Fearing the Holy Spirit

John’s first letter contains a simple statement, “There is no fear in love. But perfect love casts out fear, because fear has to do with punishment.” When we see the love of God enacted and on display, it erases our fears. The love of God is bigger than fear for a simple reason: “God is love. Whoever lives in love lives in God, and God in him.” John’s message in his first letter is simple. In God we have nothing to fear, even though we live in a world of false teachers, prophets, priests, and pastors who preach a different message about God. As believers in God we are responsible for testing the “spirits to see whether they are from God, because many false prophets have gone out into the world.” John knew how important it was to evaluate what teachings we receive and accept as true, because there were and still are false teachings that cause us to be afraid of God.

In this blog I want to look at what causes us to fear the Holy Spirit. For the Holy Spirit is the love between God the Father and God the Son. Fearing the true Holy Spirit means we are afraid of the way God loves us, or the way we should love Him. There should be no fear in our relationship with God, for as John said, “fear has to do with punishment”. Our fear of God, or as we are exploring in this blog, fear of the Holy Spirit, comes from a place of misunderstanding. For if we plainly see who God is, and how His Spirit lives within us, we would not be afraid of His presence or His power.

It is here I must make a confession. I believe in a God who is high and lifted up, one who is so great we cannot fully grasp who He is. I talk about this God a lot, emphasizing my smallness and His greatness. This kind of thinking keeps us in awe of God, respectful of who He is, and careful when we make statements about God’s nature or persona. Yet we cannot make this image of God our complete image of Him. I am guilty of putting this image of God first, and not giving enough recognition to the simple principles of God. God is awesome and mighty, but also so easy to understand children can grasp who God is. Too often we favor one image over the other, or completely divorce them from each other. We choose either a majestic complex God or a simple child-like-faith God. We need both. To tear these two images of God apart from each other is to miss-out on who God is and create heresy. One heresy keeps us on our knees in perpetual fear. The other lets us dismiss God because he’s too friendly and cannot confront our issues. Join the pieces together and we have a great God who alleviates our fears: He chooses to be close to us and make Himself known to us. I serve a great God who has made Himself known to me, not because I have a special knowledge or experience of God, but because He has made Himself knowable and accessible to everyone. This leads us to our first fear, that of accessibility. Has God made himself plain and knowable to all or only to a few spiritual elite?

The Fear of Accessibility

Looking at the opening of John’s first letter, he bases his knowledge of God on something very simple: what he has heard, seen, and touched.

“That which was from the beginning, which we have heard, which we have seen with our eyes, which we have looked at and our hands have touched—this we proclaim concerning the Word of life. The life appeared; we have seen it and testify to it, and we proclaim to you the eternal life, which was with the Father and has appeared to us. We proclaim to you what we have seen and heard, so that you also may have fellowship with us. And our fellowship is with the Father and with his Son, Jesus Christ.”

According to John, knowing God is simple. John’s knowledge is based on what he has seen, heard, and touched. He’s not basing his knowledge on a spiritual experience, or claiming that a spiritual experience is necessary in order to understand God. He’s stating that God is easily accessible and coming to knowledge of God is simple: experience God through those who have experienced God. We can view God and see God by those who have been with God. The only special knowledge John claims is the time he spent with Jesus. That’s it. John knows God because he spent considerable time with Jesus, learned from Him, and understood who Jesus was. John’s knowledge of the Spirit of God comes from seeing Jesus go about His daily life.

Too often people try to claim special accessibility or authority to God through a spiritual experience. “I had a dream” or “I had a revelation” or “An angel spoke to me”. These things do not take the place of regular time spent with God and coming to a practical experience of who Jesus is. John had dreams. John had revelations. Angels spoke to John, but he never uses these things as his authority. He doesn’t make spiritual experiences the hallmark of Christianity, even though he had experiences shared by few others. What’s most important, John never uses his spiritual experiences to elevate himself. Why? Because the experience of seeing Jesus, believing in Him, and doing likewise is enough. John says the spirit of God at work in our daily lives is enough.

Why is that enough? It’s enough because God plainly displayed himself for all to see. Not so we could speak about how good God is. Not so we could write about how good God is. But for us to live out how good God is. This is the opposite of having to experience something spiritual. For by living out who Jesus is we recognize that our daily lives are enough. It’s spiritual enough to recognize Jesus as God, believe in Him, and be changed through God’s love. We don’t have to have access to the extraordinary to be followers of Jesus, rather it is by following Jesus we have access to the extraordinary. That access is not subject to human will, but submitting ourselves to God’s will in our daily lives.

Why is this important? We need to recognize God is always present, not just in the glitz, glam, and emotion of spiritual experiences. God never leaves us by ourselves; He’s always with us from the most boring to most exciting of moments. He’s accessible 24/7 to all. We don’t have to discover the extraordinary to find God. He’s always present. He has even given us gifts and abilities to realize His presence.

What about these gifts? What are they? What if I don’t have spiritual gifts, am I still Christian? What if I do have them and people are afraid of them, can I still use them? Our fear of being gifted, or not gifted at all, isolates us from community. Which is our second fear: the fear of isolation.

