The Marriage Clash

Finally, all of you, be like-minded, be sympathetic, love one another, be compassionate and humble. 1 Peter 3.8

Several years ago JoAnna and I had entered a season of our life together where we were bickering quite frequently. We had been married a few years and had settled in well together, but things were tense – we weren’t as easy easy going with each other as we had previously been. It was at that time I came across Peter’s instructions to be compassionate, like-minded, loving toward one another, sympathetic, and humble. Out of this I pulled an acronym, CLASH, and behind it, my goal was us learning to CLASH together better – instead of fighting, to be of one mind, to understand one another, to love with out hesitancy, to be empathetic, and to honor each other above ourselves.

This wasn’t about me – it was about our marriage. At the time my own parents were splitting up and I was faced with a sense of urgency for the preservation of my marriage. I didn’t (and I know JoAnna didn’t) want to allow any sense of a rift to start as a crack from that season of our lives. And it wasn’t a big deal – I wrote it out on a little yellow sticky note and tagged it to the fridge after JoAnna and I talked about it. But, in retrospect, it was probably one of the most important things we’ve agreed on and subconsciously pursued.

Individually it’s not about me. And it’s not about her. It’s about us and the testimony our lives present day in and day out. And it’s not like we don’t fight – we still do and it’s usually because one or the other or both of us are not being like-minded, compassionate, sympathetic, loving, or humble.

For me, the humility aspect is the biggest thing. If I take the time to deflate my ego I am more likely to be compassionate, sympathetic, like-minded, and loving. I adore my wife. But I am more in awe of God, that at just the right time, in the tiniest of ways, he would show up and point me in the right direction that would change our entire lifestyle.

It was the smallest of decisions, but it has made the largest impact in our lives.

Living the Good Life

1 Peter 2.11 – 12

Dear friends, I urge you, as foreigners and exiles, to abstain from sinful desires, which war against your soul. Live such good lives among the pagans that, though they accuse you of doing wrong, they may see your good deeds and glorify God on the day he visits us.

It is plainly evident [if you can pull yourself from the muck and depravity of the world] that Christ followers are aliens. If you stop and search your heart, you should find an aching, sore spot – a hole where the things of this world are not able to satisfy. This is the plain and simple beauty of Christ and what he stirs in our hearts.

On one side you have the sinful desires of the world – the temptations that draw us in and away from the Lord. Often times we correlate these with pleasures of the body – lust, sex, drugs. But just as much as those are our temptations, the lust of the soul, of our emotions is just as strong. Some of us get off on being angry, manipulative, jealous, deprived, or self-infliction. All of these things [and more] battle with our soul, calling to us, winning us over for the temporary high or lows we have trained our bodies to seek.

At the same time, we denounce the very things to which we give our hearts. We proclaim their rancidness and denounce their pleasure battering those around us [believers and non-believers alike] into a bloody pulp. It’s a wonder anyone would take our faith seriously.

Peter, though, calls us to live so demonstratively different from the rest of the world that they would be so surprised they would tell us we were living our lives wrong. Think about that for a minute. By doing right, the rest of the world would tell us we were wrong. By being fully devoted to our spouses [even future spouses, for those who are single] and not wavering a step in our love for them, by loving the loveless, by offering forgiveness for “unforgivable” actions against us, by championing peace, not war, by acknowledging those who aren’t instead of demanding they become those who are…all of these things are so against the grain of our world that we would strike such a strange and different path the rest of the world would recognize in the flash of an instant that Jesus is Lord. It is in that moment that they will be able to acknowledge our good deeds as good and praise Jesus as God, Messiah, and Lord.

Bigots & Cults

1 PETER 2.4-10

As you come to him, the living Stone–rejected by human beings but chosen by God and precious to him– you also, like living stones, are being built into a spiritual house to be a holy priesthood, offering spiritual sacrifices acceptable to God through Jesus Christ. For in Scripture it says: “See, I lay a stone in Zion, a chosen and precious cornerstone, and the one who trusts in him will never be put to shame.” Now to you who believe, this stone is precious. But to those who do not believe, ”The stone the builders rejected has become the cornerstone,” and, “A stone that causes people to stumble and a rock that makes them fall.” They stumble because they disobey the message–which is also what they were destined for. But you are a chosen people,a royal priesthood, a holy nation, God’s special possession, that you may declare the praises of him who called you out of darkness into his wonderful light.  Once you were not a people, but now you are the people of God; once you had not received mercy, but now you have received mercy.

