I've changed my blog

Kevin's blog has moved. It is now on the Gathering His People website - http://www.gatheringhispeople.org/

You can still follow the blog via Facebook (Kevin's Blog @ GHP) or simply subscribe to the new blog at the site.

I'm sorry for the change, but I decided that Wordpress suited my needs better than blogger did.

I will keep this blog sitting here, but it will be inactive. All new posts will be on the other site.

Genuine Holiness

It amazes me how much time and energy is spent in the pulpit trying to make people behave properly when Jesus says so clearly that it is our heart that really matters (Mt. 15:19). Now, this does not mean that our behavior is unimportant. God is holy and He calls us to be holy (1 Peter 1:16). But it does mean that true holiness must extend beyond behavior and into the condition of our hearts.

If we behave absolutely in accordance with the Biblical teaching, but have the wrong motivation in our hearts, then our holiness amounts to nothing (1 Corinthians 13:1-3). The holiness God is looking for is right behavior motivated by love. That is true holiness.

So, how do we get there? Certainly, we can’t do it on our own. Our hearts are deceitful and we cannot even understand them fully (Jeremiah 17:9). The only way is have our hearts transformed by God – cleansed of all its ugliness and filled instead with His love. It is only then that we are able to truly love others and to walk in true holiness. It is only then that we are really Christlike.

Of course, allowing God to transform our hearts can mean that we engage in prayer, Bible study and other Christian activities. However, each of these only works to the extent that the Holy Spirit is active in the moment transforming us. That said, it is so much easier just to seek the presence of God directly than it is to engage in these other activities. It is in His presence that hearts are changed and nowhere else.

Experiencing the Father’s Love

I have been asked to talk a bit more about how to experience the love and presence of God. My reply is too big for a blog comment, so here it is as a post. This is an exerpt from my book, The Gospel of Freedom.

Romans 8:38-39

For I am convinced that neither death nor life, neither angels nor demons, neither the present nor the future, nor any powers, neither height nor depth, nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God that is in Christ Jesus our Lord.

James 4:8a

Come near to God and he will come near to you.

In Romans, we are given an ironclad guarantee that there is nothing in all creation that will prevent us from experiencing the love (or presence) of God. We also have a wonderful promise in James that as we seek God, we will find Him. Imagine that! We are even promised that as we seek to come closer to God, He will actually come closer to us! That’s because God wants to be in our presence more than we want to be in His.

The difficulty in these verses is that they do not tell us how we are supposed to come near to God. However, what at first appears to be a challenge is actually a blessing of great freedom. Drawing near to God is an act of the heart, not a specific outward activity. Jesus alludes to this great truth in the following verses:

John 4:23-24

Yet a time is coming and has now come when the true worshipers will worship the Father in spirit and truth, for they are the kind of worshipers the Father seeks. God is spirit, and his worshipers must worship in spirit and in truth.

Worshiping God in spirit is the inward cry of the heart expressing its love and longing for God. This inward cry may be expressed outwardly in many different ways. We have been given great freedom in deciding how we will choose to seek the presence of God.

Perhaps the simplest way to seek Him is to do it as you go about all of your daily activities. Even washing the dishes can be done as a cry of our hearts to experience the presence of God. This is because what matters is the state of our heart as we seek Him, not the particular activity.

Therefore, it is possible to seek after the presence of God by doing many of the Christian activities that we are used to doing – prayer, worship, Bible study, church attendance, etc. The difference is that these activities now have a new purpose – to encounter the living God and experience His presence. The exciting part is that we are promised that nothing will prevent it if our hearts are right.

Isaiah 57:15

For this is what the high and lofty One says-- he who lives forever, whose name is holy: "I live in a high and holy place, but also with him who is contrite and lowly in spirit, to revive the spirit of the lowly and to revive the heart of the contrite.

Isaiah 66:2b

This is the one I esteem: he who is humble and contrite in spirit, and trembles at my word.

Humility is the essential heart attitude to encounter the presence of God. In fact, God will oppose us if we are proud.

Although experiencing the presence of God is a heart endeavor, there are some practical steps we can take that may be beneficial to us.

1. Fast. When we fast, we can break down barriers that otherwise don’t seem to go away.

2. Spend time with others who experience God’s presence and ask them to pray for you.

3. Identify and renounce any false beliefs or theologies about the active working of God in your life.

4. Decide in your heart that knowing Jesus intimately is all that matters. Don’t allow your preconceptions to hinder you from seeking Him. Be willing to let Him offend you if He so chooses.

