John Eldredge's Blog, page 7
February 9, 2018
Five Agreements That Are Killing Millennials
I fear the worst has happened.
You are losing heart, may have already lost it altogether.
No more terrible loss can be suffered. For once we lose heart, everything else follows—our ability to live and love, to find joy and happiness. Without a rich life of the heart, we cannot sustain friendship or meaning or purpose or any of the things we once enjoyed. But the loss happens subtly, over time, like cancer—so that only when we are emaciated do we begin to realize what’s happened.
I believe this loss of heart, now sweeping an entire generation, is deeply linked to some core beliefs that have crept in. I call them “agreements” because they are ideas which have secured a deep agreement in your heart without you really stopping to consider the implications. We all breathe a cultural air; the assumptions we absorb are the very things that seem to us to need no explanation.
Which is good news, actually, because it means you can fight your way out; you can get your hope and your heart back.
Agreement Number 1: Doubt Is One of the Highest Virtues
You may find this statement overstated; but that is actually helpful to you. If the exposure of an agreement isn’t at first startling, we probably haven’t gotten to the core issue.
Your generation has many beautiful qualities, among them an openness to the views and opinions of others and a strong defiance of authoritarianism—especially religious authoritarianism. On a daily basis you and your peers are subjected to yet another exposé of some respected figure, policy, or organization who, it turns out, has been lying to the public for some time. Too much of this and suspicion becomes a mode of survival. Who do you trust anymore? Certainly not the banks or government, not political leaders or church denominations or even the universities.
And so doubt has become a virtue, a means of rejecting intolerance and oppression. Doubt is your millennial membership card; suspicion is your posture towards everything. Harold Bloom saw this coming when he wrote The Closing of the American Mind:
Openness—and the relativism that makes it the only plausible stance in the face of various claims to truth and various ways of life and kinds of human beings—is the great insight of our times. The true believer is the real danger. The study of history and of culture teaches that all the world was mad in the past; men always thought they were right, and that led to wars, persecutions, slavery, xenophobia, racism and chauvinism. The point is not to correct the mistakes and really be right; rather it is not to think you are right at all.
Laid-back relativism is a moral requisite for millennials. Do not dare to think you are right.
But the danger in making that agreement is that your capacity to believe—one of God’s greatest gifts to you—is being eroded hour by hour, and when you cannot hold fast to strong belief, your life is cast adrift on an ebbing tide of meaninglessness. If you feel the true believer is the real danger, then nothing really matters, because we can’t trust anything. The tragedy is, you cannot live with faith, hope, and love when you abandon belief.
Jesus understands doubt; he has mercy for it. But he never, ever leaves a person stuck there. He certainly doesn’t praise it. “Stop doubting and believe,” was his position.
The erosion of your capacity to believe is something to be fought tooth and nail, fought with every ounce of your being, as if your life depended on it. For it does.
Agreement Number 2: Offense Is the Worst
You were nursed almost exclusively on the milk of Tolerance; it is one of your highest values and the last Absolute Truth. I say this with compassion. I think Agreement 1 snuck in through the door of the very legitimate desire to avoid blind dogmatism. Agreement 2 has crept in through the door of wanting to be seen as a kind and accepting person. But the minefield of social sensitivities you must currently navigate has become psychotic, labyrinthine. Make no slight against whatever gender angle someone might be, or their politics, certainly never against people of color—though at any given moment in this shifting sea you have no idea what the offense of the day might be. You have to become a contortionist in order to find the posture every possible people group, party, faith, or unbelief will find kind and accepting.
It is like playing a game of Twister with an octopus; the octopus will always win.
This agreement is particularly seductive for Christians, who in this age of hatred want very much to represent Christ as a gracious and accepting person. And so we at first hide, then slowly surrender convictions that might put us at odds with the Culture of Tolerance Above All Else.
But, good-hearted millennial, even if you surrender every conviction, you cannot possibly avoid offense in this hour. You live in the culture that prizes and rewards victimhood; this is the culture of the Offended Self. “Do not offend” is not only a weak personal ethic, it is impossible to live out. Tolerance is simply not a strong enough virtue to build your life on. By all means love. Love is the highest call. Love is the measuring rod of all other things. But of course, Scripture urges us to speak the truth in love—not abandon the truth in order to love.
Suddenly we find ourselves faced with a choice between saying nothing, so as not to offend, and the higher call of speaking truthfully in order to love.
Jesus, who in most circles is still regarded as a loving man, passed on to his followers something awkward indeed—the offense of the Cross. But having made Agreements 1 and 2, it is understandable that Number 3 is all that you have left.
Agreement Number 3: Justice Is the Best Expression of the Gospel
Not only has yours been the first generation raised on the media of exposé (thus your suspicion of everything), you have also had the heartache of the world set before you like no previous generation. Ever. Tragedy, violence, and oppression from every remote corner of the globe is delivered to you, daily, moment by moment, on your phones. In a beautiful response, your generation has risen to champion the suffering of people groups and causes your parents never imagined.
Witness how deeply this has taken hold: if you are not up-to-date on every issue of injustice from the latest corporate scam to the plight of hidden people groups, you feel a little embarrassed. For the good millennial must know and care about everything. “Really—you didn’t know that the chocolate you are eating promotes slavery?” “You didn’t know the shoes you wear are made by a company that dumps toxic waste into Chinese rivers?” “I only wear clothing made from organic cotton by women rescued from trafficking.” To be ignorant on any point of justice is a kind of moral failure.
Compassion fatigue is inevitable. The burnout rate of those serving on the front lines of justice causes is catastrophic. What does this tell us?
Your soul is finite; you simply cannot care about an infinite number of causes. You cannot know about so much suffering without it actually doing harm. In fact, there is evidence that to be exposed to so much trauma is in itself traumatizing. So—doesn’t justice then require that you end the trauma you are being subjected to by regulating how much trauma-news you take in? The game of Twister I mentioned above has become dangerous and complex.
A second weakness of the Justice Gospel is that helping is not always helpful.
Did you know a majority of women rescued from the sex trade return to the industry of their own choosing? The reason being, unless you heal the human soul of the ravages of trauma and release it from the darkness that enters into those fractures, you will not in fact rescue those women. Justice is needed, but justice is woefully insufficient to heal humanity. Which leads us to the deepest, most entangled, and emotionally volatile weakness of the Justice Gospel…
The simple, alarming fact is that the primary mission of Jesus Christ is not social justice; it is to save mankind from their sin. The brilliance of this approach can be seen in the fact that the global sex trade would collapse in one month if every man and woman purchasing sex had a change of heart. The trade will not cease so long as depraved humanity provides a robust market for it. This change of heart, this internal moral revolution Scripture calls repentance—this is the core of the Gospel.
Given her wealth and influence, Oprah will do far more for the justice movement than you or your church ever will. But you have something Oprah does not apparently offer the world: you have Jesus Christ, and him crucified. So, is telling the world about Christ crucified central to your work? Even your motives? Alas—having become entangled in Agreement Number 2, many millennials are paralyzed here. “Can’t we just do good and let that be our witness?” What distinguishes your work from the secular NGOs doing the same?
