Growing Up With Jesus

 In John 7, there’s an interesting interaction between Jesus and his brothers:

Jesus' brothers said to him, "Leave Galilee and go to Judea, so that your disciples there may see the works you do. No one who wants to become a public figure acts in secret. Since you are doing these things, show yourself to the world." For even his own brothers did not believe in him. [John 7:3-5]

These are his adult brothers; they’ve lived with Jesus all of their lives, but they did not understand that he was more than just their big brother. It’s probably worth observing that these are his younger brothers, and younger brothers often are less than completely impressed with their big brothers, growing up, as they are, in his shadow.

More than that, as Jesus said to his neighbors, "A prophet is not without honor except in his own town, among his relatives and in his own home." [Mark 6:4] Not only did Jesus’ own brothers not believe in him, his hometown did not believe in him.
 
We know their names: “Isn't this the carpenter's son? Isn't his mother's name Mary, and aren't his brothers James, Joseph, Simon and Judas?” [Matthew 13:55, see also Mark 6:3]

Interestingly, at least two of these brothers became believers later, and even ended up writing books of the New Testament: James & Judas [aka Jude], so clearly they were leaders among the believers. In Acts 15, brother James even appears to leads the mother church in Jerusalem.

I observe that folks who have obstacles in their families to believing, once they have made it past those obstacles, often are pretty effective in their faith. Those who oppose the work of Jesus can often find themselves supporting and serving him when they are able to see more clearly.

I also observe that family was a big thing. We’re pretty sensitive about the topic of nepotism in the Church in the West, and I don’t think it applies to the first generation church. If nothing else, neither James nor Jude claimed anything special because of their relationship to their big brother. But it’s nice to see the change they went through over the years.

I Like Some Things That Some People Don't Enjoy

I like my coffee strong. A couple of times a week, I make a very large pot of “cold brew fork coffee.” One pot will last me a couple of days.

You probably understand the “cold brew” part. “Fork coffee” is coffee that will hold a fork upright in the cup. (Er… it’s a metaphor. It’s strong, but not that strong!)

I have friends who like more modest coffee. And I have other friends who drink “why bother” coffee: decaf with nonfat milk and maybe a sugar substitute. And I have friends who really enjoy <gasp!> tea! Oh my goodness.  

So yeah, I like something that other people – even people that I know and love – don’t actually enjoy participating in.

It’s amazing how that works, isn’t it? People are different. Who would have thought?

There’s another “brown brewed beverage” that I also enjoy. I had a pint of it the other evening, with a slice of pizza, with my sweetheart on our “date night.” I had an Oatmeal Stout. (It’s a kind of very dark beer.)

It’s a rare thing to find a good beer in these days. So many people are content with corporate beer (Budweiser, Coors, etc), and most of the beer nerds in my college town prefer IPA’s (India Pale Ale: strong & bitter, so that it could endure the sailing trip from England to India, way back in the colonial days).

Interestingly, I’ve seen men’s Bible studies going on in the particular micro-brewpub that she and I favor: believers are becoming less afraid of being seen with a beer. Or maybe they like the “edgy” vibe of being seen with a high-end micro-brew? I don’t know.

I like meat. Well, most meat. I’m not actually a real fan of “organ meat,” whether liver, kidney, heart, or whatever. I’ve had some that was disgusting. I’ve had some that was actually pretty good, but it’s still not my favorite.

I have friends who absolutely love chicken gizzards. And friends who really like liver-and-onions. And we’re still friends, despite that.

I know some people that really love large, corporate worship services, both mega-church and conference-type big ol’ worship events. My preference is for small gatherings: six or eight is a large group for me, but one-on-one over a cup of a brown brewed beverage or another.

Yet again: the things that bring me life are not the same things that bring other people life. Or you could say that the things that my brothers & sisters love may not be the same things that I love.

If I didn’t know better, I’d think that people are different from each other.