5. Read Scripture looking for God’s love in it, not guilt, shame and rebuke.

6. Decide to let God love you as you are if that’s what He wants to do.

7. Learn how to really worship Him and not just have a sing-along.

8. Make room in your life to seek the Lord. Build the time into your schedule, if needed.

9. Rest in the assurance that everything you do to seek the presence of God will succeed, not because of your efforts, but because of His love.

10. Learn to be a receiver from God and not a doer for God.

Over time, you will experience the presence of God more and more. You will also experience His love for you in greater measure. Whether you meet that love in dramatic encounters or experience it like a soft blanket resting on your shoulders, it will transform your life. Eventually, drawing near to God will mean nothing more than inclining your heart toward Him. No external efforts or formulas will be necessary any more.

The Gospel of Freedom

My newest book, The Gospel of Freedom, is finished! To whet your appetite, here is the introduction:

1 Corinthians 3:10-15

By the grace God has given me, I laid a foundation as an expert builder, and someone else is building on it. But each one should be careful how he builds. For no one can lay any foundation other than the one already laid, which is Jesus Christ.

If any man builds on this foundation using gold, silver, costly stones, wood, hay or straw, his 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 man's work. If what he has built survives, he will receive his reward. If it is burned up, he will suffer loss; he himself will be saved, but only as one escaping through the flames.

Living the Christian life is like constructing a building. The foundation is faith in Christ, but it is up to us what we build upon it. It is possible to build a Christian life that is a mansion adorned with gold, silver and costly stones. It is also possible to build a Biblically-based life that consists of scrap lumber with hay and straw filling in the cracks between the boards.

How can this be? How can I follow God with a sincere heart and still miss the joy and satisfaction Scripture says is mine? One reason is that a great many Christians and churches have lost sight of the core truths of Scripture and have highlighted peripheral issues in their place.

Matthew 23:23-24

“Woe to you, teachers of the law and Pharisees, you hypocrites! You give a tenth of your spices – mint, dill and cummin. But you have neglected the more important matters of the law – justice, mercy and faithfulness. You should have practiced the latter, without neglecting the former. You blind guides! You strain out a gnat but swallow a camel.”

As these verses in Matthew demonstrate, the Jewish people in Jesus’ day had the same problem. They had placed the lesser provisions of the Old Testament ahead of the more important ones. As a result, they focused on issues of little consequence while they ignored what really mattered.

We do the same thing today. Instead of mint, dill and cummin, however, we focus on church attendance, Scripture memory and acts of service, among others. When we focus on the lesser truths of the Bible instead of the greater truths, the result is a building where roofing materials are used as flooring and carpet is used to keep out the rain. In the end, we are left with a Christian life that is far less functional and satisfying than what God offers to us in the Bible.

And yet, because what we are doing is good, we fool ourselves into thinking that what we are doing is right. You see, Christian activities are not bad in themselves, but by usurping the top place in our lives, they have caused us to build shacks instead of mansions, personal prisons instead of cathedrals of praise.

We need to build (or rebuild) our lives so that the core truths of the Bible receive the most emphasis and the lesser truths are understood in light of the greater ones. What are these core truths? Freedom and love.

Like the framework of a house, freedom and love support and hold together all of the different aspects of our lives in Christ. Without these truths at the center of our lives, we end up living out a Gospel that is disfigured at best and harmful at worst.

In this book, we will examine the roles of freedom and love as the framework of the Christian life. New Christians may find many truths presented here for the first time. Older believers will find familiar truths aligned so that they breathe life into our Christian experience. Let’s begin by defining three key words: Gospel, love and freedom.

Gospel – The Gospel is the intervention by God in human affairs through the sacrifice of His Son, Jesus, and all of the benefits that come to us through that. It includes salvation and much more.

Love­ – Love is an emotion. It is a strong affection for another that results in self-sacrifice on their behalf. Freedom is an essential prerequisite to love because love can only exist where there is freedom. In an atmosphere of obligation, love gives way to fear and servitude. It is no longer love.

Freedom – Freedom is the absence of necessity, coercion, or constraint in choice or action. The sacrifice of Jesus on the cross has given us complete freedom from all external and internal constraints that would limit our choices and our behavior. Christian freedom is a place where we are able to live free from concern for our needs and without any external rules, coercion or constraints. It is a complete freedom. In fact, Christians should be the freest people in the world.