Let’s be honest: the attraction of the justice movement is that it allows people to demonstrate their good will without having to enter into that difficult task—so well-known to the prophets, the apostles and Christ himself—of telling the world that much of what it believes and how it behaves is flat wrong.
But of course, in our world, telling someone they are wrong is now considered an injustice. Which puts you in a terrible bind.
Friends, the world is a heroin addict committing crimes to feed its habit. It doesn’t just need compassion—it needs intervention. It needs to be courageously told to sober up. Yes, it needs help doing so; but it also needs to be called out, held accountable, confronted. I know, I know—we are going to be criticized for even saying this. “We are winning a hearing for the Gospel because we are involved in Justice!” I think that can be a legitimate strategy. My only question is, “Do you speak the Gospel of repentance of sins as clearly and as frequently as you provide other services?”
I believe justice is a fruit of something deeper, larger, grander. I believe it is an outcome of the kingdom of God advancing on the earth. If that’s true, if that is a far more coherent and sustainable strategy, then wouldn’t helping people learn to live under the influence of Jesus and his kingdom be our number one priority?
Agreement Number 4: Gender Is a Construct
This is where the debate currently rages regarding our view of human beings and the design God has for their happiness.
But sadly, this subject is so volatile and reactionary, so filled with accusation and vilification, that reasonable conversation has become impossible. (The octopus in your social game of Twister is now wielding poison daggers in all eight tentacles.)
I will therefore only point out something I feel to be helpful to the person wanting to take the teachings of Jesus Christ seriously: Jesus believed humanity has a design to it. He said we are made in the image of God—a truth that would do wonders for the cause of Justice if the world embraced it.
He also believed that gender was part of the created order, teaching that we were made “male and female” (Matthew 19:4). Now, whatever else that implies, Jesus clearly felt that gender is something woven into our created being, not a thing of our own making.
The starting point is this: human nature is something designed by God, and only by finding his design can we flourish. Once you abandon this, you will find you need to distance yourselves from Scripture as a whole, or rewrite it or reinterpret it in ways that are compatible with the current cultural milieu.
You can do that, of course. I simply want to point out that once you abandon the reliability of the Gospel witness of Jesus Christ and abandon with it the high view of Scripture Jesus clearly built his whole teaching on, you will no longer have anything resembling Christianity or Christ.
Agreement Number 5: There Is Nothing Epic About My Story
Yours also was the education shaped by “deconstruction,” now a marginal philosophy. But it did its damage, like a high-speed automobile accident. Sure—it’s over, but you are now missing a limb. The general impression of your peers is that no story really has any claim over any other (thus Agreements 1,2,3, and 4).
Simply notice how much you need to couch your opinions in any social setting: “But that’s just how I see it…I feel that for myself...In my own personal journey….” Not only that, anyone who steps forward with what they claim to be The Story explaining all stories is the very person every millennial in the room moves away from. Don’t want to be seen with them.
The reason I saved this for last is because the deadliest agreements are those which open the elevator shaft to the abyss of meaninglessness.
You can try to keep up with the yoga contortions of social sensitivity; you can stand for justice though your own heart drowns under the accumulated grief of the world; you can remain silent on human design. But when you come to believe that your life has no real purpose or grand design, what else follows but depression, then despair? Why else has suicide become the second leading cause of death among millennials?
And here is the tragic irony—only the epic worldview will explain your life and the world to you; only the epic worldview will see you through it. Only the strong belief (there goes Agreement 1) that you are an essential part of a beautiful and powerful Story will provide you with the bearing you need to navigate the world. Do you think it coincidence that in this very moment of unbelief and laid-back relativism, we’ve seen the resurgence of the bazillion superhero movies and the Star Wars canon? The world is aching for epic meaning.
We live in a moment in time when everything, absolutely everything, is either at stake (see Agreements 1-4) or already lost. Truth is lost. Beauty is lost. Goodness is lost. Humanity is lost. How much more epic do you want?
Small little life with some self-constructed meaning is not going to cut it, dear ones.
Your coffee-roasting, beanie-wearing, socially aware buddy is not going to save himself from a massive loss of heart.
God bless the heart—it refuses to be neglected or cowed before false gods. It rebels. It cries out in the form of anxiety and aimlessness; it protests in the form of hopelessness, depression, anger, and despair. We would do well to listen.
If any of these agreements have rung true for you, if you find that you have made even the smallest concession to them, the first matter of business is to renounce them. Kick them out of your heart and life. Reject their every attempt to rule or return. Embrace the opposite. It will not merely save your psyche; it will allow you to get your heart back. And with it, everything that makes a life worth living.
January 15, 2018
Everything We Needed
In order to tell this story well, I need to take you back to the founding of Ransomed Heart. Now, I’m not going to burden you with the ministry equivalent of watching home movies of our children. But I do want to share the wild goodness of God.
Back in 2001, I was working a couple of jobs. I had a full-time “day job,” and during evenings I was building my private practice as a therapist. My books had not yet become well-known; no one really knew who the Eldredges were and what you now know as Ransomed Heart did not exist. I remember one evening Jesus telling me very clearly to quit both jobs, and start out on this venture with him. We had no donors; we had no real plan. We did have several long weekends of prayer and fasting with key advisors, and we knew beyond a shadow of a doubt God was speaking. So like Abraham and Sarai, we set out for an unknown future. I quit my jobs. I wrote a book called Wild at Heart. We started doing retreats for men. But it was all very small and full of the unknown.
In fact, for the next two years, Stasi and I had no idea where our weekly paycheck would come from. We had no health insurance. And mind you – we had three young boys at the time!
Now, I am NOT suggesting this is what you ought to go do. You must be very, very sure God is speaking before you launch out on something so wild as that! Too many signs and confirmations came to us to recount here, but I do recall that at our very first retreat we had booked a camp for 350 men on our own checkbook, hoping we would have men show up. We had no mailing list; Facebook didn’t even exist back then. We simply put the word out, and told folks if they wanted to come to mail us a check for their registration (there was no online registration in those days; we didn’t even have a website).
Exactly 350 checks came in.
Those early days were filled with stories like that; we were living completely by faith. There were weeks when we did not know where the groceries would come from. Then, a bag of food or a tray of lasagna would just show up on our doorstep. God came through.
And he has kept coming through. In larger and larger ways.
Once you have a ministry with some global impact and reputation, the temptation is to shift from a faith-based approach to grab for security in more worldly ways. Organizations pad their bank accounts; they hire marketing gurus to conduct aggressive fundraising campaigns. But when they do, they lose something of the trueness of walking with God.
We never wanted to become that.
So each year, our leadership team sets a budget based on what we believe God is asking us to do. We look for about 40% of our income to come in through our events and resources, leaving the other 60% to come in through the gifts and support of our friends and allies.
These days, many people wait until the last weeks of December to make their decisions about their charitable giving. And so each year we find ourselves waiting in hope and faith for the groceries to “show up on the step,” waiting for the mail and our online giving to see what will happen.
Last month, we needed $937,000 to come in through donations.
In the final week of December, we needed $509,000 of that amount to come in.
And it did. With a few dollars to spare. (I have a huge smile on my face as I write this. It is such a wild and HOLY story!)
