Okay, this post may come off as mystical bordering on nutty. I’m writing it hoping that it sparks something deep in a handful of people… Bear with me friends. I’ll do my best to get this across to you.
God is teaching me something today about listening to him. But it is hard to put in words. Because the way he taught me this lesson was through a string of seemingly random but eerily “rhyming” passages of scripture deposited gently in my brain in the midst of an unusually strong connection with him. Jesus and I had a long conversation this morning as I mentally saw him sitting across from me and the connection between us hummed almost electrically. The conversation seemed at first to take a number of detours, but by the end, a few central themes were communicated with crystal clarity in a way my mind was able to grasp.
- I’m teaching you how I wired your mind to hear from me. This is how it works. No exceptions. No shortcuts. “For the Lord Almighty has purposed, and who can thwart him” (Isaiah 14:27)
- As you are sanctified, my mind increasingly works in conjunction with your mind. “We have the mind of Christ,” says Paul. Joshua heard and exercised my will in a lot of ways: angelic visitations, a “sounds like” about Gilgal, an oath-in-faith against the rebuilding of Jericho which I honored, and the plain exercise of his redeemed will against 5 enemy kings which became a tremendous symbol pointing my death and resurrection (Josh 10:27).
- I rarely do things the same way twice. So listen carefully each time and obey (Josh 8:27).
- Yes, I care about accuracy. And as you grow, your listening will become more accurate. BUT, there is a way to miss out on complete accuracy yet still feel as connected or even MORE connected to my presence than before. To hear better you have to pay attention and press in. It’s not safe to make assumptions. This is a paradox because you will need to trust the intuition I placed in you, but never make assumptions. My presence with Joshua mattered more than the perfect accuracy of His hearing (Josh 6:27).
- Pay attention to your impressions, to the coincidences of the play you’ve been acting in even before you became aware of it. Watch how the funny little things that happened earlier this week, even this morning are woven into the story I’m writing in and through you when you are finally paying attention.
- Therefore don’t be afraid and don’t let your heart be troubled. I’ve given you the peace of my Presence. That peace will overwhelm the anxiety of whether you are perfectly understanding me or not. Don’t worry (John 14:27). You are circling in on the truth of the matter. That the thing is this: I do not dispense truth. I AM Truth. True connection and true ideas…. sometimes the line will be fuzzier than you like. But over the course of a life time these will come together quite beautifully.
To explain all of this well would take a very long post, but the end result is I’m learning these lessons very well through a communication style the Holy Spirit often uses with me that feels simultaneously rambling and random, yet also profoundly succinct and effective. Just another fun paradox to wrestle with.
Jesus has been leading me to “27” verses lately… especially Colossians 1:27. And actually, as I review it now I realize, this ties in perfectly to what I’m learning too! “To them God has chosen to make known among the Gentiles the glorious riches of this mystery, which is Christ in you, the hope of glory.” You see? The content of Paul’s proclamation was a single mystery made known to the gentiles: Christ in the believer. The believer as the tabernacle of God’s Presence. The hope of glory as the outward sign of that mysterious truth doing its work. Our positional connection through Christ as those in whom God himself dwells sums up the content of God’s “gloriously rich mystery now revealed.” The connection is the content. Get it? Is your brain sizzling yet?
So anyway. 27. Right. I resist anything that smacks of superstition. So when God led me to John 14:27, I thought it was a bit too obvious. But in fact, it was dead on. I’m feeling anxious about this whole listening exercise after all… but I should remember he has given me his peace through connection with Him. And that connection trumps the anxiety about going off the deep end spiritually, about hearing wrong.
Then he pointed me back to what I read in Joshua 5 this morning and I shrugged… “I don’t know Lord.” But that whole thing about Gilgal really stood out when I read it again. I tried to put on Joshua’s shoes. What does the word Gilgal (Hebrew for “rolling”) have to do with God rolling away the reproach of Egypt? Did Joshua actually hear an audible voice say, “Because I’ve rolled away the reproach of Egypt?” Or did he get a mental image of a rolling stone and hear the words as a soft impression in His mind? I don’t know. But if it was something inside his head, then God is making a word play, a “sounds like” and Joshua has to make to connection between the word “rolling” and the rolling away of shame and the reproach of the Egyptian slavery period.
By the way… this repealing of the shame of slavery happens on the other side of the Jordan. The first generation that was free of slavery (and showing some signs of regenerated existence in things like sandals that didn’t wear out and 2 million people with “not one feeble person among their tribes”) but still slaves in their minds had finally died away and the new generation was circumcised after crossing the Jordan on dry ground. The shame of slavery was at last rolled away and from that moment forward, Israel started winning all their battles and claiming their inheritance. Can you see the parallels to the kingdom in which we now live as Jesus people? The yoke of our sin-slavery was broken by Jesus. That’s just true.