The Fear of Isolation

Too often people fret at not having any special spiritual gifts. I say special because sometimes we downplay spiritual gifts like administration. Instead we wish we had the super spiritual authoritative ones like prophecy, or the super cool ones like healing, or even the super non-intellectual ones like speaking in tongues. The problem with this mentality is that we’re not happy with what we have and put ourselves down for being something and someone we’re not. We desire to be super instead of ordinary real people. We’re afraid of not being great enough, or in some cases being too great with our gifts that others will shut us out. Fear causes isolation, from not being good enough, to being too great and unapproachable.

Paul writes about spiritual gifts in his first letter to the Corinthians. Here is what he told them:

“There are different kinds of gifts, but the same Spirit. There are different kinds of service, but the same Lord. There are different kinds of working, but the same God works all of them in all men. Now to each one the manifestation of the Spirit is given for the common good. To one there is given through the Spirit the message of wisdom, to another the message of knowledge by means of the same Spirit, to another faith by the same Spirit, to another gifts of healing by that one Spirit, to another miraculous powers, to another prophecy, to another distinguishing between spirits, to another speaking in different kinds of tongues, and to still another the interpretation of tongues. All these are the work of one and the same Spirit, and he gives them to each one, just as he determines.”

The main idea? Our gifts are to be used in community. What kind of community? One based on special spiritual authority? No. A practical community where each individual’s gifts are used to build each other up. A community based on the love of God. Just as God’s love is available to all, so too are spiritual gifts given for the common good. Not to inflate our egos, but to share the love of Jesus with each other. That’s why when Paul goes to rank the gifts in his same letter to the Corinthians he starts with love, because if, “I speak in the tongues of men and of angels, but have not love, I am only a resounding gong or a clanging cymbal. If I have the gift of prophecy and can fathom all mysteries and all knowledge, and if I have faith that can move mountains, but have not love, I am nothing.” The community of Christ is knit together and united in love. It is through this love we are not left in isolation and fear of what we are or what we are not, but encouraged to discover who we are and what we have to offer, and to use our gifts for the benefit of others.

From my own experience, giftedness can be a scary thing. I often don’t understand my gifts or try not to recognize them or think of them as spiritual. I downplay my gifts, assuming everyone else’s gift is better than mine. I glaze over my gifts because they are as natural to me as breathing. I am often afraid of using and sharing them, or worse, wishing someone else’s gift was mine. I don’t like to talk about my giftedness, but I have a gift for writing. If you were to ask me how I feel about my writing I would say I’m decent, but I have a long way to go. I’m afraid of where that destination is. Even though I’m afraid, I practice and hone my writing skills by writing and sharing those writings with others. I want to be a faithful writer, but too often I find myself downplaying the power of the written word, forgetting the influence of other authors on my life. I struggle with my writing because I am afraid most of my writing is not good enough. I push myself to publish weekly writings. I know my writings aren’t perfect, but I let my fears of not being good enough go because a community of people have encouraged me. I also have an amazing spouse who encourages me, loves me, and loves my writing. She’s done more for me in the writing department than I could express. She helps me bring my fears to the light and helps me let them go. Left in isolation I would keep writing, but I would always be convinced my writing isn’t good enough, and I wouldn’t share it.
This brings us to our final fear of the Spirit of God, the fear of inadequacy: the fear of not being good enough.

The Fear of Inadequacy

I’m not good enough. A powerful unadvertised message many believe. An invasive lie used to keep people from reaching their potential. The words used by someone ready to give up. I’m not good enough is a simple enough statement, but the power of this self-fulfilling prophecy is damning. It crushes spirits. It deletes hopes and dreams. It erases life. Too often this statement get used to mean, “I’m not good enough for God to care about me.” The simple truth is that we are not good enough; however, God cares for us because He loves us. It has nothing to do with our ability to meet His standards.

Consider Peter, widely accepted as the founder of the universal Church. We would like to believe this man came from a highly trained background, which would therefore explain his success. We want to believe there is some physical or intellectual reason Peter succeeded where many struggle today. But the truth makes Peter’s success all the more greater. According to Luke’s gospel, Jesus encounters Peter on a night Peter has failed to catch any fish, even though he’s worked hard all night. In short Peter’s hard work has earned him nothing. Jesus gets into Peters boat and tells Peter to put out into deep water to catch fish. Peter’s response is classic, “Master, we’ve worked hard all night and haven’t caught anything. But because you say so, I will let down the nets.” Peter is basically saying, ‘the only reason I’m going to catch anything is because you told me so.’ His response is simple, but also betrays some skepticism, “But because you say so” he’s saying his fisherman instincts say Jesus is one oar short of a rowboat, but he’s choosing to take Jesus at his word.

Here’s what happened: “When they had done so, they caught such a large number of fish that their nets began to break. So they signaled their partners in the other boat to come and help them, and they came and filled both boats so full that they began to sink.” From no fish after a hard night of work, to so many fish their tools of the trade started to break, showing their inadequacy. There’s no spiritual gift for catching fish, but Jesus just showed Peter the power of God by giving him more than he could handle. Jesus taught Peter a simple lesson, “It’s not about your efforts Peter, it’s about taking me (Jesus) at my word.”

You think Peter would be grateful, that he might bow down and show reverence to Jesus, and thank him for the fish, but Peter’s reaction to meeting God shows his recognition of inadequacy, “When Simon Peter saw this, he fell at Jesus knees and said, ‘Go away from me, Lord; I am a sinful man!’” Peter recognizes he’s not good enough. No one is. But this doesn’t stop Jesus from taking notice of a hard working fisherman who has nothing to show for his efforts. Too often I feel like Peter, a failure at the best of times, constantly missing out on what’s right in front of me until I accept what Jesus is asking of me. Which is simply obedience in the most ordinary of tasks.