This has been happening for 17 years now. Even though our budget grows each year, as we reach out to more and more people in more and more countries, we still see God provide exactly what we need—through your generosity and your walk with him.
What is so beautiful about this story is that we don’t raise 150% of our budget; we don’t even raise 120%. Each year, God provides exactly what we need with a touch of margin to allow us to carry on. And we wouldn’t have it any other way. You notice we don’t do aggressive fundraising. We don’t have capital campaigns, or trusts, or solicit grants. I wrote you in November asking if you would help us, and then we waited to see what you and God would do.
Everything we needed came in. It is a beautiful, wild story.
I just couldn’t let January go by without sharing it with you. I don’t want to be like the people Jesus healed who never came back to say “thank you.” From the bottom of our hearts, thank you!!! Your support matters—right down to the nickel!
Now we start again. We will live by faith this year, and walk with God. We will follow him into the missions he has for us; we will do our best to avoid the seductive lures of the world. And we will trust him to guide, and provide, as he has been doing for the last 17 years.
I love sharing this with you. I hope it encourages your own faith journey.
Here’s to a powerful and meaningful 2018!
John
Download the RH January 2018 Newsletter here.
December 14, 2017
The Great Story
A very happy Christmastide to you.
December is upon us with a rush, and soon the holidays, and then, perhaps, a breath before 2018 gets underway. The swift passing of the days—and even that feeling, “Where did 2017 go?”—all this is reminding us that this Story is racing forward; we are being carried along towards some great moment.
Story. It is one of the greatest gifts the Jews gave the world. For before them (and in many places, long after) the world and its religions did not think of life as a Story at all. Most pagan peoples saw human experience as an endlessly repeating cycle of birth and death, headed nowhere. Through the Jewish people, and then the early Church, God gave us our bearings, gave us meaning and direction and above all a breathtaking hope by revealing to us the Great Story he is telling.
Story is, therefore, how we orient ourselves.
I was enjoying some pieces of The Lord of the Rings trilogy the other night, just snatches here and there to remind me what it is like to live in an epic tale. I love the part where dear Sam Gamgee reminds Mr. Frodo of the critical importance of story. Frodo is about to give up, under the weight of it all: “I can’t do this, Sam.” To which Sam replies,
I know. It’s all wrong. By rights we shouldn’t even be here. But we are. It’s like in the great stories, Mr. Frodo. The ones that really mattered. Full of darkness and danger, they were. And sometimes you didn’t want to know the end. Because how could the end be happy? How could the world go back to the way it was when so much bad had happened? But in the end, it’s only a passing thing, this shadow. Even darkness must pass. A new day will come. And when the sun shines it will shine out the clearer. Those were the stories that stayed with you. That meant something, even if you were too small to understand why. But I think, Mr. Frodo, I do understand. I know now. Folk in those stories had lots of chances of turning back, only they didn’t. They kept going. Because they were holding on to something.
It is the power of the Great Story that gives us heart to carry on. Life is not, as Macbeth lamented, “A tale, told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.” It is not an endless cycle. This is headed somewhere; we are racing towards a breathtaking climax. And so Christians around the world will repeat The Story to one another this month, in pageants and liturgy, sermons and carols. We repeat the most beautiful moment thus far—the Invasion, the Incarnation. Our rescue. We need to repeat it, for like Mr. Frodo we bend under the weight of our own heavy burdens, and evil of this hour.
One of the ways we rehearse the Story in our family is by reading favorite passages and poems to one another. We love John Donne’s Divine Poems, a series of rich stanzas that are so beautiful and compact, you have to take them slowly. I thought I’d share a few snippets here, my Sam to your Frodo. The first stanza—La Corona—ends with the lines, “Tis time that heart and voice be lifted high” (there’s the telling of the Story), “Salvation to all that will is nigh” (as the first Christmas approaches). Stanza two—Annunciation—speaks of the mystery of Christ in Mary’s womb, ending with the gorgeous line, “Immensity, cloistered in thy dear womb.”
Stanza three—Nativity—starts with the same line, and then carries us into and through Bethlehem:
Immensity, cloistered in thy dear womb,
Now leaves His well-beloved imprisonment.
There he hath made himself to his intent
Weak enough, now into our world to come;
But O! for thee, for Him, hath th’ inn no room?
Yet lay Him in a stall, and from th’ orient,
Stars, and wise men will travel to prevent
The effects of Herod's jealous general doom.
See'st thou, my soul, with thy faith's eye, how He
Which fills all place, yet none holds Him, doth lie?
Was not His pity towards thee wondrous high,
That would have need to be pitied by thee?
Kiss Him, and with Him into Egypt go,
With His kind mother, who partakes thy woe.
So much is captured in these lines. But can’t you also feel the Story moving forward with an irreversible power and thrust? Christ is born, the Magi arrive just in time to rescue him from Herod’s genocide, and the angel has Joseph whisk the family off to Egypt. Every event, great and small, has meaning. And continuity. It is so good to be reminded of that as well—this Story is moving forward with power towards its glorious climax, or at least, the great finish of this chapter.
For like Mr. Frodo we also wonder why evil has so much sway, and if it really matters how or if we carry on. But it does matter. The Kingdom of God is winning; the Invasion worked and it is working right now. Magnificently. And we each have our role to play.
So tell each other the Story this Christmas season. Drink it in. Believe every word. We are racing towards the finish of this chapter, and what a finish it will be.
Then…the feast. And all things made new.
Merry Christmas friends, from your friends here at Ransomed Heart.
Download the RH December 2017 Newsletter Here.
November 10, 2017
Our Reach Across the World
November 2017
Dear Friends,
I have a beautiful picture I want to share with you…
Our team has been praying for some time now, asking God what His next move is on the earth, and the role He has for us to play. (We have this growing conviction, a strong sense that He is moving, and about to move in a deeper way, upon the earth.) In several different prayer times now, over the course of several months, we have seen a picture of “fires” igniting all over the map, all over the world. You are starting those fires, He said. Those are your people—that is your message. That picture fills our hearts with excitement and passion. It brings us such joy and happiness!
Deep in the DNA of every friend of Jesus is this same passion, to be a part of his mission on the earth—to see lives rescued, restored, to see redemption, to bring about beauty from ashes. I know that’s deep in you, too. How exciting to think that God is about to do something powerful!
One of the sweet gifts during the last Captivating retreat here in Colorado was not only to witness the restoration of women, but to hear from them the ministry of Ransomed Heart around the world. A woman came from Guatemala because her church developed a ministry to women based on Captivating. A woman started an online outreach to teenage girls using our message; she already has 17,000 followers. Another woman came privately to Stasi to report healing in her gender identity; she said, “I think Ransomed Heart has a really deep ministry to the LGBTQ community.”
One life is worth rescuing. One heart is worth restoring.
But God wants to show us something more—a stunning outreach across the world.
Because our work is so intimate and deeply personal, healing the hearts and souls of God’s beloved, that is what we tend to talk about. So you might not be aware of these fires that are popping up all over…
Several different ministries have been birthed to fight human trafficking through people whose lives have been transformed by Ransomed Heart. We recently sat with one couple now serving in Thailand, and heard the beautiful stories of little boys and girls rescued from prostitution through their work. I just got an email from another ministry telling me about two girls they saved.
