“F’ is for Fear-of-the-Lord

Embedded.     It was my second time of actual solitude with the Lord.  The entire encounter lasted perhaps 90 seconds yet the impact of the experience continues now 42 years later. 

I had awakened early from a restless sleep.  I quietly made my way to the living room and moved to the corner by the front window – the window with the diamond pattern etched into the glass.  Kneeling on a large pillow, I leaned slightly to rest my forehead against the corner wall.  I exhaled a sleepy, “O God,” wanting to articulate a prayerful something but no words were forming.  So I waited, not realizing the importance of waiting in solitude.

The silent, hovering-like presence began behind me.  I still grope for words to explain it.  I perceived Him as large yet gentle, powerful and tender.  It seemed like a silent buzz similar perhaps to an electrical current, pulsing slowly with an inviting intensity.  Or was it something like being enveloped in positively charged humidity, clean and strangely energizing rather than sticky and draining?  I straightened slightly when I suspected, “this is Him – Jesus.”  I dearly wanted to turn and look yet my body felt locked in place.  I was awed and astounded yet troubled as I felt His penetrating gaze – I knew I was fragile and vulnerable.  I could say or do nothing.  I was compelled to simply absorb.  Borrowing a word from Isaiah, I felt ‘undone.’  Yet I was also instantly strengthened.  In fact, I felt ‘embedded’ with a deep assurance which I now explain with a paraphrase of Song of Solomon 2:16 – I am His and He is mine.  Yes, that’s what I experienced.  Then, as suddenly as it began, it ended. 

Implanted Gift.     Some would call it an encounter with God’s manifest presence (A.W. Tozer, The Pursuit of God) or possibly God’s appreciated presence (Larry Crabb, The Pressure’s Off).  While I have not experienced God in quite the same way since, that unusual and intense encounter with God’s Holiness implanted the gift of the Fear-of-the-Lord deep within me.

A Multi-Faceted Attitude.     Fear-of-the-Lord is to be our most basic attitude toward God.  This is vitally important to the Lord so He takes personal responsibility to plant Fear-of-the-Lord in our hearts (Jeremiah 32:39-40).  Like many other gifts from God, we receive Fear-of-the-Lord in seed-form and we are responsible to cultivate and nurture it.  Fear-of-the-Lord is a complex, multi-faceted attitude and Psalm 2:10-12 reveals three of its four main facets.  Here’s an explanation of each:

1) Reverence:deep respect for God, adoration of Him, honoring Him; recognition of His overwhelming greatness and the sincere expression of appreciation and gratitude to Him and for Him.

2) Trembling:  obedience to God, submission to His ways; feeling healthy concern for God’s displeasure with disobedience; feeling reverent concern for bringing harm to our relationship with Him through our sinning; having a legitimate, healthy concern for our sins being ‘exposed.’

3) Rejoicing: our expression of great joy and gladness with being God’s beloved son/daughter; expressing our delight and abundant appreciation for who God is, what He has done, is doing and His promises.

No Contradictions.    

“Serve the Lord with reverent fear, and rejoice with trembling.  Submit to God’s royal son, or he will become angry, and you will be destroyed in the midst of all your activities – for his anger flares up in an instant.  But what joy for all who take refuge in him” (Psalm 2:10-12, NLT). 

Is it possible to do this, to have reverent fear and trembling in your heart toward God and actually rejoice at the same time?  Yes, definitely, it is not a contradiction.  God commands it and He is the awesome God of things which seem impossible.  And by the way, ‘awesome’ is the fourth facet of Fear-of-the-Lord and is clearly revealed in Mark 9:15 and Heb. 12:28-29.  More specifically, …

4) Awe:  an overwhelming awareness of God’s majesty, power, holiness and glorious goodness; a complex cluster of emotions which includes surprise, astonishment, amazement, curiosity.

Disrupts and Dethrones.     It is said that ‘awe’ is more than just a feeling—it is an ‘experience.’  Awe is an extraordinarily important experience because of its impact on us—it disrupts and dethrones the ordinary aspects of our lives.  Our ordinary plans and purposes come to a sudden halt when we are awed by God.  Our usual ways of looking at things are put on hold and we forget, at least momentarily, about our self-interests.  God-awe overrides and captivates our thinking.  God-awe expands our imagination.  We see our lives in proper perspective when we are awed by God.

