Great Lovers

Today’s post presents excerpts from David G. Benner’s Book, Sacred Companions – The Gift of Spiritual Friendship and Direction, published by Intervarsity Press:

“No account of Christian spirituality is complete if it fails to give a central place to love. God is love. He has poured this love into our hearts through the Holy Spirit (Romans 5:5). Offering us his love, he desires that we become like him – great lovers.

John Wesley described sanctification as the process of renewal in the image of Christ. Central to what this meant for Wesley was loving as Christ did. And how did Christ ove? He loved God with all his heart, soul, mind and strength, and his neighbor as himself. Christian spiritual transformation is, in the language of the Wesleyans, being made perfect in love – Christ’s love becoming our love.

The ordering of the commands in christ’s summary of the law is important. Love begins with God. Hence our transformation into great lovers begins not by loving ourselves more deeply, nor even by loving our neighbor more purely, but by falling head over heels in love with God.

How do we learn to love God? The answer is by coming to know him. But the knowing that leads to love can never be simply a head knowing – a knowing about God. The knowing that leads to devotion must be based on a heart knowing. To realy know God we must know his love experientially. I begin to love God when I know – not simply believe – that God loves me. When the thing about me that I most deeply know is that I am deeply loved by God. I have taken the first step tward a heart knowing of God. Have also taken the first step toward becoming genuinely loving of others.

The practice of the presence of God presents Brother Lawrence’s simple secret of prayer that he learned while washing dishes in a monastery kitchen for a significant percentage of the seventeenth century. His “secret” is alarmingly simple; it entails a loving turning of his eyes toward God at all times. Brother Lawrence’s prayer method is in fact nothing more than a discipline for the cultivation of a love relationship. How does one come to love another but by paying loving attention to that person?

To know God we must think of him, not simply about him. We must learn to become attentive to his presence with us. We must learn to spend time gazing on him, being still before him and focsed on him. And we must learn to listen to him. These disciplines of loving attention form the basis of the development of a love relationship with God….. (pages 32-33)”

“How I wish God had set something – almost anything – other than love as the supreme measure of spiritual progress. Recognizing the impoverishment of my love of both God and others is so discouraging. It’s the most depressing thing I have encountered in my Christ-following.

My first response to the limitations of my love is always the same – to try harder. I pray for love with more fervor. And I try to love with more diligence. But nothing seems to change. Then I recall that once again I have got it backwards. God doesn’t want me to try to become more loving. He wants me to absorb his love so that it flows out from me.

And so I return again to knowing myself as deeply loved by God. I meditate on his love, allowing my focus to be on him and his love for me, not me and my love for him. And slowly tings begin to change. My heart slowly begins to warm and soften. I begin to experience new levels of love for God. And slowly, almost imperceptibly, I begin to se others through God’s eyes of love. I begin to experience God’s love for others.

Only love is capable of genuine transformation. Willpower is inadequate. Even spiritual effort is not up to the task. If we are to become great lovers, we must return again and again t the great love of the Great Lover. Thomas Merton reminds us that the root of Christian love is not the will to love but the faith to believe that one is deeply loved by God. Returning to that great love – a love that was there for before we experienced any rejection and that will be there for us after all other rejections take place – is our true spiritual work.

Embarking on the journey of Christian spiritual transformation is enrolling in the divine school of love. Our primary assignment in this school is not so much study and practice as letting ourselves be deeply loved by our Lord. (page 34)”

Aspiration

“This is My beloved Son, and I am fully pleased with Him.” (Matthew 3:17b)

Much of the time we act as though Jesus sprang, fully grown, onto the pages of history at the beginning of his teaching, preaching, and healing ministry. After all, we don’t have much information in scripture about his life prior to appearing at the Jordan River to be baptized by His cousin John. Just one short episode from His childhood, a trip to Jerusalem for the Passover, separation from His parents for three days, and His astounding answers both to the religious leaders in the Temple and to His parents afterward (Luke 2).

