Close your eyes

This morning in my reading through the One Year Bible, this one verse stuck out to me.

2 Corinthians 5:7 says "We live by faith, not by sight."

Wow, so much packed into that little sentence. For me this is a constant tension in my life. Really up until a few years ago almost all of my decisions and my actions were based on what I could see. In other words, if I didn't know how it was going to work out, I probably wasn't going to do it. But then there was church planting. Since I began this process I've learned about moving and acting in the midst of uncertainty. From moving to surviving financially to leading down a path I've never been - all of it has been by faith. And God has proven himself so faithful during this time. He has provided for us when we didn't know how it would happen. He has blessed us for taking steps of faith where we didn't have clarity.

But the tension for me remains. Almost every day as a pastor I'm faced with what I can see - the very real circumstances of people's lives. There are marriages that are struggling, people healing through an abusive past, surgeries, and all kinds of hurt and pain. I'm faced with statistics, with attendance numbers, and with budgets. I'm faced with a growing church and growing kids ministry that doesn't have the volunteers to keep up. There are facts and figures and dates and schedules that start to dominate my thinking.

It would be very easy for me to allow what I can see to consume me, to overwhelm me, and to ultimately paralyze me. But we can't live that way. We won't live that way. We, as the people of God, we live by faith not by sight. The unseen drives us and compels us to keep going and to keep believing a different future is possible even when all that we can see now tells a different story.

Don't let your sight overcome your vision.

Sometimes I think you and I would do better if we closed our eyes every now and then. Because what we can see often keeps us from taking steps of faith. We lose hope. We lose our vision.

Your marriage doesn't have to be this way. Your finances can turn around. You can heal through this struggle. There is hope for you. When we stop living by sight and start living by faith our vision outgrows our sight. We start to believe things that right now seem impossible.

So whatever is holding you back today from doing what you know God has called you to do - close your eyes to it. Let the vision in your heart override what can be seen, and may your faith drive you forward into the uncertainty of the future.

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Childlike Faith

This Sunday at Story Church we kick off a brand new series called "Childlike Faith". It's a series I've been thinking through in my head for three or four months now and I'm really excited about it.

In Luke 18:16-17 Jesus says this:

Let the little children come to me, and do not hinder them, for the kingdom of God belongs to such as these. I tell you the truth, anyone who will not receive the kingdom of God like a little child will never enter it.

So here's a question for you - what do you think Jesus meant by that? What does it mean to receive the kingdom of God like a child? What are the child like qualities that you think Jesus wants us to mimic?

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One

One year ago today, I was on I-40 somewhere in the middle of the United States. I had just left the only place I'd ever called home in Yucaipa, CA. I had left the only ministry I'd ever known. I left my extended family, my friends, my security, my paycheck, much of my stuff. Ahead of me there were many more miles on my way to Durham, NC. There was also a new life waiting for me, a new adventure, a new ministry, new friends, new neighbors, new purpose, new challenges. As I sat with the Story Church launch team on Saturday night in my house, I was blown away by all that has happened over the last year. What began as a vision God gave me and my wife to plant a life-giving church is now a vision that several people share. When we moved here we didn't know anyone. Today we have a team. We didn't know where this church would be - today we have a location. We didn't know if the money would come in - we've never gone hungry.

There have been days over the past year where I have wondered what it would have been like if I stayed in CA. Some days I've been lonely and longed for the deep friendships I left behind. Other times I thought about how nice it was to never worry about whether or not money would show up in the mailbox to pay the bills that were due this week. But then I look at the people on our team and I am amazed. I am amazed that a group of people who didn't know each other a year ago now gather every week to dream together about a church that will transform lives and demonstrate the resurrected Jesus in this community. I'm amazed that God has gone before us and prepared the way.

I always compare that longing feeling, that looking back at the way things were, to the Israelites who were rescued from Egypt. In the Scriptures we learn of this people who were slaves in Egypt. God rescued them out of Egypt and led them to the "Promised Land". But they didn't just go straight there. They first went out into the wilderness. And the wilderness lasted a long time. And it was difficult. And it didn't take long for them to start looking back over their shoulders and longing for Egypt. They longed for the place where they were slaves in forced labor, a people with no identity, no land for themselves, and no hope. It seems strange from our perspective, but I don't think it's that strange really. I think it's natural. I think we long for the things that we know already - even if they aren't ideal. Because going out into the wilderness is scary. It's difficult.