We have no reason to be afraid of the Holy Spirit: For God makes himself accessible to us in the most ordinary and plain to experience ways; God surrounds us and encourages us with His love, which is the most important and foremost of all His gifts; and God shows us it’s not by our hard working efforts we win His favor, but simply by taking Him at His Word and applying it to the most ordinary of tasks

Applying the Trinity

Over the past five weeks I’ve been searching out the foundation of the Trinity and what it means to approach and practice the God of the Christian faith. My initial inspiration for basing my life on God the Father, God the Son, and God the Holy Spirit was more about connecting with the fullness of God than focusing on His love. I discovered over the past three weeks that the love of God is what connects us to Him: that love is the essential practice that binds people to God. This revelation isn’t in my initial notes, for my initial thoughts were more about what I believe holds the church and the faith together: namely Bible reading, community, and personal connection. Now I can see that without love these practices are meaningless, yet with love they are powerful and life changing. Love is truly the application of the Trinity. I needed this revelation, for not only have I recognized the powerful activity of God’s love, God’s love has restored my belief in the universal Church. Many today wonder if the Christian faith will survive into the next century. They assume the decline of Christianity means the end of Christianity. When I first started writing I assumed the decline of Christianity was a failure to practice the Trinity. In many ways failing to practice the Trinity will ruin Christian lives, but now I see it’s not so much the failure to practice the Trinity, as much as it is a failure to recognize and practice the love of God. The love of God binds all things together. The love of God rekindles burning embers. The love of God conquers and overcomes all obstacles. Clinging to anything but the love of God will cause Christianity to decline. It’s out of love for God we practice who He is. For the love of God causes us to practice all parts of the Trinity, not just our favorites.

When I first started this journey, I looked backward through history to times the church declined. I asked myself simple questions: “What went wrong?”, “How was the mistake a misunderstanding of God?”, and most importantly “How did Christians resolve the issue and recapture what was lost?” Christian history is exciting, for there are plenty of mistakes, plenty of suggestions, and the foundational truth that the Church has grown and moved on! Every time the Church stumbles, there are men and women who have stood beside it and helped it back to it’s feet. When I look at the individual lives of these men and women, I see a genuine love for God and I see them calling people back to the practices of the Trinity. There is an exciting fullness and uniqueness about each of these individuals, as many groups of Christians are spurred forward by their lives and faith. We still see the impact of Luther, Calvin, Wesley, Wycliffe, St. Patrick, Augustine, and many others. For their faith stepped forward, outside traditional boundaries, and yet stepped backward to core essentials. They brought a newness to the oldness, and recaptured what many of their contemporaries missed. I fundamentally believe recapturing the old in new ways will rekindle the fires of individual lives and the Church. This will creates forward, yet backward motion. Forward as we see new expressions of the old, backward as we see the essential truths unchanged. The greatest of these truths is the love of God. It is from this place of loving God that I write. In fact every time I’ve sat down to write in past four weeks the love of God is what comes out! I have much to learn on this subject, and I’m looking forward to seeing that love in motion.

What initially sparked my fire was the feeling I was missing out on God. I read my Bible. I go to church. I write creatively. But I felt something was missing. I felt the Trinity was the answer, because it is the least reducible part of the Christian faith. It’s the core essential on which everything else is based. Misunderstand the Trinity, and it makes it easier to misunderstand everything else. I figured if I could better understand the Trinity, then I might have a better understanding of God, and that understanding would change my life. Already I’m seeing the need to work out the love of God more than I currently do. To go beyond essential practices and into personal applications. Before we go there, I want to share with you a simple analogy of the Trinity.

The Trinity is the beautiful source of a colorful life, but how can we describe the need for all three persons? When I was at University I had an epiphany. The Trinity is like the three primary colors: essential to painting beautiful pictures and essential to living a colorful life. For when we paint with all the primary colors we can create a rich and balanced masterpiece. Imagine a world where we stopped using all the primary colors in balance with each other. We start letting our favorite colors dominate, pushing our color scale out of balance. Our paintings would start to miss out on the beauty of the natural world, even though we could still paint wonderful pictures. We would miss out on the beautiful complexity and harmony of all colors working together. Imagine we left one color out entirely. Suddenly we lose the magic of the color wheel, abandoning two-thirds of what we could create in favor of a single third. Our paintings, though masterfully crafted, would never reflect the entire truth or beauty of the world around us. Now imagine we painted with only one color: all we have left is shadows and brightness. There’s no more richness, just stark contrast and fine detail. Painting with just one color can be useful to illustrate a point, but continuing on without the other colors creates a black and white world. A black and white world is empty and without color. When the world becomes black and white we have abandoned colorful thinking. We lose out on the colorful richness God intended for us to see and live. Instead of having room and space to work out the talents and abilities God has given us, we draw a line in the sand saying, “Only paintings and lives lived in this style are acceptable before God.” God uses many styles, and many colors, as He stays true to His word.

