Wayne Jacobsen's Blog, page 71

The Way: Jesus

Here are some more thoughts that have touched us from The Way by E. Stanley Jones. If you want some backgound on this book, please see my earlier blog about it.

Here’s something he wrote about God:

If I were to sit down and try to think out the kind of God I would like to see in the universe, I couldn’t come up with anything higher than that He should be like Christ.

Me too! Strange how Jesus still gets a ninety percent favorability rating in the United States and the God that religion presents gets blamed for disasters and bashed for being a bully. And you know what, God is just like Jesus. He loves broken humanity and seeks to rescue men and women from all the places they got lost in the world and draw them back to his house as beloved children. That’s what Jesus showed us in his humility, compassion, truthfulness, and graciousness. Jesus is a far better representation of God than anything religion has produced.

So why don’t people believe? Many say that it is because they have not seen him and want proof that he exists. E. Stanley Jones wrote:

The person who want this proved to them is like a person who stands with their back to the sunset while I describe its breath-taking beauty. They say, “I don’t believe it. Prove it to me.” I reply, “I can’t prove it to you. But turn around and look at it; it will prove itself to you.” They reply, “No–prove it to me.” Is it fair?”

Then Jones talks about why Jesus spoke with such authority. I love this and wish I’d learned it growing up”

In other words, when He made all things, He made them to work in a certain way, and that way would be according to Christ. If the Way were written only in the Scriptures, then we might battle over the authority of the Scriptures, their authorship, their authenticity, their worth. But suppose the Way is written in the nature of reality as well as the Scriptures. Then the Way is inescapable for everybody.

If Jesus is only a moralist imposing a moral code on humanity, then of course we can question that code and His authority. But suppose Jesus it the revealer of reality’s nature. That makes Him different. he not only reveals the nature of God–He reveals the nature of life.

We have seen that the Way and not-the-way are written in the Bible. But for many people the authority of the Bible has decayed. It doesn’t grip or guide them. As one critic put it, the Christian faith as contained in the Bible is a “set of scruples imposed on the framework of humanity to keep it from functioning naturally and normally.” They therefore turn to the revelation of life through science and experience their guide. I can disregard the injunctions of the Bible if they are imposed from the outside, but I cannot ignore them if they reveal life itself, if the lift up laws written in the nature of things. For if I run away from them as written in the Bible, I still me them confronting me from everywhere in daily life.

I daresay that most Christians don’t see it this way. They think Scripture is asking us to live in a way that is counter to humanity. When Sara and I recently reread Proverbs we were struck by how much living with integrity, honesty, kindness, and wisdom was not just something God said we should do, but that those who live that way are far more successful in the things that matter in life. Even as it acknowledges that living dishonestly may make you more money as you take advantage of others, such wealth is short-lived and you’re better off with honesty and a little than deceit with a lot. The real treasures are wisdom, honesty, and kindness not material gain or influence built on deception.

The Creator spoke to us about how to live in the Creation, even one defiled by sin. He’s not imposing some moral order from the outside, but inviting us to live in the Creation the way he designed us to, before sin made the unnatural seem natural. Jesus and the Scriptures speak about life itself and that we would want to follow his way not because it would make God mad if we don’t, but because his way puts us in sync with the Godly part of the Creation and offers us the wisdom to cooperate with the way things really are not the way they appear.

That puts a different view on holiness and righteousness that is so desperately needed today.

Engage #2: Starting Fresh

Engage is our new video series designed to equip and encourage people to explore their own relationship with God. We debuted the first one two weeks ago and will add a new video every two weeks on Wednesday. Of course the most important part of this process is not the videos, but the time and focus you’ll give between them to learn the joy of letting God show you how he wants to build a relationship with you that is grounded in his deep affection for you.

Living loved is not a matter of embracing a different set of principles about God. Living loved is the fruit of growing in the “knowing” of God, learning to sense his presence in our life and to cultivate an ongoing conversation with him about what’s going on in your life. As that unfolds, or if you have specific questions you’d like to ask me, feel free to use the comment section of this blog because lots of others will probably be interested in the answer as well.

You can access these videos from our new Engage page or by clicking on the picture below:

I am also including the audio version in the podcast feature of this Lifestream blog. You can access it below or you can also subscribe to audio postings on this blog via iTunes.