Also, Fear-of-the-Lord…

• is the beginning (foundation) of wisdom (Psalm 111:10)
• is a life-giving fountain (Prov. 14:27) and lengthens life (Prov. 10:27)
• makes you secure (Prov. 14:26), protects you from harm (Prov. 19:23)
• helps you avoid evil (Prov. 16:6) and enables you to hate evil (Prov. 8:13)
• causes God to store up “goodness” for you (Psalm 31:19)

Fear-of-the-Lord nurtures, deepens and enhances our joy and draws us closer to God – it does not cancel out our Holy joy (see Jerry Bridges, The Joy of Fearing God, WaterBrook, 1997).  In fact, when our hearts tremble with holy reverence for God, our joy in Him is nurtured, deepened and enhanced.  Why?  Because we are thus assured that our Almighty Father is dangerously powerful and wildly protective of us.  In His presence we live in awe – we see His greatness and know the security of being His beloved children.  He is righteously jealous about us and will never stop doing good for us (Jeremiah 32:40-41).

Needed for Spiritual Formation.     Eugene Peterson sees the mixture of reverence and awe as the ‘core’ of Fear-of-the-Lord and necessary for our spiritual growth:

“Reverence and awe opens up in us a capacity to grow, to become more than we are – to mature.  Fear-of-the-Lord opens our spirits, our souls, to become what we are not yet.  Lacking it, we are stuck at whatever level of knowledge or behavior or insight that we have reached at the time” (Practice Resurrection, Eerdmans, 2010).

A Child’s View.     We see Fear-of-the-Lord in an excerpt from the children’s classic, The Silver Chair, in which young Jill is dying of thirst and finds Aslan the Lion positioned between her and the stream.

“She stood as still as if she had been turned to stone.  ‘If you’re thirsty, you may drink’ said the Lion.  The voice was not like a man’s.  It was deeper, wilder, and stronger; a sort of heavy, golden voice.  It did not make her any less frightened …but frightened in rather a different way.  ‘Will you promise not to do anything to me, if I do come?’ said Jill.  ‘I make no promise,’ said the Lion.  ‘I daren’t come and drink,’ said Jill.  ‘Then you will die of thirst,’ said the Lion.  ‘Oh dear!’ said Jill, coming another step nearer.  ‘I suppose I must go and look for another stream then.’  ‘There is no other stream,’ said the Lion.”

(C.S. Lewis, The Silver Chair, HarperCollins, 1953/1981)

Jill’s fear is a ‘different’ kind of fear.  It brings her not to flight but a step closer, then another step closer until she reaches the only stream which exists to satisfy her thirst.  It is the same with our souls.  Fear-of-the-Lord rightly understood, openly received and regularly cultivated steadily draws us closer to the One who gives us life in abundance.  It is the believer’s most basic and most vital attitude toward God.     

‘E’ is for Experience

Reading the Bible for the first time in my early twenties as a new Christ-believer, I was amazed at the intimate personal experiences which so many biblical characters had with Almighty God.  In story after story it was evident that God is highly relational, welcoming direct interaction with the people He calls His own.  Beginning with the God-walks and talks which Adam and Eve experienced in the Garden and ending with the revelations which John saw and heard on the island of Patmos, the Bible overflows with people encountering the living God.  In fact…

“Virtually everything we know about God has come through believing other people’s experiences – from Moses, David and Isaiah to Paul and John.”  (Bruce Demarest, Satisfy Your Soul, NavPress, 1999)

Child-Like Believing.     Those who pastored me in the early days of my salvation operated with an understanding that God has not changed His ways – if we will earnestly seek Him, respectfully wait in his presence and sincerely listen, God will communicate Himself to us.  This activated my imagination and a child-like belief took root in my soul: God desires a personal relationship in which He saves us and invites us to experience His passionate, transforming love and His stunning, challenging holiness.  God then validated my belief in an amazing way. 

Diamond Windows.     Within days I would marry my fiancé and quickly relocate to Chicago where a job awaited me.  I was concerned about a safe place to live in this city strange to us.  How would we know where to settle?  As I rested upon my bed, starring at the flat ceiling and praying about my concern, I saw, momentarily, in my mind’s eye a window glass with a diamond pattern.  This was curious and unlike any experience I’d known before.  I muttered an apparent rhetorical question, perhaps to God, “What is this all about?”  Little did I realize the Lord was structuring an experience of His transforming love for us.  Before I share the rest of the story, let’s take note of Apostle Paul’s desire for experience:

“Yes, everything else is worthless when compared with the infinite value of knowing Christ Jesus my Lord.  For his sake I have discarded everything else, counting it all as garbage, so that I could gain Christ and become one with him.  …I want to know Christ and experience the mighty power that raised him from the dead.” (Philippians 3:8-10)

Experiential Knowing.     Paul’s kind of ‘knowing’ includes but surpasses just believing information about Jesus.  It’s an intimate kind of knowing, often referred to as heart knowledge – personally engaging, intimately relational and progressively life-changing.  My exposure to the writings of Tozer helped me understand:

“Over against all this cloudy vagueness stands the clear scriptural doctrine that God can be known in personal experience.