As I meditated on this simple analogy, I started to apply it to the persons of the Trinity and their practices. Imagine a Christianity without Jesus. Suddenly Christianity lacks social responsibility and stewardship. Imagine a Christianity without the Father. Suddenly there is no more truth and people can do whatever they feel like and still claim to be in a right relationship with God. Imagine a Christianity without the Holy Spirit. Suddenly there is no expression or creativity of God’s love, no sense that He is near, still working with us and through us to communicate and show His love. I couldn’t imagine Christianity without the Trinity. As I look at the western world, too often we try to live out Christian lives without the fullness of God and His love. Missing out on parts of the Trinity is an easy trap to fall into, but it’s also an easy trap to climb out of. Christianity has social implications, it has unalterable true values, and it’s inseparable from individuals working out the love of God in their lives. It’s a life calling, something we continue to act out and grow in on a daily basis. Living out Christianity is more than religious action or attendance, it’s individual ownership and interaction with God, a communal force of love centered change that cannot be kept to itself, and the desire to see God’s love poured out and palpable in every aspect of life. This is the application of the Trinity. Anything less is to miss out on the fullness of God and His love for us.

That’s why the Trinity is so important to me. It’s a basic description of Christian values going back generations. It has taken me much looking backward and at present times to see these simple unchangeable parts, and how they change and inform those who seek to live Christian lives. To see how the Trinity has redeemed Christianity again and again, and will continue to save and redeem Christianity until the end of time. I firmly believe the practices of the Trinity are not new, nor are the Trinity’s applications. One doesn’t even have to call it a practice or application of the Trinity to live the Trinity out. Thousands of generations of Christians have felt the call of God on their lives, and made that call real. I want to do the same, and I want to do it by looking at the love of God and how it casts out fear, for I believe one of the most destructive forces against living out the Trinity is fear. In the next few weeks I am going to look at how fear has clouds the practices and applications of the Trinity, and how by identifying our fears we can learn to separate ourselves from them and return to the love God deeply desires for us.

Practicing the Father

In my last two writings I’ve written about working out the love of God: how it’s important for us to practice the love of God individually and in community. In this writing I want to answer the essential driving question, “How do we know God loves us?” We can learn much about God by listening to the Holy Spirit individually, we can learn much about God when we see people acting out the Son in community, but to approach the Father we must go beyond ourselves and our communities. We approach a timeless God who sits above our ideas of Him and everything our culture has to teach us about Him. God the Father is the great “I am”, the powerful statement of existence we cannot completely understand or fully grasp, even though we see manifestations of His love and power. For even though we have glimpsed the truth through Jesus His Son, even though we hear His whispers through the Holy Spirit, if God were to fully bring himself into our world we would all die. Not because God hates us, but because God the Father is so holy, so pure, the essence of righteousness and goodness that our sinful lives would be wiped out in an instant. God is too good, so good anything not-good cannot stand to be in His presence. There’s nothing we can do to protect or safeguard ourselves. This image of a not-good destroying God is terrifying. Rightly so. Yet we cannot stay in the fetal position, for that is not what God wants from us. As we’ve been looking at who God is we know God offers to wash us clean, to make us whole through his healing and love, so that when He comes we will not be wiped out, but be able to enjoy the wonder that is our creator, redeemer, and friend. How do we get to know and thus practice the Father? By engaging His Word, learning what He has said to us and desires for us through Scripture. Or to put it more simply, to read the book that goes by it’s own name: The Bible.

Bible reading can be dangerous. Many an intelligent atheist has said the best defense against Christianity is reading the Bible. This is because the Bible is a foreign document. It wasn’t written in one century, but across several. It wasn’t written by one person, but forty. It wasn’t written in a single language, but three. Even though the scope of the writing of the Bible is mind-numbingly wide, it stands as a unified text proclaiming a single, triune God. The authors of the Bible weren’t writing out their own ideas about God, but rather God was working through them to convey His truth. That’s why the truth of the Bible is timeless; it’s not about any one place in time. Yet the places in time and the descriptions we see can be confusing. For we don’t live in a sacrificial world anymore. We are not a wandering nomadic people. We are not oppressed by a foreign government. We have never lost our homeland. Furthermore the writers of the Bible did not hide their flaws, instead we see them clear as day. In spite of their flaws we know God loved them and called them His own, even though the writers pointed towards an impossible to follow Law. That’s why reading the Bible can be difficult. We can misunderstand what the writers were saying to their own people, and to us, when we don’t examine or try to understand the world they lived in. By only examining the literal Word, or by trying to over-analyze and mystify it, we can overlook the subtle quiet nature of our Father. He is not always a thundering voice from a mountain top, sometimes He is the subtle whisper of a gentle breeze. Sometimes God’s word to us is so ordinary and plain we simply do not see it.

Why?

