I don’t want to be stuck. I want my soul to be awakened once more, with a beautiful passion for Him! I don’t want to be crippled by fear or the ‘rules’ of the Church!

Some might call this rebellious, but I’m pretty sure that if this is rebellion, Jesus was the greatest rebel of them all!

So I’ve decided to take a journey. No, not necessarily to some far-off place (though that does sound heavenly). No, I’m taking a journey, into find Abundant Life in Jesus, just as the disciples did.

You see, Jesus is the shepherd, and we are the sheep. But a good shepherd doesn’t leave his sheep caught up in pen, does he? No, he takes them out so they can go munch on some wonderful grass, so they can wander the hills and rocky crags, so they can get some muscle, some fresh air, and some wonderfully nourishing food. Yes, there will likely be some dangers involved in this, but the shepherd knows that if left in the pen, his sheep will surely grow sick and die. And he knows he can watch over his sheep and take care of them outside of the pen, because that’s what he’s there for!

Jesus did much the same with his first ‘sheep’. He called his disciples, but he didn’t take them off to rabbi school in some building in a secluded spot for 4 year. No, they were out on the ‘field’ with him straight away. And as they journeyed together, they learned. Yes, He would teach them in private and pray with them, but all this while journeying to serve and bring healing to many others!

And although the disciples did stumble, and yes even fell, they learned, and grew, and were healed and transformed. They learned how to find that Abundant Life in Christ!

Isaiah 57 & 58 speak of much the same principle. The Israelites had given in to following their own desires and idols, again and again. They feared their idols instead of God, and thus were captives to their own lifestyles. Ever felt that way? Captive to this life and it seemingly insatiable desires? I certainly have. In the story, God chooses to give them another chance, another chance to be set free, to be restored, to be filled with courage and strength once again. Another chance to be healed, from all the hurt and shame they were surely filled with after dealing with the harshness of life.

But the way to gain healing, was not through traditional forms of worship, such as come to the Temple every day, and fasting for days. No, he says, “Free those who are wrongly imprisoned; lighten the burden of those who work for you. Let the oppressed go free, and remove the chains that bind people.  Bring your food to the hungry, and bring the poor that are cast out into your houses. When you see the naked, cover them, and do not hide yourself from your relatives.” (To be really honest, these actions are not half as 'second-nature' as I once thought they were).

His promise? That doing this will bring SALVATION and HEALING, that then their righteousness will go before them, and the glory of the Lord will be their reward.

We are a Church entirely too focused on ourselves, on our own healing and self-made righteousness. And we choose to find those things be stuffing ourselves into buildings, receiving our ‘self-help’ messages, and protecting ourselves from the ‘wicked’ world out there (though partaking of it whenever we wish). We are sheep willingly keeping ourselves locked up in our pens, grow sick, unhealthily fat, and gross. We fear the world, nag each other to bits, and constantly pick at our festering wounds as we sit, unmoving in our pens.

Perhaps, if we chose to find healing and restoration the way that God asks us to, we might actually find it, once and for all!! So, that’s the journey I’ve decided to take. I’m going find that healing, that completely and abundant life, by doing exactly what God says to do, by following Jesus out in the world out there, by grazing the fields with my shepherd and mounting the rocky crags with Him. I’m going to try to live life ‘out there’, serving others, loving those God wants me to love. Like the disciples, I’ll watch and learn as Jesus leads me to feed others, bring healing, bring the Good News, how to serve Him, how to pray in all things and so on. And I’ll do it, and gain freedom and life, by being out there on a journey with my shepherd.

A common argument here is often, “But I’m not ready yet. It’s okay for others to reach out the so and so, but I still have to deal with stuff in past, and that situation or person hits too close to my past.” I propose to you, that perhaps if we reach out, especially in situations and to persons that remind us of our past, we might actually gain fresh insight, and gain healing by replacing unforgiveness and pain with love and hands of healing? (I am not in this case, speaking of situations that might lead you into temptation in areas you have a weakness in).

Jesus says he is the Fountain of Life, through and out of whom living waters flow. If I’m filled with His water, to overflowing, I’m determined to give that water away. Because if I just take a bit of His water, fill my glass, just happy that I’ve gotten a bit, I’ve missed the point. That water won’t stay fresh and will stagnate and grow all manner of nasty things, if it doesn’t continue flowing. We have to be willing to let the RIVER OF LIFE FLOW through us, constantly. As we are filled, with give away, and are filled once again with fresh, pure water.

I don’t want to be afraid anymore, I don’t want to get stuck on me, I want to find release and freedom by moving with Christ and letting His love move in and through me! And I am desperate for others to find that same freedom and release. Won’t you join me in this journey? I believe living life for others has healing and forgiveness in its wings!! I’m giving God a heart of love and service, and laying down a mind filled with myself: my own plans and strategies, my own righteousness, my own ‘healing’, my own fears and desires.