But much of our heart still wandered out the desert as though we were still slaves to sin. When those rebellious, mentally-enslaved bits of us finally fully die out (sanctification), we cross the Jordan and circumcise our hearts to God as we begin to walk by the Spirit into the reality of our inheritance. We’re not perfect, but Christ is perfect in us. And from that moment forward, we begin winning our battles and claiming our inheritance in the Kingdom as children born of the Spirit in lockstep with the Spirit (Romans 8). This is the reality of life in the Spirit and Joshua symbolizes it beautifully. When you live in the Spirit, you stop asking whether that was God or bad tacos. You trust the connection. You know you’ll get it wrong sometimes but that’s part of the journey. You stay humble. But ultimately you trust the friendship. I think it is interesting that sometimes when I hear God wrong these days, I feel the connection with God gets stronger or at least is not diminished. I don’t need to evaluate or judge what went wrong like I used to. And I feel him still very close to me. What’s up with that? I think it has to do with me having the mind of Christ: his mind getting all mixed up in mine as “Christ is formed” in me. It’s about union, connection. And I think it has something to do with the rhyming thing.
“But seriously God. What’s up with the 27 thing?” I asked puzzled.
“I like to rhyme with myself,” he responded. “It’s a game I like to play.”
“Okay then. What’s next?”
“14:27.”
“Joshua 14:27?? Uh oh. No such verse Lord.”
“Isaiah 14:27 silly. Not Joshua. Pay attention.”
There’s a funny story from one of John Wimber’s meeting. Someone on his ministry team saw an image of a green hose. He got up and said, “somebody in this room tripped over a garden hose and got injured. Come up to the front God wants to heal you.” Though he shared the word several times nobody got up. The man was confused. He was sure God showed him a green hose. After the meeting, a man from the audience came up and said, “I tripped over a green air hose at work and hurt myself. But you said “garden hose” so I assumed the word wasn’t for me! The man with the word should have said, “Someone tripped over a green hose” and not assumed it was a garden hose.
I was reading in Joshua. I was on a roll. God said “14:27” and I barely noticed that he didn’t say “Joshua 14:27”. Only when I stopped and asked did he say “Isaiah”. I’ve got to pay attention and I’ve got to press in. The other thing he used to illustrate this was Joshua 8:(you guessed it)27… Which just shows Israel carrying off plunder from Ai, which was the OPPOSITE of what God told them to do in Jericho. “I rarely do the same thing twice. Pay attention.” And sure enough, we hear God speak in all kinds of different ways. Joshua sure did. And what he tells us to do often stands in contrast to what he told us to do yesterday. This is why it is said that many new movements of God’s Spirit in the world are persecuted most severely by the proponents of God’s movement in the previous generation. We get stuck on how God worked before, and we totally miss how God is working NOW.
One last aside: Look at the parallels between the Joshua 10 and the passion/resurrection narrative: http://validambiguity.com/2017/01/21/jesus-the-gentile-king/
The point is, Jesus goes into the cave with our enemies, the “principalities and powers” and there, “having disarmed the powers and authorities, he made a public spectacle of them, triumphing over them by the cross” (Col 2:15). Jesus and the 5 kings were hung on poles, which carried a curse under the law. They all died by sunset. They all were buried in a tomb. But those kings aren’t coming out once the stone is rolled over the mouth of the cave. But when Jesus comes out, he “rolls away” the reproach of our slavery, emerging alive and well while the enemies of our inheritance stay in the grave permenantly. Again, just a thought.
Wrapping up my conversation, I was still a bit confused about all the seemingly random and spastic bits of revelation, though the theme was emerging regarding the primacy of right connection as the only pathway to right truth (Jesus being the truth and all that). The Spirit’s final word to me was to point out the book on my desk. It was Eugene Peterson’s Christ Plays in a Thousand Places. I found it in the basement this morning and thought I would pull it out to read later. I hardly remember why I was down there, but I found the book buried in a random box and decided to bring it upstairs with me. Jesus said, “flip to page 237.” Okay… 2… (3)… 7… In one paragraph, Peterson elegantly sums up what I was just learning this morning about holding conversation with the Holy Spirit. Peterson is talking about Christ’s conversation with God in John 17. He says:
“The conversation is rambling and unsystematic. This is not what we ordinarily think of as good teaching. But Jesus is not making things clear, smoothing out ambiguities; he is making them vivid, pulsing. There is no outline and there are no transitions. Definitions are lacking. What the conversation does is immerse us in the presence of another, the presence of Jesus readying us for the Spirit. We are soon listening more to who he is than what he says; we are drawn into this seamless web of relational attentiveness, leaving and sending, sensing within ourselves the pervasive, soul-permeating continuity between the absent Jesus and the present Spirit.”
Yes indeed. This is the dynamic of conversation with God as I’m experiencing it today: He is not making things clear in the sense of smoothing out ambiguities and giving me a pithy 3-point takeaway complete with PowerPoint slides. But in my Spirit I sense connection to Truth as something “vivid, pulsing.” And I find that at the end of the day, whether I’m hearing God exactly right every moment…. “We are soon listening more to who he is than what he says.”