This freedom, however, is not a license for sin. Instead, God has given it to us so that we might grasp, even in a small way, His love for us. When we truly experience the love of the Father, our response is to love Him back by doing what pleases Him. In this life of love, freedom and holiness live in harmony and neither is limited by the other.

There is a dramatic difference between a life walking in freedom and love, and a life walking in constraint and obligation. Even though they both may result in the same behavior, one is a mansion built with gold, silver and costly stones. The other is a caricature of what God has for His children – a tumbledown shack made of wood, hay and straw.

This book is meant to be read slowly, so that the truth of our freedom may permeate our minds and transform our lives. As we enter into true freedom, we will also develop a greater love and passion for Jesus. As this love becomes our motivation for life, it will overflow in a life of freedom and holiness far greater than we could ever imagine. We will truly have life “to the full.” (John 10:10)

Copies of The Gospel of Freedom are available at periecopublishing.com and amazon.com

Living From a Place of Fullness

Ever wonder about when Jesus says we are supposed to love our enemies? (Matthew 5:44)

It sounds good in theory, but I don’t know that I could count very many people I know who have actually managed it. And when we do try to love our enemies (or even love those who hurt us just a little bit), it is usually a bitter love – the right action perhaps, but full of any emotion but love.

To reconcile this hypocrisy in our behavior with what we see Scripture, we intellectualize love so that it is reduced to only being a decision. “It doesn’t matter how you feel,” says the logic, “so long as you do what is right.” Somehow, we swallow such statements without even realizing how absurd they are.

Imagine a husband and wife who base their marriage on correct behavior without ever being concerned for the emotional state of their relationship. That’s silly! It is equally silly to imagine loving others in an antiseptic, unemotional way and still calling it love.

Here is what we have missed: Simple human love cannot accomplish what is only meant to be done by divine love.

You see, our love is limited, conditional and focused in the wrong direction. We try to love others out of our own emotional emptiness. The result is that we give love freely to those who love us back, but we struggle at loving the unlovable. The unlovable are unlovable because we rely on the way others treat us to give us the ability to love them. It is a needy, self-focused love.

The alternative that Jesus offers us, however, is to be able to pour out on others the same kind of love that He has for us. How? By experiencing His love for us first. Then, when we are filled with the love of the Father, we are able to love others regardless of how they treat us. Our love is no longer based on their behavior, but on the love of God that has been poured into us.

Therefore, the most import thing we can do as Christians each day is to allow ourselves to be loved by God – to set aside our guilt, shame, performance issues, rejection garbage and whatever else keeps us from simply letting God love us. As we do that, two amazing things will happen.

First, we will discover that god really does love us in a deeply passionate and emotional way.

Second, we will discover ourselves loving others freely and unconditionally because we have no need to be loved in return.

It is in this place of love that we enter into the abundant life Jesus has promised us.

Being Spiritually Dry

Have you ever felt spiritually dry even though you have been doing all the right things?

When that happens we often make one of two choices. We either blame our church because it no longer meets our needs ("There's too much milk and not enough meat") or we blame ourselves. In this second instance, we decide that we need to fix the problem - often by doing more - more Bible study, more prayer, more acts of service, etc.

Maybe, just maybe, there is no problem that needs to be fixed at all. Could it be that the God who made you and loves you has pulled Himself away just a bit to create in your heart a greater hunger for Him? Is it possible that instead of being chronically disappointed in you, He actually wants to be closer to you?

Could it be that spiritual dryness is an invitation for intimacy and not an opportunity for guilt and criticism?

I think so.

The Plan of the Enemy

What do you suppose Satan's chief strategy is?

Does he want everyone to ruin their lives with addictions?

Is he content to keep people from salvation through constant the distractions of life around us?

Or does he hope to see us waste ourselves in a messy stew of fear, pride and self-absorption?

Here's my vote: The chief aim of Satan is to keep us from falling in love with God. If he can do that, then we are never able to enter into the Christian life in its fullness and probably won't desire to become Christians in the first place.

How does Satan keep us from falling in love? By ruining our capacity to love. Addictions, abuse, emotional wounds, performance-based relationships, nearly everything harmful in life helps to destroy our ability to give and to receive love. Without that ability, we will never truly know God.

