The "Not Yet"

Recently, I was encouraged to spend some time talking with God about the "not yet" of the Kingdom. As a Christian, I experience this life as a state of perpetual "in between". God has revealed His rule and reign through Jesus Christ, and that reign is current and continuing, but is not yet fully realized. It is real, but not yet complete.

I live in this world, enjoying all that this world has to offer as I live under Him, but I also recognize that this world is not all that it could be, was, or will be. There is a present joyous reality of life with Christ that is interrupted and disturbed by the brokenness in and around me. This life is not all that it should be, it is not yet all that it will be. So I asked the Lord, what is your vision of us and for us?

As I prayed  I was immediately drawn to the theme of revival. As I silently discussed this with the Lord, I found myself asking, “Yes, revival Lord, but what would that look like?” Suddenly my mind was filled with images and ideas of people experiencing God personally, being ambushed by God and surprised by joy. Their joy and encouragement moved them to share their excitement and to become infectiously cheerful. As they were transformed by God’s Spirit they became more free to express what God had put in them and to use their gifts with greater freedom and power than they had previously experienced. They were hearing from God and walking with God day by day, experiencing and sharing.

As I prayerfully reflected on what could be, even in this bent world, I found myself pondering the obstacles.

Why is it that we do not live as free as we actually are? Why do we live discouraged? Why are we so easily distracted from the joy set before us? Why are we not joyously infecting the world with love, joy, and peace? Why is this vision not being more fully experienced and lived out?


The first word that came to mind was “discouragement.” People lack experience with God and this leads to a lack of trust in God, which leads to a lack of hope and boldness. If we really knew as Him as He is, if we knew God experientially, we would be more free and bold to follow Him wherever He might lead and follow Him with joy.

As I pondered why this might not be so, It came to me that that we are making it too complex. Our answers reveal that we have misunderstood the problem.

We tend to offer more information, education, and training; illustrating our belief that a lack of knowledge or technique is the problem. (Not that training is bad, but to the extent that is leads to placing our trust in methodology or technique rather than walking in a dependent and conversational relationship with God, it leads in the wrong direction.)

We (particularly those of us from the Global North and West) have a tendency to trust in our own abilities and strategies. We have been trained to value efficiency, productivity, and control. It seems to me that God is calling me (perhaps us) to a more relational and dependent understanding of Him.

Perhaps the answer is not money, education, power, or control. Perhaps the answer is "to do what is right, to love mercy, and to walk humbly with your God." (Micah 6:8)

May we not be afraid to be like little children. May we be willing to confess our dependence on Our Father and to walk with The Son under the Inspiration of The Holy Spirit. May we commit ourselves to learning to discern the voice of the Good Master rather than mastering methods and techniques. May we learn to walk humbly with Our God.

The Natural and the Supernatural

Being Christ like does not come naturally to me.  I am bent.  I have a predisposition to sin.  Not only that, but I have spent years doing what comes naturally.  I have programmed by body and my soul to respond to certain situations or stimuli in strictly natural ways.  Like one of Pavlov's dogs I hear the "bell" of stress and turn to escape.  I hear the bell of difficulty and turn to procrastination.  I have a natural tendency to turn away from God, and to seek my own way, and I have further strengthened these natural tendencies by developing sinful habits of heart, mind, and body.

Everyone of us has turned away from God.  We turn away from the Fountain of Living Water and dig cisterns for ourselves, broken cisterns that can't even hold water.  I have returned to my cisterns so often that there are now deep ruts leading to them.  It is hard to pull in another direction when my nature and my habitual way of living lead me down the well worn path.  My culture in another accomplice to my crimes.  Our cultures normalize and enshrine our cisterns.  We are surrounded by others not only doing the same things but also giving approval to our choices.  They actively recruit people to drink from the cisterns, and profit off of the enslavement to the natural.

God offers us freedom.  He offers us His very Spirit to live inside of us and lead us to new ways of living.  If we say that we don't need Him we lie.  If we say we don't sin, we lie.  But, if we confess our sins He is faithful and just to forgive us and to cleanse us from all unrighteousness.  From that place of humble surrender and gracious forgiveness He leads us, as often as we need it, back to the Fountain of Living Water. 

As we try to forget what is behind and press on for the prize, He is at work within us to will and to work His good pleasure for us.  The ruts are still there, but He calls us to abandon them, He empowers us to choose the supernatural life over the natural. We are not alone.  He will never leave us or forsake us.  It may always be more natural for me to sin than to live like Jesus, but it is getting a little easier than it used to be.  The road is long, the temptations are great, but greater is He who is in us than He who is in the World.

Bent

In Paralandra, C. S. Lewis uses fiction to explore the nature of man. He creates a cavalcade of characters that embody various perspectives and ways of living. I think one of the marks of good literature is that it makes you think. A good book will continue to bounce around in my head for weeks after reading, or at least the ideas will resurface and become a part of my mental landscape.

Just this morning I found myself reflecting on my own nature and gravitating back to Lewis' description of one particular character. He describes the character as bent. As I reflect on my soul, my good intentions, my choices, my desires, I find that this word, "bent", is an apt descriptor. I am not shattered or broken, not irredeemable or un-fixable. But I am deeply bent.

As I ruminated on this it suddenly occurred to me that the way a blacksmith straightens something that is bent is by heating and hammering. This thought rose in my mind as I was asking the Lord to straighten my bent soul. I believe that He has me in the fire right now and that the hammer is falling even as I write this. He is not doing this to be cruel. He is doing this in answer to my prayers, and for my own good. The heat and the pressure are indespensible parts of my re-formation. He is working on my bent soul. I want to be re-formed in the image of Christ, but I can't say that I always enjoy the process. So, I choose to trust and wait for the next straightening blow to fall.