Misconceptions About Being Close to God: Part 2

There is a clamoring in our hearts to sense the presence of God. We want to be awake to God’s company, His voice, His leading.  Rooted in us is a longing to “be close to God.” But what is supposed to stir up this awareness?  There seems to be an array of Christianese type answers to this question.

The answer to this modern question was settled in the minds of the religious establishment in the 1st Century.  They had come to a few seemingly certain conclusions on what it meant to “be close to God”.  Many of their answers parallel many of today’s most popular Evangelical answers explained in my previous post.  But true to His rebel ways Jesus messes with the accepted formula for relating with God. 

In Luke 15:1-31 we have profound sermon delivered by the Master Teacher Jesus.  We have two stories “The Seeking of the Lost Items” (sheep, coins) and then the classic story of “The Prodigal Son.”  It’s a shame but often the story of The Prodigal Son is preached and understood separately from The Story of the Lost Items.  These two illustrations are intricately attached to each other; they are one story.  When you read The Prodigal Son story separately you are left with a picture of God sitting at home like a grandpa waiting for his son to come home; sweet, heart-warming but not Jesus’ point.  The context to the story is what First Century listeners already assumed they knew of “how to be close to God” and “what God was up to.”  You see this in the emotional interchange between the father and older son:

• vs 29 “I’ve been slaving for you all these years” modern paraphrase “I’m close to you because I bring you glory.” 
• vs 30 “I’ve not disobeyed a single commandment” modern paraphrase “I’m close to you because of my pursuit of personal holiness” 
• vs 31 “everything I have is yours” modern paraphrase “I’m close to you because I’m saved and have the spirit” 

There is an assumed “closeness” the older son speaks of.  But in this story Jesus is alarming people to a transition taking place in what it means “to be close to God”  The Prodigal Son story is the crescendo to verses 1-10 where Jesus is painting a cosmic picture of God leaving behind things to seek broken things.  The climax of Jesus teaching here is to understand what Jesus is saying to the older son (Israel), “if you want to relate with me properly, if you want to be close to me, you need to go where I’m going.”  Jesus is showing that you cannot put a divide between presence with God and participation in His mission.  It is in participation in God’s mission that we genuinely encounter the presence of God.  To be with God, to know God, is to go were God is going.  You relate with God by entering the agenda of Jesus.

There is this kind of dualism that seems prevalent: that knowing God is separate from being where God would be.  To divide presence from mission is to feed into the pattern of perceived personal holiness, individualism and being defensive about our Christian reputation in America.   Our Christian imaginations have intimacy with God as more of a direct pipeline from God to me; if that’s true then the yoke is to work diligently on that connection.  Because of this picture in our heads, many of the prescriptions for knowing God have a greater impact on increasing spiritual narcissism then they do closeness with Jesus.  They create a spiritual trajectory of individualism.   In some sense they funnel us toward a corner of spiritual self-actualization and going deeper into ourselves.  Many of our antidotes for spiritual dryness are static and me-centered.  I do believe these antidotes have a place, not as the answer but simply as an overflow of an active missional-life.

The new and uncomfortable formula for intimacy with God is entering into what God enters into.  God in Jesus came into this world to hand deliver His love by renewing lost things.  Closeness with God is birthed in the trench of connecting with brokenness.  From the book Sometimes God has a Kids Face Bruce Ritter shares,“You collide with God, see God, know God, feel God, hear from God while you're beholding agony, loneliness, foolishness, annoying personalities, abuse, anger, and humiliation in the face of other people.”  I know it seems counter-intuitive to connect with Jesus by incarnating with others brokenness but this is the upside-down way of God.

In Luke 15 Jesus is alarming the whole world to a new way, a new kingdom culture, a new arrangement breaking in.  A missional-life is much, much more than online advocacy and it's much bigger than telling someone your a Christian; it is a pathway for a community of people to experience God as they orient their collective life around extending renewal to brokenness.  There is a pseudo closeness we think we apprehend in a dynamic worship night, or a moment were you think you heard the Holy Spirit, or in finally having a quiet time 7 days a week, or even in a short-term missions trip.  But proximity with God is found in tethering to a community of people who are together seeking out lost things in the spaces of their village.  It's simple but it is the narrow way.