Emotional healing can sometimes be a long and painful process. And yet, as we become healthy emotionally, it is then that we can experience the great love that the Father has for us. Once we know that love, we enter into real life. We may not understand the things that happen to us, but because we know we are deeply loved, the need to understand no longer has the same power.

Being loved beats understanding every time.

What are we missing today?

On October 31, 1517, Martin Luther nailed his 95 Theses on the door of Castle Church in Wittenberg, Germany. At the core of his dispute with the Catholic Church was Luther's contention that salvation was by faith alone, not works of any kind. The declarations made by Luther caused such an uproar that they resulted in the Protestant Reformation.

There are two things I find troubling by this story:

1. From a few centuries after the apostles until the Reformation, one of the key foundations of Christianity, salvation by faith, was lost to much of the Church and not understood.

2. Many of the average church-goers in Luther's day sided vehemently with the Catholic Church. They had been taught that the truth was one thing for so long that it was difficult (if not impossible) for them to consider another alternative.

Why do these things trouble me?

I am troubled because I wonder how many of the things I believe so strongly will be later revealed as untrue. I am afraid that it will probably be quite a few.

Why do I say that?

Because there are too many Bible verses that don't fit in my life yet. For example:

- I still don't get everything I ask the Father for (John 16:23)
- I'm not doing greater works than Jesus did (John 14:12)
- My life is not yet littered with the evidence of the power of God (Mark 16:20; 1 Corinthians 4:19-20)

This lack in my life is a clear message that things are not right. I (and most of the Church) am not walking in the fullness of what it means to be a Christian.

Now, we can come up with all kinds of theologies that can explain away verses such as this. But I am left wondering if, like salvation by faith, we are missing the truth and developing false theologies to justify our shortcoming. Then, our lack of faith validates the false theology we are clinging to.

Maybe it is time to stop coming up with ways to justify our lack and to begin to seek after everything we are promised. I'm willing. Are you?

Two Random Thoughts on Emotions

Just because they're in my head . . .

Thought #1

The secret to emotional survival is to become soft-hearted, not hard hearted. Avoiding pain keeps it around. Experiencing it lets it go.

Thought #2 - from a friend

The enemy wants to hang as much emotional pain as he can on the door to your freedom.

Faith and Unbelief

In general, we think of faith and unbelief as being two separate things. What we miss, though is that there are a couple of different types of unbelief.

The first type is ignorant unbelief. In this situation, we don't believe something because we don't know that we could believe it. For example, before we hear the Gospel, we are ignorant unbelievers.

At some point, though, we may discover our lack of faith. Then, we enter a place of conscious unbelief. Now we know what we do not believe. Our lack of faith may be a purposeful rejection or a simple inability to believe. For example, some people do not become Christians because they reject it while others cannot bring themselves to believe the message.

The most dangerous type of unbelief, though, is intellectual acceptance. In this situation, we know about something and we agree with it intellectually. But the fact is that we do not have faith. We have an intellectual appreciation combined with wishful thinking. It is a soul-generated faith. This type of unbelief is so dangerous because we can deceive ourselves into thinking we actually believe and because it is so prevalent in the Church today.

We must leave behind this false faith and enter into the faith of Jesus. This is a faith of which He alone is the Author. He deposits this faith in our hearts and we truly believe. It is not a faith we have to muster up.

Many of our problems in the Church today are because we lack real faith. We masquerade around in intellectual acceptance and do not really believe the truths we hear. If we did believe them, things would not look the way they do.

Walking with God Honestly

Jesus said that He is the way, the truth and the life (John 14:6).

One of the implications of this verse is that, because He is truth, we will experience the presence of God on a consistent basis only as we live in truth. In this case, truth means far more than simple honesty. It speaks to being genuine and truly yourself. This is difficult to do in a world that expects each of us to be and to behave certain ways. In addition, we live in a church culture that places its own burdens of performance on us.

In response to these pressures, and out of a desire to be a good Christian, we learn early on how to behave properly - often at the cost of being ourselves. We no longer feel safe in church being ourselves, so we hide ourselves and put on a show of acceptability to those around us.

I have decided that one of the most precious gifts I have in my life are the people who are safe enough that I am able to be myself with them. They help reconcile me to myself and draw me closer to God. I wonder what would happen if we decided to leave behind the dysfunctional rules of how we ought to behave and decided to be genuine, to walk in truth.

