One Big Reason to be Thankful

Today I’m thankful for so many things. But one thing I’m especially thankful for today is the way God has become the meeter of all needs in my life. These last few years I’ve learned to trust the way He provides everything from my daily bread to my deep down Existential needs as His child.

Today I am meditating on the middle portion of Jesus’ famous “Sermon on the Mount“ in the sixth chapter of Matthew. At first reading, it looks like a random collection of teachings on different topics: giving, prayer, fasting, etc. But I don’t think that’s what it is at all. I think it is a unified teaching with a central theme: God knows what you need and He wants you to trust that He is the One who meets all needs.

Check it out. What is it that motivates those “hypocrites” Jesus talks about? What drives these self-righteous folks to announce their “righteousness”, their prayer, their fasting? At its core I think these folks are driven by a deep hunger to feel seen and honored by others. But I don’t think Jesus is simply calling them out for arrogant self-righteousness. I think Jesus is calling them out for their basic lack of trust in God. They don’t really believe that God is there, seeing who they are and what they do. They don’t trust that He will reward their righteousness so they do what all religious folk do when they don’t actually believe in the God they’re peddling: they “practice their righteousness before others to be seen by them.” So their “righteousness“ is not driven by a private desire to please the father and align their lives around his will, but rather by a desperate bid to feel their needs being met by the approval of human beings.

I get that. I feel that longing to be seen and valued deep inside me. If I am honest with you, that’s one of the driving needs of my life. And at my worst, it’s what drives my need to perform, not just on stage but in relationships and even in ministry. When I’m driven by that performance need, it tells you something about me. It tells you that I don’t really believe God is there inside of me, Loving me, meeting me in my heart‘s deepest longings. It tells you that I’m living on some level in alienation with God. If you see that in me, you buy what I’m selling because on some level you will know it’s not working for me either.

But this chunk of the sermon is full of good news, not just chastisement or challenge: Good sees what is done in secret and He rewards those who express their deep inner trust both in “heavenly” rewards and in rewards in our life. I would speculate that among those rewards is the gift of a changed perspective and a deeper intimacy with the One who cares for all our needs. Also, Jesus promises that as calm the noisy hypocrisy of “flesh-righteousness” which comes out in loud religious showmanship and lean on God’s help to cultivate the inner heart-righteousness in the private world of our spirits, we’ll find His incredible faithfulness, the trustworthiness of his word, and the confidence of a growing faith.

So Jesus can say, “hey guys, don’t worry about food or drink or clothes, because unbelievers run after these things and your Father knows you needs them! Look at the birds: God feeds them and you’re worth SO much more than a bird! Look at the wildflowers: here today and gone tomorrow, yet so splendidly dressed. Aren’t you worth more than a wild plant?”

This may challenge us because anxiety, shame, unbelief, and self-righteousness are painfully common, even (sometimes especially) among Christians. But we make a mistake if we confuse common with normative. Because if we can trust the words of Christ that in seeking God’s Kingdom, He will happily heap “all these things” (food, clothes, value, true security, meaning, love, and so much more) on top of the pile… well then we’ll have something to be thankful for won’t we? In that place, the words of Jesus will be for us: “your heart will rejoice, and no one will take your joy away from you.”

Walk by the Spirit: a Gospel Imperative

Quick thought for you: I’ve been studying the gospels in depth for a teaching I’m doing this Friday and one thing is exploding off the page for me as never before. So put this proposition in your pipe and smoke it for a while.

Everything Jesus did with his disciples (outside his primary mission to fulfill scripture in become an atoning sacrifice for sin) was driven by a single overarching lesson in discipleship: walk by Spirit, not by the flesh. This to Jesus was the juice of the Christian life. It was THE thing that would turn a group of fishermen and tax collectors in an unstoppable global movement. That message about walking by the Spirit was:

1. Modeled (the Spirit led Him to the wilderness, the Spirit affirmed his election of disciples, the Spirit empowered the miracles, the Spirit gave him special knowledge).

2. Taught (“I say only what I hear my father saying”, conversation with Nicodemus about being “born of the Spirit”, “The Spirit is willing, the flesh is weak”, “The spirit will teach you all things”, the Sermon on the Mount which I think is normative of the Christian life but only through the Spirit).

3. Empowered (by the temporary gift of the Spirit given the disciples on their first missionary journey and by the indwelling of the Spirit in Acts.)

So if my premise is true, then everything in the Christian life relies not on the Christian’s ability to try harder in the flesh (a miserable Romans 7 reality... doing what you don’t want to do) but on their ability to walk according to the Spirit (a beautiful Romans 8 reality... having the mind of the Spirit).

We can nod in agreement with all this but then muddy the power of this reality by our own Holy Spirit agnosticism. After all the work of the Spirit seems a strange, amorphous blur to us sometimes. And the truth is, we don’t always care for the folks who ARE talking about the Spirit. Shouldn’t we just stick with Jesus and the Bible and leave the Spirit to theologians and missionaries? Or worse... confined to the pages of history?

So painful is our Spirit agnosticism that we sometimes assume walking by the spirit feels a lot like walking by the flesh but with a more accurately “biblical” set of beliefs. We might even assert that person may not “feel different” walking by the Spirit but should simply “check the fruit” (which for many Christians come down to nothing more than growth toward a basically moral life and agreement with Christian doctrines). By the way, I’m all for checking the fruit. But I’d say the “Fruits of the Spirit” (Gal 5) have been so profoundly domesticated as to be confused with humanistic niceness or basic mental health. But looking at the way the Spirit both radically regenerated and empowered people in the bible, I’d say that’s a pretty low view of the Spirit’s work. Wouldn’t you?

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If then the role of the Spirit is not an optional add-on for mystical types but the foundational “juice” for the Christian life... if being “filled with the Spirit” is both radical and imperative, then how can we begin to understand and experience the dynamic of His work in our lives in a way that actually makes us “holy” (read: opposite of common)? For many of us, that’s not our daily experience, but it is our deep longing. Maybe the question isn’t so much “what does it look like” as it is, “do you want to enter the rabbit hole and find out”?