Seeking Him out before anything else, desiring his milk, his kindness, grace, and peace – this is when we discover that Christ, like many men, yet different because he is God, our Messiah, is the source of rejection for many people. For those who abandon everything but pursuit of Him, there is relief and a firm place to stand. For those who abandon him to pursue everything else, there is fear, rejection, and emptiness.

But for those of us who choose to pursue him, who rely on him as our only hope, he is the very foundation that we, as his people, are built upon. I think it is an easy temptation for us believe that our pursuit of Christ is only about ourselves, only about living for God in singleness and making ourselves right before him. But that is a great lie – because Jesus’ death and coming to life again was to make a way for his people to unite together into one people, one nation, one priesthood. And there is no distinction between clergy and laity as has been defined throughout generations. No, these people of God are all created to serve all people. There is no Reverend and then his people – no Father and then his sheep, no mega-church Pastor and then his congregation. There is a holy priesthood, ordained to declare the praises of God who called us out of darkness into his wonderful light.

This priesthood is designed to meet the needs of the poor and needy, the fatherless, the loveless, the abandoned. We are called to meet the needs of those to whom Jesus is a stumbling block. Otherwise, we’re just a cult, a mission without a true cause, a religious group of bigots. And that is not what God has called us to.

The Breast Feeding Christian

In the first chapter of his first letter, Peter’s whole premise lines up with the entirety of the word of God: our old life is distant from God, yet our new life has established a complete relationship with him for eternity. He describes the direct difference between being born of a physical seed (man’s sperm) and the spiritual seed of God’s Word of Life.

And it seems that he draws a line between the two with such distinction that it is a bit of a strange turn when he starts out the second chapter with this: So put away all malice and all deceit and hypocrisy and envy and all slander. It’s obvious that though the work of God, by his Spirit and his Word and the sacrifice of his Son bring instantaneous effects, there also is a transition, a learning, a growing, a depth of change that comes with the continued choices we make and the constant movement toward Christ and his Word.

Like newborn infants long for the pure spiritual milk, that by it you may grow up into salvation – if indeed you have tasted that the Lord is good. The pure spiritual milk of Christ – Eugene Peterson puts it like this: “like infants at the breast, drink of God’s pure kindness.” Desperate for that fix, for that touch, for that intimate exchange of sustenance and love from the God of all humankind – that is to be our constant state of mind, rather than the lazy betrayal of ourselves on absent thought at a time.

Love and the New Life

I shouldn’t be surprised, but I find myself mildly amazed when I read from scripture and discover once again how much about love and loving others it is all about [from 1 peter 1 - the last 3 verses]: Now that you’ve cleaned up your lives by following the truth, love one another as if your lives depended on it. The distinct decision we make to be obedient should signify a new start – a separation of our old life that comes from our parent’s earthly entanglement and our new life with comes from God’s holy entanglement with our own spirit. Your new life is not like your old life. Your old birth came from mortal sperm; your new birth comes from God’s living Word. Yet we succumb time and again to our old living, to the Resistance, to giving in or giving up the glory of the life God has called us to. We must conform to the living words of God, allowing his heart, passion, and Spirit to transform us.

The truth is it is a daily battle, something that we must pursue and choose every moment of every day because our old life is waiting at every step to enter back in and take control. The devil is waiting at every moment eager to regain his grip on our throats. But Peter’s promise for us is this: Just think: a life conceived by God himself! That’s why the prophet said, The old life is a grass life, its beauty as short-lived as wildflowers; Grass dries up, flowers droop, God’s Word goes on and on forever. This is the Word that conceived the new life in you. The love of God is far greater than any self-love we can afford for ourselves. It creates a new and holy lifestyle – that is the love of God as it takes the form of a wonderful disease that spreads from one converted fellow to the next and the world is transformed.