For example – and I don’t know if you’re aware of this – there were a few holidays we just passed. There will be some more holidays this year! Did you know that some people have different thoughts and feelings about that holiday than other people do?

We’re talking believers here!! Some believers believe that the holiday belongs to the devil and they want nothing to do with it!

And other believers look at the holiday as an opportunity to reach people who are pretty much unreachable the rest of the year.

Look, there’s a really solid answer that we can all live by, as long as we’re actually going to let other people be responsible for their own life choices:

You Do You. Let Them Do Them.

If you like the events surrounding these holidays, and you can keep your heart in line with our King in the midst of them, then go have fun! I know a guy that was real tight with God and he partied with tax collectors and hookers and “sinners?” He took a lot of grief for it from the religious folks of his day, but the religious spirit pretty much always works that way.

If you don’t like parties, or don’t like holiday food, or the relevant holiday colors or sundry holiday accouterments, then don’t celebrate them. You follow God according to your conscience, not according to someone else’s.

You do you. Do whatever works for you. Be real. Be genuine. And maybe be respectful.

My mentor said it this way: “If it is possible, as far as it depends on you, live at peace with everyone.”

Cussing Out God

I feel the need to talk about a turning point I experienced a long time ago. I don’t remember having shared this before. Please be patient with me; it’s hard to talk about, and hard to write about. I find it kind of embarrassing for six or eleven reasons.

Many years ago, my bride and I joined a missions team planning to plant churches in a foreign country. In hindsight, I suspect we followed my spiritual ambition more than we followed Holy Spirit. Live and learn. But we have some remarkable memories of God’s faithfulness. (And did you know that the Amazon rainforest is really beautiful?)

There’s this aphorism in Christian culture: “Where God guides, he provides.” That’s true. But God does not necessarily provide where my ego and my ambition have guided me. Oh, we have stories of miraculous provision for ourselves and our children, but the mission – since it wasn’t a God-directed event – did not go well. It went down in flames.

We eventually made it home, tail between our legs, having spent every dime we had, having spent every relationship we had, completely destitute and desperately depressed. We had a place to live for a few weeks, but after that, unless God did yet another miracle, we’d be raising our flock of kids under a bridge somewhere.

The depression, the presence of very real failure, my inability to “get a job” like everybody told me to, it was all on my back, a heavy weight, for months, and eventually, for years.

Someone recognized I needed help, and made arrangements for me to see a therapist (a practice I completely support if you need it – and I needed it!!), but that didn’t go well at all.

The sign outside his office instructed me to wait in the lobby, but it turned out that he had no lobby, and I ended up unintentionally walking in on someone else’s session at a really intense moment, and I did that only 10 minutes after a homeless guy had walked in on the same session.

The therapist lost it, and as I retreated in shame, the Christian guy that was supposed to help me get out of my depression opened his door and shouted imprecations at me. Not very encouraging, actually.

I kind of lost it. I had risked everything on this adventure at obeying (what I thought was) what God had said, and I had failed miserably at being a missionary, failed miserably at being a Christian, failed miserably at being a provider for my family, and was currently failing miserably at life. I was making plans for the most discreet way to kill myself, and this guy that’s supposed to help me rages at me and angrily slams the door on me, literally.

So God and I had it out.

You know, when we talk about powerful interactions with the Almighty, they’re supposed to be uplifting and what-not. There’s a standard of how believers are supposed to behave in the presence of Majesty.

Yeah, not so much. This was ugly. God had (as I saw it) betrayed me yet again, and I was done with enduring. I let him have it. 

I stomped out of the therapist’s office complex, and stormed around the block (around a whole lot of blocks, actually), shouting my rage at God. I used every four-letter word I knew and made up some new ones to accuse him with. I yelled at him at the top of my lungs, my face flushed, my eyes streaming, gesticulating wildly. I cussed him up one side and down the other. If I could have reached him, I would have beat him up (yeah, right!), I was that mad at him. I beat up the air in his direction.