From a religious perspective the Bible is a series of books about morals, ethics, and laws. Our role is to be good enough and by our goodness attain the favor of God. Which is complete trash. The Bible does contain ethics, morals, and the Law; yet, it does not rest it’s laurels on these things. The Bible is about the love of God. For loving God is the correction and turning point of all the points in the Bible. We do not love God because we first loved Him, we love God because He first loved us. He speaks to us. He reaches out to us. He does the work because we can’t. We can never be good enough, for God is the very definition of goodness. From Him all good things flow. The only way we can ever be good is by having a connection with Him. When God made the universe He saw that it was good. It was good because He made it. When He made humanity in His image, a reflection of Himself, He saw we were good. He then gave us the choice to not-be-good. We have all chosen not to be good, and the universe suffers for it. We all fall short of God’s goodness, even though we can still do good things, for we are still made in His image. God can restore His image in us, restore us to His goodness; we simply have to accept that all goodness comes from God and not from us. We do not co-participate in God’s restoration of brokenness. It entirely depends on Him. God loves us so much that He’ll take anyone who wants be made whole, no matter how bad they’ve been, and make them new. This is the message of Bible: we can be made new by God, not by our own deeds or living by a strict moral code, but by the love of God. For the love of God is stronger than morals, more complete than ethics, and more definite than the Law. These things tell us how broken we are; it is by them we come to understand our desperate need for God’s healing love. For our need for God’s restoration is well and truly desperate, even though we are not to live in desperation and anxiety, for to live this way is not to live by the love of God; it is to live in fear of the Law.

What is this Law, and why is it necessary?

Consider a company owner who runs a business. The owner puts together a set of policies and rules by which he wants his company run. He gives the policies and rules to his managers and employees so they will know how to run the business. If the owner then leaves for a long time and comes back, should not the managers and employees still be running the company by his policies and rules? If he comes back and finds those he left in charge have disregarded his policies and rules: they have been mistreating customers, making shoddy products, over-charging, and taking advantage of people, would he not be angry? Would he not bring justice to his company upon his return? Would not his policies and rules include a section warning his managers and employees what would happen should he find them unfaithful? Would not his first and foremost desire be to see his company run rightly? Would he not rather encourage his managers and employees to do what is right, than warn them of the repercussions of doing wrong? And if they persisted in doing wrong, failing to listen to his gentle or harsh warnings, would he not upon his return bring about a harsh and swift justice? We would expect this from a business owner, for the company is his to do with as he pleases. But when God does this same thing for us, for we and all of creation are His, we claim He is too harsh and too judgmental. To have this view of God means we are only focusing on the judgments of Scripture, and not the numerous encouragements to live out the love of God. For when we live in love we are no longer afraid, and the love of God guides us with more precision than ethics, morals and laws combined. For there will always be those who seek to take advantage of the Law and twist it to their own ends. The only defense against such twisting of the Law is the love of God, which we come to know through the Holy Spirit, Jesus the Son, and the reading of the Word.

Whose interpretation of the Bible should we read?

The best defense of the Bible is its breadth. It spans so much time that twisting the entirety of the Bible is impossible. For a translator may attempt to bend a single passage to his will, but he will never be able to bend all of Scripture. Consider one of the early printing press mistakes called the red-letter Bible. It was called the red-letter Bible because it left out a ‘not’ in the Ten Commandments. It read, “Thou shalt commit adultery”. Not only does this not make contextual sense in the Ten Commandments, for the commandments are listed in multiple places, which means one set of commandments read, “thou shalt not commit adultery,” while another read, “thou shalt”. Even if both passages had been changed there would still be stories in the Bible speaking out against adultery. One could not read the entire Bible and reach the conclusion that adultery is acceptable, for too many of the biblical writers spoke out against infidelity. A careful reader would come to the conclusion that someone had made a mistake in the re-printing of the commandments. Or as in the case of what historically happened, all copies of the original red-letter Bible were burned. A slight confusion in translation cannot change the entire Word of God; reading all of the Bible is an important part of getting to know the Father and knowing how He wants us to live.

Practically speaking there is more to be considered. The more scholars involved in a translation, the more accurate it will tend to be. The fewer scholars involved, the more inaccurate it can be. Teams of scholars can check each other. A single scholar cannot. I consider one person’s interpretation of the Bible dangerous. For just as we can check the teaching of God’s word by His Spirit, and the living out of His word by His Son, so too we can check a single translator by looking at multiple translations of the Word. We do not all have to learn the original languages, but we all have to learn the story of the Bible and become familiar with it; it is then we will know someone has made an error in translation.

If this is so reading the Bible sounds like a difficult task. Shouldn’t we leave that task to more educated people?

No. God’s Word is for all people, not just intellectuals, philosophers, law-makers, business owners, or translators. We have a right to know who God is because we are His. It would be like trying to let someone else manage your most important relationship. The things that are most important to us we do ourselves; I would never let someone else manage my relationship with my wife, that is for me to do! To give up on the Bible because it’s difficult is to give up on God, it is to say that God is so far removed from us that we cannot understand Him. That’s simply not who God is. Yes, God is bigger than our understanding, but He has also made Himself plain and easy to understand. He has given us a simple way for us to understand who He is, and the least mystical of these ways is reading His Word.

But what if we cannot read?

God is bigger than illiteracy. If we cannot read then we should ask to be read to. For as the Bible has been handed down through generations so too we must come to understand it’s words and meaning from someone else. But we cannot stay in the place of accepting someone else’s interpretation. We must come before the Living God, the Father of all, and come to know Him. His desire is not to be removed from us, but to be close to us. That’s why we call our connection with God a relationship. For nothing comes between two people committed to each other. No circumstance will ever be able to tear them apart. This is what God offers us, this is what we get when we accept who God is. Coming into relationship with God means no longer propping ourselves up on the things that brought us to God, but wholly trusting in Him as He is. Bible reading is an essential part of maintaining and growing that relationship. It’s just as important as our personal practices and our communal living.

