This Is Why We Pray

As I look in the Old Covenant more and more for Papa, who himself has not changed, only the covenant has changed, I less and less see and angry “Sovereign God” always wanting to wreck havoc on his people but a loving Father who truly is responsive to the cries of His beloved.  Again, as a young college age believer described in the post below, I attended a summer Bible study at Third Presbyterian in Richmond hearing a great Scot-preacher teaching on God’s sovereignty from Exodus 32. Here Moses begs God to not destroy Israel for their idolatrous Golden Calf. It says in vs 14 “And the Lord repented of the evil which he thought to do to his people,” RSV- the only translation I had at the time, no NIV yet. 

"Wow, what power Moses had," I thought, to make God repent! 

But I also had memorized Numbers 23:19 in the RSV

“God is not man, that he should lie,

or a son of man, that he should repent.

Has he said, and will he not do it?

Or has he spoken, and will he not fulfil it?”

So later I asked a resident scholar at the Christian Study Center in Charlottesville about this seeming contradiction in Scripture. As a holder to inerrancy I believed (and still do) Scripture cannot contradict itself. He replied “it's a hermeneutical issue.” I had to look that word up. I was premed at the time. So I never got an answer until I could read Hebrew and change the translation to “relent” (NIV) from “repent” (RSV).

But today, 40 years later, I see something so different in the heart of God. Back then I knew God as good, sovereign, and in control. His goodness would preclude Him from doing evil or needing to repent. So we can legitimately change the translation of the Hebrew words to brunt the impact of the RSV. But today I don't need to soften these words. I am discovering the God of the Old Covenant to be the same as the God of the New, He is not an angry ogre. He is a loving Dad who wants nothing more than His kids’ hearts, to live in perfect love and devotion with them.

When Moses cried out in Exodus 32 or Amos in 7.3, God did repent of the calamity he was about to bring. Repentance means to change your mind, your direction, your intention. Hearing Moses’ cries, seeing his tears, feeling Moses’ heart all made God’s heart arise and say “NO, I will not destroy the ones I love.” Though they truly deserved it. Though to some degree we all deserve it. 

God responds to our hearts. He’s a good Dad. Perfect in his righteousness, perfect in his justice, perfect in his love. These do not war against each other, one is not greater than the other. Love does not win over righteousness or justice. His righteousness is not exceeded by his love as the old Honeytree song said that I listened to in college. Perfection is completeness and wholeness, intricate and profound, totally and particularly satisfying.

Sovereign God responds! Adonai Yahweh is Spirit. Yahweh Elohim is Love. El Shaddai is Father. Love responds to the object of His love- you and me!

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This is why we pray.

Allen's testimony of Receiving Father's Love shared at "Growing the Church in the Power of the Holy Spirit" Black Mountain, NC, May 2017

Law and Life, the Do's and the Don'ts

Why does the Law bring death though it is good? Isn't this a contradiction? So many today strive to be free from the Law. The Law is best encompassed in the 10 Commandments. 9 of those are “Thou shalt nots”. Why shall we not? Because doing those things hurts our relationship, with God and man, breaking fellowship, ruining love. “Thou shalt not” does not produce life, but it does protect life. When asked what is the sum of the Law, Jesus goes to the next chapter of Deuteronomy and cites Moses (6.5) “Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your strength.” That is the sum of what we do.

The one commandment of the 10 that is a positive injunction, something we do, is to “honor our father and mother.” Why that? Because in that relationship is the pipeline of experiential love. If we dishonor our parents we, for our part, shut off our hearts to comforting, outflowing love.  Honoring our parents is the “on earth” side keeping our lives receptive to heaven side love. Law is good because it protects what is good.

But prohibitions do not bring life.  Obedience is not merely not doing what is wrong. Biblical Obedience is listening, hearing, responding; residing, remaining, and abiding. We love because God loved us first. We love God because our hearts respond to Him loving us first. “God can only be truly loved in response,” (Steve Hill, Primal Hope, pg 145).

All our religious strivings to obey, i.e. to do the right thing, ultimately defeat us because we cannot give out from the place of emptiness. Obedience flows out of the full well of love. Rivers of living water spring up from the heart that is being nourished and amply supplied. We wrongly think that if we just try harder the next time we will do better. No, the secret is to stop trying, admit our total incapacity and even unwillingness, and say “Father, I need you. Abba, please love me right now. Hold me. Forgive me. Fill me.” And then the burden becomes easy and the yoke becomes light because we are walking together again in unity.