It felt like hours, and in hindsight, I’m really surprised that nobody called the police. Or maybe they did, but the police were too scared to confront me. I’m not a small boy, and I was really wound up; I was not safe to approach. I kind of expected God to smite me, and I wasn’t opposed to that idea: he’d abandoned me and betrayed and left me hanging so badly already; smiting was the next logical step.

And through it all, he didn’t say a thing. He didn’t actually smite me. I kind of had the distant sense that I had his attention, but he just let me go on about my rage. In hindsight, I kind of felt like he was holding my hair so I could vomit freely and not get it all over me. He took none of my foul accusations personally.

But it turned out that the rage was the turning point in my depression. Oh, I still couldn’t get a job that would pay the bills, and I still needed literal miracles to feed and house my family, and those came as they were needed. But the rage and the depression and the hopelessness had their back broken in that tantrum. Interesting.

A couple of weeks later, I had an evening with a friend that had been hung out to dry as badly as I had been. We commiserated for a few hours, but as I left, I recall really clearly saying to God, “Lord, to whom shall I go? You have the words of life.” And I recall, with similar clarity, recognizing that I really believed it. It shocked me, actually.

That was a bunch of years ago. I’ve told God (and a few others) that I’m actually glad that whole seven-year season is in my past: I’m glad I’ve learned the lessons of His faithfulness, his patience, that I don’t know I could have learned any other way. And I’m equally glad that season is not in my present, or (I trust) in my future. I don’t ever want to go through that again. But I know Him so much better these days, and I trust him so much more now, as a result of that crisis, which kind of culminated in that tantrum.

So do I recommend to folks going through their own hell-and-high-water crisis that they follow my example and cuss God out? Oh, hell no! Don’t follow me. I’m not the role model for your crisis.

But I absolutely recommend that believers, whether in crisis or not, to be absolutely honest and open with God, even with the ugly bits. And I acknowledge that it sure might take something extraordinary to get at the ugly bits that we Christians are so good at hiding, even from ourselves. Yeah, that needs to get out. Clean out every bit of that stinky refrigerator called the subconscious! And get help if you need it.

Oh, and that therapist and I eventually made peace. It turned out that nobody had ever walked in on a session before that day, and this was a particularly fragile client. He was completely freaked out when we eventually did meet, but by then, I don’t know that I needed his services so badly: Father had held my hair and let me vomit, and now it was all out. I just needed help rinsing out my mouth and stumbling back to bed.

Pizza With Jesus

My bride and I were young and optimistic. A long, long time ago, we'd signed up for an extended missions trip to a land far, far away, to tell the locals about Jesus. Since we grew up in a church that had never preached the gospel until the Sunday that I preached it myself, we didn't know much at all about sharing the good news of Jesus. 

We also didn't know much about rest. We were only there for a few months, and we were encouraged by zealous leaders to give ourselves to the job at hand, and keep nothing in reserve for the trip home. We bought into that value. 

We were on different teams. I was on the street preaching team and she was on a team that presented the gospel through song and dance. We were going hard, 18 hours most days, six or seven days a week. 

We were tired. We were also flat broke. We couldn't even buy a cold beverage of indeterminate origin at the Golden Arches place (they're EVERYwhere!!) and sit in their air conditioned space for a couple of hours. 

And even more than burgers and carbonated beverages, after many weeks, I missed pizza. But that was completely out of the question in that culture: they had no cheese of any sort (I was afraid to ask what yellow stuff was on the “cheeseburgers” that my wealthier friends had from time to time). 
 
I had been practicing what is now called Lecto Divina in my time with Jesus, and during these weeks, I had come to really value that hour or so in the wee hours before the rest of the dorm woke up. It appears that God's strength shows up particularly well when we're completely dry of our own strength. Who knew?