The Bible assumes as a self-evident fact that men can know God with at least the same degree of immediacy as they know any other person or thing that comes within the field of their experience.

And always He is trying to get our attention, to reveal Himself to us, to communicate with us.  We have within us the ability to now Him if we will but respond to His overtures.  And this we call pursuing God!”  (A.W. Tozer, The Pursuit of God, Christian Publ., 1982)

Later my soul was further stimulated by reading McManus:

“We have become believers [only] rather than experiencers.  To know God in the Scriptures always went beyond information to intimacy.  We may find ourselves uncomfortable with this reality, but the faith of the Scriptures is a mystical faith.” (Erwin Raphael McManus, The Barbarian Way, Thomas Nelson Publ., 2005)

Mysterious and Mystical.     I needed further reassurance about the “mystical’ aspect of faith which McManus wrote about.  I began to find it – the reassurance – in Bruce Demarest’s very helpful chapter, ‘Knowing God as Intimates:’

“In the words of Job, ‘God is exalted beyond what we can understand’ (36:26).  Our knowledge of God, therefore, always involves a measure of mystery.  Reason alone cannot fully describe realities such as beauty, love, or passion.  Common sense tells us that intangibles such as these are ‘better felt than telt.’

Great Christian realities, such as intimacy with God, spiritual passion, and prayer must be framed by the mind and experienced by the heart.  Christian mysticism, simply put, is the believer’s direct experience of God in the heart.  …the believer’s unmediated experience of God, ministered to the heart by the Holy Spirit, which facilitates Christlike character and empowers for kingdom service.”  (Bruce Demarest, Satisfy Your Soul, NavPress, 1999)

Love Relationship.     Spiritual formation and our needed soul transformations depend on experiencing a ‘love relationship’ with God.  Jesus places primary importance on this very thing:  “You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind.  This is the greatest and first commandment” (Matthew 22:37-38).  Yet we often minimize the experience of relational truth (love) and maximize the absorption of informational (doctrinal) truth.  Demarest helps us see it:

“A spirituality that embraces intellectual truth without personally engaging Christ in relationship is not Christian enough!  The Evangelists’ theology of Jesus in the Gospels is rather thin.  But their experience of Jesus is rich….  Experience changed them from timid, lukewarm followers into tenacious, blazing disciples of the risen Lord.

Growing Christians should view God less as a proposition to be scrutinized and more as a glorious Person to be engaged in moments of loving awe and wonder.  To know God is to cultivate a love relationship with Him  It leads to transformation of your entire being.”  (Bruce Demarest, Satisfy Your Soul, NavPress, 1999) 

Apostle Paul knew this truth and bestows a blessing upon his readers concerning the experience of God’s love:  “May you experience the love of Christ, though it is too great to understand fully.  Then you will be made complete with all the fullness of life and power that comes from God.”  (Ephesians 3:17-19, NLT)

Behind the Curtain.     In Chicago we searched for a decent, affordable apartment.  We settled for the last one available in a complex in a northwest suburb.  Dealing with July humidity and stressed to get quickly settled, we resigned ourselves to a rental fee which exceeded our non-existent budget.  We signed the lease and were about to begin unpacking when I glanced at the curtains hanging on each side of a window in the apartment.  With sudden suspicion I pulled aside one curtain and stood with stunned amazement – there was a diamond pattern etched into the window glass, similar to what I had ‘seen’ in the vision-thing a few days earlier.  Internally I was over-whelmed with a compelling sense of being loved by our ever-present God who delights in blessing His children.  I felt my belief about experience was validated, my confidence in the Lord soared and my joy abounded.  It was an unforgettable experience of direct interaction with our loving God.  Experience matters.