The Difference Between Katy Perry, Lady Gaga, and Me [and You]

I had an epiphany this morning as I sat on the toilet twenty minutes after reading this post by Seth Godin: http://bit.ly/pZfssM. [If you're too lazy to click the link] Godin talks about success and whether or not one person’s success is more special than another’s. I read Godin daily because he usually has great things to say in not too many words and most days what he writes challenges me.

This morning I breezed through his writing – it was the same good stuff but I didn’t find it particularly applicable for my day today. But then, on the toilet, it hit me. I have been striving to be successful in the ways that other people have been successful. Set a schedule, read four books at a time, drink this vitamin water, take time to think, develop your passion and screw your day job, stick with your day job until your passion becomes profitable, spend time with your family, don’t spend time with your family, go to church, pray, take a weekend off, work your ass off 24-7. The methods of humankind’s success vary greatly and I’m quite certain I’ve tried at least 5% of their ways to increase my success.

And I’ve mostly been miserable. And truthfully [though if you think you know me you would not agree with this] I’ve mostly been unsuccessful. The “trouble” with me is I am an adapter. Throw anything my way and I can make it work. But the reason I have felt unsuccessful is because I don’t just want to make it work. I want it to explode in wonder and magnitude and grace. The dreams that are stored up inside me won’t settle for making it work – they want to soar and I want to release them to something greater than pitiful me.

But there’s nothing wrong with the methods of success of other people; obviously, because they’ve worked, some of them for thousands of years. And I won’t abandon them, but I need to learn to hold myself to a different standard – and I think, probably, so do you. It’s not about ignoring everyone else, but adapting their success stories to your own success story. We’re all responsible for our own success [except Katy Perry and Lady Gaga].

It’s the Obedience

1 Peter 1.13-21

Remembering that Jesus has been and always will be, understanding that our future life starts now with him, and that he has not forgotten us in the least should bring to our heads and our hands a call to action. “So roll up your sleeves, put your mind in gear, be totally ready to receive the gift that’s coming when Jesus arrives. Don’t lazily slip back into those old grooves of evil, doing just what you feel like doing. You didn’t know any better then; you do now.” This takes effort, it takes will – this is why we were created with free will, so that we would have the opportunity to choose to live for him.

But it’s not enough to just choose him once or twice or fifty times. It takes dedication to walk it out in humility and honesty. Our old life is constantly calling to us, drawing us, wanting us to live the way we used to. But the point is that we know better now than we did before. We’ve experienced the taste of true life and true living. To turn back now would be to abandon the hope of God that has been presented to us.

“As obedient children, let yourselves be pulled into a way of life shaped by God’s life, a life energetic and blazing with holiness. God said, ‘I am holy; you be holy.” This is how obedience elongates our “choice” for God. It’s not just about us choosing God, but choosing every moment to be obedient. Every breath we take presents a new opportunity for a choice to either follow God or fulfill ourselves in our own meaningless ways. God is holy and is calling us to be holy. That’s a pretty stiff line in the sand. It’s a line in the sand created by Christ’s sacrifice: “You call out to God for help and he helps – he’s a good Father that way. But don’t forget, he’s also a responsible Father, and won’t let you get by with sloppy living. It cost God plenty to get you out of that dead-end, empty-headed life you grew up in. He paid with Christ’s sacred blood, you know. He died like an unblemished, sacrificial lamb. And this was no afterthought. Even though it has only lately – at the end of the ages – become public knowledge, God always knew he was going to do this for you. It’s because of this sacrificed Messiah, whom God then raised from the dead and glorified, that you trust God, that you know you have a future in God.“

That’s a large portion of verses that simply puts it this way: God sacrificed his Son and that’s why we choose to obey. It was no afterthought. And our choice to live for God should be no afterthought either. An afterthought turns into a forgotten thought, something that no longer comes to fruition. It’s like when you forgot to take out the garbage even though you momentarily remembered you were supposed to after you left the house. That does you, nor your wife, any good. In this case, it’s not the thought that counts. It’s the obedience.