Have you noticed that so much of the Law is prohibition? What thou shalt not do? It's hard to know what to do when all the guidance we get is what we are not to do. When love is our rule, not “Law” as in prohibited activity, but rule is in motivation, we are free. The “Law of the Spirit of Life” sets us free from the Law of sin and death” (Romans 8:2). We live “according to” or “down from” or “through” the Spirit. Spirit life here isn't describing signs and wonders and power ministry but love and fruit and relationship. Spirit life pours the love of God into our hearts (Romans 5.5) and the more our hearts receive the freer we become and the more revelation we receive to know what to do and not just what not to do. When we live in love we know.

That's The True You

I journaled on 2/2/17:

Our struggle seeing ourselves as so unworthy, so unlovable, something to be cast off, pushed aside, even burned is deep and pervasive. A friend wrote this morning struggling, feeling isolated, unwanted, worthless. This is gross, but deep down many of us feel like cur, something to be scraped off our boot. I hate dog poop. I love dogs but I hate the poop. I hate having to pick it up in a plastic bag and carry it to the trash can. I nearly gag. I love Wiley, my son’s dog. But the poop…ugh.

I had a little Facebook discussion this week with a friend about hell, whether it exists as a real physical place of eternal separation and torment. Jesus in the Sermon on the Mount speaks several times about a place we translate as “hell” but the literal name is “Ghenna” (Gk) or “Ge-Hinnom” (Hb).  Ge-Hinnom is a deep rift valley outside Jerusalem where human waste, dead animal bodies, and other nasty stuff is thrown and burned in a perpetual fire. When Jesus spoke of “hell” people undoubtably knew the imagery he was using for the fate human souls, if we stay angry or lust (Matt 5:22,30) and more. He said we cannot enter the Kingdom of Heaven unless our righteousness exceeds that of the Pharisees (Mat 5:20). Wow. Feel condemned? Unworthy? Like a little piece of….? I sure have and at times still do.

But what has Jesus done? He, by his life, “fulfilled all righteousness.” Paul tells us that His righteousness becomes our righteousness (2 Cor. 5:21). And where did Jesus go? For us? Hebrews 13:10-11 “For the bodies of those animals whose blood is brought into the holy places by the high priest as a sacrifice for sin are burned outside the camp. So Jesus also suffered outside the gate in order to sanctify the people through his own blood.”

Jesus became for us everything we want to scrape off the bottom of our shoe. All the shame, all the stink, all the unworthiness, all the filth and isolation. He, as the only righteous one who ever lived, became our unrighteousness and was essentially burned in hell as human waste/dead animal.

And now we have what theologians call “imputed righteousness.” We “are the righteousness of God.” “For our sake he made him to be sin who knew no sin, so that in him we might become the righteousness of God” (2 Cor. 5:21). So yes, we do far exceed the Pharisees and we can thus sprint joyfully into the Kingdom. But what about how we feel today? Our hearts may be  telling us the opposite of what our minds understand as truth from the Scripture. When all we can so is smell the…

“Quick, Find his mother… that baby needs his diaper changed, … and fast.”

Years ago I was taught that in Christ God does not “see” my sin. “That’s nice” I thought. “He’s blind.” "But He can’t be because He’s God." Or "He has a clothes pin on His nose." I was taught that “in Christ” God only sees “Christ in me.” That may be so but all I could see was Allen in me. “Quick, get the clothes pin...  Where’s that Febreze? Anybody got any real dark glasses?”

No, that’s not how our Father God sees or smells. Satan sees, points to it, and literally rubs it in our noses. 

Father sees, knows, picks us up, undresses us, places us in the warm baby tub of sudsy water. Gently washes us sparkly clean, picks us up again and cuddles us to his breast. He then feeds us, wraps us in clothes of pure, spotless, clean-smelling righteousness. He takes that diaper (or lack thereof) and throws it into Ghenna where it belongs. And not only is the baby clean on the outside, but the crying has stopped, the smile has returned, the heart and belly are fully satisfied. And life is as it should be.

That’s the true you.

We are not special to God because we are “good,” we are good because we listen.

Christians often ask, “How did Jesus do it?” Meaning, how did He live his live so perfectly, “without sin?” Without breaking any single commandment.