Maybe we would find that sense of community and belonging that we long for.

Maybe we would come to terms with our struggles instead of hiding from them.

Maybe we would find God in a deeper way.

Lessons of the Trinity

I have been spending some time in the past few weeks pondering the Trinity.

From all eternity, there has been one God in three persons, the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit. These three are distinct, yet inseparable.

What does that have to do with life today? Here are a few thoughts:

1. Because the Trinity has existed since the beginning, this means that the very nature of God is one of relationship. Before He did anything, the members of the Trinity were in relationship with each other. Relationship existed before task. It is at the very core of the nature of God.

2. The Trinity functions based on a relationship of love. In other words, the Son does not obey the Father because the Father has a higher place in the hierarchy. The Son obeys the Father because the Son loves the Father and the Father loves the Son.

3. It is our calling to enter into this same relationship of love. The Lord is the majestic, awesome God of all creation, before Whom we are nothing at all. He could rightfully demand our service and obedience. Yet, He lays all that aside and seeks a people who will:

- follow and obey Him purely out of love for Him and for no other reason.
- lay aside all tasks as secondary and take the more difficult and perilous journey of intimacy with the Holy One.

These are people who have fallen so deeply in love with the Lord that they have abandoned all else to have Him.

The Trinity lives continually in a relationship of love and intimacy. When Jesus says to abide in Him and He in us, He is calling us to dare to seek that same level of communion that the Father, Son and Holy Spirit enjoy with one another. It is a much more difficult journey than mere outward obedience, but it is in this journey of the heart that we truly find God. And when we do, nothing else matters anymore.

Knowing the Love of God

All we really need is to know is how deeply loved we are by God.

If we really experienced being profoundly loved by God, think of all the issues in life that would become unimportant.

1. I would no longer have to try and find my significance in other things. I would be significant already.

2. The meaning of my life might still be a question, but it would not carry very much power to it because I would have nothing to prove.

3. I would be able to love others out of security and not insecurity.

4. Th center of who I am would be a place of peace and not storms.

5. Fears and worries would no longer have a foothold because I would know that God will take care of me.

6. Sin in my life might discourage, but no longer devastate.

7. In fact, much of the reason I sin - to find comfort & self-protection - would already be met and sin would not have such power over me.

8. I would be free to be who I really am because rejection by others, while painful, would no longer threaten the core of who I am.

9. I would be able to take more and greater risks, because the outcome would not threaten my sense of acceptance by God.

10. I could love God and others without the selfish motive of needing to be loved. My love would be pure.

11. I would be able to live out of my real identity as a son/daughter of the Father.

Stages of Learning and the Presence of God

I have have been having some fun thinking of being in the presence of God in terms of the four stages of learning. The four stages of learning may be presented as a quadrant like this:







We start out as an unconscious incompetent. We don't experience the presence of God and we don't even know that such a thing is possible.


In the next stage, we learn that it is possible to walk in the presence of God, but we also realize that we are not experiencing His presence. We are now a conscious incompetent.

As we seek to walk in the presence of God, we become conscious competents. We experience His presence, but it takes concentration and effort on our part.

At some point, though, being in the presence of God becomes second nature to us. We no longer have to think about it. We are now unconscious competents. In the Apostle John's choice of words, we are now abiding in Christ.

Using this framework, here are a couple of thoughts that may be helpful:

1. Learning to walk in God's presence is a natural process that includes a lot of trial and error, especially in the transition from being a conscious incompetent to a conscious competent. God designed it that way, just as He designed how we learn to walk. Therefore, there is no need to get upset at ourselves as we struggle. The struggle is an essential part of the process. And whether we realize it or not, we are learning something valuable each time we try.

2. The enemy would like to discourage us or cause us to feel condemned by our failures. In truth, learning to walk in God's presence is a process and not an event. Therefore, there is no guilt or shame in failure, just as a child learning to walk has not guilt when he or she falls.

3. The conscious competent stage is characterized by work. In that stage, staying in God's presence is a matter of doing. In the unconscious competent stage, however, doing falls away and we enter into the act of being in the presence of God. In effect, learning to walk in God's presence starts out with our focus on ourselves and our efforts, and it ends when the focus shifts to God's love and His keeping us in His presence.

4. Most writings about experiencing the presence of God are written without a sense of growth in mind. As a result, we may feel like our efforts are futile if they don't result in mountain top experiences that we read about. In fact, those efforts are all very valuable because they take us along the path into even deeper places in the presence of God. It just takes time and perseverance.