Coming to Grips With God’s Love

I love honesty. As I’ve often said, “The truth will set you free, but it will really mess with you first.” Freedom is risky and discovering that God is loving and kind enough for you to let him into the most broken places of your life can look intimidating at the outset, especially if you’ve been good at hiding your scars and fears beneath fig leaves.

I got this email yesterday. It almost reads like a poem, and while the person writing it may be terrified of what’s to come, I see the beginning steps of a beautiful transformation. Letting him in is the hard part, because what’s he’s in there you’ll find him more loving, kind, tender and patient as any person you’ve ever known, and what’s more he has the power to heal our wounds and to walk us out of any place we got stuck and into his glory taking root in us.

I love this and can’t wait for the email I hope to get six months from now about what happened in the aftermath of opening so wide a door to him. Good things always begin where we surrender to his love, even if we’re not sure we can quite trust him yet. They will soon know that trust is no better placed than it is in him:

Your proposition about such a loving God scares the heck out of me.

I have never known this God, even though I have “known” him 30 years this year.

It scares me to contemplate this God you speak about. As part of the journey will mean revisiting old wounds and ugly scars that I have covered in layers of fig leaves.

I shrouded my wounds in religion and my shame wore clothes of assumption. I had to assume God to be a certain way to get past my painful past and my personally devastating history.

Religion told me I couldn’t ask God questions because He owes no explanation and the theology of an angry God made me look for reasons why I could have deserved all that I had grappled so long with.

I wept tonight tears that I had sealed in a private bag of pain. Now I must let God into these broken areas so that His love can heal me. This profound love you speak so hauntingly of.

We’ve been taught so many things unworthy of God by our religious traditions. This person is about to find out how amazing God is at dealing with our questions and setting us free. And I’m praying for him or her so that they will come to enjoy the outrageous love of a tender Father.

The Way: Getting Along With Others

Here are some more thoughts that have touched us from The Way by E. Stanley Jones. If you want some backgound on this book, please see my earlier blog about it.

I found this especially applicable to some of the thoughts and conversations I’m having about community these days:

People cannot get along with each other because they cannot get along with themselves, and they cannot get along with themselves because they cannot get along with God.

Every relationship we have gets twisted because we have no idea who Father is and how he’s invited us to engage him. Most of our conformity-based attempts at community fail precisely for this reason. Just to manage people we need an endless set of rules and hierarchies to keep order. All the while the real problem goes unaddressed. Until people learn how to live deeply in God, they will undermine their own attempts at community. And trying to manage people who can’t get along with God will lead to repressive, obligation-based environments that provide only an illusion of community if people cooperate on the same task. But each will be trying to get what they want from the others, and when they are disappointed they will will default to manipulating them. To guard against that, “leaders” set up rules to curtail the selfishness of others, freeing them to pursue their own.

That’s why I’m convinced that community is the connection God gives between those who are living loved. Because if Jones’ statement above is true, surely it’s corollary is as well: People who get along with God, will be at peace with themselves, and they will get along with others freely. They won’t need relationships to be managed because they’ll live in the glorious order that comes from loving others and preferring them above themselves. Such people will see guidelines and hierarchies as false substitutes for helping people really come to grips with who God is.

That’s why real community is not a goal we can achieve; it’s the fruit of people who are learning to live loved by the Father.

The Way: Freedom

Sara and I recently started reading a new book together. It isn’t easy for us to find books that we both enjoy. We’re incredibly picky because we want something that’s fresh and new to our journey, but also has depth and can challenge the way we already think. But a friend of mine recently sent me a copy of a book he edited that was originally written in 1946 by a missionary in India, E. Stanley Jones. It caught my attention because I had run across the name of this author in conversations with some of my older brothers on this journey. It seems Jones was a real encouragement to many of them.

So, Sara and I started reading The Way written by E. Stanley Jones, a missionary back in India during the middle part of the last century. It is a devotional, so it is broken into smaller, daily readings, but Sara and I have been covering two each day and then reflecting for a few moments on what he’s written. In this book he is contrasting the way that Jesus taught us to live with what is not-the-way, that lures us into sin and frustration. We are enjoying it and gleaning some wonderful insights, all the more because it’s written by someone who lived many years before us.