One morning, I'd been reading about God's provision of his disciples (probably the feeding of the 5000 miracle), and if I'm honest, I was whining about how broke we were. It was true that all of our needs were met, but it would be nice to do something special with my sweetheart once in a while. 

I felt something vaguely resembling faith (or maybe petulance) rise up in me, so I got specific: “I'd really like some pizza, please!” Ha! Fat chance of that! 

I spent the morning preaching on the streets within walking distance of the dorm, while my bride was making her way across town (in a taxi driven by someone who apparently idolized Mario Andretti!); we'd see each other at dinner for yet another plate-full of rice and corn. 

Mid-day, I headed back to the dorm (I never knew how wonderful siestas could be!) to relax a minute. A moment later, the building shook as the pack of 20-something young men stampede to their end of the dorm. Then quiet descended (relatively speaking). Another day in paradise. 

Then the single mother, on the mission field with her two young children hollered down the hallway. “Does anyone want some pizza? We've got too much!” It turns out that she'd found a Shakey's Pizza franchise in town (I told you this was a long, long time ago, didn't I?), and had bought some for her kids, but they had not been very hungry. 

My mind raced as I waited for the pack of hungry young men to speak up, but they never did. So I tiptoed down to the single mom's door and asked if she was serious? It turns out that she was. I have no idea what kind of pizza it was; it was round and flat and it had actual cheese on it. 

I spent a fair bit of time that afternoon marveling at God's tender provision, and while there wasn't enough for me to share with her, I was looking forward to telling my sweetheart my story. 

When she made it home (wide eyed at what a Formula One taxi driver could accomplish in the tiny streets and alleys of that town!), she told me her story about harrowing drives, mixed up ministry appointments, “But Sally-Ann bought us all pizza for lunch!” 

So even though we were on opposite sides of the city, God gave us both pizza for lunch, in different ways, through different people. On the day that I had asked in the morning for pizza. 

Please don't try to tell me that God is not attentive to his kids. I won't believe you. 

Promises Bring Trials. Or Do They?

It’s a commonly held belief, and one that isn’t spoken out loud all that often:

“People that get awesome prophecies get the worst trials!”

I think of the apostle Peter, back in the day. He’d just received a heckuva prophetic word: "And I also say to you that you are Peter, and on this rock I will build my church, and the gates of Hades will not overpower it. [Matthew 16:18] Dang. That’s a pretty big promise.

And not long after that, Jesus warns him of his impending failure: “And the Lord said, "Simon, Simon! Indeed, Satan has asked for you, that he may sift you as wheat. But I have prayed for you, that your faith should not fail; and when you have returned to Me, strengthen your brethren." But he said to Him, "Lord, I am ready to go with You, both to prison and to death." Then He said, "I tell you, Peter, the rooster shall not crow this day before you will deny three times that you know Me."” [Luke 22:31-34]

I was reflecting on this story recently, particularly in the context of “Lead us not into temptation” [Matthew 6:16, Luke 11:4], and I realized that there are three parts to this conversation.  
 
Part 1: Jesus warns Peter of the upcoming trial. There is no failure discussed yet, though recovery is.

Part 2: Peter boasts that he can take anything, that he won’t actually fail.

Part 3: Jesus warns Peter of his impending failure.

It seems to me that Peter didn’t take Jesus’ warning all that seriously. I’m embarrassed that I recognize Peter’s hubris.

It seems to me that inherent in Jesus’ warning is an invitation. “I’ve prayed for you. You probably need to pray about this as well.” He emphasized this a little later, when he told the boys, “Watch and pray so that you will not fall into temptation. The spirit is willing, but the flesh is weak.” [Matthew 26:41]

I probably need to note at this point: I have a strong belief that when God gives a warning prophetically, he’s very seldom saying, “This is inevitable, brace yourself.” Since his goal is our maturity in him, I figure that a prophetic warning, like what Jesus said to Pete here, is more along the lines of, “This is what’s coming down the track; you can face it, or you can change what happens to that track.”