A man came all the way from South Africa to our boot camp in Colorado, where he gave his life to Christ, and upon returning home he started an orphanage to rescue refugee children coming south from ravaged African nations. “I was fatherless,” he said. “Now I am father to hundreds.”
Friends in Switzerland developed a program to disciple young millennials in this message, over a one-year experience. I love the photos they send of these young people—eyes bright, faces glowing. Especially when you know suicide is epidemic with our young people.
Earlier this year we shared communication with the persecuted church in Syria (!), thanking us for our message and our resources—which they are drawing strength from, and using to strengthen others there. Holy.
An email came last week from a pastor in Zimbabwe, telling us his plans to use Wild at Heart and Captivating to help the young people understand who they are. An earlier letter from Liberia reports on their work, using Becoming Myself with young girls.
I could go on and on. Colombia. Poland. Norway. The UK. These are the “fires.” You are those fires!
And we sense from God that he is wanting to increase the movement, deepen the discipleship, strengthen existing fires and light many new ones! Wow. Just ...wow.
Twice a year I reach out to ask your financial help. We don’t manipulate; we don’t raise more than we need. We simply let you know we have a real need, and ask if you could help. Now is that time. Our international work does not pay for itself; we do it as an offering to those countries, those allies. We love being generous! We know you do, too.
We do need your help. We need to raise a little more than half our budget before the end of the year. Would you be able to send a gift our way? You can send in a check. Or, you can give online at our website www.ransomedheart.com. Your gift will reach out across the world!
You are supporting a beautiful work of God when you support Ransomed Heart. And that work is growing! Breathtaking!
Thank you so much for partnering with us. For being those fires. For helping us light new ones!
With you for the Kingdom,
John
PS. We are doing our first Captivating retreat in Australia December 1-4. We know that fire will start many others. There’s still space to attend there, so let your friends “down under” know!
October 20, 2017
Cousin Dwalo
So—you’ll notice that most of the articles in this issue begin with or pretty quickly refer to some conversation we’ve recently had with another guy. We put that in there to send a message: hanging out with other guys is a good thing to do, and paying attention to their questions is an even better thing to do. Maybe also to let you know we’re listening; we want this journal to be massively helpful.
Here’s how this conversation went…
There was in fact a real group of guys who’d gathered for some trap shooting, cigars, and conversation. (We do this like once a year, sometimes every other year, so don’t get the impression we live on The Island of Manly Happiness and Camaraderie). We were sitting around afterwards, chatting about this and that, when one guy shared that he’s really been enjoying all those Navy SEAL books/biographies that have come out in the past few years. You could feel the conversation shifting in the direction of significant; more than half the circle nodded because we’ve all been reading them, too. Right—the life of Real Men was the new mood in the circle.
But then he said, “So I have a pretty good idea what a warrior looks like at war, but what does it mean for me with a job and young kids?”
For about 20 seconds, nobody took a bite, a drink, a drag on their stogie. We all just sat there like men hit with a pail of cold water. We went from the epic of heroic lives to the threat of mundane in ours.
Before we could offer something—anything—in return, the man next to him said, “Yeah. You guys talk about ‘knowing your story’ and ‘finding a story worth living’ and all that, but I feel like Frodo’s cousin who didn’t even make the movie. There’s nothing about my story that will be worth telling. No—really.” There was some awkward laughter, but I think every guy was taken from the thrill of looking at other men’s epic stories to their real life, and diminishment was descending upon the circle like a cloud. I couldn’t shake the conversation for days, especially that bit about, “Where is the heroic in normal life?” and, “What makes a life meaningful?”
When so many young men are ending their lives by suicide, we know this generation is facing a massive crisis of meaning.
One thing that struck me was that this crisis is in part the fruit of being exposed to the amazing, way too often. Surely you’ve seen Danny Macaskill’s little film The Ridge. (At 53,819,468 YouTube views, I’m guessing you have.) Macaskill is a bicycle stunt rider from Mars. In this film, he first rides his mountain bike up this ridiculous knife-edge ridge on the Isle of Skye—bouncing on his back tire over chasms and hopping on his front wheel up boulders by some unknown power. Then, for the heck of it, he comes racing back down at inhuman speeds, ending the ride by hitting a sheep fence and doing a perfect aerial 360 to simply keep riding. The wow factor is way up there.
But when you’re done, you don’t feel like going out and taking up mountain biking. Because the bar was just set somewhere on the rings of Saturn.
We could name a jillion more—all those unbelievably impressive feats we’ve seen “regular” dudes doing on all those millions of videos that have gotten passed around. Heli-skiing. Base-jumping. Flying suits. Motorcycle stunts. I think the effect is actually toxic; I think it makes the average guy feel, perhaps subconsciously, My life sucks. There is no way I will ever be amazing.
A few days later I was reading an essay on spiritual acedia, or spiritual malaise/sloth—a sin our fathers seemed very keen on warning us about. (It is one of the Seven Deadly Sins.) This leapt out at me:
Our lives are made into a succession of episodes, in which any fulfillment or happiness will largely be an accident, at best a coincidence, and in either case will be of little account to us or to anyone else. In fact, we can give only the barest account of them, for there are to be no narratives to our lives, no intelligible threads running through them… (Henry Fairlie)
Even before I finished, I knew I’d hit upon the millennial malaise. Acedia. (We will devote more to this in a coming issue and podcast, ‘cause it’s big, guys.) For now, the takeaway is this: When you subtly make an agreement with a loss of story, you cannot escape the slide into a loss of meaning—losing your life’s meaning. Despair quickly follows.
Now—God did not make us all Navy SEALs or even Macaskills. So the truly meaningful life can’t be, “Go out and do something epic like Danny Macaskill or one of those SEALs.” It just can’t.
It took me days and days to think of what I wish I’d said back in the cigar circle (doesn’t your clarity always come later?). But it goes something like this:
We live in a catastrophic world (add stronger language here). This world is seriously broken; nothing is as it ought to be. We also live in a time of evil unleashed on the earth (surely you see evil ravaging humanity). Therefore, in a climate like ours, with a total loss of meaning, with brokenness all around and even within, as evil rampages, any series of choices towards the good is heroic. In a world of hatred, any choice to love is heroic. In an age of staggering unbelief, any commitment to faith is absolutely epic. In a world built upon the False, any ongoing commitment, however faltering, to choose the Real is heroic. And in a world totally stripped of gender, to choose the narrow way of masculine formation is utterly heroic and epic.
Honestly, I’ve been in some pretty gnarly wilderness situations where we survived through heroic decisions. But those are far easier than living back in the world, where we are so severely tested and never really see we are so severely tested, nor do we see the epic consequences of our small decisions. Loving, believing, and persevering are more epic here because it is a life we are talking about, and because it is so deeply opposed. Especially with diminishment.