So I’m going to share some occasional excerpts in future blogs because I think you’ll find them helpful, too, and because I find a lot of his insights so fresh and compelling. Like this one about freedom:

Apparently we are free to choose, but we are not free to choose the results of our choosing.

Let that sink in. What a great statement on freedom! Though God has given us the freedom to make choices, he has not given us the ability to control the consequences of those choices. That’s what many people miss. In the name of freedom in Christ they are still making choices that cause incredible destruction in them and disruption in people around them. Though God designed the creation so we can do pretty much anything we want, we cannot escape the consequences of those choices. Our own independence and selfishness came not only come back to haunt us in ways we’d never imagine, but also can do great damage to the people around us even if that’s not what we intended. True freedom isn’t doing whatever we want; it’s the freedom to choose his way above the moral chaos of this broken world.

To do that we have to abandon the mistaken idea that righteousness is the onerous burden God has placed on us to keep an offended deity at bay. His desire for us to be holy is not to obligate us to do things the way he wants, but to invite us live in harmony with God’s reality in the universe. That’s why Jesus told his disciples that he wanted “his joy to be in them so that they joy might be full.”

Jones continues:

(Jesus) is not imposing on us a foreign joy, trying to make us happy about something we dislike. He is giving a joy which, when we take it, is our very own… We must get hold of this until it becomes an axiom: My will and God’s will are not adversaries. The idea that God’s will always lies along the lines of the disagreeable is false. The will of God is always our highest interest. It could not be otherwise and God be God. I am fulfilled when I make Him my center. I am frustrated when I make myself the center.

That’s not because God has an ego so large that he has to be the center of everything. It’s just our growing awareness that he actually is the center of everything and true life is found in our coming to love, trust and rest in him.

And we even need his help to do that, because we are so easily swayed to do what we think best. Only when his love working in us is more real to us than what we think we can do by our own efforts, can we taste of the freedom that really is freedom!

On the Road Again

After having four uninterrupted months at home with friends and family, it looks like its time to hit the road again, and perhaps the airport. Sara has recovered well from her surgery and though I’m not going whole-hog into an extensive travel schedule, there are some invitations that I felt led to accept and some personal conversations God wanted me to have as part of my journey at the moment.

So in a couple of weeks, I’ll be heading to Edmond, OK and then on to Tulsa. I’ll be doing a number of meetings in Edmond on Friday and Saturday, March 1 and 2. During the afternoons from 1:30 to 4:30 I’ll be at Conversations in Edmond for some open conversations about living loved. In the evenings from 6:30 to 9:00 I’m going to do a brief seminar about “Awakening to the Father’s Work In Your Life” to help people recognize the way God invites them into fuller expressions of his life. Space is limited, so you need to contact Conversations at their website if you’d like to join us there.

And then I’ll be heading up to Tulsa on Sunday morning and we’ll have an open time of conversation in Broken Arrow on Sunday afternoon from 2:30 – 6:30. If you’d like to be part of that you’ll need to contact Shannan.

You can find the necessary information and contact details on my Travel Page.

After that I’ll head to Australia in mid-April for some time Brisbane, Kingaroy, Toowoomba, Melbourne, and Traralgon. Details are on the travel page as well.

World Premiere: Engage: Letting God Build a Relationship With You

We are unveiling the first video in our Engage series on this blog. Eventually these will move to their own page on our new website, but that has been delayed briefly.

Engage is my attempt to equip and encourage people to explore their own relationship with God. Unfortunately, many people who want to know God default to religious ways of trying to connect with him, but get discouraged when those attempts don’t work. I realize that a video series is not the ideal way to do this and that it would be far better to have the love and conversation of an older brother or sister near them who is enjoying the journey and willing to help others do so as well without loading them down with a bunch of religious rules and rituals. But for those who don’t know anyone like that it was on my heart to offer these short video encouragements to help others on a relational journey of knowing God. My hope is that it would also provide an example for others who want to help people on this journey but haven’t known how to do it.

Over the last twenty years I’ve taken note of the kinds of counsel that have helped people find greater freedom and reality in their own relationship with God. These are some of the things people can do and talk about as they encourage others to see how God is taking shape in them. You can use these videos for group discussion or share them with others. They are copyrighted so others will not abuse them for profit, but you have our permission to distribute them freely as you desire. Like The Jesus Lens, these videos will be available free of charge and with our prayers that many will find them helpful as they relax into a relationship with God.

