The Gospel Revealed through our Enemies

On August 8, 2015December 10, 2016 By happyreignIn Heather, Reflections & MusingsLeave a comment

A man’s character is revealed through how he treats his enemies. A man’s love extends only as far as his nearest enemy. Or does it? There are many religions in the world that refer to conflict, human interactions, and behavior choices. During the time of Jesus’ life racism was as strong as ever. Especially between the current reigning empire of Rome and the ever persevering minority group of Jews. They were excluded, forced to walk in filth on the roads instead of on sidewalks with others, they would be heckled, ridiculed, robbed, spit on, and more, even by Roman ‘police officers’.

Jesus did not avoid these issues when while spending his days with us here on earth. Kingdoms and individuals, political parties and people groups all have enemies, and all choose to respond to their enemies in certain ways revealing what lies within their make-up. In regards to individuals, Jesus’ revelation on how we should respond to people who have hurt us, robbed us, and taken something from us is VERY clear.

We may not be slapped in the face, and someone may not take our clothing from us, but there are plenty of offenses that happen to EVERYONE in daily life. No one is immune to opportunities for woundedness and accusation to take root in our hearts. Jesus, again, very clearly gave instructions for appropriate responses in these situations. The places of grievances and bitterness in our lives are the very thresholds of which the body of Christ stands on to shine something that lives inside of them that exists beyond human justice and selfish reasoning.

Here are a few examples of teachings for instance:

“Love your enemies. Pray for those who give you difficulty and hard times. In that way you will be acting like My kids. For I give good to everyone, naughty and nice alike. Even corrupt politicians love the people that love them, how does that make you any different? But love with perfection as I do.”

“If you do not forgive others, I will not forgive you.”

“Do good to those who hate you.”

What would this like if we acted like this toward the people who hate us? What would it look like if we acted like this as a nation towards countries that hate us?

I heard a man here talk about all that happened to him from under the hands of ISIS here in the middle east. He said to me, “If you knew everything they did to me, you would be friends with no Muslim.” This statement revealed not only the hurt of the individual but also his lack of the knowledge of God. God himself was beaten, betrayed, abandoned and murdered, and still the words on lips that revealed the content of his heart were “Let none of this be counted against them.”

In his innocence, God did not bear up under scorn and cry “I must have justice! I must have payment!” Instead, in complete selflessness, God denied what was rightly due him, and gave himself–his life–as an offering for their freedom, their peace, and their wholeness.

So often–myself included–we get caught up in this loop-hole of a thought process of self-justification, self-consideration, self-sympathy. We are in the right; others are in the wrong. The very ones we accuse in our minds are the very one’s God thought were worthy to give his life for. ‘Being right’ is not the answer; ‘being love’ is.

It is in the opportunities of offense, injury, and hurt we have a divine opportunity to confound the mind of our offenders in reckoning ourselves having been already crucified with Christ and not acting on our own behalf, but in his likeness living in us, as us, and through us.

We have the power to let yesterday go in the relationships we hold with people around us. I’m not saying this is easy, but it brings to mind Corrie Ten Boom who forgave one of the very guards that held her in a concentration camp, but she knew it wasn’t of herself but it was God giving that man forgiveness through her. Displays of forgiveness, selflessness, generosity, and blessing without them being deserved or earned, or even in the face of hatred, is giving others the experience of heaven here on earth.

I feel like this would be most profound on a political and international level as well. Sometimes we are holding onto power so tightly that we don’t actually utilize the opportunities we have in using the power we’ve been given.

This loving response to injury does not only reveal his glory here on earth, but is our own path to liberty and restoration; individually and nationally. Restitution follows forgiveness rather than being a prerequisite for it.

The Freedom of Disappointment

On August 18, 2014December 10, 2016 By happyreignIn Heather, Reflections & Musings

In case you are in an emotional experience of being hard on yourself or not seeing a way out of your own lack of excellent performance in your current circumstances, this blog is for you. Unfortunately perfectionism and performance based identity pervade the church. It’s unfortunateness is that it keeps individuals from experiencing heaven in just their living breathing daily life. It’s common enough, or a safe enough problem to have because it’s not against the law, it can get you ahead in approval seeking ambition or the inner disappointment you carry inside of yourself doesn’t interrupt daily living too much.

