Connection is the Content: Dynamics of Conversation with God

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.

1. 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)
2. 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).
3. I rarely do things the same way twice. So listen carefully each time and obey (Josh 8:27).
4. 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).
5. 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.
6. 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.”

Gentleness: The Feather and the Hammer

I was thinking about gentleness today. This is a value taught all across the New Testament. But among many followers of Jesus today, gentleness has been replaced by confidant assertiveness and aggression in the name of “taking a stand”. But in Colossians, gentleness is listed among the virtues that make up the patchwork garment of love that “binds them all together in perfect unity.” Check it out:

Therefore, as God’s chosen people, holy and dearly loved, clothe yourselves with compassion, kindness, humility, gentleness and patience. Bear with each other and forgive one another if any of you has a grievance against someone. Forgive as the Lord forgave you. And over all these virtues put on love, which binds them all together in perfect unity. (Colossians 3:11-13 NIV)

So why gentleness? I think gentleness is an expression of both humilty and faith: humility that we can’t really change or control a person or situation in a satisfactory way... and faith that if we press into the weakness of a gentle posture, God can do much more through us than we could ever ask or imagine. Gentleness isn’t weakness. It’s recognizing our limitations while also recognizing God’s limitless power at work in us.

I was thinking about a revival meeting I attended a couple months ago. At the time, I had never been to such a meeting, but I was so hungry for God’s love and power to more fully invade me, I was more open than ever before. I was the 6’3 Norwegian in the front row of a large African American church in Memphis, worshipping with new freedom and probably looking quite foolish... but for once, not caring one bit! I could feel God’s presence like a bright light in my body.

The second night at the altar call, the visiting preacher called up anyone feeling God’s presence. Well that was me. I jumped into line at the last minute. When the preacher came to me, he gently put his hand on my forehead and prayed a very sincere prayer for God to fill me in a new way. I felt something liquid like a bright light flow through my body all the way into my arms and legs. I felt like my whole body was illuminated! After his prayer, I crumpled like a rag doll and spent 45 minutes on the floor, my hands shaking, my whole body feeling the euphoria of God’s love and power on a new level. I could have gotten up if I had to but I didn’t want to! The feeling was incredible. One of the sweet things that happened on the floor was that a lady came up to me and lovingly stroked my back while praying quietly for me under her breath. It was very tender and though I never opened my eyes to look at her, I felt God’s love through her prayer. God started saying new things to me there on the floor that continue to shape my journey today.

The third night, something different happened. I was feeling the Lord’s Presence when the preacher called people up. But this time, when the preacher came to me, he called to the pastor sitting on stage to come pray for me. I saw the pastor leap up from his seat and run to the edge of the stage. He shouted “FIRE!!!” and literally shoved me backwards. I went to the floor and lay there for some time, but God’s Presence dissipated immediately. That liquid feeling of light was gone, although I did feel peaceful. I wasn’t offended by what the pastor did, but I recognized that the spirit was different.

I think one dynamic the Lord was showing me through that experience was this:

When we touch a person or situation with gentleness (whether physically or metaphorically), the Lord is able to touch that person or situation with real power. But when we touch people or situations aggressively, we don’t leave room for the Spirit’s work and we open the door for confusion. Was that God? Or was is just human manipulation? What we touch with a feather, the Lord touches with a hammer.

Gentleness is not tentativeness or timidity. Gentleness is very different from those things! I’m talking about a radical boldness and courage that doesn’t need to exert itself to get things done. This is because we know deep inside that the power to get stuff done doesn’t lie in us! It lies in the Father. And He gives us the power for all things, whether it is getting through the slog of our workday or praying for a friend with cancer. And when we see God swinging his hammer through our gentle touch, it makes us so joyful! Suddenly there’s no pressure in the Christian life. We don’t have to exert or strain or perform for Jesus. All we need to do is rest in intimacy with the Father, seek His heart and direction, walk in gentle humility.... and see God change the world through us!

Connection before Correction

I’ve been a bit muddy spiritually the last few days. For days after India, the Presence of God was so electrifying that I felt heat on the front of my face, electricity in my spine and arms, and an intense sensation in my upper abdomen for hours at a time. It felt good, but at times it was so intense I was physically shaking. God was speaking to me with more clarity and accuracy than usual both through “random” scripture references and directly in prayer. But by Saturday it had gotten so intense, I took one mental step away from the Lord’s presence. I’m really not sure why, but I immediately felt the difference. Anxiety and impatience started to creep in. I could still feel God there with me, but the edges and contours of my connection with him were blunted and blurred.

This morning I started rummaging through my spiritual/emotional/relational toolbox to find the right tool for reestablishing a strong connection with Jesus. At some point I pulled out the tool called “teachability”. I started earnestly asking God to change and correct whatever action or attitude might be blocking my relationship with him. I asked him to be honest with me, to correct me, to grow my character. I promised him that even if it was painful, I would cooperate with any lessons he may be trying to teach me.

