What's In It For Me?

The last two posts (not counting yesterday’s coffee break) have been heavy. I think that’s partly why I needed a break. All that business about dying to yourself—it’s kind of depressing, at least until you get past it to the peace part. So today I thought I’d climb up on a hill and look over all the humps in the road ahead and try to get a glimpse of the end of renewal. Yes, I know renewal won’t end in this life, but I need to know that things will get better, or at least that trudging along after renewal has its perks along the way.

I am a selfish person. I never do anything unless there’s SOMETHING in it for me. Even praying for the salvation of other people has a selfish motive. I love the rush I get when someone comes to know Jesus. It feels so good.

I’ve tried to fix this problem of selfishness, but so far I haven’t been able to. I’m sixty-two years old and I figure if it were fixable I’d have found the solution by now, so I’m about ready to give up. But this morning I woke up with a new, intriguing thought. Maybe selfishness is not always a bad thing. Maybe it comes from a good place and only becomes bad when it’s turned back on itself.

Maybe God wants to satisfy our “selfish” desires. I can’t think of anything He’s ever asked us to do that doesn’t have its reward. He says if we lose our lives we will find them, as if finding our lives is a great thing that He wants us to do. Maybe He wants joy for us more than we want it for ourselves. Maybe there is a good selfishness, and this deep longing in the pit of my soul is a part of that.

Remember how much God loved Jacob? One of the things He seemed to love was the grasping character of this funny little man. Jacob wanted something badly and he went after it. He went after all the wrong things in all the wrong ways, but underneath God may have seen a huge selfishness that pleased Him. Jacob’s grasping was like the cry of a hungry lamb for its mother’s milk, and in the end he took hold of God and would not let go until he’d gotten his selfish desire—God’s blessing.

I sense God’s great joy in seeing us grasp after Him. It’s like the joy on my son-in-law’s face as he wrestles on the floor with his little boy. He’s loving the closeness. The intimacy. The excuse for hugging.

I see that joy on God’s face as I write these words and it brings tears to my eyes. This is what’s in it for me.

Why do we have to experience the longing? Why can’t we just skip right over to the joy? I guess it’s because of the Fall. When Adam and Eve sinned, they gave our joy to the Devil and we’ve spent the last four or six thousand years struggling to get it back. In the end, Jesus died to get it back for us, because He loves us, and the joy is something He meant for us to have all along.

Sigh. That was a nice glimpse of the end of renewal. I think I’ll trudge back down the hill now and get on with the journey. Next post we'll continue the gruelling process, talking about the great chasm that often opens up between rededication and the actual work of putting it into practice.

P.S. My friend Camille http://www.camillecannon.blogspot.com/ posted a fun message yesterday, talking about a word contest from the Washington Post. You take any word and add or change one letter and give it a new definition. I created a new term, based on my experience yesterday. I told her I was blogged down in my writing. Cute, eh? Check out the article and try a word yourself. She’d love to have new vocabulary show up in her “comments.”

A Note to Those of You Who are Following this Blog Post Series

Whew! This blogging business has plunked me down onto a steep learning curve. The first thing I’ve discovered is that it takes much time, sweat and prayer to post every day. Too much. I already feel pressured to “produce” by my own self-imposed schedule of daily posting, and the pressure is going to tempt me to splash thoughtless (and prayer-less) drivel all over the place if I try to keep up with that rigorous a schedule.

I don’t want to do that. I’m humbled to think that anyone is reading this. I know how busy you are. I’m determined to make it worth your while. So, here’s the plan: I will only post when I’m ready to pass on something I think will be valuable to you.

I sent some of you an e-mail with instructions on how to know (without looking) when there’s a new post. I told you to go to the orange “feed” icon at the top of the blog and sign up for it—that it would e-mail you when there’s something new. That bit of information was thoughtless drivel. It doesn’t work. I didn’t know what I was talking about when I sent it. I’ve come up with a better idea (which is not saying much, I know) so if you do want to follow the blog, try this:

Go to Feedblitz.com on the internet. Scroll down and click on the green box on the left that says “Subscribe to Anything!” Type “something-about-the-joy.blogspot.com” in the box (or you can copy and paste it from this site if you want). Then follow the instructions to complete the subscription.

Don’t let the word, “account” scare you. You’re not signing on to pay for anything. This service is easy, safe and free. You can use it to send any blog or website you want to check regularly directly to your mail box.