Let’s conclude with Benner’s experience:

“…it is possible to know God’s love personally, beyond simply knowing about it.  The fact that I am deeply loved by God is increasingly the core of my identity, what I know about myself with most confidence.  Such a conviction is, I am convinced, the foundation of any significant Christian spiritual growth.”  (David G. Benner, Surrender To Love, IVP, 2003)

Certainly, apply the message of the Bible as a filter to your experiences and seek council from wise, street-smart, older Christ-believers about those experiences.  But most of all be led by the Spirit to experience the love of Christ.      

‘D’ is for Desire

Heart Desires:     The deepest, most central ‘core’ of the human soul is, in biblical terminology, the heart.  The heart is the center of many different activities – intellectual, willful, emotional, spiritual activities.  But the most basic, the most elemental, the most vital function of the heart is, of course, something we call desiring, longing or yearning.  Our desires, those mysteriously compelling forces from deep within, drive our behavior.   

Alluring:     At age twelve I experienced a sudden and lasting ‘desire’ when I first saw a 1963 split window Corvette coupe.  America’s first real sports car had been re-designed and I found it to be captivating and alluring.  I wanted one both before and after I was old enough to drive and even now when I am of sufficient age to know better!  The longing continues.  But it is now a harmless passion which arises from time to time, amusing and reminding me that God purposefully created ‘desire’ to be powerful and influential.     

Driven by Desire:     Desires come in many varieties.  We have superficial desires and we have deep desires.  We have logical longings and mysterious yearnings.  We have what Apostle Paul calls fleshly desires and, thankfully, Godly desires.  My longing to own a classic Corvette is superficial.  My longing to know God is deep – the deepest of all desires.  But we often choose to embrace the superficial and fleshly rather than the deep, Godly longings.  Fortunately, spiritual formation targets our desires: we are invited to regularly examine and embrace them, allow them to be rightly ordered and timely transformed by the Holy Spirit. We are to consistently cultivate and purposefully exercise our highest passions – God wants our behavior to be driven by righteous desires which honor Him and satisfy our heart’s longing to enjoy Him.  This is the vital ‘aliveness’ God desires for us.  “This is why holiness is not deadness; it is passion.   It is being more attuned to our desires, to what we were truly made for and therefore what we truly want” (John Eldredge, Dare to Desire, J. Countryman Publ., 2002). 

Desire by Design:     God has created our hearts with a deep void, an emptiness which only He can fill.  This void can be described as our hunger for God, our thirst for His Spirit, our desire to know, love and trust Him, our yearning to be more like Jesus – beloved and led by the Spirit. So we open ourselves to Him and we can never get enough of Him.  Each real taste of Him is wonderfully satisfying and leaves us longing for another taste.  To be satisfied by God is to further grow our hunger for more.  Even when the busyness, chaos and pain of life confuses us, distracts us and numbs our sense of wanting God, the desire remains.  When our lives are broken by loss and sin (and maybe especially during these times), our yearning for God continues.  So we must be called back, yet again, to a sensitivity, an awareness of and responsiveness to our desire for God.  It is the most important, most captivating and alluring passion we will ever know.  It’s the deepest and best cry of our hearts.

Vulnerability:     Living by desire is risky and makes us vulnerable.  Our surface desires are distractions and our distorted desires stand as stumbling blocks.  Allow these dangers to enhance your dependency on God.  He is passionate about healing and directing our life-by-desire.  He clearly puts first things first:

”God tells us to love him with all our hearts and all our souls, with all our minds and all our strength.  It’s not a burden but a rescue, a trail out of the jungles of desire.  When we don’t look for God as our true life, our desire for him spills over into our other desires, giving them an ultimacy and urgency they were never intended to bear.  We become desperate, grasping and arranging and worrying over all kinds of things, and once we get them, they end up ruling us.

All we truly need is God.  Prone to wander from him, we find we need all sorts of other things.  Our desire becomes insatiable because we’ve taken our longing for the Infinite and placed it upon finite things.  God saves us from the whole mimetic mess by turning our hearts back to him.

