What? No Doves?

I had my first memorable encounter with Jesus when I was maybe 6 years old. It was vacation Bible School at a little American Baptist Church, the only church in our upstate New York hamlet of 100 families or so. I was just learning to write, I remember that, because my printing was blocky and slow…since I lacked the hand coordination for fluid motion I had to draw each letter, one stick or curve at a time, and it took me twice as long to copy out the daily verses onto my work paper as anyone else in the class. I can remember the teacher’s impatience. She didn’t want to miss recess and the singing and games in the parking lot, or the cookies and cool-aid, sitting beside me while I finished my writing. To be fair, she was mostly likely a teen-aged volunteer, not far removed from the days when those games were for her, and they were still probably the highlight of her day. I suppose she thought I daydreamed between letters (and perhaps I did).

One day though, I was gluing the corners of a cut-out house together…you know those crafty Vacation Bible School projects…the house where Jesus lived, punched out cardboard, with a sheep pen made of pop-sickle sticks held together with twisted pipe cleaners (I can almost smell the tuna sandwich and orange slice snacks form the church kitchen). I’d gotten to the stairs that ran up the outside of the house, and, what with my hand coordination problem, was making pretty heavy work of the folds and all the little tabs that fit, supposedly, into slots in the side of the already assembled house, when, for a second there, my awkward construction came alive in a swirl of dust rich-wind and I was looking from God’s eye view at a real house, with a real boy…a boy like me…running up the stairs (and probably getting yelled at for doing so) to his mother where she cooked the noon meal on the open roof, under a shelter of poles and boldly striped wool, in the baked air of a summer day, smelling of dates and olives, in a desert land.

A real boy, alive like me. Jesus was real. He didn’t just live in the stories in the Book, or in the Sunday School lessons. He had lived and walked this earth. He had been alive just as I was. He’d had a mother. Brothers. Sisters. He had known God as his father, and hadn’t let anyone tell him otherwise, his whole life. He was real. And that meant all the stories were real, from his birth right up to his resurrection that morning on the hill above Jerusalem when the world turned inside out.

I wish I could say it was all like that…every moment such a revelation…but I was a boy, and most of my time was just taken up being me. To be honest, it was taken up in surviving being me, and it was often a close fought battle.

And then, the summer I turned 14, I spent a lot of afternoons with my cousin George (who was just a few days younger than I was) and the Pastor in the Pastor’s cramped, book-lined office, with flies buzzing at the open windows, studying for baptism. We were already close to two years late. There are, of course, certain expected rituals in the American Baptist Church, and “adult” baptism is one of them. At 12 you are assumed to be an adult (at least for spiritual purposes) and, pretty much as a matter of course, you get dunked. I think they operate pretty much on the same logic as the Jews did, figuring you want to get the important work done, the commitments made, before the kids’ hormones kick in and they find out what a lot more there might be to being an adult.

Perhaps the Pastor at the time we were 12 wasn’t eager to hold baptism classes all summer for just two boys…the closest kids in church to our age were two years older and had passed the ritual when we were still too young, and there wasn’t anyone under us for close to 4 years. I know the Pastor who conducted ours when they happened was “new” to the church, a young man, bookish, with glasses and a slightly rumpled look. I wish I could remember his name, but he wasn’t with us long. For all I know he could have been a summer intern filling in while we waited for a new pastor to be assigned. I think maybe he was.

Those summer afternoons we read scripture and talked, we wrestled with the words of Jesus, or at least I did. My cousin couldn’t figure out why I was “taking it so seriously”…

”Look, you just say yes to everything he says, they dunk us, and it’s over. It’s not like it makes any difference. Why do you want to argue with him? We could be in and out in 15 minutes instead of 2 and half hours!”

But I did want to argue. I wanted to challenge every point. I wanted to understand. I wanted to know what Jesus was asking of me.

That summer the words of Jesus bounced around inside me (or I bounced around inside them) like bees in a hive (or like a bee in a hive) looking for a way out. I suppose, you could say, I was “under conviction”…but it wasn’t a conviction of my sinfulness (which is supposed to happen before baptism), it was a conviction that Jesus wanted something of me, that he wanted me to be someone, to do something, to become what I was not and had not yet even considered being. I was under conviction that Jesus wanted me, he wanted me for his very own, for purposes only he knew…and that I had a choice to make…that I could say “yes” or I could say “no”.

I wasn’t afraid anything bad would happen if I said “no”…don’t get me wrong. It wasn’t that kind of guilt induced fever. It was quite simply a “calling”. Just as Jesus had stood in front of his disciples while he lived and called each one of them, he was standing right in front of me, and he was calling me. Follow me. Be mine. And I will give you life.

This is what I heard him saying:
Deny yourself, die to yourself, take up your cross daily, and follow me…
Leave everything behind, all thought of a normal life, and live with the message of the gospel on your lips, the love of God in your heart, the touch of God in your hands.
Claim no where as your home, and let no where claim you.
If you have family obligations, well, let the dead bury the dead.
If you have wife or family and they won’t come with you…leave them behind.
If you have a farm or business, don’t let that hold you back. Leave it and follow.
Brothers and sisters, father and mother?...your family will be your fellow believers, not flesh and blood.
If you have anything, give it all to the poor, and come follow me.
Worry about nothing: not food, not clothing, not shelter. Trust only in God.
Don’t gather possessions, and don’t trust in wealth. Trust only in God.
Speak only the truth. Let your yes be yes and your no be no. Don’t lie, even to yourself.
Love your enemies. Pray for those who persecute you. Go the extra mile. Don’t demand of others what you don’t demand of yourself. Treat others better than you would want them to treat you. Be perfect in blessing as God your Father is.
Forgive. Always. Forever. Again and again.
Live purely, honestly, humbly…cut off the hand that offends and pluck out the eye.
And don’t think you will get away with just keeping the rules or putting on a show. That’s worse than nothing. I’ll have nothing to do with play-actors.
Go heal the sick, raise the dead, cleanse the lepers. Don’t take a suitcase. Don’t take money. Just go. Stay and bless where you are welcome. Take your blessing with you where you aren’t.
Be ready to give your life for your friends.
Believe with a mustered seed faith that is mighty to move mountains.
And count the cost: make sure you are ready for this, able for the long haul.
Don’t put your hand on the plow if you intend to take it off again. This is forever.
You will be persecuted. Hated. Reviled. Perhaps even killed. You have been warned.
Stand on a rooftop and shout the good news.
Burn like a lamp on the table, like a city on the hill, like a star in the night of this world.
Don’t love the world, or the ways of the world.
Love your neighbor as you do yourself.
Love God with all your heart and soul and mind.
Take up this burden: it is easy. Wear this yoke: it is light.
If you live what I teach, then you know the truth and the truth will set you free.
Go and make disciples of all the nations, teaching them everything I have shared with you.
And the Father and I will come and dwell in you, and you in us, forever.