Delight yourself in the LORD, and He will give you the desires of your heart.

May your Kingdom come Lord, within me, within each us. May we truly learn to live your freedom Christ, and your newness of Life. I lay down my own conception of ‘Kingdom’ Lord, knowing that you came not to establish a physical throne and Kingdom in this world, but one that begins in the Spirit and will manifest itself in the new Heaven and Earth you have destined us for in eternity.

Why the Heart? (Service & Kingdom, Part 1)

I’d rather be broken, that I may be fixed, I’d rather be foolish, that I may experience God’s awesome power, I’d rather…

God desires a broken and repentant heart, not a mind filled with strategies, or a knowledge of righteousness! I don’t want to become as stubborn, hard-hearted and far away from God as His own people have been. We strive for Kingdoms in the physical, but where I ask, is the spirit of LIFE AND WHOLENESS? Do we know what it means when we say ‘Your Kingdom Come’? ‘Your Will Be Done’? I have a suspicion that we really don’t. The meaning of Kingdom is what I design to explore here, and I postulate that perhaps if we change our view of the Kingdom and how it is to come, in each one of us, we might actually be able to live our lives growing in the complete fullness of Christ! And I believe one of the key pieces lies in Isaiah 58:7-8, which gives us clear instructions on how to serve and build Gods kingdom, how to do His will, in the physical, and how that has true eternal, spiritual impact. It is an outworking of the Kingdom that looks very little like what I’ve seen everywhere else. But let me not get ahead of myself.

Christ walked on earth, calling his disciples to him, healing, and praying. Luke describes how He would heal men, as a way to prove that the Son of Man can indeed bring the forgiveness of sins. Is not what is restored in the physical simply a sign of that which can ultimately be restored in the spirit? Is not God’s ultimate desire to save all souls and restore man unto Himself? We long for Kingdom, as did the Jews of Jesus’ time, that manifests itself and is established in the Spiritual. But Jesus said, the Kingdom of God is within you. We think if we repent, become righteous, get ourselves ‘right’ before God, we can gain the ultimate Kingdom of God: perfect lives and blessing in the natural. But how self-righteous will we become if that becomes our focus? We often live for a kingdom not of God, but one of our making. And in so doing, we are much like the Israelites, who walked through the wilderness with the very presence of God as they were on their way to the promised land, but had no faith or heart for what was God’s heart. Instead, they wanted their own version of things, and ended bowing down to a calf and asking to be sent back to Egypt, the land of their enslavement!

Isn’t it interesting as well, that Christ chose only to use natural blessing as a sign of His power to bring the ultimate blessing, the redemption of souls. Very few got that. They would get caught up on the first part, the fact that he could heal, and many missed the entire purpose of his coming. Many of those He healed, would walk away without even praising Him or realizing that He was the true giver of LIFE.

In the book of Luke, Jesus says as he spends time with tax collectors, that he “has come not to call those who think they are righteous, but those who know they are sinners and need to repent.” If we only focus on leading righteous lives, and having others do so as well in order that we may have God’s blessing, we’ve missed the entire purpose of the Gospel, and are indeed, in danger of missing His call on our lives. We become dead to the redemptive power of Christ within us! That is the true Kingdom of God within us. If we understood the beauty, power and ultimate purpose of that, perhaps we would walk in all the authority so many talk about and want. But authority used to bring about our own perfection or our own kingdom, is not an authority that will stand or bear fruit. How much more would we see, and how many more souls saved, if we long for an authority that brought the Kingdom within each person! A Kingdom meant for eternity, not just some sham we can think up now. Is not the soul of a person saved more important than them gaining riches, physical blessings or the like, without ever knowing true LIFE in Christ??  To what end to we want to use the authority given us by Christ, and will it stand for eternity? Paul says “Already you are filled, already you are rich; You are reigning as king without us. I wish it were so, that we would reign with you.” (I Cor. 4:8). And in Galatians 2, he emphasizes, “I have been crucified with Christ [in Him I have shared His crucifixion]; it is no longer I who live, but Christ (the Messiah) lives in me; and the life I now live in the body I live by faith in (by adherence to and reliance on and complete trust in) the Son of God, Who loved me and gave Himself up for me.

²¹ [Therefore, I do not treat God’s gracious gift as something of minor importance and defeat its very purpose]; I do not set aside and invalidate and frustrate and nullify the grace (unmerited favor) of God. For if justification (righteousness, acquittal from guilt) comes through [observing the ritual of] the Law, then Christ (the Messiah) died groundlessly and to no purpose and in vain. [His death was then wholly superfluous.]"