I just released a book called All Things New, a book about Hope, because we live in a time of such sweeping hopelessness. One of the things I try and speak to is this “Frodo’s cousin” issue, this What is the meaning of my life? Allow me to quote a bit:
“As we prepared for Craig’s memorial service this summer, I was struck by the gross inadequacy of an hour or 90 minutes to meet the need. How do you tell the story of a human life? How can you do justice to all the hidden sorrow, the valiant fighting, the millions of small unseen choices, the impact of a great soul on thousands of other lives? How can you begin to say what a life means to the kingdom of God?
The answer is, only in the kingdom of God. Only once we are there.
Your story will be told rightly. I know the idea has usually been set within the context of judgment, and justice will be served. But the friends of God do not face judgment; for us, the celebration of our lives is clearly put in the context of reward.
But each one should build with care. For no one can lay any foundation other than the one already laid, which is Jesus Christ. If anyone builds on this foundation using gold, silver, costly stones, wood, hay or straw, their work will be shown for what it is, because the Day will bring it to light. It will be revealed with fire, and the fire will test the quality of each person’s work. If what has been built survives, the builder will receive a reward. (1 Corinthians 3:10-14)
We know our every sin is forgiven; we know we live under mercy. We know there is no condemnation now for those who are in Christ (Romans 8:1). No condemnation, ever. We will be cloaked in righteousness, and it will emanate from our very being. So if we can remove all fear of exposure or shame from our hearts, if we can set this safely within the context of our Father’s love, it helps us towards a great, great moment in the kingdom: the time for every story to be told rightly.
How wonderful it will be to see Jesus Christ vindicated, after so many eons of mockery, dismissal, and vilification. Our Beloved has endured such slander, mistrust, and, worst of all, such grotesque distortion by the caricatures and religious counterfeits paraded in his name. All the world will see him as he is, see him crowned King. Every tongue will be silenced, and his vindication will bring tremendous joy to those who love him!
But friends—that vindication is also yours.
You probably have a number of stories you would love to have told rightly – to have your actions explained and defended by Jesus. I know I do.
I think we will be surprised by what Jesus noticed. The “sheep” certainly are when their story is told: “Lord, when did we see you hungry and feed you, or thirsty and give you something to drink?” (Matthew 5:37). What a lovely surprise—all our choices great and small have been seen; and each act will be rewarded.
All those decisions your family misinterpreted, and the accusations you bore, the many ways you paid for it. The thousands of unseen choices to overlook a cutting remark, a failure, to be kind to that friend who failed you again. The things that you wish you had personally done better, but at the time no one knew what you were laboring under—the warfare, the depression, the chronic fatigue. The millions of ways you have been missed and terribly misunderstood. Your Defender will make it all perfectly clear; you will be vindicated.”
July 31, 2017
Recovering the Romance
In that place I was in the middle of the singers.
The voices of crickets, katydids, and cicadas would come to me, carried above the sounds of the creek and mingled with the pungent odor of tannins. Tens of thousands of stream-side musicians sang to me the magic stories of the farms and forests.
–Brent Curtis
Twenty years ago this spring I published a book with my dear friend Brent titled The Sacred Romance. Many people still mistake it for a marriage book, I’m sad to say. It is a love story, but far older and much more reliable than matrimony. Rather, it is the story of how God has pursued our hearts ever since we were children. A shocking, massive revelation for many people to hear that God cares about—even yearns for—the life of our hearts. That our hearts even matter to God is one of the greatest, most hopeful turns of faith that can come into our lives.
But I am not going to make that case here; it is made far better in the pages of that book, even better still in the pages of Scripture. I am after something else at the moment.
To realize God has been wooing our hearts ever since we were young, through the very things we love, is an equally startling revelation, life-changing if you’ll let it be. That, too, is an assumption I am making rather than defending, for what I want to get to may matter even more to where we are today. But permit me to catch you up on the story.
The “Romance” began for me during summers on my grandfather's ranch. I grew up in the suburbs of southern California during the 1960s and ‘70s. One vast, sprawling, uninterrupted concrete and asphalt metropolis, about 10 million people at the time. Not many places for a boy to chase pollywogs or wander through cornfields at dusk. My grandfather, however, had a cattle ranch in eastern Oregon, near where the Snake River forms the winding liquid border with Idaho. It is high desert country—hot and dry in the summer, transformed by irrigation into an vast, green agricultural quilt. Potatoes, onions, sugar beets, and mint, along with cattle pastures and the alfalfa fields needed to feed them through the cold winters. As I wrote 20 years ago,
My grandfather, “Pop,” filled an empty place in my soul at a critical moment. He was my hero, a cowboy and a gentleman in a Stetson and boots. Spending summers on his Ranch was a schoolboy’s dream—riding horses, chasing frogs, harassing the big old cows when I was sure no one was looking. I remember riding in his old Ford pickup, Pop with his cowboy hat and leather work gloves, waving at nearly everyone on the road. Folks seem to wave back with a sense of respect. It gave me a settled feeling that someone was in charge, someone strong and loving. Pop loved me as a boy and called me to be a man. He taught me to saddle and ride a horse—not merely for fun, but to take my place on a working ranch. Together we explored the open spaces of the eastern Oregon sagebrush, mending fences, tending sick cattle, fishing Huck Finn-style with willow branches and a piece of string.
Over the years, I have come to appreciate just what a staggering gift and dramatic rescue those summers were. Would that everyone were so lucky. But the Romance can come in many ways, thank God: chasing fireflies, the old library, your favorite books, the first snow, roasting marshmallows, secret forts you built of cardboard boxes. And recovering it—or discovering and then recovering it—can be one of our life’s greatest treasures.
Last month, Stasi and I returned to the tiny town of Nyssa, Oregon, for my grandmother’s funeral. It would be the first time back in nearly 30 years. Pop died when I was 17; my grandmother eventually remarried, sold the ranch, and moved to another town. I was very guarded in going back, because I know that the Romance—now even more precious to me than gold—was flowing through those childhood years like the river flowed through the valley, in a story orchestrated by God. It is not forever located in an actual place. Things change. Towns change. I didn’t even know if the ranch would still be there. “You can never go back,” became a saying because cynical though it may be, far too often it is true. Too many broken hearts have tried to go back and only found there the empty shell. Brent knew this himself; as a very lost young man he returned to his childhood farm, hoping to find answers there:
I stood there that November day looking down onto a small brown stream bordered in lifeless gray hardwoods and monochromatic fallen leaves. A few hundred yards off to my right stood our old farmhouse, now vacant with a large hole in the roof. The barns and sheds and corrals that had given it a reason to exist were gone. Weeds grew in a tangled confusion where the corn had once stood in ordered wildness. The weariness of it all came together in the silence of those absent August songsters from so many years ago. I remember feeling a sharp pain in my chest that I silenced with cold anger.
Only years later did Brent come to understand that the flowing nature of the Romance is situated not forever in a place, but in the living, moving story God has for us.
I believe we are in a process of restoration, at the center of which is a recovery of wholeheartedness.
I believe that sometimes God will invite us back into treasured memories and special places. And if it is by his invitation, we are safe to go there. He takes us back for several reasons—not only for the feast of memories that comes (some of which needing to be healed), but also to reawaken sleeping places in our hearts. Mostly I think he takes us back to show us as adults all the ways he was wooing us in our childhood, even when we didn't know him at the time.