The center of the argument I had with the Pastor that summer, the core of the issue, was that I could not imagine anyone living the life Jesus seem to be calling me to, and not being in full time ministry: a pastor, or a missionary at least. And I didn’t see how the pastors and missionaries I knew were doing it either. I didn’t see how there was any room for anything normal…a girl-friend, a family, a job, a car, a home…in following Jesus. It appeared to me that you had to abandon all that and live, as Jesus did, as his disciples apparently did, hand to mouth, from the charity of others, or you just couldn’t do it. I wanted to know what happened to Peter and John…did they go back to being fishermen?  How did they live? I wanted to know what happened to Peter’s wife.

And I am sure the Pastor answered me with Paul and his tent-making ministry. Bad choice! This is the guy who recommended that no one get married, because marriage would complicate, and, depending on your reading, maybe even compromise, your life in Christ. This is the guy who bounced all over the known world, driven out of town after town, beaten half to death more than once, and spent the last years of life in prison, as a guest of the Romans.

When you are 14 it is easy to see hypocrisy in the adults around you: in fact, it is difficult to see anything else. “Why do you spend so much time,” I wanted to know, “explaining away the clear message of Jesus? Why do you spend so much time taking this simple instruction and trying to make it fit your comfortable lives, with all the things Jesus never had: family, job, car, home? If a life of radical self abandonment, and a single minded dedication to God and the good news is what it takes to be a follower of Jesus, then why do we try to make it seem you can “get by” with a lesser standard that still allows us to have normal lives.

“And why the double standard? One for Pastors and Missionaries and one for “lay people”? And, like I said, how come the Pastors and Missionaries aren’t even living like Jesus did? I mean, can you imagine Jesus reviewing the church budget or standing up in front of any church with a slide show of the poor orphans of Samaria and asking for money? Paul maybe…but even Paul wasn’t Jesus.”

God forgive me. I must have driven that poor young pastor to distraction.

As it got closer to the date of the baptism I got more and more nervous. I knew, no matter what the Pastor said, what Jesus was asking of me, and I knew I was not ready. I mean, I hadn’t even thought, at that point, about a girl-friend, about love and romance, let alone marriage, about a job…I didn’t know who I wanted to be or who I could be. It seemed to me that here was Jesus coming in and saying “forget all that…this is who I want you to be” and I was not ready. I wasn’t ready to cut off the hand that offended or pluck out the eye…I wasn’t even sure what lust meant yet, though I was beginning to get enough of an idea to pretty sure I wasn’t ready to let that go without at least trying it first. I wasn’t good enough. And I wasn’t sure I wanted to be good enough.

Right to the last moment I was hoping: I was hoping that, despite the Pastor’s careful Baptist explanation of baptism, there would be magic in the water. I was hoping that I would come up out of the water changed…reborn…the kind of person who could live the way Jesus lived. I was hoping a dove would descend from the dusty rafters of the big Baptist Church in metropolitan Hoosick Falls (population 7000) where we borrowed the baptismal pool, and a voice would boom (at least in my mind): “This is my son, chosen and marked with my love. I delight in him.” and I would go off, I suppose, driven to fast in the desert by the Holy Spirit, wrestle my demons, and begin…

Telling the good news. And I would never stop until someone put a stop to me.

Of course it didn’t happen. I came up the same as I had always been.

I knew what was supposed to have happened in that tank…that down there, under the water…I was supposed to have said “yes” to Jesus and “no” to everything else, to all the other might-have-beens and could-bes…yes I will come…yes I will go…yes, I will be you want me to be. Yes I will, God help me, be like you Jesus.

Then, maybe, the doves.

But I had not. I had, apparently, not.  I had wanted to. I had wanted to maybe more than anything I have ever wanted. But I had lacked the courage. I had lacked the imagination. I had lacked the faith.

“Anything happen?” my cousin asked, when we were standing dripping in our borrowed choir robes back stage, toweling the water from our faces and trying to clear our ears. I think probably I just shook my head. I know I was feeling the first great emptiness of my life.

“Told you.” he said.

And, but for the infinite grace of God, that might have been the end of the story.

Faith and Knowing

Faith and Knowing
a few notes:
Faith is, quite simply, a way of knowing things.Faith is the indispensable prerequisite for knowing anything of importance.Faith is the doorway, the password, the first step on the path of experience...and all true knowledge, all true knowing, is based on experience. We know the truth of something because it has proven true. It has been demonstrated to be true, personally, in our own experience.

It works like this:We are asked to believe something, something essential to our well being...we are asked to "take it on faith." This means that we give our assent to it...we say yes to the truth of it, without proof. "Yes, I will believe that." Or, even, "Yes, I will let you prove that to me."
Note that this assent is never an act of "blind faith." It always takes place in a context which gives us grounds, generally ample grounds, for assent.

Absolutely the best ground is an abiding personal confidence in the attester (the person, being, or power asking us to believe)...the naked assumption that the attester has our best interest at heart, that, in fact, the attester loves us, would not lie to us, would not ask us to believe anything that was not both true and good for us. This is the childlike faith that all of the world's religions recommend.

More often, for those of us who think of ourselves as adults, the grounds are the testimonies of our fellows...the crowd of witnesses, past and present, who affirm the essential truth of what we are being asked to believe, who say, in effect, "I believed that and it has proven true for me."
Then too, if the attester is a trans-temporal being (or we are old enough) there is the historical record. We can look back on the actual deeds of truth this particular attestor has accomplished.

On rarer occasions the grounds may be an active, forceful, intervention in our lives of the attesting power...a compelling encounter with the one who says it is true. That is to say, the simple force of the personality of the attestor is sometimes enough to give us grounds to believe.
On very rare occasions, stubborn beings that we are, we have to be hounded into assent. The circumstances of our lives appear to cast increasing doubt on what we thought we believed and knew. What is more, there seems to be an active agency behind this disillusion, an agency that we strongly identify with the attestor. We come, in the end, to see assent to this particular truth as the only solid option left in a crumbling world.

Once assent is made, however, once the "yes" is said, then experience of the truth of the assertion should follow. If it does not, then we have every right to doubt the authority and the trustworthiness of the attester, and the truth of the proposition. We have every right, we are, if truthful to ourselves, obliged to withdraw our assent...we don't need to, or have to, believe anymore.

However, without the initial assent, no experience of the truth is possible! Nothing can be proven true until you admit at least the possibility that it is true. Nothing worth knowing about ourselves or the universe we live in can be known without that initial act of faith. All things worth knowing, once we make the act of faith, do, in fact, prove to be true.

How do I know? I take it on faith. I have made my assent to the truth, and it has proven true.
There are, of course, different varieties of validating experience...different ways of demonstrating the truth, once the assent of faith is made.