In Christ we are no longer under the law; he fulfilled the spirit of the law, and therefore it’s requirements completely. The law works itself out in some sneaky ways. Responsibility and expectations are some common forms of control in relationships, even in the relationship we hold with ourselves. You view yourself as the way you should be, or how you should act, or what you should be getting done. Even when achieving small goals or completing tasks or being helpful, we can still carry the feeling of failure if any of those things were less than, later than, or not quite up to our own expectations. Cue disappointment.

This is a wonderful way to miss the joy of existence. Without knowing it, we may embark on a journey, a project, or a relationship with preconceived expectations in our mind of how that experience or interaction should or would play out. Things may even start off smashing and go according to plan at first. It shouldn’t surprise us anymore but then bumps come in the road, at least bumps according to our expectations. And then what do we do?

How do you crawl out of a pit of the feeling of other people’s disappointment with you? How do you escape from the feeling of your own disappointment with yourself? Couldn’t I have handled situations differently? Couldn’t I have made different choices and avoided the circumstances I see around me? Can’t I manipulate and control things now and get things back to the way I had wanted them, the way I always saw them? Can’t I fix things and get them unbroken? Then I wouldn’t have to feel this way. Then I wouldn’t have to be this way.

Expectations over our own lives, and expectations other carry over us–whether intentionally or not–only carry with them the power to accuse. When expectations are the foundations of relationship they are the fuel for guilt, shame, and condemnation. Cue performance and perfectionism. If you continue to hold onto those images of unmet expectation over your own life as a source of fuel for your own judgment of your value now, you will never experience the heaven that was purchased for you by Christ, that is meant to be a free gift for your fullness of being alive right now.

Even in subtle forms or not so subtle forms we tell ourselves that those expectations came from God; they are what God originally designed or gave us vision for in the past, or these expectations come by what I obviously should be doing by looking around at others (not recommended). All of these leave a nice big hole in our heart not filled by Christ, but by our own accusations of performance-based failure.

God died to deliver you from the prison and cage of living a life of obligation, requirements, musts, duties, and have to’s. His relationship with you has never been based on your performance. Sometimes the reminder feels like a slap in the face but its the glorious good news: you cannot earn your right standing with God. Your own assessment of yourself through your own eyes or the eyes of others will never measure up to any humanistic ruler of behaviors and choices–religious or unreligious–whatever that means.

You are not a disappointment to God. Who you are, right now, is not a disappointment. God knows this but do you? In this cycle of performance we sit upon our own assessments of our lives compared to perceived expectations and continually come out lacking. If god has given us a directive and we didn’t listen or failed, then we can participate in relationship and tell him that and experience forgiveness through Christ. We must remove ourselves from our high seats of self-judgment by LETTING GO (let it gooo, let it gooo) of the expectations we have created, that God is not holding on to, because until we do, we will continue to believe the familiar lie that our value or our worth is according to our own assessments. While often ours is not, his perspective is the perfection of Christ.

Anything less and we wake up in the morning to feelings of disappointment, we experience awesome things all-the-while sitting next our companion of disappointment, and then tomorrow–again, we will not have hope because now our expectation (of God or of ourselves) is to be a disappointment (to others or to ourselves). To the degree that you resort to assessing your value or worth based on your own expectations of performance is the degree to which you haven’t experienced Christ in your identity. In order for love to cast out fear, even in your relationship with yourself in your own mind, it must not be based on your performance.

“God grant me the SERENITY to accept the things that I cannot change”…or don’t need to be and the wisdom to enjoy life.

Or what do we do when we’re really disappointed with God and holding it over him in our relationship with him? Is your relationship with him, your intimacy with him, based your own ideas of who he should be or should have been…to you? He’s okay with disappointing you because its not his obligation to meet your expectations of himself. He knows who he is. He is way better than any of us have given him credit for. It’s the unmet expectation over him you’re being invited to let go of so that you can experience once again the exchange of love with him without conditions on either one of you. This requires trust. Trust can be scary, but is a fruit of love. God disappointed everyone by dying on a cross at the age of 33 rather than delivering his people from the tyranny of Rome. He’s okay with being misunderstood and accused of failure. He’s got a different perspective and its far better than ours I assure you.