Thanks for reading. I'll post again asap.

The ox is slow, but the earth has time.
Old Chinese Proverb

Relinquishment

Every journey begins with one step. The first step in preparing our hearts for renewal seems simple. “You must Choose. Make a decision to rededicate your life to God.”

Easy, right? Not necessarily. When you really think about what it means to “dedicate your life to God,” it becomes harder to take that first step. There is a cost involved and the cost is high. Jesus says choosing to give our hearts to God (he calls it becoming a disciple) will cost us everything we are and have. He says it means losing your life--dying to yourself. Dedicating our lives to God involves relinquishing things, and even if we’ve made the initial decision before, every time we renew it there will be new things in our lives to relinquish.

Jesus urges us to count the cost of discipleship before we decide to follow him (Luke 14:26-33), and A.W. Tozer challenges us to do that by asking a number of sobering questions. He speaks of being filled with the Spirit, which is another aspect, or way of talking about surrender to God:

Before you can be filled with the Spirit you must desire to be filled. Are you sure that you want to be possessed by a Spirit other than your own? That Spirit, if He ever possesses you, will be the Lord of your Life! Do you want to hand the keys of your soul over to the Holy Spirit? . . .Again, are you sure that you need to be filled? Can’t you get along the way you are?. . .Are you ready to present your body with all of its functions and all that it contains—your mind, your personality, your spirit, your love, your ambitions, your all?

That’s heavy. What if you give your all to God and he takes you at your word? What if He takes something away that’s very important to you? What if He takes the thing you love the most?

The sobering truth is, He will. Because it’s the thing you love the most that will come between you and God, and if there’s anything between you and God, he is not Lord of your life. You have to give up everything if you want to dedicate your life to God. “If He is not Lord of all, He is not Lord at all.”

If that’s the case, it’s hard to imagine why anyone would do it. Why wouldn’t you just go on as you were, following Christ at a comfortable distance, keeping the things you don’t want to give up close to your heart?

For some reason, God doesn’t allow us to do that if we truly belong to him. He nudges us. He makes us “feel things” in our hearts. Tozer says: But maybe you feel in your heart that you just can’t go on as you are. If you feel that there are levels of spirituality, mystic deeps and heights of spiritual communion, purity and power that you have never known, that there is fruit which you know you should bear and do not, victory which you know you should have and have not—I would say, “come on,” because God has something for you.

God does have something for us—something wonderful. Relinquishment is just the first step. When we give him our all, he takes it, sanctifies it (sets it apart for holy use), and gives it back for us to use for His glory and our good. Tozer says that what God gives us back is . . .a full and wonderful and completely satisfying anointing with the Holy Ghost. It’s this full anointing, coming only after a full surrender, that opens the door to spiritual blessings in our lives that will overflow to bless the world around us with eternal good.

That’s strong motivation. The farther I go in my walk with the Lord, the more terrified I become of missing, because of my selfish refusal to relinquish something to God, the full ETERNAL blessing of fulfilling his ETERNAL good purposes for the ETERNAL lives of people in the world around me. The stakes are high. If we decide not to sell out totally, we are sacrificing eternal blessings for temporary ones, not just in our lives, but in the lives of people God longs to bless through us.

Tozer says, For every one that actually crosses over into the Promised Land there are many who stand for a while and look longingly across the river and then turn back to the comparative safety of the sandy wastes of the old life.

How tragic. Lord, I do choose, once again, to give myself totally to you. Thank you for giving me that choice.

Beginning a Journey Toward Spiritual Renewal

Ten Ways to Prepare your Heart for Renewal began a series of regular postings on this topic I plan to publish over the next few weeks. In a blind leap of faith, I’m going to suggest that some of the words I write will not be FROM me. They will be THROUGH me—and TO me, as well. I’m determined to be painfully honest as I share my own faltering, hesitant steps on this journey toward personal spiritual renewal. It’s so easy to become stale and stagnant. I’m a beginner, again, after all my years of walking with Jesus. It’s a new year, and I’m making a new start at personal renewal.

I trust you will be able to discern the difference between my words and His as you visit this site. Expressions of my faltering walk are my own. Any words that ring with a greater Truth are from God, to all of us. So let’s travel together on this path toward a deeper relationship with Him. I’d love to have you comment on posts, adding your own insights and encouragements—your own words from the Lord—for the edification of all of us.