There is what we have come to think of as the scientific method. Repeated trials of the hypothesis match the predictions of our theory (what we believe to be true). In the more general sense that is what we are saying when we say that experience bears out the truth of something. "By golly, every time it gets put to the test in my own life, it turns up true!" We may not be consciously or willfully experimenting, but we view our lives and experience as the great experiment...the lab of truth.

Then too, nothing true exists in isolation from other truth...from the fabric or web of truth which sustains the universe. Truth is often demonstrated by the way in which the new assumption fits in, or fills out, the pattern of truth already known. That's what we mean when we say something makes sense. It meshes with the existing pattern of truth to maintain a seamless whole. Better yet, the new assumption may extend the pattern in directions we did not even know were possible...it may suddenly expand the fabric of truth to cover whole new areas of experience and knowledge...open new vistas, new directions for further growth. Such meshing and or/expansion is, in and of itself, a sufficient proof.

There is also the simple attesting certainty that sometimes follows the act of faith. "My whole being cries YES! The universe around me resonates, vibrates, with affirmation, with rightness!" (Giving one sense, the radical or grounding sense, of the "ring of truth," about which more later.) It is the experience of being instantly bigger, better, and more real because you believe, because you know; the "ah ha," the "eureka," the pure leap of the spirit and laugh of joy that comes with unshakable certainty that you have glimpsed the truth. Don't discount it! It has never, in my experience, failed to be followed, in time, by ample, if more mundane, demonstrations.

The "ring of truth." By that we generally mean that something sounds as though it ought to be true. The fact is, the more often we make the assent of faith and let the truth be proven to us, the easier it becomes for us to recognize the truth by its flavor in the mouth, its ease in our minds, its resonance with and within our spirits. The ring of truth, in and of itself, becomes an ever increasing ground for assent.

I have tried to keep this, so far, in the realm of pure philosophy. I find it necessary, now, to introduce some personality and take it into the realm of theology. Of course, all that about the attester above is the opening.

One of the basic assumptions of my life, one of the basic leaps of faith I have made, is that there is an attesting power, a benevolent being, a repository of truth who is in charge of the universe...whose personal truth underlies and maintains the validity, the very substance, of the universe. God. I also believe in our kinship...that we are of the same kind...that I am a child, one essential and unique personality within the (infinitely various) child of God, and that it is God's delight to parent me...to instruct me in the ways of the universe and of truth, so that I may both live and grow. God loves me. These truths began with an act of faith, taken in a context of ample reasons to believe. They have been abundantly demonstrated, attested, validated, in my own experience, and they continue to be so.

If you now read back through this whole thing, in that light, you will (should) see that I am saying that faith is operative principle of God's instruction. In a universe founded on the truth of God, it is the operative principle of truth itself. God's truth must be believed before it can be seen to be true...once it is believed, abundant proof follows...not the least of which is the certainty, the tangible spiritual evidence, that you have achieved a closer relationship, a more perfect unity with the loving parent of all...the very substance and being of all. It is the resounding, embracing, personally affirming, yes that is the highest word in the language of love.
To put it in the most traditional of terms:

"I am crucified with Christ,
never-the-less I live,
yet not I but Christ lives in me.
And the life I live in the body,
I live by faith in the son of God."

S. Ingraham

What Matters

I was in Spain, operating on too little sleep, in a setting that was just short of surreal. It was El Rocio in the flat marsh country they call The Doñana, just inland from the Mediterranean, where the coast makes the turn down to Gibraltar on the west. It is a “preserved” village, we would call it a “National Heritage Site”, all but a ghost town most of the time despite the tourists, dedicated to a once-a-year horse-back and wagon-drawn pilgrimage connecting the sites of statues-of-the-Virgin miracles across Andalusia. We weren’t there for the pilgrimage. The Doñana is also home to one of the world’s great wildlife and bird refuges and we are the Zeiss worldwide birding market team. The meetings had been intense: important product decisions which could affect the future of the company for years to come, and me, as usual, taking the risky position and demanding a higher effort.

And then one of those typically Spanish dinners that started at 8 pm and didn’t finish until after midnight: about seven courses, fourteen bottles of wine (four bottles of sparkling water for me and the one other non-partaker at the table). What with the night flight in and going straight into meetings, I had been awake for 24 hours by the time I got back to the classic old adobe hotel, and I was overstuffed and over-tired when I finally stumbled into my narrow bed.

So I wasn’t really surprised at the early morning dreams. I often have what prove to be memorable dreams in similar situations (why I get myself into such situations is another question all-together).

I don’t actually remember the dream, but I woke with a conviction, which proved a question, and a good deal of meditation since.

The conviction: It does not matter to God whether I am whole or broken. Oh, he does care about that, but it matters very little compared to what really matters to him most. And what matters most is that I be available, totally available, whatever my state, to do whatever he needs me to do, moment by moment, for the good of the Gospel and those around me.

Further, I had the sense that when I concern myself about my wholeness or brokenness, and especially when I invest time and energy in attempts to fix myself, I am, to a degree, failing in my faith. I had the sense that God expects me to just trust him. He will make me as whole as I need to be for his work, and if my brokenness servers him better than wholeness would, or even if I can serve him just as well broken as whole, well then, I am called to endure my brokenness, (even, perhaps, as both Paul and James suggest, to rejoice in my brokenness) while continuing to turn myself over to God with utter abandonment.

By easy extension that becomes: God will make me as holy as I need to be for his work, and if I judge myself to be less holy than I ought to be, or even than I want to be, well then, I should just trust God to finish what he began in me, and get on with making myself available, just as I am, for the good of the Gospel and those around me.

It is not, I begin to suspect, wholeness or holiness that God values most in us: it is availability…openness to his will and his work. He doesn’t even require ability…he will, according to Paul and a host of other witnesses, provide that. Just availability. Just a “yes God” attitude. Just faith.

(You might take that “yes God” attitude to be what we traditionally think of as obedience. There is an element in this that I would love to claim as true obedience, but too often our Christian obedience, our whole concept of what obedience is and what it requires of us, is limited by what we believe we are capable of doing (see Moses) and not empowered by our faith in a God who can do anything, even in us, just as we are. Availability is more than obedience. It is a total abandonment of self to God: a “Here I am, just as I am. Use me as you will.” As I say: I’d love to claim that as the true definition of obedience. It would make sense of a lot of scripture for me.)

And so, to the question: Is it true? Can it be? Can God possibly care more about our availability than he does our wholeness or holiness?

All of this flies in the face of so much of our current teaching and apparent understanding of the Gospel. I mean, after all, if God doesn’t make us whole, if he isn’t the business of fixing us (or, even, helping us to fix ourselves) so we can live good lives, holy lives, lives which honor him and demonstrate his power and his love, then (I hear a great chorus of voices asking) what is the point of the Gospel? Surely God wants us whole and holy, first and foremost, and certainly Christ died to make us so.