We know, only by second-hand comments by people from His hometown, that Jesus grew up to work in His earthly father’s carpentry shop, at first alongside Joseph, and later as his successor. For all intents and purposes, He lived a fairly normal life up until the age of thirty, except for one thing. His life was fully pleasing to His Heavenly Father.

When the voice from the clouds speaks at the time of Jesus’ baptism, it is a commentary on the life He had lived up to that point – the normal, day in, day out life of a Palestinian Jewish carpenter in a small village in Galilee. Somehow during those hot, dry, dusty days of sawing and hammering and chiseling and drilling, and sanding in that tiny little shop in that tiny little town, in the process of constricting tables and benches and coffins, Jesus pleased God. And not just barely, or a little bit.

The voice would say that God was “fully pleased” with Jesus. Some of that had to do with what Jesus had not done during His first thirty years, what later churchmen would call the via negativa of avoiding sin. He had not avoided temptation. The writer of Hebrews tells us that Jesus was in fact “tempted in all things as we are….” (Hebrews 4:15) What was different about Jesus was that He had not given in to temptation. Ever. Not once.

But that was only part of it. It wasn’t just what He hadn’t done, it was what He had done, the via positiva. It was all the ways, big and small, observed and invisible in which He had loved God with all His heart, all His soul, all His mind, and all His strength. It was all the ways He had loved His neighbor as Himself. It was the fact that in doing these things, He had fulfilled all the Law and the Prophets. And it was how He had done it all, by abiding in His Father and through the work of His Spirit within Him. The Spirit didn’t come down upon Jesus like a dove for His benefit. It was for the benefit of those looking on, just like the voice that declared, “I am fully pleased with Him – right now, today.”

The Apostle John said in his gospel that Jesus possessed within Him the life that was the light of mankind (John 1:4) John also recorded Jesus as saying, “I have come so that you might have life in all its fullness.” (John 10:10). In his first letter, John said that if we acknowledge that apart from Him we are sinners, God would forgive for our sinful actions and cleanse us from their stain. He said that it was possible to live a life free from constant, habitual sin, but that if we did sometimes fail and fall, Jesus stood ready at God’s side as our Advocate and Atoning Sacrifice.

Then John said that not only was it possible to live like Jesus lived, but that those who claim to be His followers should customarily do so. (1 John 1:5 – 2:6). However, if people are to walk as Jesus walked, they can only do so by abiding in Him in the same way He abode in His Father and in the Spirit. (John 15).

That kind of living didn’t suddenly one day beside the Jordan River. It had been the pattern of Jesus’ life for thirty years. The ability to live that kind of life is available to all today. What kind of person do you aspire to be? The Apostle Paul says that it is God who places within us the desire to please Him and the capacity to live in ways that do so. (Philippians 2:13). We can’t do it on our own. That’s religion. He does it in us as the fruit of an ever-deepening intimacy into which He draws us. That’s gospel.

Disappointment

Learning to respond in healthy ways to disappointment is one of the hardest, but most necessary skills to learn in life. A friend and I talked about that the other morning over coffee. We’re both in that season of a man’s life when we sometimes looks back over his shoulder to revisit the road we’ve taken in life and the territory we’ve passed through. Almost invariably, that road and that territory isn’t what we thought it would be in our younger days. Some of us are blessed to be surprised at the opportunities we’ve had, the accomplishments we’ve achieved, and the places we’ve been. Many more of us look back to see unrealized dreams, choices we wish we hadn’t made, missed opportunities, and so on.

What’s worse, our youth-obsessed culture tells us that the years ahead will present diminisghing opportunities and that our best years are behind us. That can send a chill up a man’s spine and cause us to get stuck looking back, or worse, trying to recapture the long-gone glories of youth, even if our youth wasn’t all that glorious. We may even begin to use our children to try to reclaim what we sense we’ve lost to the years. At some point, something in a man’s heart begins to ask, “What am I leaving behind? What will be my legacy? How will anyone know I was even here?”