We affectionately refer to this the anti-discipleship approach because so many think have the idea that discipleship is teaching people how to build a relationship with God, which usually involves a heavy dose of doctrine and religious activities. In truth, discipleship isn’t about you building a relationship with Jesus; it’s about Jesus building one with you and you coming to recognize how he is doing that. He wants to draw you into his Father’s heart and teach you the Father’s ways.

What that means is the videos are just a catalyst for your own time learning to enter into an engagement with the Abba Father. We’ll post new videos every couple of weeks to give you plenty of time between them to explore how God wants to engage you in your own heart and day. As you focus on him, let him make himself known to you and show you how to participate in an ongoing conversation with him in the realities of your own life. As best you can, relax in the process. It does take time for him to disconnect the frenzied input of the world around you, and the performance-based approach of religion, and free you to relax into his reality in a way you can recognize and enjoy.

I am hoping Engage fosters a conversation as well that will incorporate your questions and insights into this process. Please feel free to use the comment section on this blog, and the comment section of the web page when we get it set up, to ask questions you’re encountering on this journey. And if you have a question you think will also interest others, and can record it on a video camera, please send us the recording and we’ll see about using it on future videos. I’m hoping at least the first time through this will be a bit like a class where we can discover together what will most help people who want to engage God and his life.

Here’s the first one. If these are helpful I will continue with future videos every two weeks or so. The only way this works is if they encourage you to spend some time exploring your own connection to God and learn to find your way into the conversation God wants to have with you.

If the video does not show above in your browser, you can view the video here.

I am also including the audio version in the podcast feature of this Lifestream blog. You can access it below or you can also subscribe to audio postings on this blog via iTunes.

What I Have Learned About Friendships

For those who follow this page and The God Journey, we’re having quite a bit of discussion about relationships and community. Learning to live in the love of the Father, and then out of that love to others opens the door for the kinds of relationships that we crave and that God designed us for. But these kind of friendships don’t happen quickly and can’t be manufactured by human engineering. They are deeply rooted in a heart God is healing and allows us to engage others with freedom and joy.

I wrote this over a year ago and found it in an old file today. Here are some things I have learned about relationships over the course of my life:

Friendships that are filled with love, grace, and shared wisdom are the best treasures we’re given in this life—those that are filled with laughter, that speak truth graciously, and that serve each other generously. They will last a lifetime and are more valuable than gold.

If you value any thing more than your friends, your friendships won’t last. Bet on it.

It takes two people and a significant amount of love, grace and time to build a friendship in which the glory of God can be revealed. It only takes one of those people and a careless act of betrayal to destroy it.

Failure alone won’t end a friendship. Abandonment will.

No matter how broken a relationship is, it can always be reconciled if both people are willing to invest the time and effort to own each other’s story. But the process demands a healthy dose of honesty, tenderness, and openness to see things as they are, not how we want them to be.

Real relationships are not about just being nice. There is no relationship without authenticity and truth. Light and love travel together, as painful as that might be at times. But that’s a glorious mix.

Learn the wonder and power of forgiveness so that other people’s failures don’t become your issues.

Too many people want a relationship only for what they can get out of it, and will not always be there to help others when the friendship asks something of them.

Your coping mechanisms might have saved you in trauma when you were younger, but they will subvert healthy friendships now. That’s why wholeness is worth fighting instead of simply passing your pain on to others.

If someone is making accusations about another’s motives to you, you can bet that they are also doing it about you to someone else.

When the conversation shifts from how we share together what God gives, to demanding for ourselves that which we think we deserve, that friendship has been sacrificed on the altar of selfish ambition and vain conceit. It’s a really bad trade.

Those who give up on a friendship, had to never know the joy of that friendship to begin with.

Most people are users, pretending a friendship to benefit themselves. But users won’t change without being loved, even if it takes a number of discarded friendships for them to learn that. Love them anyway, just do it with your eyes open!

When accusations enter a friendship before the person ever sits down to discuss his or her concerns, you can be sure that gossip has had its course and the accusations will be distortions at best, or outright lies at worst.

It’s easy to stab a friend in the back, because they are trusting you not to. Betrayal is an act of cowardice.

When people give up on a friendship without even a meaningful conversation where they seek to hear as much as be heard, you can be pretty sure it was always a one-sided relationship to begin with.