Well, if my dream conviction is anything like true, then we ought to be able to find it in scripture, and, of course, immediately the scripture engine in my brain kicks in and I begin to make connections…to line up a whole raft of verses, proof texts, that make sense in the light of that conviction (or that throw the light of sense on that conviction).

As significant to me as scriptural confirmation is, it was not proof texts that made the immediate impact. I had this sudden experience, vision almost, of being in the presence of the saints: of those actually used by God. (I don’t know whether this was, in fact, part of the dream, or part of my first waking reflection on the dream.) Their biographies, their histories, what we know (and what little I know) of them as people rolled in front of my mind’s eye, and I realized that they weren’t, most of them…from the earliest Old Testament records, right up through the Gospel story, and on out the other side to the saints who have been recognized as such since the scriptures were closed…particularly whole or holy folks. Certainly the vast majority would fail any modern test of psychological wholeness, and whether they were holy or not depends a lot on your personal definition of what holiness might look like.

They were just, for the most part, available to God, to a greater or lesser degree, at least some of the time: at least when it mattered. Certainly they were all well aware of their own failings. In fact, what unites them at their best (or the best of them) is that they thought little of themselves at all…they were focused on the will of God…on doing, not being…and not in the abstract either. They, each of them, answered a call to do something for God, generally something quite specific and generally something quite impossible, at least in human terms. And in the midst of doing it, they gave, at most, a passing thought to their own ability, or wholeness, or holiness…generally along the lines of “why me?…I can’t do this and I am not fit to do it…” followed immediately by “but if you say it has to be done God, and you can’t find anyone better, well then, I’ll just do my best. It’s your look out anyway. And don’t say I didn’t warn you.”

Now, I want to be whole and holy as much as any Christian. I want the life I live to proclaim the good news of Christ risen and alive in me, and it makes sense to me that the best witness for Christ would be whole and holy. But what I have come to see is that my two wants there, to be whole and holy, and to display the truth of the gospel, may not be the same thing at all. It might even be that the best witness for the gospel may not be particularly whole or holy.

For one thing, while I am focused on my wholeness and holiness I may be so busy with myself that I am not available for the good that God is asking of me in that moment. For another, I have come to see that the power of the gospel is Christ alive in us…just as we are…just as much as, however much, we make ourselves available to his work and his will…and that the power is best seen in the fact that he can do what only he can do, right now, even in my brokenness and even though I am not, at this moment, by any reasonable standard, very holy. The power of the gospel is not what God is able to do because of my goodness, my wholeness, my holiness, but what he is able to do in me despite my brokenness, despite my lack of holiness, despite me altogether.

Like Paul when discussing similar matters, I have to back pedal here and say that none of this can be taken as an excuse for unholy living, or for taking pleasure in, or for actively pursuing, the habits that cause our brokenness. Willful unholy living, and pleasure in sin, will completely occupy us, take all our time and attention and energy, and prevent us from being available to God (if God can be prevented?). No, this is addressed to those who already have the desire for wholeness and holiness, and have already made the turn toward God in Christ. This is for those who already have the life of Christ in them, and who have a genuine hunger to see that life be more effective in the work of the gospel. For such as we are, there is no danger in saying “don’t concern yourself with your own wholeness or holiness” since we know that in saying that we are really saying “trust God for your wholeness and holiness, by making yourselves totally available to him.” It’s his look out anyway. And he has been warned.

One of the hardest things for the good Christian to surrender to God is our desire to be good…good enough for God…good enough for the work of God. It is a natural desire, and it generally predates our rebirth by at least a few moments, months, even years. It grows in part from our legitimate thankfulness that God should consider such as you and I, and that he spent his son so what we could have forgiveness and new life.

But it also grows in part from our very human desire to be in charge and to be accepted for who we are (at its worst we easily identify this attribute as pride). We want to be able to think of ourselves as good enough for anything and anybody. And if we know we aren’t, then at least we want to be in charge fixing ourselves.

Our life in Christ begins with the admission that we are not good enough, and never will be, and that we can not fix ourselves and never will be able to. Only based on that admission can God apply the grace that is in Christ, and only after that admission can the new life of Christ be ours. When we enter into Christ and he into us, we surrender our “right” to be good enough on our own, along with any idea that we will ever be able to fix ourselves.

However, part of the persistence of the old man in us is our tendency to immediately (or over the first few months of our new life), and largely unconsciously, take back our surrender. “Christ died for me…and now I need to be good enough to justify the price.” “My sins are forgiven, and now I have to live a life that is worthy of the God who saved me.” It is easy, all too easy, to cut God’s grace out of the picture again…to begin to rely on our own goodness and/or our own ability to fix what is wrong with us. Oh, we would never consciously (or willingly) admit that we have done any such thing: we know we are sinners saved by grace, and that through faith, which is itself a gift. We can quote the scripture, and we have experienced the reality of it in salvation, so we quote it with conviction.

The thing is we don’t act, or talk, much of the time, like we are trusting only in God’s goodness in Christ, or trusting in God alone to finish what he began in us. We say things like “God did his part. Now we have to do ours.” “God’s grace is sufficient, but certainly we have our part to do too.” “God helps those who help themselves.” All of this makes God an accessory to our own efforts to be good enough, to fix ourselves so that we can satisfy him. We admit his grace as the means, and then fully intend to do the work ourselves, with his help, of course.

This is all very tricky ground and I know it. This balance between faith and works, between God’s action in us, and our action for God and for good, between us as God’s children and God-in-us, is one of the most difficult aspects of Christianity to understand…and, I am coming to believe, without a doubt the most difficult to get right.

I don’t claim to have it right. Let’s understand that right now.

All I know is that I am coming to believe that you can not go wrong trusting God, and you can not go wrong trusting God more. You can not go wrong by basing the life you live in Christ on simple, complete, absolute faith in the God who saved us in Christ, and who has promised, through Paul, to finish the work he began in us. You can not go wrong by abandoning yourself to God.

The thing is, such an absolute faith that God will act in us for our good and the good of those around us…the kind of trust that says in effect “I am not capable of any action for my own or other’s good…yet I believe that God will act in me in Christ” short circuits everything that is human and limited in us, and puts the whole thing back on God…a God who has always delighted in proving he is able to those who trust in him alone. “It is your look out, God. There is nothing I can do to help you. You have been warned. But I believe you will do in me what I could never do in myself. Do your best God, for me and for those around me. I am yours.”

And if you doubt that will work…remember you are doubting that God is able and willing to do good in us unless we meet some criteria of wholeness and holiness. Isn’t that the same as doubting God’s ability and will for good? Do you really want to doubt that?

