Exploring Guilt--Day 2

My beloved grandfather choked out the words on the phone, "Debi, get your mother. Hurry!"

A chill ran down my spine as I yelled through our house. It would be one of his last conversations with his only child--my mother--as he was calling to say he was having a heart attack that would, a week later, take his life.

My high school self thanked God a thousand times that I wasn't chatting on our only phone line (this was the late 1960's) and kept father-daughter from this critical conversation.

I was spared--in this instance--from a lifetime of wrestling with optional guilt.

Too often, however, circumstances turn out for the tragic.

A young man on an outing with his family is killed on his four-wheeler.

A brother commits suicide soon after his sister doesn't get to answer his call to her cellphone.

Replay begins.

What if they hadn't gone on the outing?

What if she had answered her phone?

The code name for optional guilt is what if?

Every mishap, every tragedy, every outcome that breaks our heart can be replayed to have a different ending.

Is there any way to stop the replay? Where is God when our string of events plays out for the worse?

One of history's greatest heartbreaks was Mary watching her son die a body-bludgeoning death on the cross. This was her baby, her firstborn son.

Besides being conceived in her virgin womb, he had probably been a mystery to her since he stayed back at the Temple at age 12, scaring his traveling parents to death, seemingly nonchalant that they were frantically searching for him.

Now, at the foot of the cross--his 33 years too brief on this earth--how could she not replay what if while watching his bloody body breathe its last?

Would her racing mind have gone something like this:

What if God hadn't asked this of me? My heart would not be breaking now.

Why does God ask us to travel through heartbreak? What is our hedge against the optional guilt of replaying a "better ending?"

Tomorrow: the road through the heartache of "what is."

Exploring Guilt--Day 1

Guilt.

It is an outlier, existing outside of us, yet very much a crouched tiger, ready to spring into view to assault us at any given moment.

It seems there are two arenas of guilt:

Conventional guilt, into which we step with our poor behavior choices, our sin

Optional guilt--thrown our way by the enemy of God--that we adopt for ourselves for any number of reasons

Interestingly, both have a measure of choice about them.

When we sin against God with our thoughts and deeds, we are exercising the choice of our behavior. Jesus lived in human flesh without sin as our ultimate model, that to which we aspire but will never reach in our current state. His human flesh was horribly crucified instead of ours--when we say thank you in acknowledgement of His willingness to be slain, we are given the means to deal with conventional guilt.

Why is a sacrifice required? To reconcile with the holiness of God.

God's holiness cannot embrace our sin, but neither does He mean for us to carry the guilt of our choices.

Conventional guilt has an out: acknowledging the price Jesus paid and in honor of that Power, asking God to extend to us that covering of forgiveness and reconciliation.

Conventional guilt that we stepped into by choice once again becomes an outlier, outside of us.

God will keep that crouching tiger in check if we let Him truly have authority over it. If we remember the guilt and take it back over and over, it will harass us in ways that Jesus lived to overcome.

I want to allow Jesus' few horrible hours on the cross to keep my crouching tiger of conventional guilt at bay.

Jesus gets the honor; I get the release and freedom. A gift freely given in both directions.

Tomorrow: exploring optional guilt.

Building an Acts 2 Community--Our Prayer

Our Sweet and Loving Father,

Would You be pleased to rest Your Holy Spirit upon any church or churches in our community who are "all in" to usher in Your kingdom on earth?

We offer up ourselves for this endeavor. We commit our resources as we tithe, because we know we are invited, in fact, commanded, to test You in this in Malachi 3:

Bring your full tithe...test me in this and see if I don't open up heaven itself to you and pour out blessings beyond your wildest dreams.

A full storehouse and shared resources with other churches would so magnify our outreach in our local, national and international communities as You direct. 

We ask Your courage for our pastor-teachers, that they are not impeded by worldly culture or the culture of stuck churches. Your presence and Your power enable our leaders to be strong and of good courage, able to discern fellow churches with healthy root systems with whom to partner.