So why do I say all this? Because what I’ve seen of the Western church, is that to the extent that it knows the truth and principles of God, knows what right and wrong is, it also has forgotten the redemptive work of Cross, and what that work indeed calls us to. Paul says, “I have determined to know nothing but Christ and Him crucified”. To know, each every day, that He died for our sins, to know His sacrifice. That we would walk in humility and thankfulness for His grace and mercy and loving-kindness for doing so, to learn how to live our own lives of sacrifice. Paul also encourages the Church to “boast only in the Lord”, for it is by His grace that we do any and all things.

(Some ‘Christian’ nations were established with a thought to go create a righteous, holy place in this world, with perfect governing laws. However a lovely and utopian thought it was, it not only didn’t work, but I wonder if perhaps the thought was not even founded in a proper knowledge of the call of the true follower of Christ, what he meant by Kingdom and how he desired to establish it? Perhaps in this very thought there lay a bit of self-righteousness that is still visible today?)

I might be going out on limb here, but GOD HASN’T COME FOR THOSE THAT KNOW THAT ABORTION IS WRONG, OR THAT HOMOSEXUALITY IS IMMORAL, OR THAT HONESTY IS GOOD! He’s come for those that don’t. Do we still have heart for them? Or are we so focused on being righteous, on justifying, that we’ve completely forgotten why God called us in the first place and how to reach those that need the same call? (On a side-note, at times I wonder how much the justice-movement is also a part of this striving for self-made morality and righteousness, and if perhaps we are not very balanced in our approach). The sad thing is, we’ve become self-righteous in certain areas, and just like the Pharisees, have only picked out the parts of the law we want to listen to (and even added some of our own laws). If we were honest, we’d acknowledge that we are failing miserably at being righteous! Why does no one talk about the problem of divorce in the church, or greed, or the myriad of other sins? We’ve put a bandaid on our problems, thinking that by pointing out all the wrong in society, we can cover our own wrong. A proper work of healing and wholeness requires something much deeper, and unfortunately something much more long-lasting. Eternal in fact. Instead, we have become short-termers with no eye for the goal. Have we so quickly forgotten that it is not this life that is our prize?

Something is missing, we’ve obviously missed the formula, because we are becoming a stagnant body, growing so engorged on ourselves that we can’t even move out of our buildings, our homes, and be relevant to others. We don’t even know how to LOVE AS JESUS DID! So my question, how can we learn to live and love wholly in Jesus, from the heart?

The Source of All Charity

Before I launch into any kind of tirade about 'service', and the discoveries I'm making about that right now, allow me to just leave you with a excerpt from C.S. Lewis' "The Four Loves". I kind of fell in love with this description of a love (charity as he calls it) that comes from a source way beyond anything we could produce ourselves!

"To say this [that natural loves are not self-sufficient] is not to belittle the natural loves but to indicate where their real glory lies. It is no disparagement to a garden to say that it will not fence and weed itself, nor prune its own fruit trees, nor roll and cut its own lawns. A garden is a good thing but that is not the sort of goodness it has. It will remain a garden, as distinct from a wilderness, only if someone does all these things to it. Its real glory is of quite a different kind. The very fact that it needs constant weeding and pruning bears witness to that glory. It teems with life. It glows with colour and smells like heaven and put forward at every hour of a summer day beauties which man could never have created and could not even, on his own resources, have imagined. If you want to see the difference between its contribution and the gardener's, put the commonest weed it grows side by side with his hoes, rakes, shears, and packet of weed killer; you have put beauty, energy and fecundity beside dead, sterile things. Just so, our "decency and common sense" show grey and deathlike beside the geniality of love."

Happy ponderings!

Chile Video - Finally!!

Here's a video of the work done rebuilding homes in the rural village of Espinillo after the earthquake of February 27th, 2010 hit Chile.

Discovering Life through Death

It’s been over 6 weeks since my Opa died, a 6 weeks filled with many new things, a bit of transition and whole heck of a lot of busy-ness. And yet, that event in my life hasn’t lost its freshness, nor all its meaning.

We see and experience many great and horrible things in this world, and I count myself graced to not have known most of the horrors, and to have experienced many of the great. Yet the death of someone I loved dearly opened a whole different set of emotions and realities unbeknownst to me. It burst the bubble of life as I knew it, or perhaps, illusioned it. You know, the life filled with a never ending set of great milestones and things to achieve and be. The life filled with, well…you know…life. And then death came knocking at the door. And what I realized was this: life really isn’t Life until we understand death.

It’s like the old Hegelian philosophy that one cannot know oneself until one knows the Other. In much the same way (or perhaps quite differently) I think God designed us to not quite understand life, or have a real longing for eternity, until we have understood death and the finite. We also have trouble truly appreciating beauty when we know nothing of ugliness (such is the story of Good and Evil). The one defines the other.

What did I learn then, about death that will now define my Life? Well I’m still on a learning curve, but here are a few.