My words: Yesterday I took one small step along this path to renewal. The seventh way to prepare your heart, according to Thursday’s post, is to listen to worship music, so I spent all day cleaning my office for the sole purpose of making a place near my mini-boom box for my worship tapes. Aren’t you impressed? Finally, in the evening, I sat down and listened to one of those tapes and got a brief, refreshing taste of the fruit of the Spirit. A great supply of tapes are now sitting over there against the wall waiting for my next visit.

But this morning I forgot all about asking God’s blessing on our worship before I went to church. I was too busy thinking up blog post ideas ABOUT renewal to ask for it. Thankfully, our worship leader led us all into God’s presence at the beginning of the service and I was blessed in spite of myself.

God’s words: In cleaning out my office I uncovered, dusted off, and opened up a little book that immediately rattled the foundations of my already shaky spiritual complacency. It’s called, Gems From Tozer, and I’m going to share some of those gems with you over the next few weeks. These words are truly from God. A. W. Tozer (1897-1963) has been called “a 20th Century Prophet” but his words ring truer today than they did when they were written in the 1900’s.

I have to warn you, as with most prophecies, these gems don’t just sparkle, they’ve got very sharp edges. I can already feel them cutting through my phony self-righteousness and exposing my spiritual poverty. Hmm. This renewal business might just have to start with repentance. I hadn’t figured on that.

Oh well. If I have to go there I won’t go alone. I’m dragging you with me. We’ll start, tomorrow, with Tozer’s thoughts on the first step in opening our hearts to renewal. Please don’t run away. Once we get through this “repentance” business we’ll begin to get to the “joy” part. I’m pretty sure of it. So please come back. I need your companionship on this journey.

Almost every day of my life I am praying that “a jubilant pining and longing for God” might come back on the evangelical churches. We don’t need to have our doctrine straightened out; we are as orthodox as the Pharisees of old. But this longing for God that brings spiritual torrents and whirlwinds of seeking and self-denial—this is almost gone from our midst.

A.W. Tozer

Ten Ways to Open Your Heart to Renewal

The beginning of a new year is a natural time for thinking about renewal. We say good-bye to an old, tired year and look with hope and expectation to a new one. A clean page. A fresh chance. A time to think about how to make our future better--more productive, more significant, more successful, more joy-filled.

For Christians, thoughts of renewal usually revolve around God. We belong to Him forever, but we are vacillating human beings, and our relationship with Him can easily stagnate. We need times of refreshing. We need to come again to the fountain of living water. We need to long for Him so deeply that it drives us back into His presence. Thankfully, God prompts that longing. He never forces Himself back into our lives, but the restlessness we feel without Him invariably draws us.

So what to do when we feel the restlessness? When we become aware that something's not right in our spirits? God is the One who must rescue us from the doldrums of spiritual lethargy, but there are steps we can take to make ourselves available to Him again. If you are feeling this restlessness today, here are ten ways you can prepare your heart to receive Him anew in this new year:

1) You must choose. Make a decision to re-dedicate your life to God. Pray a prayer of submission to Him. Affirm your commitment to His lordship in your life. Give Him permission to touch you in a fresh way. Choose to die to your own agenda for your life. Mark this recommitment decision in your journal.

2) Time is of the essence. Follow up your decision with determined action: choose to spend time with Him. Not just a few moments at the beginning or the end of your day, but an extended time, over a period of time. This will require a measure of sacrifice. You’ll have to make the time or it won’t happen. The sacrifice might involve some kind of fast—giving up food, or a particular pleasurable activity you habitually enjoy (coffee time), or a time-waster you’re used to indulging in (TV or computer games). As you choose to remove something from your schedule, deliberately decide to put Him in its place. Spend the time you would normally be indulging in your sacrificed activities in quiet prayer in His presence. Ask Him to lead you in this process.

3) If you build it, He will come. But be prepared to wait. He might not meet you powerfully in the beginning. He sometimes has to test our commitment, not to find out how committed we are—He already knows that—but to strengthen our hunger for Him. Trust Him with the process. Just continue your discipline of spending time with Him, approaching Him on each occasion with the expectation that He may be ready to announce Himself to you in some new way. If he doesn’t, go away with anticipation that the next time He might. Let Him come in His own time.