We sell our commitment to the world and rather point our time and love and relationship to doing life together, integrating our work and family and play with our pursuit of Jesus, and caring deeply for the lives and families of those with whom we worship. We learn that when our church family has our backs, we are blessed indeed. A solidarity of shared mission can flourish under Your direction.

Our daily discipline will be worship, individually, with family and with church family. For in our freely given worship of You lies access to Your promise spoken through David:

I've pitched my tent in the land of hope. I know you'll never dump me in Hades; I'll never even smell the stench of death. You've got my feet on the life-path, with your face shining sun-joy all around.

Help us face our detractors with courage, Lord, for they will be many. The enemy of God will try to break our backs as we pursue Your agenda. Help us understand our detractors' wounds, doubts, and misunderstanding of who You are, for they, like us, are in need of Your grace and love.

Holy Spirit, when we are ready, unite and ignite. Jesus, in Acts 1, states our mission:

"...when the Holy Spirit comes on you, you will be able to be my witnesses in Jerusalem, all over Judea and Samaria, even to the ends of the world."

There is no higher honor than to extend the love of Christ that has changed each of us to someone lost and hurting. Help us live this change and extend Your heart.

In Your Name we pray,
Amen

Building an Acts 2 Community--Day 5

Our job as believers is to usher in the kingdom of God on earth. Only God knows the potential for our geographical setting. Our job is to prepare ourselves as we wait on the Holy Spirit, realizing we are simply parts--pinions--that fit into a God-directed whole.

A pinion is a small cogwheel that engages with a larger cogwheel. What matters first is the spiritual health of each small cogwheel.

Churches as pinions with God-directed root systems become the teaching and refreshment places on the community map, whereupon becoming filled and skilled, its committed attenders begin to move through the population with love-filled work and outreach. We are known by the fruit of our heart that the Spirit has worked out within each of us individually--we extend love, our joy and peace. We are forbearing with each other, always moving with kindness, benevolence, faithfulness, humility, and self-restraint.

The commitment to wait on the Power of the Holy Spirit brings that which we cannot attain on our own. Paul writes in Galatians 5:

When you attempt to live by your own religious plans and projects, you are cut off from Christ, you fall out of grace. Meanwhile we expectantly wait for a satisfying relationship with the Spirit. For in Christ, neither our most conscientious religion nor disregard for religion amounts to anything. What matters is something far more interior: faith expressed in love...it is absolutely clear that God has called you to a free life...use your freedom to serve one another in love.

Our little cogwheels of worship, when empowered by the Holy Spirit, will join with others to produce ever greater Power. The machinery of the Spirit begins to touch hearts of people who are disenfranchised, discouraged, and in despair. At the Spirit's invitation, the lost begin to rally and awaken to love expressed by the outreach of these churches.

Tomorrow: our prayer for an Acts 2 community.

Building an Acts 2 Community--Day 4

Rarely does a following accomplish anything without a leader.

Children follow parents, who envision their adulthood. Carpenters follow an architect, who envisions the new home. Employees follow the entrepreneur, who envisions the product line or service model.

An Acts 2 community follows church leaders, who envision what Jesus directed in Acts 1:

In face-to-face meetings, [Jesus] talked to them about things concerning the kingdom of God. As they met and ate meals together, he told them that they were on no account to leave Jerusalem but "must wait for what the Father promised: the promise you heard from me. John baptized in water; you will be baptized in the Holy Spirit. And soon."

Wait for the Holy Spirit.

What does a local church look like when their leader and followers are waiting on Holy Spirit Power?

Lots of face time with Jesus.

Lots of prayer to learn what God envisions for His kingdom in the here and now, in the serving, not in being served.

Asking God whom He wants as new leadership is added, just as the disciples did in choosing one to replace Judas.

Agreement that they are in "this" for good. 