What surprised me was how incredibly rich it was to drive down those country roads again. To smell the onion fields, go into the small M & W Market. A thousand memories came rushing in. And then to pull up on the ranch road bordering my grandfather's place. Yes, it wore the burden of 40 years gone by: the paint was faded and peeling; the pastures were neglected; my favorite cottonwood was gone. But nearly everything else was intact—every barn, shed, and even the old tack room are still there. “I used to feed the horses in that trough,” I whispered to Stasi. “There’s the old workshop. I oiled that shingle roof one summer.” The experience was almost like a waking dream where you get to revisit the best days of your childhood.
So many memories. So much of the Romance to be reclaimed.
Now yes, we do need to be careful with our hearts as we venture back, either in memory or in actual places. The Romance moves and shifts as we grow, move, and shift. The Romance is not in present-day Oregon for me; it is right here in Colorado now, because this is where God and I live together. This summer it is in the sound of crickets and hummingbirds, the smell of petunias, my granddaughters’ first popsicles. When we mistake the Romance for a person or a place, even a season of our life, it can really break our hearts, because people and places and seasons change and pass away, and if we are not careful, tender places of our hearts can pass away with them.
I wrote a new book this year. It speaks of the promise of the restoration of all things (one of the greatest promises of the Romance), which Jesus makes very clear includes actual locations like homes and lands (Matthew 19:28-29).
There was an old wooden bridge on my grandfather’s ranch; it crossed a large irrigation canal the size of a good stream, which flowed constantly with milky water the color of well-creamed coffee. Cottonwoods grew in the rich loamy soil along the canal, and their huge boughs covered it in shade all summer long. Even in the dog days of August it was always cool there, and the waters made the quietest lovely sounds as they passed under the bridge. It was a magical place for a boy. Coming in from the fields we would race the last hundred yards, galloping our horses over the bridge which boomed and echoed under our hooves with a marvelous deep sound like thunder, or cannon fire from the deck of a great ship. Swallows would shoot out from under either side, spinning away up and down the canal. As far as I was concerned, in my seven year old heart, that bridge had always been there, and always would be. Wallace Stevens shared a similar experience from his boyhood,
Unless everything in a man's memory of childhood is misleading, there is a time somewhere between the ages of five and twelve that corresponds to the phase ethologists have isolated in the development of birds, when an impression lasting only a few seconds may be imprinted on the young bird for life…I still sometimes dream, occasionally in the most intense and brilliant shades of green, of a jungly dead bend of the Whitemud River below Martin's Dam. Each time I am haunted, on awakening, by a sense of meanings just withheld, and by a profound nostalgic melancholy. Yet why should this dead loop of river, known only for a few years, be so charged with potency in my unconscious? Why should there be around it so many other images that constantly recurring dreams or in the phrases I bring up off the typewriter onto the page? They live in me like underground water; every well I put down taps them. (Marking the Sparrow’s Fall)
I now understand, some 50 years later, that the bridge under the cottonwoods was filled with “a sense of meanings” and “charged with potency” because the Promise was coming to me through that place. And oh, how I would love to see it again, take my own grandchildren there; charge our horses over and make cannon fire, then sit quietly and dangle our bare feet over the edge, watching the swallows come and go.
Yes—I had hoped to visit that bridge again last month. But the ranch belongs to someone else now, and the bridge is tucked way back on private property. I did not feel comfortable trespassing. There were so many gifts in my visit, so many wonderful memories recovered. I felt God saying that my visit to the bridge waits for the Restoration. I drove away, probably for the last time in this life, with a settled heart. I’ll see it soon enough.
John
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June 13, 2017
Summer
Now summer is all around us.
I was sitting on the porch early this morning, sipping a cup of tea, enjoying those very early moments before the sounds of the city have ramped up, before I needed to rush into the day myself. In the cool of a summer morning, I was loving the birds singing joyfully, trying to outdo one another in the trees in our yard. Such a hopeful, lovely sound. The fragrance of summer flowers wafted over me from a hanging basket nearby. A butterfly fluttered by in its whimsical “what-are-you-worried-about” careless way. For a wonderful, lingering moment, it all felt brimming with promise.
Not just the promise that it’s going to be a good day, but something richer, deeper. The promise that everything is going to be wonderful.
You’ve probably felt that promise, too, as you stood in some favorite spot—watching the beauty of the waves, spring flowers in the desert, walking the streets of Paris at night, or sitting in your garden with a cup of coffee. Something keeps whispering to us through the beauty we love; something seems to be “calling” to us through the beauty and goodness summer especially brings. “Many things begin with seeing in this world of ours,” wrote British artist, Lillias Trotter. “There lies before us a beautiful, possible life.”
I love summer. I love the lushness of life it brings. I love the sense of promise nearly every summer morning proclaims. But most of us—while we sense the promise—are not really sure what to make of it.
There was an old, wooden bridge on my grandfather’s ranch. It crossed a large irrigation canal the size of a good stream, which flowed constantly with milky water, the color of well-creamed coffee. Cottonwoods grew in the rich, loamy soil along the canal, and their huge boughs covered it in shade all summer long. Even in the dog days of August, it was always cool there, and the waters made the quietest lovely sounds as they passed under the bridge. It was a magical place for a boy. Coming in from the fields, we would race the last hundred yards, galloping our horses over the bridge, which boomed and echoed under our hooves with a marvelous deep sound like thunder, or cannon fire from the deck of a great ship. Swallows would shoot out from under either side, spinning away up and down the canal. As far as I was concerned, in my seven-year-old heart, that bridge had always been there, and always would be.
Wallace Stevens shared a similar experience from his boyhood,
I still sometimes dream, occasionally in the most intense and brilliant shades of green, of a jungly dead bend of the Whitemud River below Martin's Dam. Each time I am haunted, on awakening, by a sense of meanings just withheld, and by a profound nostalgic melancholy. Yet why should this dead loop of river, known only for a few years, be so charged with potency in my unconscious? Why should there be around it so many other images that constantly recurring dreams or in the phrases I bring up off the typewriter onto the page? They live in me like underground water; every well I put down taps them.
Some sort of Promise seems to be woven into the tapestry of life. It comes to us through golden moments, through beauty that takes our breath away, through precious memories and the hope even a birthday or vacation can awaken. It comes especially through the earth itself.
That Promise fits perfectly with the deepest longing of our hearts—the longing for everything to be good.
The experience of this “Promise” is one of summer’s greatest gifts to us. But few know what it means. Does it ever come true? That’s what our hearts long to know—does it ever come true? Why did God put this Promise in the earth, and in the human heart? Part of the answer is revealed in Romans chapter eight:
The created world itself can hardly wait for what’s coming next. Everything in creation is being more or less held back. God reins it in until both creation and all the creatures are ready and can be released at the same moment into the glorious times ahead. Meanwhile, the joyful anticipation deepens (19-21).
Paul believed that all creation was trembling with anticipation, because nature knows some great secret we do not. Jesus revealed the secret very clearly:
“I assure you that when the world is made new and the Son of Man sits upon his glorious throne…everyone who has given up houses or…property, for my sake, will receive a hundred times as much in return…” (Matthew 19:28-29 NLT)
When the world is made new. At the restoration of all things. This is the great secret of creation. This is the great hope of our faith.