4) Take encouragement from others. To jump-start your time of renewal, you might want to read an inspiring or challenging Christian book. Check out the church library. Go in and look around, asking the Lord to put your hand on a book that He wants to meet you in. Then browse until one strikes you as being valuable.

5) Promote a spirit of worship. That’s what this whole process is about. It’s not about personal discipline. It’s not about coming out of the doldrums in your life. It’s not even about intercession or evangelism. It’s about worship. Totally. All other benefits will come as a by-product of your focus on Him. How do you promote a spirit of worship? . . . . .

6) Focus on His attributes. You will find them in the Bible. Nowhere else do we learn what He is like. Make a list of His attributes. Rearrange the items on the list, from the most important (to you) to the least. Look up each attribute in a Bible concordance and write the Scripture references beside each. Read the references, looking for the one you connect with the most for each attribute. Memorize at least one sentence from the passage you have chosen for each attribute. Repeat the sentence off and on during your day, until it becomes a permanent fixture on the screen-saver of your mind. Note: The Psalms are great places to find such passages.

7) Listen to worship music. Find songs or a style or an artist you like—one that moves you toward worship—and play the music as you begin your time with Him. Sing the words to Him as you listen.

8) Don't miss worship time at your church on Sunday mornings. Note: This activity will not be useful to you unless you take time to pray before you come to church, asking God to touch you in the service and to bless others with His presence. It will also not be useful to you if you are not willing to let go of your irritation about any of the following: 1) the style of worship; 2) the selection of songs; 3) the loudness of the music; 4) the repetition of what might seem, at first glance, to be shallow messages. There is only one thing that can ever ruin worship, and that’s your attitude toward it. God doesn’t care how loud the music is, or who’s singing, or even what the words are. He cares only about the heart attitude and focus of the worshippers. Determine to look beyond anything that would distract you from loving God. Focus on the truth in the worship songs and love the people around you, for Jesus’s sake.

9) Let worship lead you into intercession. Intercession--praying for the needs of others--will lift you out of your stale mindset and put you down in a wider space. It will also place you right where the heart of God is. When you begin interceding for others from a place of worship, you will pray with strong faith and great authority, because the greatness and goodness of the One you’re petitioning is right before your eyes. You will have no doubts about his ability or willingness to answer your prayers. Praying with your eyes on God will also put you in a place of hearing from Him about how to pray. Ask God to bring specific people to your mind and show you specifically what to pray for, then pray for them that way. If appropriate, call or e-mail those people and tell them how you’ve felt led to pray for them. They will be encouraged that God brought them to your mind, and you may be encouraged to discover how appropriate the specific thing you asked for was.

10) Share your experience of renewed fellowship with God with others. Renewal must spread past the realm of individual experience before it can accomplish God’s complete purpose, and nothing is more stimulating for corporate renewal than hearing how God is working in individual lives. God’s desire is that His Church be renewed and that the world be blessed through His Church. Renewal must start with each individual—with a fresh commitment to Jesus as Lord and a leap of faith that leads to an expectation that He will meet us in a significant way. But when we come to him as individuals, and share our experiences, the fire spreads. God’s Church is revived and the world is redeemed.

Let’s pray together that God will pour out a spirit of repentance, of renewal and of hope on each of us as we move into this new year.

End of Year Reflection

So I end 2008 eating chocolate for breakfast, spending the morning playing on the computer, and putting off my quiet time until noon. Does not augur well. Lots of fodder for New Year's resolutions here, but I probably won't make any. My dreams for the new year are always pretty much the same: to see Him more clearly, to love Him more dearly, and to follow Him more nearly, day by day.

I see little progress from year to year. Maybe it's there but just invisible to the naked eye. I hope so. But it is good to stop now and then and give the Lord a chance to lead me into more of what He wants so I will do that for a moment now. I suspect He wants to do more than I can imagine. My heart longs for Him. I want to reach out for that "more."

So if I were to pick a keyword for my goals for the coming year it would be TRUST. I want to consistently, joyfully, confidently trust Him with things I can see and those I can't. To trust that He remains unchanging and faithful, that His love endures forever, that I am His forever. I want to trust Him for blessings I can't even imagine, to step out into the unknown courageously, to fling myself into His arms the way a trusting child would reach for a good Father.

That probably involves putting away the chocolate and opening my Bible every day before I turn on my computer. For starters. I think I'll try that.