But on the other side, there's a promised land. There's blessing. There's hope.

I don't know what that looks like for you. But I hope that you have the courage to keep looking ahead. Keep following the vision God has given you. There's something so much better just ahead.

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Trust me

I was reading a very familiar proverb today when something occurred to me that I never noticed before. It comes from Proverbs 3:5-6 in the Old Testament of the Bible. It says this:

"Trust in the Lord with all your heart, and lean not on your own understanding. In all your ways, acknowledge him and he will make your paths straight."

You see, I've always pictured trust as being one of things we do when, based upon the facts at hand, we make an intellectual decision to go along with the situation at hand. We decide to trust, and in doing so, we trust with our heads. But today I noticed something different. This particular verse says to trust "with all [our] heart." Our hearts are the center of our will. It's the place where we sit on the throne. It's definitely an area of decision making, but it's not an intellectual decision per se. It's a decision to place our will in submission to someone or something else. We "trust" when we submit our will. Solomon (the writer of Proverbs) places this trust in direct contrast to "our own understanding." He knows that all too often we want to fall back on our own wisdom, our own experience, our own understanding. Trust is difficult. Trust is required when we don't have all the answers, when things don't make sense, or when things are outside of our control.

The other thing I find interesting here is this: Solomon is said to be the wisest man who ever lived. And yet Solomon is saying that we shouldn't lean on our own understanding. If anyone could have done some leaning on their own wisdom you would think it would be Solomon. Which basically tells me, I'm in trouble if I think I can do life on my own.

I love the promise here that if we trust God, and acknowledge Him in all our ways, he will make our paths straight. He'll clear the road. He'll take care of us. I've experienced that so many times. The times of biggest stress in my life are when I look around and realize that I'm depending on myself instead of Him.

How about you? What do you think of trust coming from the heart? What do you think that looks like?

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Visioneering

I'm reading Andy Stanley's great book Visioneering right now and it is really hitting me at just the right time. As we get further along in this church planting adventure, and closer to our launch, I feel more and more inadequate and less and less prepared. I just thought I'd post a few of my favorite nuggets from the first few chapters so far and let you think about them.

"Vision is always accompanied by strong emotion. And the clearer the vision, the stronger the emotion" (10).

"God ordained visions are always too big for us to handle" (42).

"You are not responsible for figuring out how to pull off God's vision for your life. You are responsible to do what you know to do, what you can do. And then you must wait" (56-57).

"If it is just a good idea, you have to make it happen. When God gives you a vision, there's a sense in which you stand back and watch it happen" (57).

"I think it is safe to assume that most Christians are not attempting anything that requires God's intervention" (71).

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Faith

I was reading from Mark 6 this morning. Jesus is in his hometown and people are questioning his credentials and his abilities. He's the guy they've all known their whole lives. He grew up with many of them, they had hired him to do carpentry. And now suddenly he's the Messiah? I guess I can't say I blame them for their comments and their questions. It would be a little tough to wrap your mind around. But aside from that, there's a really interesting thing that Mark tells us at the end of these few verses. This is what he tells us:

"He could not do any miracles there, except lay his hands on a few sick people and heal them. He was amazed at their lack of faith."

A couple of things stand out to me about this. First of all, there is a direct link between the amount of faith people have, and God's ability (is that the right word?) to do miraculous things. Mark tells us "He could not do any miracles there...." And apparently it was their lack of faith that made it impossible for these things to happen. That all tells me that if I want God to do amazing things in and through me, I need more faith. My faith is weak. And I need to grow in that regard.

Secondly though, look at what Jesus did do. It says that he couldn't do any miracles there, "except lay his hands on a few sick people and heal them." So "all" he could do was heal people? I don't know about you, but I think that healing people would be pretty unbelievable! And yet, for Jesus, he's disappointed because he clearly wanted to do more than that. Do you ever get the feeling that maybe we think and dream too small with God? I mean, sometimes I pray for God to do things like heal someone from a sickness. But how often to I pray that God will cure blindness, take away cancer, make the lame walk? What if what we ask for, and what our "faith" hopes for is absolutely nothing compared to what God really wants to do? It's a crazy thought isn't it? If God were going to decide what to do today based on your faith, what would we see happen? I know that my answer to that question is embarrassing. Pray with me that God will increase our faith.

