How to Get Ruined by Jesus' Love

Song of Solomon is one of those books I’ve never quite known what to do with. In my tattered and underlined old bible, the pages of this wisdom book are surprisingly clean. Though I knew on some level that Song of Solomon is an prophetic allegory for Christ’s relationship with the Church and with individual believers more specifically, it always makes me a bit queasy saying things like “let him kiss me with the kisses of his mouth” in regards to my relationship with Jesus.

But recently I’ve started meditating on Song of Solomon line by line, placing myself in the character of beloved. I’m asking the Spirit of Christ to illuminate each phrase in regard to my relationship with Him. As I do, I’m finding two realities that move cross-current against evangelical sensibilities.

1. Jesus is far more in love with His people than we ever imagined. Listen to what he speaks over his bride

“You have stolen my heart, my sister my bride. How delightful is your love , my sister, my bride! How much more pleasing is your love than wine, and the fragrance of your perfume more than any spice!”

“How beautiful you are, my darling! Oh, how beautiful! Your eyes are doves.”

“You are altogether beautiful, my darling; there is no flaw in you.”

Though Jesus, allegorically cast in the character of Solomon rides majestically up from dessert surrounded by columns of smoke and 60 fierce warriors, when he reaches his beloved, he can barely keep his composure. Uncomfortable as it is for us confess, you and I make Jesus’s heart race and his knees quiver.

But we think that’s all too close, too intimate for Jesus to relate to us in that way. Jesus loves us, of course. But He is also mighty and exalted isn’t he? Sure He loves us a lot, but is it really appropriate to say that Jesus is our lover, ruined by his romantic affection for broken sinners like us? Like Peter, we don’t want to see Jesus coming down to our level to wash our feet, to wash us with his loving words. We distance ourselves from his affection in the name of protecting his dignity. But Jesus won’t have his bride any other way. So Jesus says to his friend, “except I wash you, you can have no part/share/inheritance in me.”

2. We are more beautiful than we ever imagined. All through the book, you see the bridegroom speaking his pleasure over his beloved, praising her beauty. And the bride struggles to embrace her identity. Yet the things she says of herself might be considered vain if they were not simply agreeing with the words of the lover: “Dark am I yet lovely,” she says in a half-hearted attempted to agree with what He says about her. Yet when she can begin to embrace her identity and beauty in the eyes of her lover (and many of the things he adores in her are actually things he himself gave her) she can say confidently, “Why should I be like a veiled woman beside the flocks of your friends?”

In other words, she knows she’s the Shephard’s beloved and that it is her right to connect with Him directly. She’s not a prostitute or concubine who can only connect with her lover in some distant or second-hand way like through a priest or lesser shepherd. “I am my beloved’s and He is mine.” She knows they belong together in direct and unninterupted union because she has begun to receive His words of affection for her.

In the church, we’ve become so strong in our teaching of original sin, that we’ve started to actually deny the heart of Jesus for us. We’ve developed “worm” theology that is more interested in how bad we are than how good God is! Of course God knows the darkness and pervasive nature of sin and death that works corrosively in all human beings. That’s why He sent his son to die and rise and ascend and deploy the Holy Spirit to indwell us! But God also sees the glory of His image reflected in us and it makes his heart long for us, broken as we are. 

And for those of us who are in Christ, he sees the flawless beauty of the gift of his grace at work in us as well. To be clear, it is all grace. But even when we struggle, he looks at us and sees us perfect in Him. God, standing sovereignly outside of time always sees our matured and perfected selves standing clothed in Christ before him. This may not be our present experienced reality. But it is God’s reality. 

So in this sense, there really can be “no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus” because the sin that lived in our flesh was condemned and executed on the cross. What is left is a ravishing, resurrected bride who is seen as “altogether lovely”. Jesus didn’t die for a worm. He died for a priceless bride who has stolen his heart. Of course this is hard for us to believe. But when we do, we come into the inheritance of uninterrupted joyful union with Him and that makes all the difference.

The 180-degree turn of repentance doesn’t start with a change in lifestyle but a change in belief. Reading Song of Solomon is forcing me to repent of my unbelief in the love of Christ. Yes, I’ve been embracing the love of Christ in deeper and deeper ways the last few years, but this goes even deeper than I ever imagined. I’m hopeful that meditating on Solomon’s prophetic love song will draw me into “the King’s chambers” where I can be ruined by the pervasiveness and stability of his affection for me.

