Where God guides God provides.

When God closes a door He opens a window.

God is in control.

God said it. I believe it. That settles it.

I bet you immediately thought of a few you could add to the list.  Cliches are fun.  Quippy.  They roll off the tongue.  And most importantly, they’re a “get out of jail free” card you can throw on the table when someone is sharing a complex, painful, or unexplainable story you just don’t know what to do with.

(They’ve also bred a giant, money-making, Christian knick-knack and greeting card industry.  I mean really, where would our mantles and bookshelves be without cliches?).

Cliches are very tempting.  In the last month I’ve sat across the table from people dealing with all of the following crap (in no particular order):

A spouse that had an affair and walked out on the marriage

A  7 month job search filled with hundreds of applications, a few interviews, zero offers (and a shattered sense of self-worth).

A 6 year old daughter killed in a freak recreational accident

A passionate musician that has slowly lost almost all of his hearing

An 11 year old girl who’s best friend just moved 500 miles away (ok, this one’s personal)

Seriously, what am I supposed to do with this stuff?

As I engage these conversations, there is a natural sense of panic. What to say?  How to fix?  Does my understanding of God give a good explanation for these kinds of circumstances?

Somewhere in all the discomfort, these trite little sayings begin filling my mind.  Cliche Christianity. And in our over-comforted, consumerist, sitcom-solution society, I fear we’ve begun to believe a lie about God.

Christian apologist Ravi Zacharias loves to quote this powerful truth:

“Jesus did not come into this world to make bad people good. He came to make dead people live.”

In much the same way, I also don’t believe He came to make bad circumstances easy to explain.

Jesus never promised this life would be easy, He just promised to always be with us.  To never leave us.  To be our peace.  To help us live,  fully alive. In all the joy, sorrow, pleasure, and pain.  We need to embrace that truth with one another.

No cliche there.

“In this godless world you will continue to experience difficulties. But take heart! I’ve conquered the world.” (John 16:33 MSG)

If we really had the guts, some of us would have to admit our faith is cheap.

Never tested.

Rarely wrestled with.

Never sacrificed for.

Just handed to us. By our family.  Our surroundings.  Our culture.

Not an encounter with God. Just something we do.  Our lens for thinking about and understanding the world.

And like a leaf being swept down the white-capped rapids of a raging river, our faith is just going where the motion naturally takes us (or sometimes leaves us drowning against a protruding rock).

Cheap faith.

In that context, the question “why?” is an assumption-bucking question.  It’s paddling upstream.  Swimming against the flow.

“Why?” is powerful.  It can also be incredibly dangerous.

In the hands of a cynic it can breed a sense of meaninglessness, contempt, and even less trust (if that’s possible for a cynic).  But asked with the right motive, “why?” can bring strength, deep conviction, and even greater freedom.

This week at CityCom, we launched a brand new series aimed at asking “why?”  (Or in our case, “Y.” You know we just can’t be normal).  Click here to hear the audio of the opening message called “Y Ask Why?”

Jesus loved to ask “why?“  But unlike the religious leaders of His day, His “whys?” weren’t aimed at protecting cultural assumptions.  Jesus’ questions cut His listeners to the core and exposed their motives.  With Jesus, it’s not just the action but the driving force that really matters.

What’s your why?

Why do you believe what you believe?

Why don’t you believe what you don’t believe?

Asked with the right motivation and within the scope of true community (like drinking alone, asking why alone may be a sign of trouble ahead), the question “why” will destroy cheap faith. Because Jesus Christ is not a philosophy to be embraced, He’s a “Person” to be encountered.

And He’s not afraid of your “why?”  In fact, He just might meet you there.

Sometimes I live like Jesus is a giant, inflatable bubble. You know, like something you’d see on that ABC summer smash-hit series Wipeout (yes, I know they jump on top of the big red balls, just roll with me here).

If I can figure out the rules, contort myself just right, and gain the assistance of a fully trained production crew with a human-sized shoe-horn, maybe (just maybe) I can squeeze inside.  Sure, it’s exhausting.  But it satisfies my sense of self-righteousness and desire for control. After all, I want a God I can define, and today I’m defining him as a giant, inflatable bubble ball.

Only problem?  Jesus isn’t an oversized sphere (Seriously. I’ve read the whole Bible. Prince of Peace, Lamb of God, Lion of Judah. No inflatable ball references anywhere).

He’s not asking me to squeeze my way in.  He asking to be invited in.

It stands to reason, doesn’t it, that if the alive-and-present God who raised Jesus from the dead moves into your life, he’ll do the same thing in you that he did in Jesus, bringing you alive to himself? When God lives and breathes in you (and he does, as surely as he did in Jesus), you are delivered from that dead life. With his Spirit living in you, your body will be as alive as Christ’s! (Romans 8:11 MSG)

I’ve been following Christ for a long time now, and still every so often I realize it’s happening again.  Slowly and subtly, life becomes all about my effort to squeeze in. To fit the Christian culture.  To Perform well for all who are watching.  Including God.