5. It seems that many who want to walk in the presence of God get discouraged and quit when the going gets hard. They read about how easy it is to be in God's presence and decide that it must not be for them. When we realize that each stage experiences the presence of God differently and that the struggles we face today will bring us to a point of breakthrough, then there is good reason to keep pressing in.

Christianity with Power

In Acts 1:8, Jesus tells the disciples that they would be given power for ministry. It reads:

But you will receive power when the Holy Spirit comes on you; and you will be my witnesses in Jerusalem, and in all Judea and Samaria, and to the ends of the earth.

Here are a few thoughts on this verse:

1. The verse is not referring to merely receiving the Holy Spirit. That happened to the disciples earlier (John 20:21-22).

2. This empowering was so important that Jesus told the disciples to do nothing until they received it (Acts 1:4).

3. This verse was fulfilled in Acts 2 at Pentecost and it involved much more than speaking in tongues. After Pentecost, we see in the disciples a new boldness, unity, and spiritual power. There is also a remarkable lack of selfish ambition.

It seems to me that we in America lack spiritual power. Only a small percentage of what is accomplished by most churches is the unmistakable work of God. Much of what we do is based on human efforts and abilities instead. What will it take for us to finally enter into power? Here are a few ideas:

- We need to admit that the way we function now is powerless. It is time to quit pretending that our candles are bonfires and confess our poverty before God.

- Like the disciples, we must wait on God, seek after Him, and receive power from Him.

- I do not think that receiving God’s power is done merely “by faith” as we often think of that phrase. Receiving things by faith is often an excuse for being lazy. Instead, there has to be an intentional pressing in that costs us something – an ongoing asking, seeking and knocking. That is faith at work in a way that allows us to receive.

The American Church is losing ground with each passing year. And sadly, rather than humbling ourselves and seeking God, we are caught up in all kinds of human efforts to make things better. The only solution that will work, however, is a genuine move of God in power.

I think that when this happens, God will be seeking out people who are willing to abandon themselves and their reputations and their security to follow Him. God will not be looking for the talented or the leaders to further His purposes. He will be looking for people like Mary in Nazareth – people who have no other qualification except that they are willing.

Am I willing? Are you?

Worthless Christian Activities

1 Corinthians 3:10-15 (NIV)

By the grace God has given me, I laid a foundation as an expert builder, and someone else is building on it. But each one should be careful how he builds. For no one can lay any foundation other than the one already laid, which is Jesus Christ. If any man builds on this foundation using gold, silver, costly stones, wood, hay or straw, his 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 man's work. If what he has built survives, he will receive his reward. If it is burned up, he will suffer loss; he himself will be saved, but only as one escaping through the flames.

Yikes! This passage gives us a very strong warning that it is possible to do all kinds of Christian things and then discover that God considers all of our work to be pretty worthless. Can you imagine serving the Lord for years and discovering that He thought all that you did was a waste of time? Sadly, I think this is true for most Christians and Christian ministries. I know that is the case for me.

You see, although Paul warns us about worthless activities (wood, hay and straw), he does not tell us what God's standard is for evaluating our work. What makes what we do wood as opposed to gold? The answer is found in the book of John.

John 15:1-5 (NIV)

"I am the true vine, and my Father is the gardener. He cuts off every branch in me that bears no fruit, while every branch that does bear fruit he prunes so that it will be even more fruitful. You are already clean because of the word I have spoken to you. Remain in me, and I will remain in you. No branch can bear fruit by itself; it must remain in the vine. Neither can you bear fruit unless you remain in me. I am the vine; you are the branches. If a man remains in me and I in him, he will bear much fruit; apart from me you can do nothing."

Here at the end of these verses, Jesus says that if we are not abiding in Him, we can do nothing. What does that mean?

To start with, abiding in Christ is not simply being a Christian. It is living in a love relationship with the Lord in which we have an active, on-going communion with Him. We are able to sense what the Holy Spirit is saying and we respond in loving obedience to His leading.

Secondly, when Jesus says we can do nothing, what He is telling us is that apart from abiding in Him, nothing we do matters to Him. We can do plenty of things apart from Christ, good and bad, so the saying that we can do nothing must apply to the value of those works.