“But certainly,” I hear you saying, “God requires our cooperation.” Our cooperation? What is it that we can do that God is not able to do by himself?

There is an answer to that, by the way. It is not just a rhetorical question, though I hope it made you think.

The one thing that we can do that God can’t do is to touch other people. We have the hands, the tongue, the physical presence that God himself, since Christ returned to the Father’s side, has not had. God needs our hands, our tongues, our minds, our hearts in this world to do his will. But we won’t do it by trusting to our own good, our own wholeness, our own holiness. We will do it only by being totally available to God…by turning over our very flesh…our hands, our tongues, our minds, our heats…to God for him to use for the good of those around us.

But it is not our cooperation he needs. God is not our copilot! He needs our abandonment to him. He needs us totally available to do what only he can do. He needs our willingness to be used, and our complete surrender. He needs us to trust him, and him alone.

“But certainly,” you say, “we are more effective for God when we are whole and holy…so God won’t ask me to do anything as impossible as loving those around me, before he makes me whole enough to love, and holy enough to be believed.”

Ha! Where does that come from? When has God ever waited for his Children, his creatures, to be ready to do good? When has he ever given any of his servants, his saints time to “get it together” before asking them to do the impossible? When we say to God, “I am not ready. Make me better before I have to act.” Aren’t we just, again, doubting God’s ability to do what needs to be done, and to do it through us. Aren’t we doubting God’s ability? Do you really want to start doubting that?

And, how often do we “second guess” God. I mean, he called us in Christ. Christ died to give us new life. We experienced that new life in salvation. Why would we doubt God when he calls us to do the impossible now, now that Christ is already our life? Why do we question our wholeness or holiness, or ability, or fitness for anything. That is God’s look out. (And he certainly has been warned.) God is God. He is able. No matter how broken I am, no matter how unholy, no matter how unable or unfit: God is God, and God is able. Do you really want to start doubting that?

If I believe him for forgiveness and salvation, why would I doubt that he is going to finish the work, and that he is, right now, just as I am, right this moment, using me to do his will in the lives of those around me. Why would I doubt that he who works all things for the good of those who love him is, right now, just as I am, broken or whole, holy or unholy, working my good and the good of those around me…using even what I and others see as my failings, my sins, to accomplish what needs doing.

Just as I am. I came to him just as I was, trusting to his love and his power in Christ to save me. Just as I am. Just as I am I come to him now. I make myself available to him just as I am, trusting to his love and power to use me for good.

Oh yes! I hope to be better. I hope to whole and holy. I hope to shine like a city on the hill…like a star in the darkness. But that is his lookout, and his alone. I trust him make it so. Yes God! Make it so. Amen and Amen. Make it so.

In the meantime, whole or broken, holy or “just as I am”, I make myself available to God for good.

Now. If I can only remember that. Dream convictions are hard to hold on to. But that is God’s look out. And he has been warned.

The Want and The Will

The Want and The Will
God is showing me, these days, that we have two different forces at work in us—two very different, but closely related, forces that make us do the things we do—that enable us to do the things we do.
One is entirely “of the flesh” and we call it (or I am going to call it) “the want.” The other is entirely “of the spirit” and we generally call that “the will.”
Most of us already know about “the will.” We are strong willed, or we are willful, or we seek the will of God. What God is showing me is that we have a force in us that is just as strong as the will, and it is that force that needs a new name. “The Will” on one side then, and “The Want” on the other.
We want a lot of things. I want to get home early this evening and spend some time with the family. I want a candy bar (or a whole can of Planters Lightly Salted Peanuts, all to myself) after school. I want to get my own way (always). I want to love my wife more. I want peace on earth. I want to know God better.
Some of the things we want are good and natural, and, of course, if we are honest with ourselves, we will have to admit that at least of some of the things we want are not good for us (or for those around us). A pastor friend (Keith Bulthuis who lives and works in Gallup, New Mexico) once told me: “We human beings, for the most part, do what we want to do, and only what we want to do. When we come to Christ, what Christ has to change in us is not our wills, but our wants.” There is remarkable wisdom in that simple statement and I think of it at lest once a week in my walk with Christ. Thank you Keith.
The will, though we are more familiar with the term, and, we think, with the concept, is actually harder to define. When we say someone is “strong willed,” what we are really saying, generally, is that he or she knows what he or she wants and is stubborn enough to insist on getting it. When we say that someone is “willful” what we are really saying is that the person always wants to get his or her own way, to have what he or she wants, at any cost to the others that might be in the way (which is, of course, another definition of “strong willed” if you happen to be in the way of a strong willed person’s want).
Will is a somewhat mysterious force in us that, we assume, enables us to do things, to overcome obstacles, to accomplish what we want. Will power! The little engine that could. I will get it done. I will love you forever. I will make it to the top.
The trouble is, that by this definition, the will is what helps us to get what we want. You could equally well say “I want to love you forever.” “I want to make it to the top.”
How often is “will power” really “want power” in disguise?
There are two cases that come to mind that might reveal the will more clearly. One would be the case where we will ourselves to do something we don’t want to do (I once read this argument in a Charles Finny book, and I think Dr. Dobson has adopted it in some of his Focus on The Family teachings. According to this teaching, the will only really comes into play when we do things “against our will.”). In most cases, though, I suspect that a clear-headed (and clean-hearted) examination of the situation would show that what we take for will is really just a higher want. We might not want to share our food with the poor, or give up a cherished Saturday afternoon activity to spend time with the family. We might will ourselves to do it, however, if we were convinced it was a good idea. Or, to put it another way, we might be able to make ourselves do something we didn’t want to do if we wanted the greater satisfaction or the higher result (or the sense of divine approval) that we knew (or even suspected) would come with the act. We would then be using the wants of our better nature to overpower the wants of our worse nature (assuming, for a moment that there are such things as a better and a worse nature), but I don’t, personally, see where the will comes into it at all.
The second case for the will would be when we use our wills to overcome apparently insurmountable obstacles: the little engine that could syndrome. What this generally boils down to though (again in a clear-headed, clean-hearted examination), is that we convince ourselves that we are able to do what we want to do (but don’t really feel able to do) by telling ourselves, over and over, that we can do it, we can do it, we can do it, we will do it, we will do it, we will do it, yes I can, yes I can, yes I will.
Note, however, that even here we began by saying “we are able to do what we want to do.” The motivating force is still want, not will. We even acknowledge this in another piece of folk wisdom (popular on posters of kittens hanging by a single claw from the limb of a tree): “If you want it bad enough, you can do it!” Coaches regularly use their teams’ “want to win” to motivate them to their best effort (even to go beyond their best effort). The want to be respected and successful, to have all the things our society and culture offer, including self-respect, is often the motivation for the underprivileged to improve their condition, many times against amazing odds. Once more, though, I am not convinced there is any will involved. Want is enough to explain it all.
There is, of course, a completely alternative use of the word “will”: as in “I am willing to do it,” Will, in this case, is not a mysterious force, but a simple readiness to do whatever is being asked, whatever is necessary. Willingness is other centered. It does not depend on what we want, it depends on what others need. Far from imposing our “wills” on the situation (forcing circumstance to conform to our wants), willingness makes our energies available to do what is necessary and right so that we all, while we might not get exactly what we want, will have what we actually need. Willingness is a gift of ourselves, of our life energies, to the others who are part of our lives (and, if we are honest, part of our selves).
And, of course, here we come to the spirit/flesh dichotomy. There is nothing in our flesh to enable us to give that gift. The flesh wants what it wants. The flesh is not willing to surrender its wants for others. The flesh, left to itself, will always try to impose its wants on every situation.
So what will make us willing? Nothing in the flesh, and yet we experience willingness in ourselves (at our best) and in others (at theirs). Therefore there must be, somehow, somewhere, an actual power of willingness at work. If it is not in the flesh, then it must be in the spirit. “The spirit is willing but the flesh is weak.”
Which brings us to the fact that the flesh, which I may seem to be belittling here, is, in a very real sense, all we have to give. To accomplish anything, for ourselves or others, we have to put our hands to the task, put, as they say, our backs into it, spend ourselves, our flesh, our life energies, to get the job done.
Our life energies, which we are, at times, willing to spend on others, are all in the flesh, already dedicated to getting what we want. That means that to actually do what we are willing to do, our wants have to change. Which brings us right back to Keith’s insight. Thank you Keith.
Now here is where it gets a bit mysterious, a bit mystical. My experience (and the collective experience of the culture as expressed in literature and art) is that human beings are never really happy, never really at peace with themselves, unless their wants and their wills are in tune with each other. There is nothing more miserable than not getting what you want—there is nothing more miserable than knowing you are wanting the wrong things—there is nothing more miserable than constantly having to suppress your willingness, your awareness of other’s needs, in order to get your own way. I suspect that, in fact, want is supposed to always be the servant of will—that our willingness is supposed to direct our want to get what needs doing for us all done. You might say that our highest want is to be willing.
We know this, instinctively, because it is coded, hard wired, right into the fabric of our brains and bodies, into our flesh, which is, of course, supposed to be the physical expression and perfect servant of our spirits (ultimately, if you are Christian as I am, the perfect servant of the Spirit of Christ that is ours by faith).
So the conclusion I reach is that we will never have what we really want until we are willing to respond to the needs of others as though they were our own. Now there is a truly scary thought.
Once more, it is tempting to say that there is nothing in us that is capable of such action. But there is! We have a will (a willingness). We have a spirit. We Christians have, by the grace of God, the Spirit of Christ. We expressed our willingness when we said yes to Christ’s claim on our lives—when we said “yes, I am willing to die to myself and be born in Christ.”
We have an inborn, a reborn, willingness, and that willingness is real power. Beside willingness, want becomes what it has always been, a mere shadow power, the fleshly part of the mechanism that gets things done. Want can only stand up to willingness so long before we are forced to recognize it for what it is, and to allow the willingness in us to put it in its place.
Again, we have the testimony of thousands, the experience of millions and billions, to base our hope on. Want will be overcome, sooner or later, by will(ingness) for all those who are truly in Christ.
All it takes is a willingness to be transformed—to have our very wants transformed.
So, if you want to see real power, be willing. Your willingness will transform your wants, and release the power of God in you. Your willingness will “tune” your wants until all you want is to be available to others, until all you want to do is to spend yourself so that others might live more fully. Your willingness will become Christ’s willingness to die for us that we might live. Now there is something I can truly say I want will all my heart and mind and soul.