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Formulaic Faith

This summer I read Donald Miller's book Searching for God Knows What. It's really an amazing book. It's been one of those books that has stayed with me for quite a while since I've read it, partly because of my own thoughts, but also partly because some of the high school students in our group have been reading it and talking about it with me. As I read it, I began thinking about doing a teaching series on some of the ideas that Miller addresses. So anyway, this week I started that series.

We talked this week about the problem of understanding faith as some kind of formula or recipe, where when we do this, God does that. I went on a Christian book web site this week and typed into the search engine the words "How to". The results were crazy! There were hundreds of books that had these words in their title. Why is it that we've taken this rich, mysterious, deep faith that we have and made it into a three-step process? Why do we want so badly to have a simple formula to follow? I think it comes down to an issue of control. When we follow a formula or a recipe, we know exactly what we are doing, and we know exactly the outcome to expect. The thing about biblical faith is that it tends to be messy, never the same twice, and often ends up with people doing crazy things. I think that scares us. That sounds like there's no control.

I think it also has a lot to do with our consumerist society. We are used to having a problem, a need, a desire, and being able to go out and find exactly what we want to fill that need or desire. I kind of think of it as infomercial faith. Every infomercial has the same basic format no matter what they are selling. There's always the guy who is way too excited about the product. There's also the guy who asks the obvious questions and is apparently really slow because he doesn't understand until it's been described three or four times. You know the guy - "Wait a minute, are you telling me....?" But they all promise the same basic things - it's easy to use, great results = happier life, and at very little cost to you. It doesn't matter if it's an ab machine, a cheese grater, a blender, a vacuum, or a machine that does all of those things, the promises are the same. And for some reason, I think that many of us have seen the effectiveness of this message and taken a God that's hard to understand, and a faith that often leaves us with more questions than answers, and tried to package it in a similar fashion. It's easy to use, it will make your life better, and at very little cost to you. Is that really the gospel of Jesus?

Call me crazy, but that kind of simple, packaged, formulaic, recipe-like faith just doesn't interest me. I don't believe there is a "how-to" book we can follow that tells us what faith is like because I believe that faith is about a relationship with a person, not a formula. Relationships are dynamic, changing, growing, they ebb and flow, they feel close at times, further at other times, and there's no "how-to" in the world that can teach you how to navigate that. Think about the relationships you have, whether its a friend, a spouse, a father or mother, a son or daughter. If I followed a book about "How to be married" and simply followed the steps outlined in said book, I think I might be looking for a new wife in no time at all. Love isn't formulaic. There's not a three-step process to being in love. My wife doesn't want me to follow a list of bullet points in my love for her. She wants my heart. In that way, Miller says faith is a lot more like falling in love than it is following a formula.

But some have argued that faith is a sort of formula. Scripture says things like "If we confess with our mouth that Jesus is Lord and believe in our heart that God raised him from the dead, we will be saved" (Romans 10:9-10). Isn't that a formula? Confess this, believe this, and you will be saved. I guess I would just argue that saying something out loud, simply going through the motions, the right mechanism, doesn't save us. Confessing that Jesus is Lord is a relational statement. We are declaring the fact that He is our Master, He is the one we follow, and not ourselves. The title Lord implies a relationship. There's not really any way around that as far as I can see. God is constantly saying in the Old Testament, "I don't want your sacrifices, I want your heart." Jesus condemns the Pharisees with the same kind of fervor - telling them how incredible it is that they go through all the law and seek to follow it down to the smallest part, and yet they have missed the whole point of the law! They have no relationship with God, he doesn't have their hearts. I fully believe that God is less concerned (not unconcerned, just less concerned) with what we believe, and even what we do, than he is about having our hearts.

One of the real problems in the church that I think we're beginning to see a bit of resistance to in the Emerging Church movement is that we have really stressed knowing and doing the right things, and not so much of having a heart that is being transformed by a relationship with Jesus. We've stressed an intellectual faith over a relational faith. We've told people that faith is easy - just follow these steps. We've told them it will make their life better - happier, wealthier, healthier. We've even failed to tell them the cost - it might cost family, friends, possessions. Faith isn't simple. It isn't a formula. It can't be put into a "How-to" book. It's a constant, everyday, growing and changing, dynamic, exciting relationship with the living God. I'll take that kind of faith any day over a formula. If I can put God into a chart or graph and understand all the dynamics of the Scriptures and easily discern his will - then he must not be that great of a God. I'm reminded of Isaiah who says "Your ways are not my ways, nor your thoughts my thoughts."

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