Misconceptions About Being Close to God: Part 1

There is a clamoring in our hearts to sense the presence of God. We want to be awake to God’s company, His voice, His leading. Rooted in us is a longing to “be close to God.”  But what is supposed to stir up this awareness?  There seems to be an array of answers to this question.  Here are the typical answers delivered in the most widely digested Christian books and sermons:

• Spiritual Disciplines: “Hiding God’s word in your heart” (scripture memorization), “On-fire prayer life” (longer, desperate, expectant, dependent), “Get into the Word” (regularly studying, feasting on deeper theology).            

• Connect to the Spirit – “Let the Holy Spirit guide you” (deciphering between your own internal voice and God’s voice), “See God’s activity” (learn to notice personal messages and circumstances where God is speaking to you)

• Identity in Christ – “Rehearse your identity in God” (I’m loved, I’m God’s treasure, I’m his beloved, I’m not condemned) “Know your True Self” (walk through your emotional wounds, experience therapeutic prayer and counsel)

• Serve God – “Find you gift” (Use your gift to serve the church), “Find your passion” (youth, men’s issues, woman’s issues, social justice, worship etc)

• Surrender Everything – “Be Sold Out for God” (An intense effort to give God glory by becoming more committed through every decision you make)

I'm convinced all these prescriptions are partial remedies for closeness with God.  In part, these prescriptions have a greater impact on increasing spiritual narcissism then they do closeness with Jesus. They create a spiritual trajectory of individualism.  In some sense they funnel us toward a corner of spiritual self-actualization and going deeper into ourselves.  Yes, most of the common answers here have an element of truth and a portion of effectualness in connecting us to God.  You can find verses to support each one.  But when slices are taken out of the narrative of scripture and blown up as the whole they end up sabotaging genuine transformation.  Subscribing to the pursuit of spinning all these plates simultaneously hollows us out slowly.  I’ve suspected that in response to this reality people either 1. Give up out of disillusionment,  2. Try to convince themselves psychologically they are feeling something with God against their questions and best instincts,  3. They have to continually tell themselves to remember faithfulness and obedience is what counts not feelings.

I don’t have the attention span right now to unpack in what I think should be put in place, I will in my next post.  But here is a clue: I think the answer can be found in the life of Jesus but more specifically in Luke 15:1-24.  I believe that Jesus addresses the whole drama of scripture, the misconceptions about how closeness with God functions and what direction we should head in.  In Luke 15 Jesus asks us to rethink the primary ways we relate with God..  He illustrates for us the larger story, the whole story of what it means to "be close to God."

Check back for part 2.

How to Listen to Your Neighborhood

Our Leading Community at Axiom has been talking about the issue raised in this video. We are together learning that we cannot duplicate/transplant a program we think will meet a spiritual need or attract people with specific longings. There is a natural tendency to do just that for a few reasons: maybe we've seen a program work at another church, maybe we just want to get active now, maybe we read a book and want to implement it, maybe we just want immediate traction and visibility or maybe we want something to measure our churches health by.

Instead we need to genuinely and humbly enter into a patient posture in our city to listen and put our ear to the ground; "What is God doing, where is the hurt, where are the cracks and crevices that despair is hiding out in?"  We need to press into relational spaces in our city and connect and search for were God wants a fresh expression of His Kingdom.