All the other desires find their place as we give God his place.  That is why the psalmist urges us, ‘Delight yourself in the Lord and he will give you the desires of your heart’ (Ps. 37:4).”  (John Eldredge, The Journey of Desire, Thomas Nelson, 2000)

Prayer:     O God, I have tasted some of Your goodness and it has both satisfied me and made me thirsty for more.  Help me to hunger and thirst for the best things.  I confess that often I am unaware of what You desire for me.  O God, I long to be filled with longing; I thirst to be made more thirsty; I want Your desires to become my desires.  Enable me to sit and delight in Your presence while You warm my soul and grow the desires of my heart.  In Jesus name, I pray.  (Prayer patterned after A.W. Tozer, The Pursuit of God, Christian Publ., 1982)   

‘C’ is for Contemplative

Con•tem•pla•tive:     I stumbled over this word in the summer of 1995.    After two decades of longing and yearning for more of God’s love, I was beginning to actually taste the reality of my spiritual adoption by Abba, Father (Gal. 4:4-7) and beginning to sense the security of my core identity in Christ – I was a beloved son of God (Eph. 5:1-2).  Yet I struggled with two desires which seemed contradictory in my brand of cloudy, confused Christianity:  I desired a life of deeper devotion and I desired a well-reasoned, deeply thoughtful knowledge of my faith.  Could reason and devotion coexist?  Could I move within an intellectually oriented belief system and simultaneously experience a relationally rich and rewarding fellowship with God? 

Contemplative Defined:     At first I feared it.  The word conjured my own stifling assumptions of monastery life – cold, dark rooms, long hours of silent prayer and brooding introspection.  My fear eased only a little when I read a definition: “Denoting, concerned with, or inclined to contemplation; meditative; a person dedicated to religious contemplation or to a way of life conductive to this” (Collins English Dictionary).

Contemplative Desired:     That summer as I read David Hazard’s paraphrased selections from the writings of John of The Cross (You Set My Spirit Free, Bethany House, 1994), I learned that I wanted what Hazard reported John of The Cross possessed: “fire of devotion” and “piercing intelligence.”  I wanted both and had neither.  Hazard indicated that becoming ‘contemplative’ was the route to opening the heart so that God’s transformations, God’s renewal of the soul could be cultivated and experienced.  Deep, rich, rewarding relationship with God through contemplation of Him and His holy scriptures – this was John’s journey.  Would it be mine?  Could it be yours?       

Kənˈtemplədiv:     This word has been used (and abused) many ways and most North American Christians simply have not been introduced to the beauty, depth and importance of the contemplative way to knowing God and living life.  What follows is what I have come to understand as the widest, deepest and most glorious version of what it means to become contemplative.  Let’s start with what it is not.

Being contemplative is not simply a type of praying, although the contemplative way of life includes intimate prayer with a great emphasis on listening to God and receiving ‘life’ —“taste and see that the Lord is good” (Psalm 34:8).

Being contemplative is not about becoming some kind of cloistered loner who lives in a monastery or cave, although the contemplative way of life encourages regular times of solitude allowing stillness of soul and quietness of heart—“be still and know that I am God” (Psalm 46:10).

Being contemplative is not a rigid, legalistic code of conduct, although being contemplative shapes, molds and slowly purifies everything about us: our conscience, motives, desires, thinking, imagination, emotions and behavior—all of the functions of the ‘heart.’  “God blesses those whose hearts are pure, for they will see God” (Matthew 5: 8).

Being Contemplative:     It’s all about living the Christ life in the Christ way.  Stated more accurately, it is all about Christ living His life, in us, in His way.  Eugene Peterson has been faithfully practicing the contemplative life for decades and describes it…

[Positively] “…the contemplative life, living the Christ life in the Christ way.  The words of Jesus that keep this in focus are ‘I am the way, the truth and the life’ (John 14:6).  Only when we do the Jesus truth in the Jesus way do we get the Jesus life.”

[Negatively]  “Christ is the way as well as the truth and the life.  When we don’t do it his way, we mess up the truth and we miss out on the life”  (Transparent Lives, The Christian Century, November 29, 2003, pp. 20-27).

Christ came that we may have His life and have it abundantly (John 10:10). Being contemplative opens us for His abundant life.  So we summarize: being contemplative involves every aspect of life—it includes all the ways and means by which we hope to achieve this end—becoming mature, Christ-like disciples who make disciples.  Peterson is realistic about the challenges of being contemplative:

“But this isn’t easy.  It has always been more difficult to come to terms with Jesus as the way than with Jesus as the truth, more difficult to realize the ways our thinking and behavior get fused into a life of relational love and adoration with neighbor and God, God and neighbor” (Transparent Lives, The Christian Century, November 29, 2003)