A lot of this is tied up with the expectations we had when we boldly strode into adult life after high school or college. And that’s where things start to get dicey. Expectations are tricky things. They generally start with how we want things or people to be. Somewhere along the line, “I wish ….” makes the leap to “ya know, they should…..”. Before you know it, it’s morphed again into, “there must be …..” And it all started out so innocently as a personal preference that grew into an expectation of how something or someone should be.

The problem is, nobody told them about the expectation. They didn’t realize and didn’t agree to that part of the deal. So, when they fail to live up to our expectations, which they didn’t know they were operating under, we react with frustration or even anger, as though we’ve been somehow cheated. The question that rarely occurs to us in this whole process is, “Based on what we know about ourselves, about other people, about the way the world works in general, why made s think that things would work out the way we wanted them to?”

Theologian Reinhold Neibuhr is credited a prayer that has become famous in its short version as The Prayer for Serenity: “God, grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, the courage to change the things I can, and the wisdom to know the difference.”

The original prayer doesn’t end there. It goes on: “Taking one day at a time, living one moment at a time, accepting hardship as a pathway to peace. Taking, as Jesus did, this sinful world as it is, not as I would have it. Trusting that you will make all things  right if I surrender to Your will, so that I might be reasonably happy in this life, and supremely happy with You in the next.”

There’s much to ponder in this prayer.  It calls forth issues of time and eternity, human destiny, and the tension between divine sovereignty and human free will, let alone trying to determine accurately what things I can change and what things I can’t.  But for me, the crux of the prayer is expressed in the old gospel song title, Trust and Obey, which for many years has been my favorite definition of faith.  Do I trust God enough to relinquish control of the direction and day to day living of my life and give myself fully to what I know of His purposes, living as best I know how according to His ways, resorting to His grace and forgiveness when I fail or fall?  

I don’t believe anyone ever arrives at a place of intimacy with God who hasn’t passed through the portal of letting go of their dreams, ambitions, expectations, goals, and agenda for their own life.  If Jesus experienced this, what makes us think we won’t have to?  The thing is, all of the things He promised us about abundant life all flow out of a place of ever-deepening intimacy with His Father, living in the every day, all the time presence of the Holy Spirit.  It’s the place where we are able to honestly say with the psalmist, “You alone are my portion in life.  You’re all I need, You’re all I want, You’re enough.  You alone.”

In Him we will never be disappointed.  Without Him, or with Him and other stuff, too we’ll always be disappointed.  Always.

Confessions of a Control Freak

I’m an inveterate planner. I love to think about how to go about doing things, lining up the stuff and the people I need to get things done, making arrangements, setting up task lists and timetables. I constantly find myself thinking a week, a month, a year out from today. I used to think that all was a positive quality. I’m not so sure anymore. I’m beginning to believe that it really shows how much of a control freak I can be.

My wife and I have been traveling through some unknown territory for most of the past year. We’ve had to trust that we were hearing God’s voice correctly and that He was in control of what was going on, even though much of the time it didn’t look that way. We’ve had to endure the questioning tones of voice and skeptical looks from friends and family members. We’ve lived mostly in “manna and quail country”, that land where “give us this day our daily bread” isn’t just something we pray from memory. We’ve had to watch for the pillar of cloud and the pillar of fire to move or come to rest, in order to know what directions to go in and when to stop going in any direction. If you’re unfamiliar with these references, check out Exodus 16 and Numbers 9.

We’re still in the process. To be honest, these days I hope we’re always still in the process. I think we’ve been brought into a place of intimacy with God that we were missing before. I used to think that followers of Jesus went through these kinds of times for brief periods, until life got back to normal. I’m not sure I want life to get back to what normal was. I think God purposes for us to always be in manna and quail /pillar of cloud and fire country, the place where we are radically dependent upon Him for absolutely everything in life. Saying it is cliche. Living it is terrifying, humbling (sometimes humiliating), gut-wrenching, etc..