Newsweek & Abandoning the Church

In his latest Newsweek article, Andrew Sullivan is proposing an idea to "Forget the Church and Follow Jesus." Sullivan thinks that saving Christianity is that simple.  Sullivan has accepted that for the sake of survival and purifying the church we need to leave it behind.  He writes that the church has "grafted American politics with Christianity:" I completely agree.   He states that "the church has been almost totally subverted by American culture;" I thoroughly agree.  He's spot on in declaring the church has butchered grace in how we've handled hot button issues such as woman's rights, racism, and homosexuality.  But the glaring problem with Sullivan’s argument is that he commits the same crime of syncretism by building his case stacked on two other highly esteemed American values; individualism and freedom from authority.  This whole mantra of “I’m into Jesus but not into church” is naive to its union with Americanism.   In fact, it’s so blindly soaked in individualism, that even the language focuses almost solely on the self; “My belief,” “my Jesus,” “my walk,” “who I’m called to be,” and so on.  There is absolutely no sense of community beyond a bunch of individuals, with individual beliefs, who support advocacy around justice and blog about their dissatisfaction with the church.  While this utopian ideal may seem like a good thing, the truth is that it never works.  Even more fundamentally it takes us further away from Jesus himself.

1. We cannot just follow Jesus as a profound teacher.  Yes, yes, yes we need to “return to what Jesus actually asked us to do and to be,” and return to a “simpler, purer, more apolitical Christianity.”  The Western/American Church has gotten in bed with power and believing change happens from acquiring more of it.  Jesus did conduct himself with —”calmness, love, acceptance, radical surrender and show us what it means to truly transcend our world.”  I too can understand why "it is no surprise that the fastest-growing segment of belief among the young is atheism,"   But I don’t think that the only way to address the current crisis of Christianity is by remaking Jesus in the image of St Francis or Ghandi or Martin Luther King.  It's natural to remake Jesus out of reaction to loud conservativism or liberalism but I'm sorry it's not a healthy catalyst for healthy formation.

Jesus’ “commandments” were not given as universal spiritual-ethical teachings.  Jesus was not a philosopher. We can learn from Him, but not by picking out the best bits, and not by ignoring the larger story.  Yes, we should be troubled to the core by the crisis that Sullivan describes.   Still, there is no way around it, Jesus came declaring that he was King, Ruler and Lord.  Those claims should stop us in our tracks.   They caused His own people to murder Him and the Roman Empire to see him as a serious threat to their dominance.  The larger context is that Jesus is addressing humanities constant rebellion against His gracious authority, unseating Satan’s dominion and declaring His love-filled rule is breaking in.  I’ve known a lot of young adults who’ve been burned by heavy handed theology and leadership, I was one of them.  So in reaction, it’s really easy to over-shoot the pendulum and to exclusively buy-in only to the humanity of Jesus.  But this cannot be done if we learn from Jesus on His terms.  He declares He is God, He is what God looks like and then invites us to submit to His charge over our lives.  When we wrestle through this then we can follow Jesus into the broken places in our world.

2. We cannot just follow Jesus without His followers.  I’ve said many times in moments of emotional honesty "I’d rather love Jesus than love Jesus in people."  I understand and I’m with you Andrew “Christians often make me nauseas.”  But to follow Jesus is to deal with His historical-rooted vision.  You must take seriously Jesus and the collective-movement He died and rose to birth.   He envisioned a renewed “people of God”; an actual committed community of people.   I know the word church has a massive stench to it; a stigma.  If you don’t want to call it the church, you don’t have to, but that is what Paul called it.  But you cannot get away from the concrete reality Jesus was teaching about.  Jesus did not envision a bunch of individuals who wander the earth living like enlightened-homeless-sages.   Church cannot be dissolved into a buzz of idealistic Jesus followers that just want to hang out.  The historical Jesus affirmed the continuing relevance of a chosen people, a people for God’s own possession, a kingdom of priests.  He envisioned a tethered-community of people submitting to each other, submitting to Him and submitting to working for the flourishing of the kingdom of God on this earth.  You can mess with the formula of church (I’m doing that as we speak). You can also loosen the ties with Systematic-Neo-Fundamentalist brands of theology (I've done that as well). You should also do your best to prophetically detach the “Body of Christ” from; materialism, obsession with numbers, intellectual dishonesty, enmeshment with politics, doctrinal arrogance and pastoral celebrity worship.  I’m all about trimming away the Christian culture fat but you can't have a church-less Christianity.  Remember the only Jesus we have—and the Jesus in the Gospels is a fully contextualized Jesus launching a new organization of people under His headship.