So, here in John, Jesus says that if the things we do are not birthed out of an on-going love relationship with Him, they are worthless in His eyes.

Sadly, I think much of my Christian life has been wood, hay and straw. I was taught how to be a performer for God, not a lover of God. It also seems to me that most American Christians fall into that same category - and most churches and ministries as well. We have programs and activities and we are very, very busy. But in the process, we, like the church in Ephesus (Revelation 2:1-5), have lost our first love. As a result, even if God uses our efforts, they amount to very little in His eyes. Our works, because they are not grounded in a genuine relationship with God, are wood, hay and straw, if even that.

So, if you have a very successful ministry, but do not have a deep love-walk with Jesus, do not deceive yourself that God is pleased. He is using your efforts, but they are wood, hay and straw. Likewise, if all you do is mop floors for a living, but your work springs out of a deep love for your Savior, then there is precious gold every time your mop slides across the floor.

What will is take for us to quit doing all kinds of stuff and learn instead how to be lovers? At what point will we finally lay aside our wood, hay and straw so that we can pick up the gold, silver and costly stones that are found in loving God?

Finding Ourselves

A few decades ago, it became popular for people to step back from life and take time to find themselves. They would leave college or work and venture out into the world to discover who they were. Many became temporary hippies. Others made it their vocation.

What these people had right was that they understood how the world around them had defined them and they wanted to find a place of deeper meaning. They did not want to be known as an accountant or as so-and-so's child. They wanted to discover who they were apart from those things.

What they had wrong was the notion that humans can define themselves apart from the world around them. We all get our identities either by what we do or who we are in relationship with. Men tend to focus on the task-based identity, i.e. "I am a writer." Women, on the other hand, lean a bit more towards the relational identity, i.e. "I am Kevin's wife." In either case, we cannot separate who we are from the world of tasks and relationships we live in. That's just how it is. The idea of the autonomous identity is a false one.

The problem, however, is that when we choose to find our identity in the tasks and relationships of a fallen world, we will end up with a fallen identity. The mirror we are looking in is too badly damaged to give us a true picture of ourselves.

The only way to discover our true self is to draw our identity from the One Who made us. It is as we understand who we are in relation to God that we see our real identity. Therefore, the more we are able to see God for who He really is, the more we are able to see ourselves for who we really are.

And, as we look upon the cross that Jesus died on, we discover that we are the well-loved children of an incredibly loving Father. We can then step into an eternal identity that is better than any earthly identity we could ever find.

Walking by Faith

There comes a point in our Christian growth when God calls us to walk by faith. Walking by faith has two key components - having faith and surrendering. This means that our walk by faith may have a couple of different stages to it (Note: there is no set path from stage to stage, however).

Baby Stage (Low Faith, Low Surrender) - In this baby stage, we do not really trust God, nor have we surrendered ourselves to Him in a significant way. We are walking by faith in name only. This is the typical starting point for most of us. The key indicators of being in this stage is that our life matters a great deal to us and we do not think God can or will take care of us.

There is a second group in this category of low faith and low surrender, but they are not babies in the faith at all. This group consists of people who have such a negative emotional picture of themselves and the Lord that they cannot trust Him or surrender themselves to Him in a significant way. Typically, they are well aware of their struggles and really want things to be different. However, they are in the ICU Stage (Low Faith, Low Surrender) where much healing needs to happen before they can walk by faith.

Self-Sufficient Stage (High Faith, Low Surrender) - When we believe in the goodness of God, but we are not yet ready to lay down our self-will to Him, we are in the self-sufficient stage. It is possible for us to have been Christians for a long time and to be well-regarded by others, and yet still be in this stage. This is especially true if we are very talented or have a lot of worldly wisdom. Because our hearts are so deceitful, it is also possible to live in this stage and not even be aware of it. The key indicators are that we still consider our lives to be important and we still think too highly of ourselves. It is a place of great, albeit subtle, pride.

Wounded Stage (Low Faith, High Surrender) - Frequently, people who have been wounded in the past are willing to surrender themselves to the Lord, but do not have any expectation of receiving anything good from Him. They are willing to pay the cost to follow Jesus, but they walk by faith in not being blessed instead of in being blessed. Because they simply cannot face the disappointment of being let down once again, it is easier to just not expect anything. The key indicators of someone in this stage are unresolved abuse, rejection and authority issues.