I hope we can change our minds about God’s love for us. I hope we can change our minds about who we are before him. As I look back on my life, I realize that the pivot points in my spiritual journey have been those small moments where I changed my mind about something and before long, started discovering the truthfulness of my new belief being validated in my experience.

A couple years ago, I decided that I no longer believe that God withdraws from people periodically  to “strengthen their faith”. The belief no longer fit with my reading of scripture or my understanding of my relationship with God. I decided to start believing that God is actually always present and available to connect with us in a way that we can understand and experience. I remember the moment I started embracing this new belief because for the first time in my life, I started experiencing what I was believing for: the limitless availability of God’s abiding presence in me, which has not subsided in the last two years. New belief, new reality.

I wonder… if we can repent of our old beliefs about ourselves and about Jesus… and if we can begin believing for the depth of Christ’s love painted in the Song of Solomon, what new reality might we be ushered into?

Let Him Author You

One phrase from the bible has meant a lot to me the last several months. It bounces around in my mind throughout the day and sometimes just reciting the words, savoring them in my heart connects me immediately to the presence of God. The phrase is this: “fixing our eyes on Jesus, the author and perfecter of our faith; who for the joy set before him endured the cross, scorning its shame, and sat down at the right hand of the father” (Heb 12:2).

There are sermons upon sermons packed in that one phrase. But one thought struck me today. We have a bible full of stories: people whose lives which encourage, instruct, and warn us. We have teachings and doctrines we can discern from the pages of scripture. But at the end of the day, it is Jesus himself who is authoring the story of our faith. He is the writer of this epic, this journey we now are on with God. He’s also the Perfecter, the one responsible to develop the climax and bring the story to a good conclusion, to resolve the tension, to develop the characters, and to assign meaning to a narrative arch that often feels chaotic and meaningless.

As much as we may appreciate and learn from the writings of Moses, David, Job, Ezekiel, or Paul, it is Jesus who is writing us. And it is Jesus who makes sure the words of our life breathe like God-inspired literature.

And where is this crazy story leading us in the end? Love and suffering and finally the ultimate goal: sitting down with the Father, participating in the divine relational intimacy the flows through the Trinity. The goal is “that where I am you may also be” (John 14:3). The great joy of the Author is being with God. It’s not being spiritually enlightened, or saving souls, or fighting God’s battles, or starting a movement, or leaving a legacy. It’s stepping back into the place of perfect intimacy and connection with God.

So what’s your goal in life? Is it the same goal as the one who authored and is perfecting you? Is it friendship, intimacy, and connection with God? Is it resting in vital connection like a branch attaches to a vine? Or is it something else? Is your deepest motivating joy to simply be with the Lord? Or is being with him some means to a different end?

I encourage you to let the author write his story on the notepad of your life. As you do, consider that the best conclusion to your story will be like the conclusion of his own: death and resurrection yes. But even beyond that, intimate connection and union with God.

Secure Connection and the Witch of Endor

Today I’m in 1 Samuel 28, which provides an eerie but insightful peek into another spiritual ecosystem: that of witchcraft. In this scene, King Saul consults a spiritist in a desperate attempt to gain direction and insight on the eve of a terrifying battle against the Philistines. In this passage we see the irony of Saul who had in his zeal for the spiritual purity of his people expelled spiritists from Israel now seeking the guidance of a witch. I can imagine the shadowy room in a hovel lit by a couple smoking lanterns. Saul, weak from fasting but frantic sits across from the disheveled woman awakened in the middle of the night. After assuring her she would not bear the consequences of channeling the dead, he asks her to bring up his former mentor, Samuel. Only the woman could see the shadowy figure of Samuel coming up from the ground and she channeled his voice. 

After confirming the woman was really seeing Samuel by asking her about his appearance, Saul explained his desperate plight to Samuel: “I am in great distress,” Saul said. “The Philistines are fighting against me, and God has departed from me. He no longer answers me, either by prophets or by dreams. So I have called on you to tell me what to do.”

Samuel has no encouragement for Saul and assures him that “tomorrow, you will be here with me.” Saul collapses with grief and exhaustion. It is only with the insistence of his companions that Saul is willing to receive the kindness of the spiritist in feeding him what may have been Saul’s last meal. The next day, both Saul and his sons were killed in battle.