One of the things that marked me most was that my Opa ‘Koetjes’ (Opa ‘Cows’) as we fondly called him as kids, never achieved many of the things this world calls ‘extraordinary’ or ‘great’. By most standards, he was quite the average man, with quite the average life.

My Opa was born in 1925 into a large family and had 10 other siblings. His family worked hard to make ends meet, and lived in an unbelievably tiny house. My Opa was a young lad when the War hit, and he had many an adventurous (and sorrowful) tale of sneaking around the German occupiers. He didn’t get much schooling, and instead worked hard (even at one point selling klompen (wooden shoes)). But he was an avid reader and quite smart in his own right. Shortly after the War, he met my Oma at a youth conference of some sort, and as the story goes, was quite smitten indeed. They exchanged letters and visits, and pretty soon my Opa proposed. However, a few strings were attached to the ‘yes’, including that my Oma was an only child and therefore her father wanted her future husband to marry into the family and come live and work on their family farm. So off my Opa went to marry his girl and work on a farm in the east, something he knew little of.

Fast forward a few years, and he had 5 kids, worked hard on the farm while trucking nights delivering pigs to the slaughter houses. After years of hard labor, he became overwrought, had a nervous breakdown and would never work the way he had before again. Instead, the Opa I knew as a child would cook delicious vegetable soup with mini-meatballs, would drive around visiting neighbors and selling pots of French honey, and on occasion would takes us kids with him, a trip which often included a stop for some fresh liverwurst, a great treat!

 In his 70s my Opa became totally deaf. An outgoing man who always loved to chat had his communication severely limited. In his last years we would communicate with him via email, written notes and even an iPad.

He passed away at the ripe age of 86.

No, the man had no record achievements in his lifetime. In fact, he had some very sad things happen to him, not all of which I mentioned here. Yet for all the tragic things Opa went through, he could have become a very bitter, disillusioned and depressed man. But never did the man cease cracking his jokes and loving to make people laugh.

Opa had about 250 people attend his funeral (including 5 children, 25 grandchildren and 30+ great-grandkids). And what did people do? They talked about what he meant to them. Not once were his lifetime ‘achievements’ mentioned or hailed. But the people whose lives he touched? Yes that was mentioned, and was overwhelmingly evident in the amount of people that came to his funeral, and the large amounts of condolence cards my Oma received. You see, Opa loved to tell people about Jesus, especially if they didn’t know him. He led Sunday school for children in his younger days (some of which remembered him and came to his funeral) and later after his nervous breakdown, would pass his time visiting with his neighbors and any he was selling honey to, and would ask them if they knew Jesus. He would pray for his family, loved his grandchildren and great-grandchildren dearly, and when he knew that he was dying, he was concerned not about where he was going, but about leaving ‘us’ behind. At his funeral he didn’t want the preacher to talk about his own life, but wanted people to hear about the answer to True Life.

His life was about relationship. Relationship with others, and relationship with God. And that was all that was left to show or hold any value upon his death. Talk about having our professions, careers, finances and everything else not matter!! It made me think: am I chasing after Life, in all its abundance, or have I just been caught in a spinning wheel of a life that no one will remember or care much about.

Was my Opa perfect? By no means! He was just as unique, quirky and yes at times quite as broken in his own right as anyone else. But in the end, that wasn’t what mattered.

One of the things I asked Opa shortly before he passed away, was if he had any words of wisdom to pass on to us young folk? He shook his head, and said, “Read Proverbs 3:5-6. One thing I’ve come to know in this life, is that I haven’t known or understood much at all, and that nothing is ever quite what is seems.”

So, in the wake of death, I’m asking myself, what is Life? And am I truly living it?

(Here's a song to go with my ponderings: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YqUsAHTUPTU&feature=fvst

New video of our time in Espinillo, Chile coming soon...!

Ramblings

I will not fear great statues of gold;

Or all the worth of this world

I will fear the LORD, for from Him

Comes Mercy and Love Unfailing

Oh Lord, teach me this Love,

A LOVE that Forgives,

That No Record of Wrong Keeps,

That does not Boast,

Nor Envy’s for what the World Has

A LOVE that never GIVES UP,

A LOVE that ENDURES,

A LOVE filled with FAITH

For In You LORD, are riches unimaginable

Father, Today I give YOU might thoughts,

I give you my worries and FEARS,

I give you my relationships,

I give you my ambitions, so futile

And most importantly, I give you my heart,

And the DESIRES it holds

And I ask instead, that you fill and cover

Every part and parcel

With YOUR LOVE!

With a LOVE that brings

Freedom

For Who Can Fathom

the Great Love of The King

For His Children!

Father, ABBA

I Delight Myself In You

I trust You, I believe In You

I BELIEVE in You,

I believe in Jesus as the SON of God,

And In the Work of His Spirit