Into the Unknown with Jesus

 Preserve my life, for I am godly;

    save your servant, who trusts in you—you are my God. 

Be gracious to me, O Lord,

    for to you do I cry all the day.

 Gladden the soul of your servant,

    for to you, O Lord, do I lift up my soul.

(Psalm 86:2-4, ESV)

 

 

Alas, wherever I go, ahead or behind,
        He is not there;
        I am unable to find Him.
When He works on either side of me, I still cannot see Him.
        I catch no glimpse of Him.
But He knows the course I have traveled.
        And I believe that were He to prove me,
        I would come out purer than gold from the fire.
My foot has been securely set in His tracks;
        I have kept to His course of life without swerving;
I have not departed from the commands of His lips;
        I have valued everything He says more than all else.
He alone is one True God; who can alter Him?
        Whatever He desires within Himself, He does.
For He will carry out exactly what He has planned for me,
        and in the future there are more plans to come.

(Job 23:8-14, The Voice)

 

Do not take money with you: don’t take gold, silver, or even small, worthless change. Do not pack a bag with clothes. Do not take sandals or a walking stick. Be fed and sheltered by those who show you hospitality. When you enter a town or village, look for someone who is trustworthy and stay at his house as long as you are visiting that town. When you enter this home, greet the household kindly. And if the home is indeed trustworthy, let your blessing of peace rest upon it; if not, keep your blessing to yourself. If someone is inhospitable to you or refuses to listen to your testimony, leave that house or town and shake the dust from your feet. This is the truth: Sodom and Gomorrah, those ancient pits of inhospitality, will fare better on judgment day than towns who ignore you tomorrow or next week.
 

Listen: I am sending you out to be sheep among wolves. You must be as shrewd as serpents and as innocent as doves. You must be careful. You must be discerning. You must be on your guard. There will be men who try to hand you over to their town councils and have you flogged in their synagogues. Because of Me, naysayers and doubters will try to make an example out of you by trying you before rulers and kings. When this happens—when you are arrested, dragged to court—don’t worry about what to say or how to say it. The words you should speak will be given to you. For at that moment, it will not be you speaking; it will be the Spirit of your Father speaking through you. (Matthew 10:9-20, The Voice)

 

It is a terrible risk to follow even a Friend into the unknown. It is made worse by the fact that he so often seems to disappear or go ahead instead of staying close by. 

 

The instructions he gives us should make it so much easier to continue our journey: but what instructions?  

 

'Don't provide extra for yourself in case I let you down.'
'Don't worry what to say.'
'I will be there when you need me, even if it's only at the last moment.' 

 

Instructions like these leave us incredibly vulnerable but they are only examples of what he is really asking from us: that we choose intentionally, deliberately to make ourselves vulnerable and to walk in that vulnerability! (Northumbria, Aidan readings, Dec. 2)

 

 

Prayer as Moving Outward

PRAYER AS GIVING FROM ABUNDANCE

Prayer that does not move outward dies.  When I hear this, I am haunted by the thought that unless I am hurried and harried by my efforts to do good, my prayer life must be dying.  It is more along the lines of saying, "To breathe, you inhale and exhale."  There is a necessary rhythm to prayer that follows Jesus commands: "Love God and love your neighbor."

Similarly, Moving Upward comes naturally to Moving Outward.  Foster quotes from Bernard of Clairvaux about the relationship between Moving Outward and Moving Inward and Upward: "If then you are wise, you will show yourself rather as a reservoir than as a canal.  For a canal spreads abroad water as it receives it, but a reservoir waits until it is filled before overflowing, and thus communicates, without loss to itself, its superabundant water.  In the Church in the present day, we have many canals, few reservoirs."  (Prayer Treasury, Foster, p. 168)  Now I find I can practice what Jesus told his disciples to do, "Freely you have received, freely give."  (Matthew 10:8)

ASKING A GOD WHO WANTS TO GIVE FREELY

Praying the Ordinary, Petitionary Prayer, and Intercessory Prayer form the beginnings of giving.  All of them serve to keep me giving along with God rather than in my own strength with my own resources.  Praying the Ordinary takes brings prayer into my life "by turning ordinary experiences into prayer, . . .  seeing God in the ordinary experiences of life, and . . . by praying throughout the ordinary experiences of life." (ibid, p. 169)  In asking for myself (petition) and for others (intercession), I can ask for God to supply of the things I have let go and I ask freely from a God who wants to gives freely.