A Greatly Preposterous Idea

1 Peter 1.8-12
You never saw him, yet you love him. You still don’t see him, yet you trust him – with laughter and singing. Because you kept on believing, you’ll get what you’re looking forward to: total salvation. The prophets who told us this was coming asked a lot of questions about this gift of life God was preparing. The Messiah’s Spirit let them in on some of it – that the Messiah would experience suffering, followed by glory. They clamored to know who and when. All they were told was that they were serving you, you who by orders from heaven have now heard for yourselves – through the Holy Spirit – the Message of those prophecies fulfilled. Do you realize how fortunate you are? Angels would have given anything to be in on this!

For myself and many of my friends, the reality of Jesus Christ living in this world comes from stories we’ve heard as babies, children, and teenagers. As I am teaching my own daughters, there is no doubt that Jesus lived as a man and crafted miracles beyond the ordinary things of this world, and that he willingly sacrificed himself so that we can live forever with him and those who love him. This reality has been my reality for as long as I can remember, from flannel graph depictions to the deep vibrato story telling of my father to the soft and precious prayers my mother prayed for me before bed. No matter the number of disputes or claims or fictional oppositions – Jesus Christ has always been the Son of God who walked this earth two thousand years ago and counting.

If we think about it, it really is a pretty preposterous idea. Even starting with the fact that there is a God – one who crafted everything we can see and touch and feel (and everything we can’t see or touch or feel). The fact that this God who made our ever expanding universe also crafted a plan for a man to be born from another preposterous idea: the Holy Spirit and a teenage virgin. The fact that Jesus, who grew up as a carpenter’s son would abandon his obligated familial craft to craft the physical, mental, and spiritual restoration of human beings by healing them of sickness, ailment, and even death. The whole story is the grandest of fairy tales.

Yet there were women and men, who for thousands of years, eagerly anticipated the arrival of one like him – one who would bring healing and restoration and eternal salvation. They did not have the stories we have, they only had their own imaginations of what might happen. Yet they believed, perhaps more so than you or I. Instead of experiencing the joy and satisfaction of the now and coming salvation offered by Christ, they had to be satisfied with knowing that they were paving the way for men and women and children like us – ones who would come after him, who would get to hear of his miraculous deeds and passion.

And Peter, who lays this all our for us, simply asks, “Do you realize how fortunate you are?” And sadly, the majority of the time, I must confess that I do not. I must confess that many days I feel it a burden to know the stories of Christ that I know. Because I am so easily consumed with myself and making myself satisfied with the things of this world. We have much more than the prophets of the Old Testament had – yet we fritter it away with meaningless, loveless relationships, with throwing ourselves into putting on a show for everyone else so we can look pretty for them, with determining to never allow our hearts to be hurt like we had before.

And when I write it like that, that is an even greater preposterous idea than the thought that God crafted a plan to bring you and me and everyone else into a permanent relationship with him.

The Future Now Realm

I remember it first from about the 3rd grade on, but I know it existed long before that. I see it nearly every day in both of my daughters. I can see it in older family members and I see it in friends my current age. In the 3rd grade I couldn’t wait to be in the 4th grade. 4th graders were way cooler than me, they got to play recorders! By the time 4th grade came around, I was ready for the 5th grade – they had the coolest teacher. By the time I had that coolest teacher, 6th grade was where it was at, and everyone knows why, because 6th graders rule the roost of Elementary school. And it progressively got worse, each year yearning for something the next age had. With that longing also came this idea about what it must be like to be that next age. And from day one I always imagined that Seniors were the coolest cats and that they had it all figured out.

Sooner or later I became a senior, and let me put it this way, I still don’t have it all figured out – on the outside I may have pretended to know what was happening, but truthfully I still felt like a 3rd grader. All of the joys that I imagined would come with the next age were not nearly as satisfactory as I imagined them to be, with two exceptions: marriage and kids – and even those beautiful things have come with struggle and frustration.

Yesterday, I finished my writing by mentioning how Peter hopes that we would all experience the good things God has to offer. He continues in the first chapter of his letter by saying, “What a God we have! and how fortunate we are to have him, this Father of our Master Jesus! Because Jesus was raised from the dead, we’ve been given a brand-new life and have everything to live for, including a future in heaven – and the future starts now!”