But here’s what I’m learning. As I trust Him more dangerously, and depend on Him more shamelessly, I’m changing. I’m actually experiencing that kind of inner transformation that we often preach about in the church and then make excuses for why it doesn’t happen more regularly to more people. What’s weird is, I still plan, but how I plan, and what I plan are very different than they used to be. I’m being dismantled, taken apart piece by piece and then re-assembled. Actually, I don’t like how that last bit sounds – too mechanical, but I don’t have any more organic terminology for what’s happening.

The writer of Proverbs said, “Commit your work to the Lord, and your plans will be established.” (16:3). These days I spend a lot more time listening than planning and a lot more time watching than strategizing, though I still do both. The only way I can I describe it is in the words Nehemiah used, “….what the Lord (has) put in my heart to do….” Through listening prayer and reflective, prayerful reading of scripture, my thoughts are becoming His thoughts, my plans His plans. I am far more interested in getting in on what God is blessing than I am in getting Him to bless what I’m doing. Maybe that makes sense to you, maybe it doesn’t. But that’s my story and I’m stickin to it.

Galatians 2:20 – Dead man walking.

Conversations with Dad

Our church is adopting a new working definition of prayer: “realtime conversations with our perfect, almighty Heavenly Father about the real stuff of life.

The first part of the definition, “realtime”, tells us that we don’t need to wait until we’re in the right place, or the right mood, or at the right time in order to process what’s going on in our lives with God. Realtme means, “right now”, “right when we need it”.

The second part of our definition, “conversations”, reminds us that prayer is intended to be a two-way form of communication. There is a rhythm to prayer – sometimes we speak and God listens; sometimes He speaks and we listen. Have you every tried to talk to someone who began talking over you as you were speaking? I wonder how many times I’ve done that with God.

The next part of our definition, “with our perfect, almighty Heavenly Father” is where a lot of people have problems. I’m amazed at how many people I’m finding who have painful memories of their relationship with their earthly father. Many still have awkward or strained out relationships with them if they’re still living. All of us have imbedded within us certain ideas of what fathers are supposed to to, things like loving us selflessly and obviously, protecting us, providing for us, and disciplining us (understanding that discipline means both teaching and correction). The problem is, earthly fathers are fallen, fallible, and often foolish human beings. They mess up, and when they do, it’s often their children who suffer the consequences. The very best of earthly fathers make and break promises, because they forget, because something happens that they didn’t count on and can’t change, or even because they never intended to keep their promise in the first place. Earthly fathers let us down. And that hurts. Alot.

But God is perfect in his character, perfect in love and goodness. He is perfectly faithful and trustworthy. What’s more, He is completely capable of keeping His promises – nothing prevents God from doing what He has decided and committed Himself to doing.

Finally, God is the source of all our impressions about what fathers should do. We as a species had the kind of relationship with Him once in which He related to us in that kind of perfect intimacy. We’re the ones who violated the intimacy and decided not to trust what He said. From that time forward, the spark of God’s image in which human beings were created was scarred and bent, warped and broken. Some of it remains, but in barely recognizable glimpses.

So God did what He always does – He took the initiative to rescue and redeem us by sending His son into the world in human flesh to live a life of perfect love for, obedience to, and service in the name of His Father. He showed us what this kind of life looks like, and the fact that He did it perfectly made Him the one suitable sacrifice by which to atone not only for our ancestors original sin, but also our very personal transgressions of His love and law.

Through that sacrifice, He has now opened the way for everyone who responds in loving, grateful, repentance and faith to be adopted back into an ever-deepening relationship of intimacy with the God who chooses to relate to us as Father. And unlike our earthly fathers, He never lets us down.