By practicing these things we will come to know God; He will reveal Himself to us as He promised He would. For those who seek God will find Him. When our community confuses us we must turn to the Word and seek His truth. When we err in our personal lives, He will speak to us through His Scripture, reminding us of His love even as we read His Law. Yet should we err in the Word, the community of Christ, who have hidden the Word in their hearts, will come alongside us and bring us back to Him. For this is the power of God’s Living Word. It is the power to change, not only as individuals, but also as communities. Can we do any of this ourselves? No. It is only by the power and love of God that any of this will be revealed to us. A power that comes from a loving Father, made manifest through His Son, guiding us by His Spirit, made plain to us by His Word. Amen.

Practicing the Son

Practicing the Son is the scariest of the three parts of the Trinity. I believe the love of Jesus works itself out through community, that community is an essential part of being Christian, yet community scares me. It makes me ask difficult questions like, “What if this happens? How should I respond?” I get easily worked up and scared and start justifying when I don’t have to. Why? Because the love of God casts out fear. Living in the love of God casts out my fears and lets me trust him and love other people. When I remind myself of this Christian community doesn’t have to be justified or reasoned or thoroughly explained: it just needs to exist and to be practiced as the love of God made manifest. For God did not come into the world to save some good people, He came into the world to redeem the world. He wants to redeem and save us all. Not just the fearless ones, but the ones who are reasonably made nervous by the idea that loving God means loving people.

We are all sinners. We have all fallen short of God’s standards. His standard are perfection. We are not perfect. No single person fully practices the love of God. The only person who ever did was Jesus, because He is the living embodiment of the love of God. Jesus is God; God is love. We don’t deserve to be loved by God; we haven’t somehow earned God’s love, but God has chosen to love us. All of us. The acceptance of His love is called confession. The practice of His love is called forgiveness. The completeness of His love is called salvation. Living out God’s love is called sanctification. It is through the acceptance, practice and completeness of God’s love that we are transformed when we live in community.

What is this community? It is a group of forgiven sinners learning to love God, each other, and the world. Yes, it means there is a difference between the forgiven and the unforgiven. No, it doesn’t mean Christians can justify separating themselves from the world. Christians must live in the world. Christians must show God’s love. Living in the world and loving the world must be a deep part of who a Christian is. That strong sense of identity in Christ’s love, coupled with the urge and desire to love others, must take hold in such a way that we don’t have to demand love from each other. For demanding and commanding love are to miss out on love entirely. Love is free. Love is a gift. Once we start demanding, people’s responses are no longer free. Demanding removes the ability for spontaneous response and expression. We lose our ability to give when we are told what and how to give. Love is about freedom. Demands are about control. We cannot demand love, for doing so comes from fear. We cannot live in community where fear is the driving force, where people are not free to give and love as God has given us the ability to do so. This is what scares me about living in community. That we move from a place of freely giving and loving into a place of obligation. For when we act out of obligation we tread the path of acting without love. My personal fear is that we don’t take the love of God seriously enough to submit to His love and let it transform us,  impacting us wherever we go.

How does the practice of Jesus work itself out this way? It can be methodical, but it be also has to be unorthodox. There’s a freshness to our actions, even if we’ve done them a thousand times before. God’s love made manifest is an event, an event that is more than the sum of its parts. When Christians gather to spend time with each other, practicing the love of God through everyday and ordinary means, God’s presence transforms these gatherings into something more. These events become more than a group of people gathered together, there’s a unity made manifest through God’s love that binds people together, even though they may have little in common. Part of practicing community is when we stop watching the clock in each other’s presence. When we ignore the clock, and our desire to be efficient, we start focusing on each other and how God is working within us. We start listening, conversing, engaging, learning, sharing, and grow as a result. Trying to measure a community by the make-up of its parts is to miss out on community. Community is more than we can measure; its greater than the sum of its parts. It’s greater than it’s parts because practicing community means showing the love God has given us.

The challenge of community is not just to be around people, but to be known, loved, and to love. Community is a crazy thing God does through us because He’s already loved the unlovable. He loved us while we were still sinners and he died so we could be reconciled to him. All we have to do is live in that love and let it transform the world. Which is a simple, radical, and completely ludicrous idea that actual works. If I could explain it I would. But I know the love of God is so great that trying to explain it is like trying to explain the ocean, or the universe, or why we choose to love one other person unconditionally in this thing we call marriage. There’s simply something we miss trying to put these mysteries into words. Yet this mysterious thing is so practical and so simple we often overlook it, which leads us to place where we ask, “How can we find and practice the love of God?”

How do we put this love into action? I can’t really put that into definite words, because each person is different, but I can say by getting to know someone we open doors to learning how to love them. God loves us because He knows us. He knows we are His; He created us. He knows everything about every one of us. Everyone who has ever lived or will live God knows and loves. The question is, “Will we let that love restore us and be reconciled to our creator?” Community reconciles us to each other, not just to God. This communal reconciliation has the power to bring us to a place where we see and grasp the love of God because we see people loving as God loves. This is the mark of Christian community: loving as God loves. Not because we think someone deserves love, but because God looks at everyone and sees His own child and desires to be in relationship with them. The communal love of God is about relationship.