I believe that Peter was not destined to fail, until he responded in the flesh a couple of times:

First, he boasted that he could take it. Then he slept instead of watching and praying. And because of that, he tried to stand on his own strength when faced with the reality of the unexpected trial [Matthew 26:69f]

And as a result, he did fail [Matthew 26:75]. And then in his grief and shame, he gave up and went back to his old life (of fishing), from before Jesus had called him [John 21:3]

Fortunately, Jesus followed up, fulfilling the “when you have returned to Me, strengthen your brethren” part of the prophecy [around the campfire in John 21].

The place that my meditation has taken me is this: I think I don’t accept the curse (and yeah, it kind of works like a curse) that says that any time I get a good prophecy, a good promise, that I therefore need to go through hell, that I must be thoroughly (and painfully) tested.

In place of that, I want to substitute the truth that I need to stay snuggled up with Jesus, I need to stay up-to-date in my intimate communion with him, I need to stay humble.

Maybe I’ll get sifted by hell. More likely I have the option to short-cut that trial by staying plugged in with my King. But in the end, I need to stay with him, rather than stand on my own in the face of the trial, rather than run off to the old life when I do fail.

Stay close to Jesus. That seems like pretty good advice for pretty much all the time.

The Throne of Grace

Think with me a minute here. . .

Jesus sits on the Throne of Grace [Hebrews 4:16].

We are encouraged to "come boldly" before him. And, oh yeah, we sit on that throne with him [Ephesians 2:6].

I'm reminded that this is the throne of the God who is love [1 John 4:16], so everything he does there is done in his massive love.

And in the same paragraph, I'm reminded that there is no fear in love. So there is no fear in what happens on this throne.

And my mind wanders to Revelation. "At once I was in the Spirit, and there before me was a throne in heaven with someone sitting on it." [Revelation 4:2]

And God is "immutable" (he doesn't change [Hebrews 13:8]), so the throne on the sea of glass that John is marveling at, where the elders are throwing their thrones [Revelation 4] is still the Throne of Grace, where we may "receive mercy and find grace to help us in our time of need," where the Love of God is administered without any fear.

And the throne a few chapters later, described as a great white throne, is still the Throne of Grace, is still the throne where the selfless love of God is administered, and is still without fear. That's not saying that there's no judgment there: it's saying that anything done during that judgment is from grace, with its foundation of love, and is completely removed from fear.

I think I need to understand the goodness of God better.

Eat the Meat. Spit Out the Bones.

There's an uncomfortable truth about the human species:

Ain't a single one of us that's perfect. Well, except the Creator God who became fully man; He is and was perfect, but other than him nobody is actually perfect.

"As it is written, There is none righteous, no, not one." [Romans 3:10]

And that means that it is inappropriate (and a waste of time) to expect perfection from any member of the human species. Excellence is good (and there is a lot of that), but don't waste your time looking for perfection in people.

• None of our leaders (political or religious) are perfect leaders.
• None of our teachers teach perfect truth.
• No book or class or video is perfect in all its content.
• No fellowship of humans will be perfect; there will be mistakes and failures in 'em all.

Does that mean that we should give up on leaders, teachers, fellowships, and just go solo, "Me & Jesus, and nobody else"?

That won't work. You're not perfect either. (Me neither.)

So we quit expecting perfection, and we look for the good.

"Finally, brothers and sisters, whatever is true, whatever is noble, whatever is right, whatever is pure, whatever is lovely, whatever is admirable--if anything is excellent or praiseworthy--think about such things." [Philippians 4:8]

Pay attention to the good. Overlook the imperfect. Which, of course, means the need to test things, to discern truth.

(Does this mean we never strive for improvement? Heck no.)
(Does this mean we overlook persistent sin, our own or our brother's? Heck no.)

Eat the meat. Spit out the bones. "Even a dumb ol' cow knows enough to eat the hay and spit out the sticks."