As a result, we can now talk with Him about the real stuff of life. That means the stuff around us, meaning our circumstances, our relationships, etc. It means we can talk to him about the stuff ahead of us, meaning our future. We don’t have to be stuck in worry or fear about the “what ifs?”. We can process that stuff with our Dad.

We can also talk with Him about the stuff behind us, meaning our past. Alot of us would benefit from talking with God about the stuff in our past – our failures and the guilt and shame that stills haunts us about these, the junk that others have done to us and our inability or unwillingness to get past what happened. The truth is, too man people are allowing their yesterday to control their today and shape their tomorrow. That simply doesn’t have to be the case.

Most of all, God wants us to talk with him about the stuff inside of us – our thought and feelings, especially the stuff we don’t talk about, or even acknowledge to ourselves.

So we’re beginning to learn a new way of thinking about and engaging in prayer as a spiritual practice that is part of God drawing deeper into intimacy with Himself, where He can forgive us, heal us, and transform us into useful agents of His grace and love in the world around us.

Looking in a Poor Mirror

“For the time being, we see things imperfectly, as though looking in a poor mirror….All that I know is partial and incomplete….”

Part of “pressing in” to ever-deepening intimacy with God is coming to grips with all the things we believe about the world and about ourselves that simply aren’t true. The closer we move toward the Source of Ultimate Truth, the more we come to recognize what is true and what false. All of us harbor ideas about the world and people around us, and about ourselves that are mistaken. Letting go of them is hard because we got these ideas from people we love and respect, or because they give us the permission to act the way we want to act, or because they support our illusion of being in control of our lives. None of us surrenders these false ideas without pain, struggle, or anger. We may try to bargain with God to get Him to allow us to hold onto them because we believe (falsely) that they give us comfort. Only through the work of the Holy Spirit and the support of people who love us so much that they speak truth into our lives are we able to pry our hands loose and release these false ideas, perceptions, self-portraits, etc.. But release them we must, because they will impede our journey into intimacy with God as long as they are allowed to influence our thinking and doing. These are the things a few select others know about us and in spite of which love us anyway. That’s why intimacy with God never happens in isolation, but only in community. Chalk that little puzzle up with the other mysteries of following Jesus.

“Pressing Into God”

Sharon and I ate lunch yesterday with the crew from our local church at one of the families’ homes. During the meal, our hosts’ dog, a wonderfuly lab-chow mix named Sydney, slipped under the table and laid across our feet. Sydney’s come a long way. When we first met him, he would not come near us. That wasn’t unusual our friends assured us. Sydney had apparently suffered abuse from some previous master. He’s still skittish around anyone with a cane, but these days he’s much more trusting, and he loves to press against anyone who’ll let him. Our own dog, Rachel does the same thing. So do our cats. They’re all strays or from the pound who are now part of our family. But one thing they share is the habit of “pressing in” as a way of expressing, or requesting affection.

This got me to thinking. I have wonderful memories from our son Adam’s days as a toddler. When I would come home, one of his favorite things to do was to was to run and jump into my arms and have me swing him around. Then I’d give him a big bear hug and he would squeeze me with all his might, “pressing in” hard against my cheek. Somehow this triggered long and deeply buried memories of doing the same as a child with my mom and dad.

All this began to make more and more sense to me as I thought about the nights when Sharon and I  lie in bed, “pressing in” against each other. It isnt’ because we’re cold, and it isn’t even sexual. It goes beyond either of those. There’s something that just makes me want to “press in” so much to Sharon that if I could, I would press beyond her skin into her very heart and soul.

Our English Word “intimacy” comes from a Latin verb that means, among other things, “to press into”. We were made for intimacy. We were made to “press into” God and each other. That’s the way life was in Eden. That’s what all of us ache for now in a world fallen as a result of violated intimacy. To ease the ache we try various substitutes or forms of medication, but none fully satisfy. In our gut, we know there’s something more, something missing, something…..