Jesus’ Metaphor – Awareness and Responsiveness to God.     Jesus told a story to illustrate two of the ways and means of being contemplative.  In the parable of the wedding banquet (Luke 14:15-24) Jesus reveals our tragic disinterest in God and our obsessive/compulsive busyness with self-focused things.  We so often turn down God’s invitations—invitations to be aware of what He is doing and how He is doing it.  And we often decline to receive the blessings of His presence.  Author/theologian Ronald Rolheiser elaborates:

“The non-contemplative is work oriented and too busy to go to the wedding banquet.  …the people were too preoccupied with measuring land, testing oxen, and going on honeymoons to take notice of the ongoing feast.  This parable is Jesus’ own metaphor for non-contemplative lack of awareness.  The preoccupation …reduces the chances of being aware that there is a divinely initiated banquet going on at the heart of ordinary life.”  (The Shattered Lantern, CrossRoad Publ., 2004)

How many of God’s banquets have we missed out on?  How often have we turned down His invitations to be truly ‘with’ Him?  How often are we simply unaware of His invitations and unaware of His presence?  The contemplative approach emphasizes God awareness and responsiveness, daily, in our ordinary lives.  I continue to desire to become contemplative – to search my Abba’s scriptures, to ponder and meditate, to chew on the Word, listen for Christ’s voice, respond to the drawing and leading of the Holy Spirit.  God has invited us to the banquet and He calls us to taste and see that He and His life of contemplation are good.  Participating in the banquet is spiritual formation.  

‘B’ is for Beholding the Bread of Life

Daily Bread.  We can jump-start our spiritual formation by being transformed, daily, from spiritually hungry to spiritually nourished.  A piece of bread can be our simple reminder that Jesus, the Bread of Life, faithfully supplies what we need for this basic transformation.  The potency of the following spiritual ‘practice’ is real, remarkable and restorative for our souls.

Natural Hunger.     I awaken each morning and typically address my hunger with some form of bread.  This tradition stems from my childhood days.  My paternal grandfather, Anthony Andres, was a baker.  We called him Jajo and he was a Polish immigrant who settled in Pennsylvania and founded the Andres Bakery in 1921.  Best known for rye, pumpernickel and French bread, the bakery was family operated for 53 years.  I especially enjoyed toasting his dark rye and I continue to compare any rye I try with Jajo’s.   

Unsatisfied.     Jajo’s life was consumed by the long hours and demanding labor of bakery work.  He passed away when I was eight years old and I hardly knew the man.  Two of his sons continued the baking tradition but my father chose a different vocation.  Dad did not like bakery work and found the on-going family tensions within the bakery very distasteful – the human relationships were, at times, sifted like flour.   Dad directed me, during my teen years, to not work the bakery as a summer job.  That small family business struggled to compete with the large, commercial bakeries and eventually the Andres ovens and lights were turned off forever.  I regret never really knowing Jajo and never learning the artisan skills which were passed on to others – these are hungers which remain unsatisfied.

Spiritual Hunger.  I had a poorly developed awareness of my spiritual hunger during the early years of following Jesus.  Initially I felt the need simply to be saved from my foolish sins and to gain some sense of eternal security.  Later I began to realize my appetite for an expanding variety of God’s goodness and blessings.  At times I am confused with the complexities of the many hungers, desires and needs within my soul – some superficial, some surprisingly deep, many intermingled with sinful, self-centered desires.  The work of sorting out the good the bad and the ugly and the process of becoming more like Christ seems slow and haphazard.

Initially the more I read about soul restoration and transformation, the more complex it seemed to become.  The Holy Spirit is working to purify and enlarge my heart (Psm. 119:32), He is tending to my wounds and peeling off layers of the ‘onion skin’ which cloak and choke the righteous desires God gives me.  Within the heart, He is strengthening, maturing and integrating my various human capacities (see 2/4/17 post), working to create in me an undivided heart (Psm. 86:11) – the work which Curt Thompson, M.D. calls “differentiation” (Anatomy of The Soul, Tyndale, 2010).  I want transformation, need on-going healing, yearn for growth and maturation.  I need God’s desires to become my desires and these right desires to drive my will.  But it is so easy to ignore God’s invitations for restoration and allow myself to stagnate, leading to de-formation.  When I do choose to sit at the table God has prepared for me, I wonder where to begin?  Which needed transformation should I ask for, first and foremost?  At times I am bewildered and overwhelmed with it all.  But I am learning to …        

Behold the Bread of Life.     Reading John’s gospel I became transfixed on Jesus’ words, “I am the bread of life” (6:35).  Jesus’ personally chosen title, this tasty metaphor, this intriguing reality of His identity resonates within me in a new way.  Like an awe-struck child I find in this ‘I am’ saying a previously unperceived concreteness.  As I chew on His words I find clarity about both my need and His provision.  My deepest need is for spiritual food.  I hunger most for God – to know Him, experience Him, follow Him, become like His Son, Jesus.  And Jesus joyfully supplies Himself as the bread of life which feeds my deepest need.    I am now aware that the transformation I most need, every day, is the transformation from being spiritually hungry to spiritually nourished.  Is this the most essential transformation, the one which precedes and prepares us for the other needed transformations?