Almost as soon as I admitted to him that I was struggling, the fog cleared a bit and I could see Jesus in my mental imagery standing just outside my car on the gravel parking lot of the bird sanctuary where I was parked. He looked peaceful, accepting, and a little mischievous as though he was laughing at me.

When I walked out by the lake, I could feel his Presence quietly standing just behind me, his arms wrapped around me as we both enjoyed the sun poking through the tall Georgia pines, streaming across the cold marsh. I started exercising my “teachability tool”  to strengthen the connection with my standard “teach me something and don’t spare me the hard stuff” prayer. I could almost hear him chuckling in my ear. “No child. That’s not what you need right now. For now let me just be with you. All that other stuff comes later.”

I could feel the goodness of his gentle rebuke. I know this stuff. Connection always has to come before correction. Don’t we all know that “truth” is best delivered in a context of safe relational connection (truth spoken in love)? In a deeper sense, Jesus’ claim in John 14 to BE “the truth” means that truth is not a set of principles outside of God that are best delivered relationally, but truth itself IS relational and intrinsically wrapped up in a divine personality.

In my recent work in trauma healing, I’ve learned that one of the hallmarks of trauma is the brain’s tendency to disconnect from an unsafe person or situation to protect itself in the midst of a trauma. Unfortunately although this mechanism protects the person in the short term, this disconnection also results in wrong assessments of the existential meaning of the trauma and all kinds of wrong beliefs about self, the world, and God result. That part of the brain that was traumatize remains disconnected and the wrong conclusions of improperly-processed trauma continue to snowball over time. To heal trauma a person has to reintegrate their minds and reestablish safe relational connection (ideally with God) in the context of the traumatic memory. From there, correct existential meaning can be discerned and right beliefs about self, the world, and God can be established. We are able to metabolize the pain of the trauma in healthy ways without it permanently damaging us. (credit to Dr. Karl Lehman’s “Pain Processing Pathway” for this: www.immanuelapproach.com)

Sorry if that’s a bit heady. For me, the “connection before correction” dynamic just means that my personal connection with God always has to come before the hard work of acquiring new lessons, skills, or maturity; not because I don’t want to learn and grow, but because learning and growth are made possible by connection. The “lessons” rarely lead to effective connection. But connection almost always leads to new “lessons”. It sounds like this:

“My child, I love you. Feel my presence with you right now. I accept you. I care for you. I understand what you are going through and I’m going to take care of everything. I really enjoy being with you. Let me just be your friend right now... can that be enough for you? Good. Now... let’s get to work. There are some things I need you to understand and some things I want you to do.”

Does that make sense?

I suppose then the question remains: how do I establish a reliable connection with the Lord from which everything else can spring naturally?

As I wrestle with that question, I’m tempted to point you to a variety of tools that have helped me. But the reality is that the tools themselves don’t guarantee connection though they can be helpful. What we are really after is not a “connect with Jesus” program that we can put on our computer and run whenever we need it. What we’re after is a whole new operating system that can naturally host a whole suite of new programs that move us toward our natural state of a relationally connected life in Christ.

Someone asked me this morning how I get this consistent connection with Jesus I keep talking about. I asked Jesus how to respond to this friend and instead of giving me words, he showed me a picture. It wasn’t a picture of a lesson, a tool, or a principle. Rather it was a picture of an invitation. In this picture, Jesus was standing in front of my friend with a lighthearted smile on his face, looking into my friend’s eyes. He was beckoning with his hand for her to come with Him. With a conspiratorial smile, He asked her if she wanted to come with him on a new adventure. It was a very tender image.

If you are reading this and it is hitting a nerve, I wonder: can you feel the invitation of Jesus to a deeper connection, even now as you are reading this? No matter how many years you’ve been trying to connect with Him, no matter how much anxiety you have, no matter what your situation is, no matter what your history is, Jesus is meeting you exactly where you are without judgment, trepidation, disgust, or prerequisites. He’s meeting you with right where you are with love and delight, and he’s inviting you on an adventure. Can you feel it?

That’s where it all started for me. One morning two years ago, I heard Jesus say in my mind, “I really like our morning walks together!” and that started changing the way I saw my relationship with Him, knowing that he liked being with me even more than I liked being with Him!”

If you can, in the quiet places of your mind, hear the invitation of Christ to come with Him on a new adventure of connecting and abiding in Him... then let me simply encourage you to go with Him and see where He leads you! From there, we can talk about tools and techniques. But for now, I pray you can feel his invitation to a deeper life with Him.