Your value, and God’s affections for you, are undiminashable. I want to encourage you today. In your rest, God can bring about all he has gloriously planned for you to experience in this life. Maybe even lay down the process of making expectations over yourself and discover the wonder and beauty of your life as he reveals its glory to you.

Relationship

On June 4, 2014June 4, 2014 By happyreignIn Heather

Ya know how sometimes you listen to wisdom and it benefits you, and then there are other times when you don’t and you end up going down a mutli-year journey of not listening to wisdom only to find out that that truth is still true but now its burned into your heart through experience, and hopefully you won’t be too dense to forget it too quickly anytime soon? This is a story of one of those.

I think sometimes the most vulnerable times in my mind are sometimes when I spend time with the Lord. Looking back I think over the course of some years I grew calloused in my personal interaction with the holy spirit in hopes to avoid some pit of confusion or condemnation, both of course concerning religious thoughts even, for example, theological uncertainty amidst opposing schools of thought in my mind such as, personal doubt based on insecurities in my performance before God, or contrarily my arrogance in entirely ignoring my spiritual performance before God believing only on that of his son not opening up myself for dialogue about it to protect myself from the afore mentioned accusations, along with the lack of spiritual aperture to be able to keep it all afoot in my mind, casting blame towards myself in that if I was really spiritual and tight with God I wouldn’t be having any of these intellectual roundabouts.

Unfortunately the affect of this disclarity and self-accusation was an almost removed protection in my prayer times with the Lord. I came to take great comfort in the work of Christ and the declaration of his goodness over all of humanity because that gave peace to my soul and confidence before God. I know this might sound peculiar and odd to some but it was almost as if I was positioning myself in comfort with a theological viewpoint rather than in God himself.

I took safety in my relating to someone else’s conceptual soundness of God’s nature and that worked for me for a time. But as time passed I could feel unrest in the heart of me and I would think it’s because I’ve forgotten the truth: the truth about who God is, the truth about who I am, and I would once again almost methodically remind myself of these truths to bring comfort. While this is good, for me, it was still lacking. It was as if I had lost relationship with God and positioned myself hiding behind the concept of his goodness for protection, which worked…but didn’t. I was still missing out on the reason I was created. Let me continue.

As time passed I grew in the freedom of these truths I was learning, both in identity and experience but my one on one relational interaction with the Lord had somehow faded. I was no longer surviving on a tough mission field wrestling against principalities–because he called me to rest from that–and afterwards I guess there was recovering time to be had in my relationship with the Lord after what I had made our interaction out to be and the pendulum swung the opposite way. If God wasn’t breaking strongholds and releasing strong prophetic acts in the earth and ministering powerful words through me to people and I needed a break from all that, what was left of he and I? On the other side of that, if I’m at complete rest and nothing depends on me because he’s all sovereign and powerful and in control and I can completely rest in him in retirement what purpose remains left in the exchange? To what purposes have I reduced our intimacy to?

And so with this ominous void of recreational communication in our relationship, the doubt about ‘us’ would come around all the while I knew with certainty my unshakeable position that Christ had obtained for me. It was almost as if I always knew we were legally married but had lost intimacy of our enjoyment of one another as people and the shared experience of this life together, except as silent shipmates or something. Don’t get me wrong, the gratefulness was always there, the wisdom was sometimes there, the comfort was there, but face time was still missing. As I continue to live this life, more and more I’m discovering God relentless and unconditional goodness despite my end of participation in this relationship.

And so in this season in my relationship with him, his abounding goodness continued in full force. It continued to confirm to my mind who he was, but it was almost as if there was a lack of connection of the heart. And in this, life continues. Can anybody relate to this? I know I’ve heard at least one person say to me, ‘I remember what it felt like when I was experiencing the Lord more back then…what happened?’