Faithful Stage (High Faith, High Surrender) - The person in this stage has embraced the paradox of losing their life to gain it. He or she places no importance on their life anymore - they do not love it even to death. They exist only to serve the Lord. At the same time, this person has discovered the tremendous love that the Father has for them. As a result, they gladly trust Him and have no fear of what may happen.

Notice this, though, what may happen may not be pleasant. The person in the faithful stage is no longer personally invested in how their life turns out. Their life is fully surrendered to God and they have released any claim they may have had on what God does with it. Instead, their satisfaction and success in life is found in the love of the Father - and this allows them to have great faith that whatever the Father does with them is good.

Also keep in mind that the stages presented here are not distinct categories. There are gradients to faith and surrender. Rarely will we find ourselves exactly in one category or another. However, we can begin to see what our dominant tendencies are and ask the Lord to work specifically on those areas so that we can mature in our walk with Him.

Conclusion - The way we grow in being able to walk by faith is simple: The more we know the Father and His love for us, the better we can surrender, the more faith we can have, and the more healing we will experience. So, we don't exert ourselves to generate more faith or greater surrender by ourselves. Instead, we make it our goal to press in to know the Father. As we do that, all the rest gets taken care of.

Freedom in Christ - Free to be Ourselves

I have been spending my time lately contemplating freedom. Here are a few thoughts:

1. We limit our own freedom: Although most of us say we want to be genuine with others, we are often afraid of what others may think. So, rather than be genuine, we perform, presenting to others who we think they want us to be, not who we are.

This masquerade has a couple of unintended consequences. First, we begin to think that we also need to perform for God. We act differently at church than we do at home. We become dishonest in prayer - telling God what we think He wants to hear, not what we actually think or feel. In doing so, we lose the opportunity for a real relationship with God. It all becomes a dry act of religion with no life in it.

Another unintended consequence is that as we get better and better at performing for others, we lose sight of who we are. We begin to identify ourselves with the persona we present to others more than the person that we really are. We become lost. As a result, it becomes increasingly impossible for us to have meaningful relationships with others since who we really are is never a part of the relationship.

2. We limit others freedom. We all have a natural tendency to try to define a person in a particular way. When we make our definition of someone rigid and inflexible, our relationship with them will be limiting on who they are and uncomfortable for them. Probably the best example of this is when we are around family members who have not seen us in a while. When we are together, it feels like they are squeezing us back into who we used to be instead of letting us be who we have become. We notice the discomfort when it is we who are being squeezed. Still, we continue to squeeze others because it would become uncomfortable to us if we were to actually give them the freedom to change.

3. Freedom is found in Christ. The best way to allow ourselves to be who we really are is in a genuine relationship with Jesus. When we know the love of God in a deep and personal way, then our deepest needs for security & belonging are met. Then, we are able to risk being ourselves from a position of strength instead of having to fiercely guard against rejection.

In addition, when we cry out to God to know Him more, He begins to work in us the healing we need to be who we really are. You see, He wants a relationship with us and not any persona we put on. So, seeking intimacy with God calls forth from within us our genuine selves and puts us in a place of emotional security that gives us the courage to live genuinely with others - and to let them be genuine with us. This process is not always as easy or pleasant as it may sound.

Still, perhaps today, Jesus is calling out to us. If you are like me, your genuine self has spent too much time buried away. And now, the Savior is walking up to the tomb, calling out to the Lazarus in each of us, "Come forth!"

4. Freedom is Attractive. Of course, what I have written here is just one aspect of the freedom God gives us. There is much, much more. However, in a world that is hungry for real people, the freedom to be ourselves is perhaps even more appealing to them than the message of salvation. We, as lovers of Jesus who live life genuinely, will naturally call forth to the many Lazarus's we meet. Our own honesty will cry out to them to come forth, too.

Impossible Callings

There are times when the Lord calls us to do something that is impossible. It may be an act of forgiveness or a task that is outside of our abilities or any one of a number of things. In our performance Christianity, we usually think that every task God reveals is one that we need to do, even the impossible ones.

God's plan in those moments, though, may not be to make us do the task at all. More often than not, God's purpose is to expose our self-sufficiency and call us to a deeper level of trust in Him.

The next time you are confronted with something you can't do, don't beat yourself up over your failing or get discouraged at the task demanded of you. Instead, quiet yourself like a little child on its Father's lap and confess your smallness before Him. The Lord loves it when we trust Him and make room for Him to work.