We basically have three opportunities – to live in the now and for the future, or to live for the future and abandon everything of now, or to live for the now and not maintain our sight on the future. Peter goes on to say, “God is keeping careful watch over us and the future. The Day is coming when you’ll have it all – life healed and whole. I know how great this makes you feel, even though you have to put up with every kind of aggravation in the meantime. Pure gold put in the fire comes out of it proved pure; genuine faith put through this suffering comes out proved genuine.”

At the end of the day, if we choose to live in the future now realm, we’re proving our trust in God and our faith in his plan and heart for us. On the other side, if we live for the future only, we’re abandoning any hope of God’s work in us, drawing us closer to him. And finally, if we live only in the now and not for the future, we’re placing our trust whole-heartedly in ourselves to pull us through the demons we face every day. As Peter says when he wraps this section up, “When Jesus wraps this all up, it’s your faith, not your gold, that God will have on display as evidence of his victory.”

I have exerted a lot of energy in living only in the now or only in the future – but both ventures have only proved my inability to be God. It is only in living in the future now realm that we experience God at his greatest peak – instilling his Spirit in us, helping us prove our faith genuine in every current moment as we move toward that time where all saints will join together in his presence.

You and Me and Everyone Else

FIRST PETER
CHAPTER ONE: VERSES 1 – 2

I, Peter, am an apostle on assignment by Jesus, the Messiah, writing to exiles scattered to the four winds. Not one is missing, not one forgotten. God the Father has his eye on each of you, and has determined by the work of the Spirit to keep you obedient through the sacrifice of Jesus. May everything good from God be yours! 

In these two opening verses, two things stick to me: Peter knows who he is without a doubt, and he knows God’s heart for everyone else. These two things should be central to the faith of every follower of Christ.

I say this because I know what it means to struggle with knowing who you are in Christ and living that out whole heartedly. Peter, at this stage, had no doubt. He was an apostle, one of those personally commissioned by Jesus the Christ to take the word of testimony to the nations. In this letter he is fulfilling part of that commission. And, it’s not without doubt that Peter has reached this status of knowledge about himself in Christ. Without too much detail provided, you can draw into your mind the reality of Peter in the days during and after Jesus as man was crucified. First the denial of his personal relationship which followed so closely his sworn allegiance – then his return to the old way of living for him: fishing as if he had never known Christ and the magnificent things he had done.

I want to respond with ridicule at this point: who would go back to just fishing as a way of life when you had experienced the power of the resurrection of the dead (multiple times!)and the instantaneous healing of people without even a touch (and those who had been touched)?!? Peter most definitely experienced a stage of deep grief in wondering who he was in Christ. But, thankfully for us, we need to go through a crisis of identity to be able to stand firm in our knowledge of who we are in Christ. Some of us do not have to go through the drastic state that Peter went through – complete denial and utter retrograde of living. But it manifests in everyone’s life at some point.

And Peter knows that too, because the first thing he mentions about those he is writing his letter to is that they are exiles spread throughout the earth, but that they are not missing or forgotten. That God, the Father of all, is watching every single one of us, keeping a careful eye and willing his Spirit to work in us.

If you’ve gone through or are going through what I am experiencing, you know how important this is for your life’s breath. The distance, the ache, the emptiness you feel when you do the things you’ve always done that have gotten you close to God. Strangely enough, I have intense moments of intimacy with God – but in an instant they vanish and my heart remains longing, wishing for a longer embrace, praying for a revitalization of my spirit with the Spirit.

And that is exactly what God is at work doing: by the Spirit, keeping us obedient through the sacrifice of Christ, the Messiah. This takes patience from God, the great Patient One; and this takes discipline from us, the Undisciplined Ones. Listening to the Spirit takes great effort – you won’t grow by going through the motions and not paying attention; but we will grow by being attentive and allowing for a greater measure of his breath in our spirits.

And finally, Peter wishes that all would experience the good things God has to offer. This isn’t riches or worry-less freedom; this is the life and breath of God. Knowing who you are and who everyone else is, is one of the keys to maintaining a firm balance of life in the chaotic balance beam world in which we live. God’s heart is for us, the extended, the lost, the depraved.