Another contributing factor to this felt internal distance was pride on my part, even though I could see it was there. Where the directions you keep looking lie to you and make you feel like you well off with God. I already knew I knew nothing, I already comprehend my comparative nothingness in light of everything that it generous and extravagant being God himself. I at least I thought I was well off enough in that line of thought.

Turns out God doesn’t care if I know right answers, even though he taught us them. God doesn’t care if we think we know right answers when we obviously haven’t even barely begun to know anything really. Although God continually relates to me as my teacher, and the disciples never graduated from being disciples, he doesn’t care that about my accumulated experiences with him. He doesn’t care if I’m still being faithful and loving people well and whether I’m using the giftings he’s trained me to use. All of this means nothing to him.

He continues to be good, he continues to be faithful, he continues to show up on my behalf, but there’s so much more that what I’ve made it. There so much less that matters when it comes to his heart than we seemingly radical believing empowered christains have made it out to be.

Relationships are just humility and dependency. Independence–which is a reactionary weakness of mine that finds it way into my relationship with God is a false form of protection and comfort. Thankfully he’s ballsy enough in our relationship to shake that for me. Because our experience has taught us such, so often we try so hard for so long to do things on our own; even when it comes to our relationship with God, our interaction with him, and our expectations of ourselves as well as of him. Sometimes this creates some aspects of a relationship with God that has become sterile, formal, ritualistic, or stale, even in the midst of powerful corporate experiences.

Interacting with God is not about work. Let me say that one more time. Interacting with God is not about work. Relationship is just being yourself with someone. Giving them enough credit to be honest with them without any pretense or predisposed concept of who they really are without giving them a chance to show you or tell you who they are. God is really good at interacting with us as adults even when we’re acting like children.

Humility involves recognition of need. I think its one thing in your mind when you know that you could absolutely do nothing without God and then its another thing when humility is walked out in the way in which you dialogue with the Lord himself. Spending time with him, being vulnerable, listening, communicating need, asking questions, being teachable, discussing the painful stuff and actually listening rather than reacting out of emotion–all these things flow naturally out of humility before God.

After my brief years of doing life with God I think I’ve come to appreciate a hearty dose of perseverance and steadfastness and resolve in protecting connectivity with the Lord regardless of anything; not letting discouragement or accusation or confusion or distraction keep me from coming and being with him. He has always been and will always be for me. Always.

Let’s move fears out of the equation. Your relationship with God is not looming and threatening to end resulting in eternal destruction. He’s not going to reject you. He is good and will continue to be good. There’s no whirlwind of justifications, excuses, memories or enemies. But the wonderful part I’ve discovered about our existence in this journey of mine is that I was created to experience love.

I was not created to know of it, I was not created to experience it at one time, I was not create for a one time event of salvation, I am created with a need to experience the ongoing relationship with a living God that expresses love for me and towards me in an active and ever present way and reality. Nothing less will do in this life. It’s okay to need to be loved. He wants to spend time with me. He wants it. I still have things to be taught, I still have things to learn. But even the purpose of learning is not about obtaining the answer, which is good, its about the experience of exchange. For in the giving, is the receiving of love.

The most vital thing you can give someone your in relationship with is your attention. Withholding it simply not doing relationship. Relationships require time and space for them to happen.

I get to participate in union. I get to choose it. At one point God referred to Psalm 81:9 with me, ” You must never have a foreign God; you must not bow down before a false God.” I asked him to clarify his point to me at the time and he said that’s when you ‘run to someone or somewhere else for comfort other than me.’ He’s so good at being our everything, he wants us to experience nothing disappointingly less than himself.

And so, his mercy’s are new every morning. This was one of my journey’s that took too long to be reminded of but have found solace in his relentless pursuit of reminding me of what he and I are all about. He’s loves loving me and it’s not some concept in order to form a workable theology around. He enjoys relationship with me and his best for me is my daily face to face experience of that with himself. It’s what I’ve been made for, its what I’ve been saved for, and it’s the joy of my waking reality. My only strength is found in him. Peace.