Communion Musings

Communion musings.

I do not want, by my use of the word metaphor here, to diminish in any way my conviction that something real is happening between God and I (or any believer) in Christ when we come to the table of the Lord. I do not want to diminish the sense that Christ is "really present" in the communion, and that it is his flesh and blood that, in some totally (and joyously) mysterious way, I eat and drink.

I am a poet, and for a poet, metaphor and symbol are two very different words. A symbol stands for something else. A metaphor enacts a new reality by connecting two things which are not otherwise obviously connected. Bread and wine are the physical metaphors Christ chose to connect us to the reality his of death for us, and his presence with us and in us, until he comes again…and, I believe, to renew daily our sense of participation in the work God began in creation, continued in Christ, and continues to this day in Christ in us.

So, let us, as Christ did, begin with the bread.

What is bread? Isn't it the very substance of the living God, our Father, creator of the universe, given freely to us to keep us alive one more day? Isn't that why we thank God for our daily bread? I certainly get the feeling that it was in this fashion that the Jews blessed the bread long before Christ, and even before Exodus. Our Father, creator of the universe, shaped our bodies, our flesh, from the ground, and daily produces, from that same ground, the substance, typified in the bread, that sustains the life of these bodies. He made us so that this flesh could serve him, could be his hands, his arms, his legs, his mind and his heart, in the created universe, so that his act of creation might be carried on in and through us.

Our flesh is not our own. It belongs to its maker, is sustained by its maker, out of his own substance, for his own ends, for our Father’s ends. This is the bread. This is why we bless the bread, and this is the acknowledgement we make when we eat it. Our flesh is not our own.

What is wine? For a people without a knowledge of organic chemistry and organisms behind fermentation, wine must have been a miracle. Certainly in the juice of the grape they could appreciate the concentration of sun, rain, wind, and earth, the distillation of the substance and provision of God into a liquid essence. And then, if left to itself, this liquid sunshine produced, surely by God's sovereign action, a "spirit", some other kind of invisible life, so powerful that it lifted them right out of their flesh, and liberated something in them that brought them into contact with something larger, and other, than themselves.

There are limits to the metaphor, of course. The Jews recognized the dangers of drunkenness, of excess that separated them not only from themselves, but from God, and made them salves to the very thing that was intended to free them, to “gladden” their hearts.

But there is more. When God, our Father, formed our flesh from the ground to serve his ends, he did not stop there. He breathed his spirit into us so that we became living beings...fully created in his image, alive with the life of the spirit, eternal and holy, infusing the life of the flesh with true life..

For the Jews the "life" of the flesh is in the blood. What God breathed into us as spirit, became our living blood once inside us.

This is a remarkably accurate inference for a people without our modern understanding of respiration and blood chemistry. Think about it. We breathe to take in oxygen, which is essential to maintain life in us. Without oxygen, our flesh is, or will be very soon, just so much dead meat. And it is, of course, the blood that carries the oxygen from the lungs to the far reaches of the body. It is the blood that carries the breath into us and keeps us alive. What begins as breath becomes blood, so that we can live.