To live inside of lies you have to block out any voice that challenges your thinking. When you live in the truth you need no such protection.

My dad taught me that my word is my bond. If you say it you do it. If you cease to respect your own word, you’ll gather no respect from others. And don’t confuse someone’s love with their respect. They are two separate realities. You can love someone you don’t respect, but the great friendships are filled with both.

Proverbs says that telling lies about someone is an act of hatred, no matter what excuse you give yourself.

Those you love the most, can hurt you the deepest. Keep loving anyway!

The best counsel I know for the kind of deep friendships that spawn true community come from Paul’s words in Philippians 2:1-4- “Therefore if you have any encouragement from being united with Christ, if any comfort from his love, if any common sharing in the Spirit, if any tenderness and compassion, then make my joy complete by being like-minded, having the same love, being one in spirit and of one mind. Do nothing out of selfish ambition or vain conceit. Rather, in humility value others above yourselves, not looking to your own interests but each of you to the interests of the others.” No man or woman can live that way by their own efforts. It takes a rich and real relationship with Jesus to be transformed enough by him to have the freedom to live like that.

The Best Laid Plans…

Despite assurances that we were going to launch our new website this past weekend, I have now been notified by the development team that it will be delayed at least a week due to a catastrophic server failure that resulted in a loss of two weeks worth of work. I’m embarrassed and frustrated that we haven’t been able to deliver to you what was promised to me. Our original date was January 1. That got pushed back to February 1, and now we’re being pushed back even further.

I’m sorry to have given out information that later turned out to be undeliverable. I’m most disappointed that we cannot launch our new video series, Engage! I’ve gotten a lot of email about it but it was designed to fit the new platform. Since the website will be delayed at least a week and possibly two, I am going to check on some other options to add the first episode to our current website on a temporary basis.

Again, please accept my apology. We’re going to try to get all that fixed as soon as we can.

An All-New Lifestream.org & a Series Called “Engage”

Sometime this weekend, the new Lifestream.org site will launch. It has been in the works for over six months. Most of why we had to redesigned this site has to do with some back-end realities that you’ll never see that will help us streamline many of the things we do on that site. But that gave us a chance to update the look of the site and reconfigure it to be far more user-friendly with the current content we have. With our new back-end features, we will in time be able to help people connect with other folks who resonate with Lifestream content in their own area, but it will still take some time to configure that, and it will only be for those who opt-in to use it.

The reason I’m telling you now is so you’ll understand any delays and complications that will result from this switchover. Hopefully it will be seamless, but since we’re also switching servers it may take some time for everything to get in place. If you encounter that problem, we apologize. The switchover will come over the next few days and will take some time to propagate throughout the web.

We will also be launching next week a new feature at Lifestream called “Engage!” This will complement two of our major free resources—Transitions and the Jesus Lens. It will be a series of 3-5 minute videos designed to help coach and encourage people in the early stages of connecting in their own relationship with God. It is not a curriculum, nor a set of steps to build your relationship with God. In fact, it’s the opposite. This is not how you can build a relationship with God, but learning to recognize how God is building one with you, which is a very different process. Knowing him is not about your effort or achievement, but learning how to relax into the reality of his love and beginning to recognize his whispers in your heart and his fingerprints in your life.

Engage: Recognizing How God Is Building a Relationship With You!

It will only provide a context for people to explore their own connection with Father, Son, and Spirit so that they can find their own unique walk with him. Each video will also include the opportunity for comment, questions and discussion as they process this in their own lives. I realize that the use of video for this purpose is limited, and that it would be far better for them to have someone they could sit down with face-to-face as they explore their own journey. So I’m doing this not just to help people walk with Jesus, but also to give people who want to help others learn how to walk with him an example of the kinds of things that can help people on this journey.

In the end, I’m not at all sure this will be helpful. We’re going to try it. If it is, we’ll continue. If not, we’ll take it down. In any case we will be offering this, like all our best resources, free of charge. How can we do that with the great expense of video production? Because we’ve always had people who find these things helpful willing to contribute to the costs so that others can as well. We trust that continues here so that others around the world can have access to resources like this one.

We’ll announce here when Engage is ready to launch and I’ll look forward to feedback from people who want to utilize that resource.

Here’s a sneak peek at our new look, if you’re interested.