What strikes me in this passage is the contrast of Saul in chapter 10 and the one we find 18 chapters later. In 1 Samuel 10, Samuel gives Saul the blessing of kingship with the anointing of oil and a kiss saying, “Has not the Lord anointed you ruler over his inheritance?” Then Samuel gives an unusually descriptive prediction of events to come that would assure Saul that God was working and anointing him for this task. All this things were fulfilled with divine precision, including a supernatural overriding of Saul’s natural will in an Acts-like visitation of the Holy Spirit, Saul’s prophesying, and transformation into “a different person.”

I love what Samuel says to Saul by way of instruction: “Once these signs are fulfilled, do whatever your hand finds to do, for God is with you.” Don’t you love that? When God is with us, transforming your essential character, we can essentially do what comes to us, trusting the security of our position in God’s presence and the transformation of our person.

So what went wrong with Saul?

As I think about the episode in chapter 28, I can see the ways in which Saul’s earlier spiritual journey was consistent with his final conclusion. I believe Saul found himself dabbling in witchcraft because of a series of choices, but none of these choices were inconsistent with Saul’s basic desires and natural inclinations. And in some ways, the episode in chapter 10 flows naturally into chapter 28. Think of the things Saul would may have quietly understood from his unusual spiritual encounter in chapter 10

1. God speaks to me primarily through someone else.
2. The pursuit of spiritual power is connected to my security and blessing in my calling.
3. God’s power is separate from the free exercise of my will.

What we see its a rapid amplification of destiny affirmed by a dramatic encounter with God but not accompanied by the slow formation of character through a consistent personal relationship with God. Is is any wonder that when Samuel dies, Saul seems desperate to connect to God in the only way he knows how: through somebody else? In contrast, our early images of King David are of a young shepherd cultivating a love relationship with God in private and channeling the power of God through the exercise of his will (i.e. his willingness to go against Goliath).

Although Saul did not have the indwelling of the Holy Spirit in a New Testament sense, I think we can draw many parallels to the ways in which we process our relationship with God as Christians. 

How many of us have had an experience of God through another person, whether a friend or a public figure… and then believed that the best manifestation of God’s presence would only come through the intervention or guidance of a specific mentor, friend, or spiritual figure? While I think Christians are supposed to act as bridges (priests) to connect others to the heart and presence of God, I also see friends getting stuck in the emotional belief that they are somehow unqualified or not “anointed” enough to receive a strong connection with God through their private relationship with him. Maybe the most common manifestation of this is that the role of praying, whether for a meal, a church service, or a sick person often falls to the pastor because people assume that a pastor’s prayers are more likely to be answered that that of “ordinary” people. I’ve been guilty of this myself at times and while I do think we can receive specific blessings attached to the anointing and faith of certain people, we should be careful about placing the weight of our spiritual wellbeing on the shoulders of a “more spiritual” person.

I’m also mindful that the pursuit of the miraculous as a source of encouragement and security in our calling and destiny is a strong temptation for many of us. We all experience disconnection and discouragement in our journey at time. But instead of pressing into the discomfort of those emotions and talking with God about it, we often go hunting for a sign or a demonstration of power to assure us that we are still blessed, chosen, anointed, even saved. We end up quietly testing God to see if really is there with us. In one sense this is natural. We all look for signs in our relationships that we are safe, favored, and accepted. If those signs are never there, our relationship has a problems. But often we look for assurance only in the ways in which we are conditioned to receive them. 

I think about my relationship with my oldest daughter Annabel. There is nothing I want more than for her to rest in my secure affection and love for her. I want her to know that I’ll bend over backwards to care for, protect, and provide for her. But she is hardwired to receive love through gifts. But if that becomes the only way for her to know my favor and affection, then she’ll only feel loved a few times a year. As a dad, when I see my daughter testing my love, feeling insecure in my affection for her, I feel an intense love-anger; a jealousy for her to know that I like her, that I’m on her side. I imagine God feels that towards me as well. But as long as I’m testing our connection through my experience of the overwhelmingly supernatural, any hope of an actually secure connection is ill-fated.