I now understand, some fifty years later, that the wooden bridge under the cottonwoods was filled with “a sense of meanings” and “charged with potency” because the Promise of the restoration of all things was coming to me through that place. It is coming to us in many ways; it is coming to us through the glories of summer.
I share this in hope that you and I will begin to understand the whispers of the promise that are coming to us, that these gifts will fill our hearts with hope. “The Spirit of God whets our appetite by giving us a taste of what’s ahead. He puts a little of heaven in our hearts so that we’ll never settle for less” (2 Cor. 5:5).
May summer whet your appetite. May it assure you completely of the Great Restoration that is nearly upon us.
Love,
John
PS. Go to allthingsnew.com for a beautiful video of a talk I gave on the Great Restoration.
Download the June 2017 Newsletter Here
April 18, 2017
Easter
We can understand someone dying for a person worth dying for, and we can understand how someone good and noble could inspire us to selfless sacrifice. But God put his love on the line for us by offering his Son in sacrificial death while we were of no use whatever to him. Now that we are set right with God by means of this sacrificial death, the consummate blood sacrifice, there is no longer a question of being at odds with God in any way. (Romans 5:7-11, The Message)
As the church has understood for more than 2,000 years, the Cross was not merely Jesus “entering into our suffering.” It was a sacrifice of incredible proportion, made necessary because of our sin. This is so important for us to name, because in our age the concept of sin has almost completely disappeared and what has replaced it are words like “brokenness” and “woundedness.” Just the other day a good man, a true disciple, was telling me a story of some egregious evil committed against him. In the next moment, he said, “They were just acting out of their brokenness.” This is the common spin, and it is partly true. But what is missing is the forthright naming of sin. If brokenness is all that we needed help with, Jesus certainly wouldn’t have had to go to the Cross.
Now—you know we spend a good bit of time healing human brokenness here at Ransomed Heart. All the more reason for us to give some reflection to the fact that Jesus went to the Cross for our sins, or we will lose our gratitude for it. And there is so much more.
Christ redeemed us from the curse of the law by becoming a curse for us, for it is written: “Cursed is everyone who is hung on a tree.” (Galatians 3:13)
Here again we have the clear view of Atonement—Jesus is judged so we wouldn’t be. But another dynamic is being described here. The Cross breaks the power of all curses. This too is so important to name at this time when so much envy, hatred judgment and cursing is taking place in social arenas. When someone judges you, when they pronounce words of hatred or judgment against you, those words have real effect. Both Testaments take blessing and cursing very seriously. “Life and death are in the power of the tongue” (Prov 18:21). So it is a great relief to bring the power of the Cross against those words and judgments spoken against us. Witchcraft is also on the rise in this pagan culture; many curses are being pronounced on Christians from the dark side. How wonderful that our God has provided the solution: we are able to bring the Cross of Christ against all curses and cancel them in Jesus name.
Can you feel your appreciation of the Cross deepening as we name these things?
Paul explains later in Galatians, through the Cross of Christ we are crucified to the world and the world to us:
May I never boast except in the cross of our Lord Jesus Christ, through which the world has been crucified to me, and I to the world. (6:14)
The Greek word used here for “world” includes the entire human family. The Cross of Christ changes every human relationship. In a world where so many relationships are unhealthy, where people try and control us or exert unholy authority over us, where people often attach their needs and longings to us, the Cross is our rescue. It is so helpful to pray the Cross of Christ into every relationship so that only what is holy and good can pass between us.
And of course the Cross is what sets us free not only from the penalty of sin but from the very power of it:
We are those who have died to sin; how can we live in it any longer? Or don’t you know that all of us who were baptized into Christ Jesus were baptized into his death?...In the same way, count yourselves dead to sin but alive to God in Christ Jesus. (Romans 5:2-3,11)
Anyone trying to live a whole and holy life knows the grief that comes—regularly—when we cannot seem to live beyond our sin and addictions. You must understand: the unholy trinity Scripture names as the world, our flesh, and the evil one conspire to undermine your character. In that swirling mess, it can feel like you want to (fill in the blank…yell at your kids, look at porn, envy your friend’s success, indulge bitterness, etc.) but what we must, must cling to is that we have died with Christ in the Cross; sin no longer has to rule over us. We have a choice!
Which brings us to my last observation: the Cross was not only then, it is now. Every day. We do have a choice to make, and the essential choice we face every day is whether we will let the “self” life reign in us, or will Christ reign in us? By the “self” life I simply mean that part of us that wants to reign as lord of our lives. The first issue is never sin; it is what we do with our internal, natural inclination to play lord of our life. All the hatred and envy you see in social media—that is the “offended self” lashing out. When Jesus invites us to take up our Cross daily, he is not saying we have to crucify our every hope and desire. He is saying we must choose not to let “self” reign—neither in our internal nor external world. Christ is Lord of both.
Alas—there is so much more to say but we are out of space. For more on the power of the Cross let me recommend: my book Free to Live, the “Daily Prayer,” the “Prayer for Breaking Curses,” and our audio resource on Soul Ties. You can find them on our app or website.
Much love,
John
Download the April Newsletter Here
March 20, 2017
March 2017 Newsletter
What a life-changing experience it has been to uncover the personality of Jesus! Or how about learning that we can hear his voice, and all the blessings that come to us as we actually walk with him? And what absolute relief is ours as we explore the healing available to us through Christ? In the spirit of recovering lost treasure, I want to point out this month something that has baffled me for some time: Whatever happened to the promise of reward?
“I tell you the truth: at the renewal of all things, when the Son of Man sits on his glorious throne…everyone who has left houses or brothers or sisters or father or mother or wife or children or fields for my sake will receive a hundred times as much and will inherit eternal life.” (Matthew 19:28)
Jesus was responding to a question Peter asked when he declared these bold promises: “We’ve given up everything to follow you. What will we get?” (19:27). Christ is neither alarmed nor offended by the question. He doesn’t tell Peter that service is enough, nor that virtue is its own reward. He quickly replies with the proclamation of the Great Renewal, and then—as though that were not enough (!)—goes on to assure the boys that they will be handsomely rewarded in the coming kingdom. It is a mindset almost entirely lost to our age. Who even talks about reward anymore? Who anticipates it? Expects it? Honestly, I have never had one private conversation with any follower of Christ who spoke of their hope of being handsomely rewarded. This isn’t good; it is a sign of our total bankruptcy.