So, I have come to see the wine as the living spirit, the breath of our Father God, that gets into our blood and fills us with his life. The wine is his daily gift to us so that we can live beyond the limits of our physical flesh, be alive with his eternal spirit, and truly participate in his act of creation as his children, fully made in his image.

In the bread and wine we are reminded that we belong to God, and that our purpose is to present him, his life, his love, his person as a blessing to the world in which we live, by doing his works of love.

Therefore, I begin my communion with an offering of bread and wine to my Father God, who fashioned me out of earth, who sustains me in my flesh by the gift of this daily bread, substance of his substance, so that this flesh can serve him, …I thank him for the wine, his spirit, that runs in my blood, lifting me beyond the limits of the flesh, making me alive and alove with his life and love so that what I do in this flesh, and in his spirit, will truly carry on his work of creation, and be a glory to the living God.

Bread and wine: flesh and spirit: the gift of God: the glory of God in on-going creation.

But, I am also reminded in every act of communion that things are not as they should be...we fell.

We are a fallen people. We stole the flesh that God created for his ends and used it for our own ends. We denied his spirit in us, and substituted a self-life, a self-will, a synthetic spirit of self, that robs us and God of our lives lived in creation.

I was born in this condition. Created in the image of God, but without without the necessary connection with God's Spirit. I was born as dead as the body without life-giving oxygen, without the breath of God in my blood.

And then, following my tutors in this fallen world, I set up that synthetic spirit of self in God’s place, and I continued to use this flesh for my own ends. I did this. I became a willing participant in the theft of the life God wanted to give me.

But God, ever God, in the fullness of time, after thousands of years struggling with the human spirit, trying to work with us in in our fallen state, spent himself once more, entered creation in the person of his son, was born as a baby, grew as man, proclaimed the Kingdom of God, demonstrated the power of forgiveness and love, was arrested, tried, crucified for our sins, raised from the dead, ascended to right hand of the Father, and released The Spirit to empower those who are alive in Christ to life lives of love.

Christ, the bread of life, the bread come down from heaven, the living bread. When I come to communion I come not in my fallen self, but as new creature, twice born, a new creation. And I eat the bread of life, the bread come down from heaven. I eat the flesh of Christ, the son of God, and once more I live, my flesh lives, not for my own ends, but for the purposes of God. I am bought back, my flesh is bought back and cleansed of the deadly results of generations of self-life by the broken body of Christ on the cross that I might use it once more to serve God.

But again there is more. Not only do I eat the bread, I drink the wine, the blood of Christ, the life of the living God, The Spirit, and it enters my blood, carries the life of God, his Spirit, to the far reaches of my flesh, and makes me fully alive and alove with the life and the love of God in Christ.

However, just in case we might be tempted to exalt ourselves once more in our new life, Christ reminds us, in communion, that the cup he shares with us is the cup of suffering, the one he drank to the dregs in the garden, and on the cross. That is the cup we drink in his name and in his stead until he comes again. The cup of suffering, the spirit of self-sacrifice, God's Spirit as the one who spends himself that we might live.

Therefore, we use this flesh, and spend ourselves, the life God gives us every day,.that other's might live.

Communion reminds us that we are twice born, twice made in the image of God, twice shaped, called, given life to serve...twice alive and alove with the life and love of God.

Bread and wine. Communion. Flesh and blood.

The Story of One

Always there is a being who is life and love personified, existing as three in one, in the eternal dance of relationship. They, the One, are so full of life and love that, from the unformed nothing, They created a universe of space and time, matter and energy, in which to play: to embody life and love in all possible ways.

In that universe They created mankind, in Their own image, male and female, to be Their hands and tongue and heart and mind, to continue the work of creation They, the One, had begun, in a living relationship of love with Them. It was Their intent that mankind would be all They are, working in the many the will of the One, filling the universe with love and life.

Time and space, matter and energy are not "for ever." If left to themselves, they run out, they run down, they fall apart, the patterns break and disorder returns. It takes a constant infusion of life and love to hold them together.

Mankind, in living and loving, is to continuously renew the universe of time and space, energy and matter, resisting disorder and death, and to live in love with Them.

But mankind rebelled against the One, and took the place in their own heart and mind where the One was to dwell. They turned life to their own ends, and loved only themselves and what was theirs.

They took the creation for their own and used it as they wished. Each of them sought to dominate all others, or as many others as possible, in order to control more time, more space, more matter, more energy. In doing so they worked disorder, death, the opposite of life and love, in creation.

After a time, the One decided to select one family of mankind, from among all mankind, to be Their heart and mind and tongue and hands in creation...to be a gift to all mankind by resisting the disorder and death, and by carrying Their love and Their person into the universe. They made that family into a nation, intervening in their lives and their conflicts time after time, attempting to form them into hearts and minds and tongue and hands to bring creation alive and alove. It didn't work. No matter how hard They tried, mankind would not let Them back into that place in their hearts and minds and tongues and hands where They had intended to dwell, and even Their nation could only do so much, not enough, to redeem time and space, matter and energy as a place where the life and love of the One could be made present.

In the fullness of time, the One determined They would have to enter time and space, matter and energy in Their own Person. Out of Their nation, They made a baby, born of a woman, One of Them in the flesh, in a body made of matter, running on energy, in time and space. He lived as a child, grew as man, and when he was about 30 years old, another One of Them came and made a home in Him. For three years He went around telling the good news that the One was with them, that the One was renewing life and love. "The Order of the One is come." He said. "All who want to can enter Our Order, and embrace life and love once more. I am the One. Believe in me, trust my words and my will and all your disorder will be forgiven: you well have Our life and love in you and become a heart and mind and tongue and hands to live and love forever."

He demonstrated life and love, and their power over death and disorder, by healing the disordered bodies of the sick, raising the dead, stilling the wild energy of storms, creating matter and energy out of nothing to feed the crowds. He gathered followers. Many believed He was the One, the very One, in time and space, matter and energy.

But opposition rose from the ranks of those who should have been most eager to receive His news...those entrusted with maintaining life and love, and the connection with the One among Their people.

He told His followers that this had to happen. That He had to be killed, to die for the rebellious, self-centered disorder of all men, in order for Them to enter back into creation and claim the hearts and minds and tongue and hands of men again for life and love. He promised that even death could not disrupt the life and love of the One that was in Him, and that He would show Himself to them alive after death, that He would, in fact, live in all who believed in Him as the One. More then that, He would release Another of Them, the One who dwelled in Him, to dwell in those who believed until the end of time. He promised that in the power of life and love, all who believed He was the One in time and space, matter and energy, would be in Him, and He in them, and They all One.