Finally, I think we have a common misconception that a genuine God encounter should override my will. For instance, I prayed for a long time that God would strike me with the gift of tongues. I was sympathetic towards spiritual gifts though I hadn’t experienced much myself. I think I assumed that anything supernatural would have to come through the overriding of my will. Certainly I spoke with some folks who described their experiences in this way. I figured if God wanted me operating in the supernatural, he knows where I live and he knows how to get ahold of me. But the more I began to operate in the supernatural, the more I found out what a unique dance it is between our decisions and God’s power. Without God’s power, our efforts quickly become manipulation. But somehow, God has wired us to channel his power more often than not through the mechanism of our choices. So I pray for people even when I don’t “feel the Spirit” and often the Spirit shows up! I make decisions based on my best understanding of God’s heart and often discover “random coincidences” that affirm God’s presence in that decision. While I try to stay pliable to God totally changing my schedule, often when I ask him what he wants me to do that day, he’ll simply say, “You’re plan is good. Go for it.”

I think we often want God to show up without the exercise of discipline. We hear crazy stories of people encountering God in amazing ways. What we don’t hear about is the months and years of faithful Christian discipline that many of these people went through in pursuit of a deeper life with God. The exercise of discipline is not our way of manipulating God. It’s our way of “knocking” as we trust that the door will opened to us. As I think over the tremendous growth both in my internal reality and the anointing on my life I’ve experienced the last couple years, I realize that it has been accompanied by the greatest exercise of personal discipline I’ve ever practiced. It started small, but the more God responded, the greater my discipline became. The secret is that at the time, it didn’t feel like discipline. My brain actually processed it as delight. And in the end what I have is a wonderfully secure friendship with God.

We say we want God to take over, to override our faculties, and in the short term that may feel good. But I think God knows that to build a close, secure relationship with us, it needs to be reciprocal and private in a long-term relationship that slowly loses its conditionality and takes us deep into the language relational delight. In that space, we flow freely in his power and security of our sanctification as we walk with Him.

Spirit-Led Discipleship: What's in a Name?

Friends, today I continued a conversation with God I've been having for some time which I believe will become a book He and I will write together. It's a book on making disciples under the leadership of the Holy Spirit. I hope to paint a vivid picture of Christ's disciple-building ministry as an essentially Spirit-driven affair. Chapter 1 is all about identity and the significance of the gospel records giving us the names of the 12  disciples (Mark 3:16-19). I hope to discuss some of treasures buried in the biblical concept of naming and its significance for the discipleship as well as disciple building. I hope to also paint a picture of the ways in which the names of the disciples defined their greatest points of struggle and redemption. But to get there, I found I had to dig back into the Genesis account. Here is what I've come up with so far. If this topic is of interest to you, I'd value your feedback and ideas!

It begins with identity, with calling: calling by name.

Naming is no small affair. Naming was one of the first jobs given to the first human: “Now look here Adam. I’ve made all these animals. Now I want you to name them.” You might say that naming was an act of co-creation with God. After all, in Genesis we see that after forming the animals from dust, God brought them to the man “to see what he would name them; and whatever the man called each living creature, that was its name” (Gen. 2:19). God, who formed man from dust and breathed the life of His own Spirit into the man’s nostrils is waiting on the edge of his seat to see what identity this dust-and-spirit man would assign to each of his creatures. So Adam, resting in the creative power of God’s life reverberating through his bones calls out each creature: giraffe, vole, hippopotamus, egret.

This act of will, this assigning of identity became a prophetic act. As Adam’s mind comingled naturally with the mind of His Father[1], out came a name. And the name stuck. God honored the identity given by the man and caused that identity to weave itself in and through the individual stories of each creature. Eugene Peterson eloquently writes:

The first use of language in the Garden is naming animals and birds... Naming identifies. Naming, when done well, captures something of the essence of the life so named.[2]

This is truer still of the names we give each other: Helen, Jason, Ichabod, Harold. Names are powerful things. Names are relational. Names tie our journey to another person’s destiny. That’s why so many names in the bible relate to the mother’s story or the circumstances surrounding the child’s birth. Consider for instance, the ways in which the children of Leah are named in relationship to her ongoing quest to win the affection of her husband. Reuben: the Lord has seen my misery. Simeon: the Lord heard that I am not loved. Levi: my husband will become attached to me.[3]

The first words spoken about a human by another human are relational. They are words of intimate recognition and delight:

“This is now bone of my bones

and flesh of my flesh;

she shall be called ‘woman,’

for she was taken out of man” (Gen 2:23)

Man’s first recorded words are poetry, “our basic intimacy language—the language used by gurgling and cooing infants, by lovers, by pray-ers.”[4] In this exultant love sonnet, Adam finds himself in the emerging story of his partner. He identifies her in relational terms. He first recognizes her according to her position toward himself: she has his bones. Eve Bonewoman, the perfect complement to Adam Dustman.