Giving deepens through Healing Prayer and the Prayer of Suffering.  The strength of the cross is that it promises both healing and the redemption of suffering.  Resurrection is the ultimate form of healing and the hope for which all healing points to.  As for suffering: "George MacDonald notes, 'The Son of God suffered unto death, not that men might not suffer, but that their suffering might be like His.'"  (ibid, p. 322)  Both prayers for healing and in suffering are based in giving from the strength and hope that God gives.

GIVING REQUIRES COMMUNITY

Authoritative Prayer and Radical Prayer address healing and suffering through command rather than request, and in community rather than solitude. "In the power of God we learn to take authority over everyday issues like our eating habits and and our sexual fantasies and our fears and our failures."  (ibid, 237)  In these prayers, I feel God has wanted me to learn how to identify more deeply with Christ by not merely asking, but speaking out his will in community.

As I spend time with my family or go to church or even go to work, I sometimes dream about what it would be like to be in a world or community where such giving was typical and not extraordinary.  What would it be like to live where prayer was as natural as complaining is now?  Blessing as easy as cursing?  Healing as pervasive as hurting?  This will be the case someday.  By God's grace my heart and my life will be ready for it.

Lord, teach me not to hold my breath, trying to hoard in all your blessings, goodness, and knowledge that you give so freely.  Let me breath out with prayer, kindness, and service, sharing your gifts freely as you have shared them with me, knowing that you will always share more.  Let my prayer not become a time when I gripe about how bad everyone seems, but rather a time where I can hear you speaking through other people's lives. Amen.

Humility in Daily Life - Give as You Have Received

If anyone says, "I love God," yet hates his brother, he is a liar. For anyone who does not love his brother, whom he has seen, cannot love God, whom he has not seen.  (1 John 4:20)

It is easy to think we humble ourselves before God: humility towards men will be the only sufficient proof that our humility before God is real.

The insignificances of daily life are the importances and the tests of eternity, because they prove what really is the spirit that possesses us.  (Andrew Murray, Humility, Chapter 6)

There is a lie circulated in many Christian circles.  Actually, it is also popular in non-Christian therapy.  "You must forgive if you want to be forgiven."  What heavier burden could I place on another person?

The thought comes from a misinterpretation of part of the Lord's prayer and other passages like it: "Forgive us trespasses as we forgive those who trespass against us."  I have tried to live this false idea out and have placed the burden on other people as well.  The story is grounded in a false picture of God.

Somehow this god says that I must prove my gratitude to him by loving and forgiving other people who are disagreeable or even hurtful toward me.  He says, "I will withhold my love, peace, and joy and will not forgive you until you love and forgive your enemies."

If this is how God is, Jesus would say to the Samaritan woman, "I will not speak to you until you forgive all the men who have used and abused you as well as all the people who have mocked and excluded you.  Living water is only for those who forgive."  Maybe he would say to the woman caught in adultery, "I will condemn you until you forgive those men who were about to stone you."  Instead of saying, "Neither do I condemn you - go and sin no more", Jesus would just say, "Go and sin no more."

The point that Jesus is making in his parables and sayings about forgiveness is not that we should forgive or that we must forgive, but that those who live in the love and forgiveness of God can forgive.  As James Bryan Smith says, people who do not forgive do not lack willpower, but resources.  With this truth, when I cannot forgive, I realize that it is the measure of lack of awareness and experience with God's forgiveness of me.

Yes, lack of forgiveness points out hypocrisy in me and in others.  I make myself a liar when I withhold forgiveness.  The real story, however, is not that God holds a grudge against me until I forgive.  Instead, the story is that I need to understand and experience God's forgiveness in my life before I can share it with others.  The basic misunderstanding is that I need to forgive rather than sharing Christ's forgiveness with other people as I have received it.  "Freely you have received, now freely give."  (Matthew 10)

Humility underlies that forgiveness.  Humility toward other people indicates that I understand my place before God.  Again, this is easy to misunderstand.  The narrative is not that I am so low and unworthy before God that I only deserve to be the lowliest scum slave before other people.  No, I am loved and gently cared for by God, who is everything to me, so losing to others, serving them, and lifting them up does not take anything from me, but allows me to serve my God through my service and humility toward them.  "Whatever you do to the least of these, you do it to me," says Jesus, not as a threat, but as a promise of peace and joy in and with him.