Reward is central to a kingdom mindset…
“Rejoice and be glad, because great is your reward in heaven.” (Matthew 5:12)
“For the Son of Man is going to come in his Father’s glory with his angels, and then he will reward each person according to what they have done.” (Matthew 16:27)
So do not throw away your confidence; it will be richly rewarded. (Hebrews 10:35)
By faith Moses…chose to be mistreated along with the people of God rather than to enjoy the fleeting pleasures of sin. He regarded disgrace for the sake of Christ as of greater value than the treasures of Egypt, because he was looking ahead to his reward. (Hebrews 11:24-26)
“Look, I am coming soon! My reward is with me, and I will give to each person according to what they have done.” (Revelation 22:12)
Reward, reward, reward—it fills the pages of both Testaments. Saint Paul expected to be rewarded for his service to Christ, as have the saints down through the ages. Patrick, that mighty missionary to the Irish prayed daily, “In the hope of resurrection to meet with reward…So that there may come to me an abundance of reward.” It is our barren age that is out of sync with the tradition. C.S. Lewis wrote,
If we consider the unblushing promises of reward and the staggering nature of the rewards promised in the Gospels, it would seem that Our Lord finds our desires not too strong, but too weak. We are half-hearted creatures, fooling about with drink and sex and ambition when infinite joy is offered us.
“The unblushing promises of reward,” stopped me in my tracks the first time I read it. I’ve never heard a contemporary Christian use it. Unblushing means boldfaced, unashamed; it means brazen, outlandish and unapologetic. Did you know the promises of reward offered to you in Scripture are bold, unashamed, and brazen? God seems to be of the opinion that no one should be expected to sustain the rigors of the Christian life without very robust and concrete hopes of being brazenly rewarded for it. Are you looking forward to your reward???
That pastor who serves a rather small, petty and thankless congregation for forty years, the man who works late hours visiting the sick and comforting the brokenhearted, the servant who is grossly underpaid and regularly berated by his own flock—what does he have to look forward to? Shouldn’t his reception into the kingdom be like that of a great Prince returning to his Father’s country, with lavish reward? Indeed, he will. Will not his kindness be rewarded? It will. Will not his longsuffering be rewarded? It will. In fact, every noble deed of his largely hidden faithfulness, every unsung and even misunderstood action of love will be individually and specifically rewarded (Matthew 25:35-36, Matthew 10:41-42). And so he shall be a rich nobleman in the kingdom of God.
What about the believer who struggled under mental illness all her life, largely alone and almost completely misunderstood, clinging to her faith like a drowning woman clings to a rock while a broken mind tormented her daily? Should she not step into the kingdom like the Queen of an entire country? Indeed, she will. She will probably be granted a position dispensing wisdom and insight that heals the hearts and minds of her countrymen. O yes, rewards will be given out in the kingdom with great honor and ceremony. One of our great joys will be to witness it happen.
When you think of all the stories of the saints through the ages, and all the beautiful, heroic, painful, utterly sacrificial choices made by those saints, the suffering, the persecution—how long will we enjoy hearing those stories that ought to be rewarded told, and then watching breathless as our King meets the specific situation with perfect generosity? The thought of it fills me with happiness even now. I have friends and loved ones for whom I want a front row seat to witness this very moment.
Begin to allow your imaginations to go in the direction of reward. Your heart will thank you for it.
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March 17, 2017
February 2017 Newsletter
First, a big thank you from the team here at Ransomed Heart. I reached out at the end of last year to ask for your support, and I wanted to tell you the result: We made our end-of-the-year budget, right on target, with a few dollars to spare! God is so playfully faithful to us, and you are so faithful too. I didn’t want to move on into the new year without saying thank you, so very much! Thank you.
It’s already February. 2017 is off and running like a downhill skier on Red Bull. I want to share a series of encounters I had to get us into the topic of this letter...
First, a friend shared with me how much he was enjoying a podcast by a thoughtful NPR commentator, and the nuggets of insight were impressive. A few hours later a different friend mentioned how much they were getting out of another podcast. I thought to myself, I’d better subscribe to those; they sound really good and I feel like I’m not keeping up with the trends. That afternoon, Stasi said something about some world news event she had just read about, and I thought, Wow—I am not keeping up on global happenings. I’d better do more of that, too. During a meeting the next day, someone makes a reference to a well-known ministry when everyone else at the table nods like they knew the story, and I’m wondering, Wow—I have no idea what is going on in the church world; I need to keep up. Meanwhile during the same meeting everyone was checking their cell phones for messages, updates, and news.
That evening I finally listened to our own podcast—the one Stasi and Cherie Snyder did on trauma (I’m three weeks late)—and I found myself thinking, Gadzooks—I am not taking care of the unattended trauma in my soul and its lingering effects. Meanwhile, I am getting ready for another set of upcoming meetings with some leaders, and I feel I ought to be far more prepared with some keen insights on the age, the prophetic, how God is moving in the world, and how we therefore ought to be strategizing.
The cumulative effect of all this—and I am describing a fairly benign and ordinary week—was to have a large part of me feeling woefully ill-informed, and grossly out of touch with all sorts of important matters. Shame was not far behind, followed by that scrambling we do to “get back on top of things.”
Another part of me—a deeper, quieter part—meanwhile was pushing back, wondering, How in creation do these people have a life with God and care for their souls in the midst of this barrage of media input, global information, social analysis, prophetic teaching, ministry news, and not to mention minute-by-minute updates from their hundreds of Facebook friends?
How does any human being care for their soul in a frenzied moment like ours? The simple, honest truth is...they don’t.
It is beyond all practical possibilities.
However, the ongoing deluge of intriguing facts and commentary, scandal and crisis, genuinely important guidance, combined with the latest insider news from across the globe, and our friends’ personal lives, gives the soul a medicated feeling of awareness, connection, and meaning. Really, it’s the new Tower of Babel—the immediate access to every form of “knowledge” and “groundbreaking” information right there on our phones, every waking moment. It confuses the soul into a state of artificial meaning and purpose, all the while preventing genuine soul care and life with God. Life with God...period. Who has time to read a book? Plant a garden?
Let me say it again, because it is so counter to the social air we breathe: What has become the normal daily consumption of input is numbing the soul with artificial meaning and purpose while in fact the soul grows thinner and thinner through neglect, forced by the very madness that passes for a progressive life.
I am not scolding; I am tossing a lifeline.
The first draft of this letter went on to try and tell you how to care for your soul and have a genuine life with God—not to mention with your friends and loved ones—by giving you little tiny things you could squeeze into such a life. After twenty-four hours, I realized I was simply allowing the madness to go on ruling our lives. I was capitulating and then trying to work around it. And that is neither kind, nor loving.
What I am going to say to you is that sincere followers of Jesus in every age have faced very difficult decisions—usually at that point of tension where their life with and for God ran them straight against the prevailing cultural ethos. The new Tower of Babel is ours. We have always been “strangers and aliens” in the world, insofar as our values seemed so strange and bizarre to those around us. We are now faced with a series of decisions that are going to make us look like freaks to the world. Choices like turning off Facebook every other day (or perhaps completely), never bringing our smart phones to any meal, conversation or Bible study, and cutting off our media intake so we can practice stillness every day.
If we offer anything of value to you here at Ransomed Heart, we offer care for the soul. And so for the sake of sanity and mercy I am going to ask a few questions...
What are you going to do this year to save your soul from the madness that passes as “normal life?” How will you cultivate a life of beauty, goodness, and depth of soul? How will you send your roots deep down into the soil of God?
The good news is, we actually have a choice. Unlike persecution, the things currently assaulting us are things we can choose not to participate in. What needs to go away in 2017 so that you can take your life back?
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