The leaders of Their people had Him arrested, tried, and killed. He rose on the third day, alive and alove, appearing to many of those who believed He was the One. After He left them to return to the One, He did as he promised and sent Another to live with and in them, bringing out His life, Their life, in them, so that they could be Their hands and tongues and minds and hearts, living and loving, and holding back disorder and death, and speaking Their order, Their love and life, until He came again.

For He promised to come again, in Their full power, at the end of time, when this universe of space, of matter and energy, finally breaks down, and that They will then create a new universe, one that will finally be so infused with Their love and life that it will not run down, one in which we all, We All, the One, will live and love forever.

Do you like this story? It is a special story because it has no end, and you can still be part of it. The One who was made flesh still lives in the hearts and minds and tongue and hands of those who believe. Another still moves through this universe of space and time touching us, inviting us, calling us to believe. Do you hear the truth in this story? Are you one who will believe? Is your heart open? Is your mind willing? Is your tongue loosened? Are your hands ready? Do you want to be part of the One, and Their creation work of holding back the darkness until He comes again. Believe. Lay down your disorder and He will enter in, and you will receive Another's power to live and love, and, in the last day, will be part of Us, One in the new creation, forever, alive and alove.

There Is No Such Thing As A Good Habit

There is no such thing as a "good habit!"

Bad habits are easy to form but it is impossible to from a “good” habit.Good is always a choice: it is never “automatic”; it always cuts across what the flesh wants to do. It has to be created new in every situation in response to the prompting of the spirit. It doesn’t follow patterns. It doesn’t, generally, happen the same way twice. Good can never become a habit. You have to choose it new every time.

A habit is something we do often enough so that we no longer have to think about it. It is a pattern of behavior that becomes, by repetition, encoded in the flesh. Habits program us, our flesh, to behave in certain ways in certain situations, or in response to the things that happen to us.

One of the dangers of any habit is that it controls us. Once the pattern of behavior is engaged it is difficult to break it, even when we realize that the response is not appropriate to the situation, even when we have grown beyond the habit and want to do something different. If we are controlled by our habits, how can we surrender ourselves to God’s will? Or, as Paul has it in Romans Chapter Seven, if we are controlled by the flesh, then how will be ever be controlled by the spirit?

Bad habits are easy to from since they reinforce the built in, inherited, tendencies of the flesh. They build on our self-will and self-interest. Good always requires surrender to the God’s will and a yielding to other’s interests. Bad habits are the worldly, self-centered ways we have learned, the ways in which we have trained our flesh to solve our problems or to comfort ourselves. Bad habits are what we can do, all by ourselves, to get what we want: good always requires God’s help, by faith, through the spirit of Jesus Christ. We can’t do good by ourselves. Habits are safe. We can predict the results. Good always requires a risk. We can not predict the outcome, other than the fact that it will be something beyond what we could have asked or imagined (Ephesians 3:20).

Bad habits help us to get what we think we want. Good always requires us to give what we have, and, since it is God’s good, to give it all even when we can not see, in the flesh, how it will make any difference. Bad habits buy us momentary success or comfort. Good demands that we spend ourselves for others. Again, spending ourselves in this way, down to our last spiritual penny, means that we have to trust God. Good is always an act of faith.

Even when we do form what we consider a “good habit,” once it becomes habit it is no longer good. God does not value what is done out of habit, in the flesh. The flesh can not please God (Romans chapter seven). When church, or prayer, or praise, becomes a habit, something we do without thinking much about it, just because it is part of the pattern of our lives, even those “good” activities lose much of the life that makes them worth doing.

God wants us living creatively, by faith, all the time. If we are relying on our good habits, we are no longer trusting in God. If we can do it ourselves, by habit, then we don’t need God, we don’t need the Spirit, we don’t need faith. That is not good!

The excuse we often give for habits is that without them we couldn’t survive. The argument goes that if we had to think, every time we did it, about every little motion and decision that goes into walking across the room, bending to pick up a shoe, riding a bike, or driving a car, we would be so busy thinking about all that that we wouldn’t have time to think about anything else. And, in the wisdom of the world, we wouldn’t survive long. While we were still thinking, trying to decide which way to turn the handle bars of the bike to get around that root in the trail, the low branch we were too distracted to see coming would knock our heads in. Habits, as the world sees it, are just shortcuts to success, tried and true methods of solving problems, patterns of behavior that free us from the necessity to think about what we are doing all the time.

Yet, God says the righteous “walk” by faith. If we take that as a literal truth, God wants the very act of walking across the room to be an act of faith, not a habit. What is done in the flesh can not be pleasing to God. Our walk, our run, our ride, our life has to be by faith, by trust in God.

The best we can do is to train the flesh to be ready to do good. Paul says that training the flesh is of some value. Training and habit are somewhat similar but totally different (to strain logic to express the truth). A good example would be learning to play a musical instrument. When we start to play, our flesh is simply not capable of hitting the right keys, or pressing the right strings, or, often, of moving fast enough and with enough precision to make music. We have to train our flesh, the muscles and bones and sinews, our brains and nerves, to make the motions, to achieve the coordination that is needed. We have to stretch our abilities. We have to learn to do something we can not, by nature, do. We have to practice and practice and practice. We have to exercise. Practice (and good practice is always exercise) stretches us beyond what we can currently do. It requires the flesh to learn something new.

One of two things can happen then. The new motions and attitudes, once we learn them, can become habit and we can learn to play “music” by rote, note after note, mindlessly, soullessly following the pattern we have trained into our flesh...or we can constantly build on the new skills we have learned, constantly be stretching beyond what we can actually do yet, to make the music that sings in our souls, in our spirits. You have heard both kinds of music and musicians. Surely you know the difference.

Habits become habits and we stop thinking about them. Training never ends. Reading the Bible, or going to church, will never become a habit, if every time we do it is a real exercise...if every time we do it stretches and challenges us...if every time we sit down with the word of God, or gather with God’s people for praise and prayer and study, it is a real workout for our spiritual muscles and challenges the flesh to do something it can not yet do. The value of daily scripture reading, or of church attendance, is not in the habit of devotion, but the exercise, in the growing readiness to act for the good, the spiritual strength and conditioning, the coordination of flesh and spirit, that it builds us for the day when we will need to do good.

Being in good spiritual shape is not a matter of developing good habits, but of continual faith exercise.

Paul has a lot to say about all this in Romans chapter seven and Ephesians chapter four, where you can safely read “the flesh” or “the unspiritual man” as the “creature of habit,” the man controlled by all the bad habits encoded in the flesh by years of life in the world. Clearly Paul’s “old man” in Ephesians is that same creature of worldly habits, and the "new man" is the holy self who partakes of the creative, spontaneous, nature of God through Jesus Christ.

God does not have a habit of doing good. It is God’s nature to do good. To attribute God’s good to habit is diminish both God and good. No more should we attribute any good we do to “good habits.”

There are no such things!