Paul’s Beholding.     Apostle Paul revealed a discipline which opens our hearts to transformation.  He chose an archaic sounding verb – behold – which draws special attention to a potent spiritual practice we call ‘beholding is becoming.’  He explained it this way:

And we all, with unveiled face, beholding the glory of the Lord, are being transformed into the same image from one degree of glory to another.  For this comes from the Lord who is the Spirit.  (2 Cor. 3:18  ESV)

‘Beholding’ means to observe closely, to contemplate, to gaze upon and deeply consider; to examine, absorb and appreciate the significance of what is seen; to allow what is seen to penetrate and disrupt and motivate and influence us. 

We become more like Christ by beholding His revealed glory.  ‘Glory’ (doxa) refers to “the revelation of the character and the presence of God in the person and work of Jesus.  [Glory] is shown in His deeds, in His disciples, and above all in Jesus.”  (New Bible Dictionary, 2^nd ed.)  To the extent we see Jesus and see glimpses of His glory, we will be transformed, changed, further sanctified.  We can expect to be transformed in ways which make us more like the One we are contemplating – Jesus.  This can happen when we behold His glory in… 1) the written Word, 2) when we gaze at Christ within our hearts, and 3) when we glimpse Christ, outwardly, in others.  Here’s some help:

1) “When we look at Christ as seen in the stories of his life, he looks back at us.  His glance may challenge us as it did the rich young ruler, or judge us as it did the hard-hearted opponents of Sabbath healings…  Saul’s sight of Christ on the Damascus Road destroyed a persecutor and created an apostle.  Beholding Christ allows his image to implant, grow, develop and mature within.”  (Kim Coleman Healy, From Beholding To Becoming, Brazos Press, 2004)

2) “…as we develop an inward gaze on Jesus Christ, give our attention to him, relax in his presence, and rejoice in his company, we will increasingly resemble the One upon whom we focus.”  (Joel Warne, Soul Craving, Standard Publishing, 2007)

3) “When we see God in another person, whether in their actions, words or quiet spirit, a pure freshness touches our hearts.  Sanctification and transformation come from beholding – not from striving!  I jumped through every religious hoop I could find but it wasn’t until I began to behold that my heart was transformed.”  (Mike Bickle, Passion For Jesus, Creation House, 1993)

Daily Bread, Daily Transformation.     When I am attentive to it, I am reminded of Jesus the Bread of Life as I look upon a loaf of rye, pumpernickel or some other bread.  Each morning I attempt to awaken to my deep spiritual hunger, allowing Jesus’ words and the yeast of God’s presence (the Holy Spirit) to rise and satisfy me, transforming my soul from spiritually hungry to spiritually nourished.  

Practice.     Let a loaf of bread be a reminder to you of God’s daily provision.  Ask to receive glimpses of His glory in the Word, behold Him in your heart, contemplate His beauty in the life of others and in nature.  Allow Him to transform you from spiritually hungry to spiritually nourished.  He is the living bread which has come down from heaven and He’s already broken Himself open for you.

‘A’ is for Abba and Adoption

Unpacking Packer.  I can think of no better starting point for learning a spiritual formation alphabet than ‘A’ for ‘Abba’ and ‘adoption’.  I recall hearing nothing about the doctrine of adoption from preachers in my early Christian days – I awakened to it while reading J.I. Packer’s book, Knowing God.  Packer masterfully distilled adoption’s crucial vitality when he wrote, “…the entire Christian life has to be understood in terms of it.  [Adoptive] Sonship must be the controlling thought – the normative category, if you like – at every point.”  Packer had me hooked and the Holy Spirit, the Spirit of Adoption (Rom. 8:15) began to reel me in.