Deep POV and Real Life

Thinking about deep POV (see http://www.something-about-the-writing-journey.blogspot.com/) has drawn me into a deeper contemplation of my own life, and the way we human beings view ourselves and our world, and even--or especially--how we view God.

In writing, "deep POV" is point-of-view, or perspective, written from deep inside the POV character. It gives readers a view, not only of the character's thoughts, but of his emotions and his physical sensations—what he sees through his eyes, hears through his ears, and feels in his body. It brings readers as close into the character's reality as the character is. Readers become the character while they are reading.

But it's possible for a writer to write from a character's POV and still keep readers at arms length. The character's thoughts are expressed, but the reader (and the writer) are viewing the character from outside his skin. They're reading his mind, but not fully sharing his experience. That's a shallow POV. Deep POV takes the reader closer into the experience of the character.

This distinction applies to life on a broader scale. It has occurred to me that I often view my own life from this "arms-length" perspective. I watch my life as an outsider. I live analytically, thinking about life more often than living it, detaching myself from my world and thus never deeply experiencing it. Does this make sense? Even when I go for a walk by a river, I'm sometimes not there. I'm thinking, not feeling--thinking about things outside my body, things in other places or other times--past or future. I'm not living in the present, feeling the warm air on my skin, hearing the birds chirping, smelling the pungent scent of sun-warmed pine trees.

I don't think I'm the only one who lives this way. I have a friend who is going through a great hardship right now. She feels, rightly, I believe, that distancing from yourself is sometimes a necessary coping mechanism. When life is too painful, we have to detach to survive. But as the pain begins to heal, we need to make sure we don't remain in this detached state. We have to move back into the experience of life. Often the move has to be deliberate. Otherwise the coping mechanisms become castles with high stone walls that keep out, not only the pain, but the joy of life.

Zinovy, the main character in my novel, lives in this kind of castle. The pain of seeing his mother brutally murdered when he was five, spending his childhood in an abusive foster home, and growing up as a teen in a Russian military orphan camp has driven him deep into an analytical mindset and locked out the possibility of all emotional involvement with the world around him. There is no room in his worldview for non-rational reality or for personal, subjective experience. His redemption from this self-imposed prison/fortress constitutes the main theme of the book.

In my own experience, I wonder where this tendency comes from. I think much of it is in my genes. I'm naturally an analytical person. But the deep pain of losing my father when I was seven definitely drove me more deeply in this direction. I remember moving out of my body when the grief was too hard to bear, and I lived that way for years. Even as the intensity of the grief softened, I don't think I softened. The coping mechanism had become a part of who I was, and it has only been recently, in my old age (!), that I feel I'm finally able to recognize the problem and overcome the tendency.

My deep personal relationship with God was a part of the healing process. But even so, I know I've done this kind of withdrawing from God, too. I read the Bible and learn about him. I think about him. But I suspect my analytical approach often gets in the way of my actually experiencing him. God doesn't want to be simply thought about. He wasn't meant to be known analytically. The purpose of thinking about God is to bring us into relationship with him--to bring us to the point of experiencing him.

Experiencing God, I am learning, can even be wordless. That realization is a shock to my system. I'm a writer. Words are important to me. But more and more I'm discovering the limitation of words, particularly in growing deeper in my relationship with God. Yes, words are necessary in our understanding of who God is and who He isn't. There are proper limitations. He is Good. He is not bad. He is Eternal. He does not change. He is Faithful. He does not abandon us. He is Righteous. He is never unholy. I'm glad those words about Him are in my mind. But I want, more and more, to be able to sit in His presence, letting the knowledge of who He is penetrate beyond my mind into my heart--letting myself feel his love around me, hear the whisper of his truth brush past my mind and into my spirit.

I think we're all on the same journey as Zinovy. We all begin at different places, and the path is more difficult for some than for others, but God's purpose in life is to move each one of us toward a full and deep and glorious experience of Him—of His truth and his love.

It's a wonderful journey. I'm glad I'm on it. But I long for the destination. I know the end will be pure joy. Yes, I’m into happy endings. I believe in them. Whoever said the truth had to be miserable? That just doesn’t make sense. What's good makes sense. This is where the analytical and the experiential come together: God is Good. This is the rational reality. But I want to know that truth on a continuously deeper level. So the journey continues, and I'm glad the Good God goes with me.