Church as usual, in our Western culture, has not been waiting on the Holy Spirit. It has been more like a business venture serving its clients.

A church waiting on the Holy Spirit and giving up everything in this single-minded pursuit will often find itself in the impact zone of God's agenda. Surfers know the impact zone as the place where they get the worst beating when paddling out to catch a wave--where the falling lip of the set wave meets the water.

Those in pursuit of the wave of the Holy Spirit, paddling toward God's agenda with heart and soul, will take ferocious beatings from the falling lip of the enemy of God. They (the enemies of God) want no such endeavor in the community over which they have charge.

But such churches are in "this" for good. So wait they will.

The roots are healthy and mature. They await the Wave. Something only God can envision is about to happen.

Tomorrow: what might God envision as an Acts 2 community ushers in His kingdom?

Building an Acts 2 Community--Day 3

There is a side of "Christian" posturing that is ugly and non-fruit-bearing.

Besides rendering hate-filled, anonymous slander, it feigns captivity of God:

God fits into OUR methodology and you must jump through our hoops to "get Him."

A lesson for our churches is spoken through nature: the power of a majestic tree lies in the health and maturity of its root system. If the roots are brittle and loosely anchored, the tree's presentation (the part we see) cannot thrive.

Local churches have both a root system and a visible presentation.

The root system of a local church begins to mature as it releases its feigned captivity of God and prays instead to be captured by the love and radical grace of Christ.

Its visible presentation will be an outgrowth of this healthy and mature root system, and it will begin to display Christ as He lived on earth--embracing and serving the broken, teaching truth through the conduit of love and grace.

Maturity in church attenders is fostered when we let God grow us rather than insist on futile attempts to downsize Him into steps and definitions.

There is no hatred in maturity in Christ. The overarching theme of Jesus is reconciliation--first with God, then with each other. No swipes at each other, no hiding behind the cowardice of anonymity, but rather respect for and learning from each other's personal and collective pursuits of Christ.

When a local church allows God to grow its roots with health and maturity, those roots begin to reach toward those of other healthy and mature churches in the area. These are the churches and thus, the blessed community, that await the power of the Holy Spirit that unites and ignites.

Tomorrow: churches as leaders in the prep of Acts 1.

Building an Acts 2 Community--Day 2

In the school where I taught first grade, the principal decided to ration copy paper.

This was in the age of worksheets (my apologies to those students), when we somehow thought it was a good idea to give kids a stack of worksheets at the beginning of class and help them work through them.

(Students for whom school is easy can work through a stack of virtually anything; I know, sadly, that those for whom school seems insurmountable, we were just adding to their mountain of hopelessness and despair.)

Our rations were delivered to our classroom, and we took our own paper with us to the copier, protective of every sheet. Unbeknownst to the principal, the secretary would open a pack of paper for her own work and leave it conspicuously on the shelf by the copier.

And we would steal. Just a tiny speck, not the whole pack, of course. Our proprietary spirit, the one that guards what is ours, would kick into motion.

That same spirit activates when someone tells us about their doctor or their diet or their child-rearing method. We want to come back with that which is ours--our doctor, our diet, our child-rearing method.

And so it is with our church. Its leader, its worship style, its children's programming--all somehow more right...except that, they are not.

A proprietary spirit guards what is ours, including our opinion. At the most inopportune time, this spirit launches us into believing that our opinion is best, when, in fact, it is just an opinion.

A local church who seeks God's agenda is simply part of the greater Church, the one over which Jesus gave us charge before He left His stint on earth.

When we busy ourselves indulging our opinion that we are somehow better, stronger, and more in line with what God wants, we are giving voice to that proprietary spirit, and building an invisible barrier to complete sharing of mission and resources with other churches.

We steal. Not the whole mission, of course, just a tiny speck of it. 

It never occurred to us to share our copy paper; may the mission of Christ fare better.

Tomorrow: where the root system begins.