At its core, Easter is about the recovery of intimacy. God, who placed within us the desire to press into Himself, has also provided the means for us to once again find the intimacy for which we were created. We are invited to trust. We are invited to run and leap into the arms of a loving and merciful Father who will hold us close as we press in more and more to Him.

And as we press into Him more and more, we are healed.

Varieties of Intimacy

A friend of mine is writing a book in which he questions the western church’s linear view of following Christ and instead suggests an orbital model, like that of the planets around the sun. He makes some compelling arguments for the damage that’s been done because of our western fixation with achievement and performance. He asks whether from God’s perspective human behavior, and even morality, aren’t so much what God is concerned with as much as what constitutes the central point of our life’s orbit – God or something or someone else we’ve substituted. He talks about the gravitational pull of grace (I love that concept!)

So here’s the question that his thinking and our talking spark in my brain: what if the orbit thing is actually a kind of helix or vortex, in which we don’t just circle God, but through the gravitational pull of grace we’re actually drawn “further up and further in” to use a phrase I think C.S. Lewis used in one of his books. That would mean that we are crossing through some kind of spiritual and emotional landscape that lies between where we start from and the “place” to where God’s grace is drawing us. How much, I wonder of that landscape is defined by our unique life experiences and backgrounds? If, as I suspect, a the answer is “a fair amount of it”, then our relationships of ever-deepening intimacy with God might, and probably do look different from one another. Our particular connection and expression of that connection may look very similar but not identical to someone whose life experiences and background have been similar to mine, but extremely different from someone whose experiences and background have been nothing like mine.

So there might be varieties of ever-deepening intimacy with God, some which incorporate the practices and patterns of classical, congregaitonal model of following Christ. Others would look entirely different, perhaps even rejecting the classical practices and patterns but still carrying individuals “further up and further in”. If this is so, are there any constants that link all the varieties of intimacy with God?

Some things that come immediately to my mind are the atoning sacrifice of Jesus on the cross, God’s self-disclosure in the scriptures, the privilege of conversing with God through prayer (which takes many different forms), and the real presence and continuous working of the Holy Spirit in people’s lives.

What do you think?

Abiding

In John 15 Jesus gives his disciples a picture of the relationship He will have with them after His death and resurrection. He uses the word picture of a vine and branches. The point of what Jesus says has to do with bearing fruit. It’s important for plants to bear fruit. From our standpoint, fruit is important as a food source. From an ecological standpoint, fruit contains the seeds which reproduce the plant and preserve its place in the ecosystem.

Jesus tells the disciples that it’s important that they bear much fruit. What kind of fruit are they to bear? Plants can only bear the kind of fruit whose seed gave them birth. Orange trees bear oranges, apple trees apples, etc.. Jesus says that while they are the branches, He is the vine, so the kind fruit they will bear should look like the kind of fruit His life bore: traits of character, good works, and transformed lives.

Jesus’ word picture comes in the context of Jesus explaining to His disciples that He is going away from them, but that He will not leave them alone. Another (the Holy Spirit) will come to them and fill the place in their lives that He has filled for the past three years. The paradox is, Jesus says that He is going away, yet He tells the disciples they must “abide” or “remain” in Him. How can they do this if He is leaving them?

The answer is, of course, because Jesus and the Spirit are each a part of the mysterious trinitarian nature of God, to be in the presence of one is to be in the presence of all three. When Jesus underwent baptism by John, the Holy Spirit in the likeness of a dove came upon Jesus in a symbolic representation of this truth. In turn, the Apostle Paul writes of followers of Jesus being baptized “into” Christ and being “in Christ”. Likewise, Paul writes that the evidence of a person being “in” Christ are the manifestation of the fruit of the Spirit, a set of character qualities that were evident in Jesus as He interacted with people. Operating from a deep intimacy with His Father and a character shaped, empowered, and directed by the Holy Spirit, Jesus taught, healed, fed, confronted evil, and gave Himself sacrificially in service to His Father and the extending of His Kingdom.