The saddest thing about our choice to be in a relationship with God is that we can reject it. We reject God’s love when we reject other people. So often we refuse to love other people because they’ve done something to us, and we let that something come between us and them. There is an art and a science to healing broken relationships, part of that science is to remain in community, even though the intimacy of fellowship is broken. I whole heartedly understand some broken people chose not to be restored: in some cases community cannot be reconciled. Why? Because accepting God’s love is a choice. We cannot force the love of God on each other. Even when communities fail God’s love remains. Communities are forever going through the process of being shaped and re-made, that’s life, but whether or not we choose to live life governed and guided by the love of God is up to us.

The love of God is about difficult times and places. Jesus loved a very hard and broken Jewish community. Some of them accepted God’s love. Some of them rejected it. Some of them killed Jesus over His love for others because it threatened their security and special privileges. The love of God breaks down walls and barriers, it helps us all to see each other as brothers’ in Christ: male, female, old, young whatever-you-like we are all equals and inheritors of God’s kingdom. That’s what being a brother is all about. Equality. There’s no distinction, no glass ceiling, no holding each other down, only lifting each other up and supporting each other. Equality gives way to encouragement. It casts out fear because there is no hierarchy to be climbed and no ladder to fall off. Equality praises success and builds up those who struggle and fail. That’s the hallmark of a Christian community, recognizing what is good and encouraging people along the way.

When I consider Paul’s letters to the churches, he did a lot of encouraging, but he also did a lot of protecting. He protected what was good by pointing out what was evil. He didn’t get bogged down in pointing out evil, but rather used the opportunity to write about what is good, pure, and lovely. If our focus is simply sifting out evil, we can get trapped in a legalistic mindset when we engage in community. We start forming rules about life and habits, building a culture around don’ts, forgetting the seed of that culture is freedom in love. Love creates freedom, but that freedom must be used wisely. When I consider the Law, it tells us what not to do. It’s very specific in this regard because we need a definite outline of evil, but when it comes to loving God the Law is an open book. God gives us freedom to love Him, but he also draws the line and tells us when the freedom of His love goes too far. This is where community is essential. We need each other to see, remind, and caution each other of going overboard on the Law and overboard on freedom.

In our cautioning we must act in love. We must point back to the source of that love, for the love of God is what transforms us and shows us what is true. The focus of our community needs to be on the love of God, not just cautioning each other on doing good and avoiding evil. For when we make our communities about caution they are no longer about love. They become based on the fear of not loving properly. True love casts out fear. True love conquers fear. Fear has no place in community, for the fear of God or the fear of each other will surely annihilate community. We should not be afraid of God, but hold Him in awe and respect, honoring and worshipping Him in love. For God is mighty and powerful and fully above our ability to understand; that’s why his love is so powerful and life changing. It simply is above and beyond our capacity to understand. It’s so deep and so wide that He constantly takes us back so long as we continue choosing Him. His forgiveness knows no bounds. No matter what we’ve done God will never give up on us unless we’ve fully and completely turned our backs on Him. His love is so strong it binds us to Him and to each other. His love is not just for us as individuals, but to reconcile His creation. His love creates community. The practice of community: forgiveness, encouragement, spurring each other onwards, clinging to what is good, leaving behind what is evil, is what God’s love is all about. That’s the love He manifested through his Son, Jesus. That’s the love He wants to manifest through us, bringing many sons, many heirs of all genders and ages, to glory. Hallelujah, amen!

Practicing the Holy Spirit

This is where the rubber meets the road! I’m excited, scared and a few emotions in between to be writing about the Holy Spirit. I’m excited because of the three persons of the Trinity this is the one I know the least well. It’s easy to study Jesus through Christian community and God the Father through the Word, but encountering the Holy Spirit! Mmm, there’s just something new and fresh that makes me want to write J

Before we look at practicing the Holy Spirit, I want to take a look at what the Holy Spirit is. I say what, because the Holy Spirit isn’t really a who like God the Father and God the Son. The Holy Spirit isn’t a ghost. The Holy Spirit is the presence of God. Brother Lawrence, an eighteenth century French monk was famous for practicing the presence of God, which is the name of a book put together after his death. Brother Lawrence was more famous for washing dishes than writing. He is famous for the way he did menial chores; he did them with love. That’s what the Holy Spirit is, the love of God. When I first heard someone outright say this, I thought, “What?” and had to kick the idea around before I could embrace it. The Holy Spirit is the love of God.

I heard three current theologian/pastors talking about this idea, that the Holy Spirit is the love between the Father and the Son. It literally blew my mind. No one has ever explained the Holy Spirit that way to me. I’ve always thought of the Holy Spirit as this slightly mystical miracle working thing I don’t really understand but am supposed to have a connection with. For a long time I’ve wondered how I’m practically supposed to work that out. Does my life have to take on strange ‘spirit-filled’ practices? What does ‘spirit-filled’ even mean? The idea that the Holy Spirit is the love of God, and therefore to be ‘spirit-filled’ means to be full of the love of God puts me at great ease. It makes sense. Shouldn’t all people who call themselves Christians be overflowing with the practicable love of God? Wouldn’t that make being spirit-filled so much easier? Not a strange mystical sign as some Christians make it out to be, but a simple statement of guiding truth? I think so. And I believe Paul would agree with me.