She is ezer k’negdo, the beautiful “opposite-yet-alongside helper-and-deliverer.” She is a “life-saver!”[5] She completes the man in fully expressing the image of God through intimate relationship. Sex and companionship in reciprocal unity of will and purpose become the enduring word picture of God’s relationship with His people.

In chapter 3, Adam assigns his wife her proper name on the heels of God’s prophetic word about their destiny after the fall. She would be Eve, “because she would become the mother of all the living” (Gen. 3:20). It is a present designation pointing to a future reality. Eve would become the mother of the living, but the way in which she would actualize her name would be a grand milieu of pain and redemption.

A Name is a Battleground

Adam Dustman was a gardener, a master groundskeeper. In the context of unashamed union with his Father, he could tend any garden with ease. A seed fallen to the ground would spring from the earth in a tender shoot, impossibly green and delighted to grow as it breathed in the life of God swimming through all creation. Adam knew when to water, prune, harvest, and replant. Large firm tomatoes jostled each other as they ripened on the vine, eager to be plucked and enjoyed for their sweetness. Crisp apples virtually rained down from overhead, wanting nothing but to nourish God’s creatures and recreate themselves in a hundred new plants. Adam was good at this. But one day, God’s groundskeeper bit into the wrong fruit with a disobedient heart massaged by complacency. Connection ended. Shame entered the world. When it did, his assigned name (Adam: “Red”, as in “Man of the Red Earth”) became a battleground. Now the earth from which he was formed and which had so eagerly yielded itself to him became an adversary and an obstacle to him. Just as his heart hardened against God in disobedience, the soil itself hardened against the man. “By the sweat of your brow you will eat your food until you return to the ground, since from it you were taken; for dust you are and to dust you will return.”[6]

For her part, the woman ate the fruit hungering to be something she believed she could never be: like God, knowing good and evil.[7] Yet Eve was like God in the sense of bearing his image. Yet in striving to achieve through works what was essentially hers by grace, connection with both God and her husband was lost. Now striving and pain would become the battlefield of her identity. “With painful labor you will give birth to children. Your desire will be for your husband, and he will rule over you.”[8]

Yet God would redeem their names. The woman would indeed become the “mother of all the living”. And though she would bear the pain of childbirth, we see a glimpse of God’s redemptive purposes in her joyful surprise at the birth of Cain: “With the help of the Lord I have brought forth a man.” In this exclamation she properly ascribes to God his role in the creative act and she rejoices in the miracle of life being brought fort from life. Ultimately one of her own decedents would require to help of the Lord to “bring forth” the Man, who would redeem all things including her own sin. Adam too would find a reminder of his original earthy identity in every bite of food his family enjoyed. The image of God within him was marred but not lost entirely. One day, a descendant of Adam named “The Last Adam” would come as an imperishable seed of God’s final redemption, planted in Golgotha’s red earth in a newly-dug tomb surrounded by (of all things) a garden,[9] and springing defiantly to life after 3 days in order to bear life-giving “spirit fruit”. As Paul says, “’The first man Adam became a living being;’ the last Adam, a life-giving spirit.”[10] Names are God’s idea. Names are beautiful. Names carve out the spaces in which our identities come under the greatest attack and find the greatest restoration.

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[1] I use Father instead of creator in keeping with Adam’s designation as “the son of God” in the geneology of Christ (Lk 3:38)

[2] Eugene H. Peterson, Christ Plays in Ten Thousand Places. (Grand Rapids: Eerdsman, 2005), p. 80.

[3] Gen 29:31-35

[4] Peterson, p. 81.

[5] http://www.ransomedheart.com/daily-reading/ezer-kenegdo

[6] Gen 3:19

[7] Gen 3:6

[8] Gen 3:16

[9] John 19:41

[10] 1 Cor 15:45