Now here in John 15 Jesus is telling His team that after He is gone, they are to continue doing exactly what they have seen Him doing, in the way they have seen Him doing it. And He tells them the only way that they will be able to do what He is directing them to do is if they “abide” in Him, in other words, if they prioritize cultivating an ever-deepening intimacy with Him, and His Father, and His Spirit that shapes their character, motivates and guides their activity, and through them transforms their world. Jesus makes the point that if they try to do it in any other way, if they break contact with Him as their Source and Strength, they would fail to produce fruit of any significance.

If one scans the landscape of the American church, it is hard not to conclude that we are largely fruitless. For all our wealth, technology, and education, we have failed to reproduce in large scale the character qualities of Jesus within local congregations. We have failed to produce the kinds of good works and internal loving community that point people’s attention toward God and get them thinking that the Gospel just might be true after all. And we have failed evidence in ourselves or stimulate in our communities the kind of genuine transformation that characterized the early church or which is characterizing the church in the Majority World Church today.

Could it be that we’ve settled for trying to impersonate the external behaviors of Jesus rather than truly “abiding” in Him? What do you think?

The Quest Begins

Welcome to The One Thing. We hope this forum  will become both a conversation and a community of people questing together in search of the only thing that matters in all of life – intimacy with God.  The title comes from the New Testament Gospel According to Luke, chapter ten, where Jesus visits the home of Martha and Mary, the sisters of Lazarus.  While Martha is bustling around the house preparing a meal for Jesus and His disciples, Mary instead sits at Jesus’ feet in rapt attention to His every word.  Eventually Martha complains to Jesus and asks Him to tell Mary to help her with the preparations.  Instead, Jesus says, “Martha, Martha, you are scattered and distracted by so many things.  Only one thing is really essential.  Mary has chosen the better portion, and I won’t take it away from her.”

Only one thing is essential.  Like Martha, we spend our days hustling and bustling doing so many things,  good things, important things.  Yet in spite of all our busyness, and all our accomplishing, something gnaws at us – a feeling that something’s missing.  So what are we to do?  If we’re participants in some organized religious body, we might redouble our efforts to “practice our religion” by attending services more often, reading our sacred texts every now and then, and mumbling a prayer or two, and perhaps even getting involved in the charitable programs of our church, synagogue, or mosque.  If we’re not affiliated with any particular religious body, we might decide to dip our toe in the water by visiting some house of worship.  Or maybe we go to the library or bookstore and begin exploring books on “spirituality”.  It’s like our souls have this giant case of the munchies – we’re starving and we’re not sure what it is we’re hungry for.  All we do know is that none of the well-known fare of our favorite spiritual take-out joints is what we need.  

The Apostle John wrote that the Eternal and Living Word of God, who participated in the very formation of the universe, took on human form in the person of Jesus of Nazareth, who came to be known as the Messiah, or Christ.  John wrote that in Jesus, there was a life, a way of living, that was the light of all mankind.  We believe that that life was a function of the deep personal intimacy that Jesus had with His Father in Heaven.  We also believe that the same kind of life is available to be lived out today by ordinary people of all ages and situations who will pursue intimacy with God as the one thing toward which their lives are oriented and around which their lives are organized.  We believe that this intimacy with God is, in fact, the recovery of the kind of life humanity experienced in the very beginning and is God’s intended path for all persons today.  We also believe that over the centuries since the life and ministry of Jesus and the first generation of His followers, the organized and institutional Church has unintentionally become encumbered in the chains of religion and lost its focus on this life of intimacy with God as its only reason to exist.  We believe that God is raising up men and women from all parts of the worldwide Body of Christ to recover this long-neglected priority.

We hope that what is posted here, and the conversation it stimulates, helps to lead all of us into ever deepening levels of intimacy with God that in turn transforms us into the kind of people who daily live out and advance the Kingdom of God upon the earth.