In recent years I have been seeing that a key to Jesus’ obedience was His ability to hear His Father’s voice and thus to do His Father’s will unblinkingly. I have tended to, in the past, think of “obedience” as “doing the right thing,” keeping the letter of the Law, doing the opposite of what my sinful nature wants to do. But I am discovering even further now, this is not God’s intent. In fact, it wasn’t His intent from the very beginning when He called his children, the nation of Israel, out of Egypt to be to Him His “special, treasured possession.” (Exodus 19:5)

In the Biblical Hebrew language, the word we translate “obey” primarily means “listen/hear.” I remember my mother at times very frustrated with me as a child and saying “Why can’t you listen to me.” Well, I was “hearing” her but I wasn't “listening.” In other words, we may hear someone speaking but in our hearts and minds we aren’t really “listening,”  we’re just doing our own thing, probably even rebelling or thinking of some caustic retort.

Exodus 19 is the account of Moses going up on the mountain to receive the Ten Commandments from God. It is these Ten Commandments that truly distinguish Jews and Christians from the sinful, pagan nations. But, I am asking here, is it “obedience to the law” that makes us Christian or Jews, like circumcision for the Jew or tithing for the Christian? No. And it never has been. The apostles in Acts 15:10 realized that the law was “a yoke neither we nor our ancestors have been able to bear.” In other words, “no one can get it right.”

How did Jesus do it? In the same way God intended from the beginning with his people Israel as we see in Exodus 19:5 (My very literal translation of the Hebrew): “Now” (since you’ve seen how I delivered you from slavery in Egypt, vss 1-4), “if you listen to hear my voice and keep watch over my covenant, you shall be to me a treasured possession” (particular, special, protected possession).

We are not special to God because we are “good,” we are good because we listen. Jesus listened and He did everything He saw His Father doing and spoke only what he heard His Father saying. That's what made Him perfect. Perfect means complete, whole, healthy, good.

Hebrews 5:8 says about Jesus, “Son though he was, he learned obedience from what he suffered.” What? Jesus had to learn obedience from suffering? Again, the Biblical word for obedience has the root “hear,” literally it means “to listen under,” i.e. to hear and submit, to do what His Father was telling him.

God said to Jesus (Hebrews 5:5) “You are my Son, today I have become your Father.” Sons and daughters listen to their Papa. Like Jesus we too at times “offer up prayers and petitions with fervent cries and tears” (vs. 7) on behalf of the lost world around us, in the face of persecution or grave illness. But even in the midst of huge suffering, even death on a cross, we can say to our Father “into thy hands I commit my spirit” or “Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do.”

You are God’s treasured possession! He has hidden you in His heart, in a safe place. No matter what may be happening externally in your life, He wants to hear your voice and you to hear His. Obedience is nothing more than reverent, submissive listening and then doing. And as we center ourselves  in Papa’s love, reverent submission becomes  a joy and delight. When we  are experiencing Father delighting in us, delighting in Him comes naturally and easily. That’s how Jesus did it.     

Christmas in the Spring

Psalm 63

We sang a song when I was  in college at the AO House. “Thy Loving Kindness is better than life… my lips shall praise thee, thus will I bless thee, I will lift up my hands in thy name.” Verse 3 in Hebrew reads “Since/because your hesed is better than life, my lips shall praise you.” “Life” here isn’t “the meaning of life” or "value of a life" but life as in nature, as in green plants, running streams of water, fresh air, sunshine.  Nature at its best. A walk in the mountains on a sunny, warm day. So God’s loving faithful kindness is better than this? Just how does that work?

If we think of God’s love as a concept, and idea, even a principle, it remains in our thoughts as an abstraction, perhaps even a philosophy or ethic. “That’s nice… next.”  But is this how we experience nature when we take a walk on a beautiful spring day after a cold, wet winter? No!

We deeply breathe in the fresh air, we open our eyes wide to see the beauty of new life, we listen to the sounds of trees rustling in the wind and birds chirping age old songs. We richly inhale the aromas of flowers, green grasses, and budding trees. We even shed as much of our clothing as we dare so our skin can touch and feel the warm sun and the fresh dry air.  In other words, nature is to be experienced with all our senses. And then our senses touch our hearts and we say “I love walking in the woods, I love running through gardens, I love life.”

This indeed is how God wants us to experience His love, His “hesed,” which means faithful, reliable, trustworthy, unfailing love. God created us for love, to be experienced deeply in our bodies and in our souls.

Since it is almost Christmas, when we celebrate God come into the earth and living among us as a man, we can also celebrate God’s love coming into our hearts, into the deep recesses of our souls and filling us with his love like our lungs fill with air on a fresh spring day. Breathe deeply this Christmas season. Open your eyes, listen to the song. Oh taste and see that the Lord is good.