Toxic.  For the first dozen years of my salvation history only God knows what my “controlling thought” had been.  Whatever it was it certainly was tainted by the lingering anger and frustration I carried from a disappointing relationship with my biological father.  There had been sharp, on-going animosity between my parents, much of it stemming from my father’s passivity.  We had not realized Dad struggled with clinical depression.  As his suffering worsened, I experienced Dad as emotionally unavailable, distant, aloof, functionally uninvolved and apparently uncaring.  In response I adopted a toxic attitude: “Dad, you haven’t helped me much along the way; you’ve left me on my own to make life work.”  Hatching judgments against him, I reacted by becoming equally aloof and uninvolved with him.  I was busy constructing my ‘self’.

Unavailable.  Only after his death did I recognize my need to forgive Dad and apologize for my sinful responses to his difficult life.  I made a 2,000 mile pilgrimage to the hilltop cemetery where we had buried him some months earlier.  In a rainy downpour I searched each row of markers looking for his gravestone, determined to find him and make the pronouncements which were churning in my heart.  But I could not locate the gravesite.  Shaking my fist at the stormy sky, I raged, “Just like always, you are not here when I need you.”   Truth is stranger than fiction at times: as a final expression of bitterness toward father, my mother had chosen to not place a marker on the grave.  Even his resting place was ‘unavailable’ to me.

Shame.  Later I did my forgiveness work in absentia.  But for months thereafter I carried a loneliness and heaviness which I later recognized as shame.  I was ashamed of my fatherless-ness, my disconnection.  I sensed a vague personal inadequacy and a lingering restlessness, a vital lack.  Eventually I came to realize my condition was a common continuance of Adam and Eve’s garden affliction, for their sin had resulted in a loss of intimacy with God the Father and, as the scriptures explain, they knew their nakedness – they were ashamed (Genesis3:10 ).  Jimmy Long has further explained:

“The sin of Adam and Eve separated them from God.  This separation is like a wall that God built to shield his holy character from our guilt.  We build a second wall when our shame causes us to feel unworthy of God’s presence.  …we long for the kind of intimate relationships that the human pair experienced before the Fall.” (Generating Hope, InterVarsity Press, 1997)

Adoption.  My father-wounds and my own sin continued to grind my soul.  I was constantly hungering for Fatherly love, acceptance and belonging, the kind of connection which might bring deep meaning to my life and a settled peace to my soul.  When I finally recognized my specific need, I was awakened to God’s solution:

When the right time came, God sent his Son, born of a woman, subject to the law.  God sent him to buy freedom for us who were slaves to the law, so that he could adopt us as his very own children.  And because we are his children, God has sent the Spirit of his Son into our hearts, crying, “Abba, Father,” prompting us to cry out, “Abba, Father.”  Now you are no longer a slave but God’s own child.  And since you are his child, God has made you his heir. (Gal. 4:4-7, my synthesis of ESV and NLT)

“Then Jesus came.  His mission was to take our sins upon himself as a guilt offering of redemption and to remove our shame by restoring us to a right relationship with God the Father, thus tearing down the wall of separation.

Christ’s role is to enable God to be a Father to us, while the Holy Spirit’s role is to allow us to be again a child of God.  The Holy Spirit helps us deal with shame, which prevents us from restoring our relationship with God as our Father.” (Jimmy Long, Generating Hope, InterVarsity Press, 1997)

Two-Part Harmony.  Transformation occurred as I began to understand and experience the reality of biblical ‘adoption.’ My vision of God was clarified, my first love deepened and my desire to glorify and honor God as Holy Father was vitalized.  A stabilizing peace arose within my soul and I began to find rest in His presence.  I began to sense the Holy Spirit crying out within my own heart, “Abba, Father,” and He enables my own exclamation, “Abba, Father.”  My cry harmonizing with the Spirit’s cry:  two-part harmony so wonderful it can only be appreciated with the ears of our new heart.

Practice Solitude.  I have re-visited the cemetery, not physically but in my mind during solitude retreats.  I still find no marker on the grave but now two things seem remarkably well-placed:  grief and joy.  I can grieve over my fatherless-ness and yet never stray from the joy of my adoption.  The grief is not without hope (1 Thess. 4:13) and the joy is being made more complete clearly because of my adoptive relationship with Abba (1 John 1:3-4).

I recommend you practice similar solitude: meditate on Gal. 4:4-7, persistently exercising your heart cry of “Abba, Father” and wait for the beautiful harmony to develop in your soul.  The Spirit of Adoption’s main role is to tune your heart to resonate with Father God, enabling “Abba, Father” to become your controlling thought.