India in the Presence

I’ve been in India this last week with a group of pastors, ministry leaders, and theology students doing my discipleship thing. We all stayed together in a verdant Catholic retreat center in Vellore eating mostly spicy vegetarian food and sitting in the corridors joking around with the Anglican archbishop, our “gang leader” who organized the seminar.

I collected a number of stories from people who encountered God in a life changing way that week. 17 of our students said they felt they would never be the same after.  I took everyone through simple Immanuel exercises designed to build and maintain a connection with God through memory and deliberate appreciation thinking at minimum it would help attune them to what God might want to say to them through the seminar. Everyone said they were able to physically feel the presence of Jesus in the room (heat, electricity, peace, a sense of being elevated, etc) and most could hear Him speak. One woman confessed after the first day, “I’ve been running so hard for Jesus but now I know I need to be running with Jesus!

I took 5 students individually through the Immanuel Approach for healing traumatic memories and everyone had a profound experience. One person saw Jesus heal a 3 significant memories of traumatic abuse and then say, “if you ever need to know anything else [read: if you need resources] you can always come back to this place and I’ll explain everything to you.” The next day he said his feelings about the traumas had permanently changed. Another person felt so overwhelmed by the loving presence of God he said he could sit up anymore and had to lay down.

Other fun adventures included:

*Endless games of connect four with my friend Emmanuel’s 3 kids who called me “Nate Uncle”.

*Learning to make chapatti and chicken curry from some Indian ladies

*A visit to a nearby gypsy camp to distribute clothing

*A couple women getting healed of moderate to severe back pain

*A day trip through monkey-full mountains to the archbishop’s home for biriyani.

*A surprise ordination service with 3 bishops in which I became a priest in the Anglican Episcopal Church International. I’ve technically joined a monastic order modeled after the order of Saint Francis!

*Watching my friend Emmanuel teach several sessions in our seminar. I’m ready to call him a fully equipped trainer!

I’ve been trying to boil down the experience to a few salient reflections. I started seeing things come out of me naturally this week that show me I’m growing. I came into this week wanting to put all the intimacy I’ve enjoyed with Jesus the last 18 months to the test. If Jesus is present with me throughout the day in Fayetteville, leading me in tender and clear ways, can I trust him to lead me through a training seminar, a healing prayer session, a sermon, or a casual conversation in India? My conclusion? Far more than I ever imagined.

One morning Jesus showed me that the pace of his Presence is much slower than the pace of our brains and if I slowed my mind down enough to attend to Him, He would lead me in wonderful ways. This required a level of comfort with silence and potential awkwardness in the group. But after that, I made an effort to walk slower, talk slower, think slower, and invite Jesus into every situation. I would feel electricity in my body that was so intense at times I would be shaking. One student said he could see Jesus standing at my side whispering directions to me.

I also made it my ambition to stay with him during preaching. He actually told me before I left home that I should NOT prepare for these sermons, except to reflect on the passages he gave me for my own application. I realized how quickly I can get into my own clever thoughts and applications but totally miss what the spirit is doing. I wouldn’t say I totally succeeded in this faith experiment, but I could see Jesus in the back of the room and not having notes allowed me to keep my eyes on him and also to cultivate a new empathy and tenderness toward the people in the congregation. I tried to preach directly to the kids in the front row. I don’t think the content or delivery suffered for my lack of prep. If anything, I felt greater clarity, peacefulness, and conviction than I typically do.

But it wasn’t just during teaching and preaching that I felt God’s Presence. I felt Him there during tea breaks, sitting cross-legged on the bed with my friend Emmanuel, or joking with the other students in the hallways. Several times God showed me an image or word for someone, which seemed to fit them well. The only times his presence faded was when we were traveling, meeting new people, or when I felt some pressure to perform. But on the whole, He has been with me. He sharpened my intellect, increased my emotional capacity, turned on my relational circuits, gave me insight, and made me completely peaceful with virtually no feelings of doubt or intimidation which I’d expect given all the PhD’s, bishops, and ministry leaders in the room.

Here’s the cool thing though. I clearly heard Jesus say, “This is only the beginning.” As fun as this week was, I believe that much better things are coming down the road.

Much of my spiritual journey has felt a series of expansions and consolidations. This week felt like a hugely stretching and growing experience, although in some ways, it’s only an outward expression of the intimacy I’ve been enjoying privately for the last several months. Every time I have a growing experience like this, I have a choice: I can press into the growth by cultivating a quiet season of growth and intimacy... or I can lose the gains through pride, ministry strategizing, and overworking and grow at a much slower pace. I hope to take some extended time this week just enjoying my friendship with Him.

In one short month I’ll be in West Africa doing this among people who are working among the least reached. I’ll be meeting with Muslim leaders and looking for the presence of Jesus there as well. I wonder what the Lord can do if I slow down enough to let Him do His thing? I wonder what the Lord could do through you?

Here are a few snapshot for you to enjoy!