Paul struggled with a ‘spirit-filled’ church in Corinth. This church put spiritual practices ahead of the practical ones; they loved their spiritualism more than loving each other. Paul wrote to them to correct this problem. He didn’t squash their spiritualism as much as put it in it’s proper place, behind loving people. I think that’s what scares us so much about the spiritual side of the Holy Spirit, we’re afraid of the creepy weird things people do out of good intentions because we haven’t experienced the power of the Holy Spirit being worked out in love. I believe if we had more people working out their spiritual gifts in love we would be much more open to the Holy Spirit, and that’s where I want to take this piece of writing: to the love of God working out through our gifts.

What are our ‘spiritual’ gifts? What makes them any different from our ‘normal’ ones? Let me start by examining the word spiritual. In Koine Greek, the language of the New Testament, the word we translate as spirit is pneuma. If you’ve ever had pneumonia, you’ve had problems breathing. If you’ve ever worked a pneumatic drill it functions on air. Pneuma means breath or wind, and in the case of spiritual gifts I would simply say this: it’s that thing that if you stopped doing it would cause you to stop breathing/wanting to live. For me it’s writing. For my cousin it’s painting. For runners it’s running. There is some “thing” we love to do with all our heart and soul, and that thing is our gift. For the chef it’s cooking. Isn’t it wonderful to sample the food of a master chef? It’s complex, robust, refined, elegant yet simple and a natural extension of who they are. That’s what a spiritual gift is, a natural extension of who we are wrapped in love. Spiritual gifts take discipline and time to master, just like any skill or trade, but when gifts are at work we are all blessed, not just the audience, but the gifted as well. I am absolutely implying that the gifts God has given us should be worked out in community, which is where we will go next week, but right now we need to dig into our gifts and the Holy Spirit and crack the surface of our hidden treasures.

One of the best ways of connecting with God is prayer. I’ll never forget a praying while running down a mountain. The sheer exhilaration of running just a few steps under control brought an enviable closeness with God I don’t often feel. I’d never felt so alive or so close to God. That’s what I think prayer should feel like, it should aliven us, wake us up and make us feel closer to God. Sadly, I think many of us miss out on this kind of prayer. We make prayer a dry and dusty place, or a desperate plea for something, when all along God has wanted us to connect with Him in his love. We don’t have to run down mountains at top speed to feel close to God, but if there’s no connection between God and the word’s we’re saying we might just need a prayer lift. I don’t know what works well for you, but physical activity and writing works for me. There’s just something really sweet about feeling God with me when I do something I enjoy. It helps me recognize those places where the love has run dry, those places where I need to reconnect to God in my life. For prayer is more than getting on our knees and saying a few words; it’s a lifestyle. Too often at work I’ll find myself going through the motions and not really connecting with the work before me or the people around me: this is heresy. God wants me to be connected to him through all things at all times! The challenge of living a prayerful life is connecting to the love of God at all times.

When we learn to pray through our days, it transforms ordinary activities into opportunities to be connected with a Holy God. Before becoming the patron saint of Ireland, St. Patrick was a bored Christian. As a youth he went to church and did churchy stuff, but could not have cared less. He was just being a good Briton. But when he was captured in an Irish raid and sold as a slave he found his faith in God. It wasn’t through church services. It wasn’t through reading the word. It wasn’t though engaging with other Christians. He was alone watching sheep in a cave by himself. For six years St. Patrick learned to pray by making prayer a part of his daily life. He remembered what he had learned from his upbringing and made it part of his life, taking it farther and making it a part of himself, not because he had to, but because he wanted to. That’s the secret power of prayer. It’s not a must, it’s a burning unquenchable desire for God to be made real by experiencing and living in His love. It was this kind of prayer and internal desire to see God made real and manifest that brought St. Patrick back to Ireland after he escaped, it’s this same kind of Christianity that transformed a pirating backwater island into the driving force of Christianity for over four-hundred years! Talk about transformation! The love of God changes us when we live by it!

I would love to stop here, and just keep this writing to the love of God as practically worked out by us, but that’s not the full power or practice of the Holy Spirit. The full power of the Love of God works itself out through miracles. I don’t know how miracles happen, but I know they do happen. The age of God working in our lives through the unexplainable is not over, it is still now. I honestly believe one of the greatest miracles is coming to know God and living out that love, but God can do more than wrap his arms around us in love: He can heal. I mean this in the very practical sense of broken families and broken lives, but I also mean it in the physical sense. God can heal broken bodies just as God can heal broken spirits. If it weren’t true He wouldn’t tell us He could; He wouldn’t lie to us about His power; He wouldn’t tell us something that isn’t true; He wouldn’t send his Son to heal people of disease of if He didn’t want us to do that as well. I’m not saying I know how to work miracles, I’m saying I know a God who works them. I know His miracles involve His love and His Spirit. I know I serve a God who can make things right beyond our capacity to explain how or why. That’s the power of the Love of God. I can’t explain that Love, all I can do is marvel at it, and work that out through my daily life and my gifts. I think that’s what God has called Christians to do: to work out and practice his love. Not just for ourselves, but for other people too.

That’s what I believe practicing the Holy Spirit means. Simply what I would say to you is this: dance, run, sing, lift, build, write, play, engineer, coach, speak and work out the love of God in your heart and your life. Live in prayer, not the dry and dusty kind, but the kind that makes breathing easy, wonderful, and full of life. And maybe, just maybe, you’ll see God work miracles ;)