Daily life is the place where this plays out.  It is more about how I treat people on the road than how many I invite to church.  It is more about what I do for my wife and kids than what I do for the homeless person "out there."  It is more about how I do my job at work that how many committees or ministries I serve in at church.  Humility plays out in "insignificant" places rather than ones that seem "spiritual" or "important."  This is a hard lesson to learn in many ways, but the goodness of God makes it possible for me to be trained and grow in humility and forgiveness.

Lord, Help me to lay aside the false ideas about forgiveness and humility.  I want to embrace humility that touches each area of my life.  I want to see you as the forgiving One, the humble One, and so find my hope and strength.  Open my eyes.  Clear out my ears.  Let each day bring me a time when I can yield to other people as I yield to you.  Amen.

Humility: The Glory of the Creature

Shout for joy to the LORD, all the earth.
Worship the LORD with gladness;
   come before him with joyful songs.
Know that the LORD is God.
   It is he who made us, and we are his;
  we are his people, the sheep of his pasture.  (Psalm 100:1-3) 

Whoever finds his life will lose it, but whoever loses his life for my sake will find it.  (Matthew 10:39) 

Humility, the place of entire dependence on God, is, from the very nature of things, the first duty and the highest virtue of the creature, and the root of every virtue.  And so pride, or the loss of this humility, is the root of every sin and evil.

 When the serpent breathed the poison of his pride, the desire to be as God, into the hearts of our first parents, that they too fell from their high estate into all the wretchedness in which man is now sunk. In heaven and earth, pride, self-exaltation, is the gate and the birth, and the curse, of hell.  Hence it follows that nothing can be our redemption, but the restoration of the 'lost humility, the original and only true relation of the creature to its God. And so Jesus came to bring humility back to earth, to make us partakers of it, and by it to save us. . . .  His humility gave His death its value, and so became our redemption. . . .  His humility is our salvation. His salvation is our humility.

[Humility] is not a something which we bring to God, or He bestows; it is simply the sense of entire nothingness, which comes when we see how truly God is all, and in which we make way for God to be all.

This humility is not a thing that will come of itself, but that it must be made the object of special desire and prayer and faith and practice.  (From Humility, Chapter 1, Andrew Murray)

 At the heart of praise and worship is this knowledge: the Lord is God alone.  A necessary attendant to this knowledge is the knowledge of my "creature-liness."  I am not my own.  I was made by God.  I belong to God.  I am "pastured" and sustained by God.  Praise and worship focused on God and not on performance - "How am I doing?", "How do I look?", "What do people think of me?" - teaches humility.  May God grant me the knowledge - the actual experiential, hands-on knowledge - that the Lord alone is God.


When Jesus talks about losing one's life, some parallels in surrounding literature are a centurion who betrays his army and country, or the daughter of a priest who becomes a whore.  The loss is to throw away what is precious to oneself; to render it completely useless.  In trying to make my own way, I render my life an empty betrayal; I throw away what is most precious in myself.  When I lay my life down as nothing before God, seeing it as refuse and dung in comparison to knowing him in Christ, I can begin to know what my life is for and what I have been made to do. Humility is losing my life so I can find my life.  May my life be nothing to me in the light of Christ my Lord.


Humility is simply the other side of faith.  When I "see how God truly is,"  humility is the "sense of entire nothingness" that comes.  It is not a matter of self-deprecation (which, in my experience, is a pride-based humility, as strange as that sounds) but a loss of self-consciousness and worry in the light of God's glory and goodness.  It is freedom.

This freedom was coaxed out of our hands by Satan.  The "high estate" of Adam and Eve was their humility. It is the true nobility of human beings.  In contrast, "self-exaltation is the gate and the birth, and the curse, of hell."  This is the great Fall of man: from humility to pride.  I am still facing the fall.  Like in free-fall, many no longer sense their downward plummet until they are caught by the wind of the Spirit which propels them upward into humility or hit the bottom of the fall of pride: misery and death.

When Paul says that everything that does not come from faith is sin, he is also saying that humility supports all other virtues.  Humility is the underside of faith, making virtue possible and rendering sin unappealing and ineffective.  When God is who he should be, then I can become who I should be.  Faith in God brings humility and humility supports faith.

Lord, let humility become the object of my desire and prayer and practice.  Let me give everything up for this pearl.  Work it into my life, Father.  I am yours.  Amen.


As you think about God or worship him or pray to him, do you ever become aware of a "sense of entire nothingness?"  Do you resist humility or embrace it?  Do you see it as painful necessity or your "true nobility?"