To climb inside the Jesus bubble.

When all along Jesus is waiting to come alive inside of me.

To do the work.  That I can’t do.  His Spirit.  Inside-out.

Elementary?  Maybe.  New revelation?  Not really.  But I bet every one of you wrestle with the same temptation: trying to climb your way into God’s good graces. It’s natural.  Like water flowing downhill (or boogie boarding into a pool full of breakfast cereal…for real, click here).

Are you trying to climb inside the Jesus bubble?  Why not invite His Spirit to come alive in you instead?

It actually works.  And you look a lot less silly.

As a parent, I long for my children to embrace Biblical values.  My values.  I even pray they’ll become inseparably grafted into their DNA.  Good things. God-things.

That they’ll be drawn to the right kind of friends.

That they’ll do well in school.

That they’ll have wisdom to make good decisions.

That they’ll connect to the local church.

That they’ll be smart with their money.

That they’ll discover their God-given gifts and an expression for them.

That they’ll find a God-fearing spouse.

That they’ll save sex for marriage.

That they’ll stay away from drugs and never abuse alcohol.

That they’ll learn to talk to God and gain regular insight from the Bible.

That they’ll love Jesus.

As strange as this may sound, I think it’s possible to become everything on the list above and completely miss becoming true followers of Jesus Christ. Yep.  Really.

I even believe it’s possible to “love Jesus” without truly following Him. We see it throughout Scripture.  Crowds surrounding Him.  Pressing in on all sides in ways that would make the Jonas Brothers jealous.

For inspiration.  For healing.  For food.  With needs (and some very legitimate).  With hopes that Jesus would come alongside the picture they had painted for their lives and give it a boost, fill in the gaps, create some magic.  They loved Him (at least in their understanding of what it meant to love).

But few followed.  Really followed.  It just cost too much.

So if I really want what’s best for my kids, I think I it might be time to change my prayers to different things. More difficult things.

That God would crush them.

That pain would refine them.

That they would dream God’s dreams and not just an American one.

That they would be willing to give up everything to follow Jesus.

That they would completely die to themselves in order to find true life in Christ.

That they will be alive and not just “good.”

Scary stuff.  Radical.  Dangerous.  A loss of control.  Counter-culture, even within the church (maybe especially within the church).

But longings I need to pursue, and not just for my children, but for myself as well.  Maybe you do, too?

Because it’s all too possible to embrace Biblical values from the outside-in, without ever truly becoming a follower of Jesus Christ from the inside-out. To embody, or retrain behavior, without ever truly submitting the will. To be “good,” without ever truly being alive.

For the record, I still long for that first list.  I just want it to grow through the soil of the second. Never at the expense of it.

So what do you think?  Is it possible to embrace the values of the Bible and completely miss Jesus in the process?

After a week to reflect on my Israel journey, I’ve summed the adventure into three takeaways. Takeaways you can process yourself, even if you’ve never stepped foot out of your own hometown:

A STATEMENT:

Standing in the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, I watched lines of people stop to touch, kiss, and pray on a giant rock slab. This stone, according to tradition, is the place Jesus body was prepared for burial after He was taken from the cross (we later found it was placed in the entryway during a 19th Century renovation of the church, but who really cares about details?).

After days of watching buses of tourists pile into these “holy sites,” and realizing my own propensity for getting caught up in the drama of these historic locations, I heard God make a clear statement from the vestibule of this Gothic church that will stay with me the rest of my life:

“Many people want the blessing of being where I’ve been, but so few want to pay the price to follow me where I’m going.”

A QUESTION:

From the ruins of this Capernaum temple on the shore of the Sea of Galilee, Jesus spoke some of His most difficult words. Just days after He fed 5,000 people on a Galilean hillside with 5 loaves and 2 fish, He challenged many of these same people to embody the essence of Who He was, not only the blessing of what He could do for them.

Jesus loved to create unresolved tension.

After hearing these words, Scripture tells us “many of his disciples turned back and no longer followed him.“ It’s easy to look backward and wonder how anyone could have stood in the physical presence of the Messiah and walked away. But standing in these temple ruins where Jesus Himself had stood, I heard Him ask me the question:

“If you had been standing here in this temple that day, would you have stayed with me or left like so many others?”

A PERSON

I grew up in a charismatic church movement. And honestly, over time I grew to resent it. Because of what I experienced in many “spirit-filled” encounters, I pushed the Holy Spirit away. I despised the manipulation. The abuse. The emotionalism. All with little evidence of truly transformed lives.

So I rejected the Spirit, too. Not overtly. Subtly. In my heart.

But standing in the Upper Room, the ascribed location for Acts 2, I realized my prior experience was mis-informing my current reality. What I was rejecting was the man-made charismatic subculture, not the Holy Spirit Himself. That would be asinine!

Jesus promised the Spirit to bring transformation, power, and the miraculous into our lives. The desire and ability to follow after Him. He is meant to be a normal reality of everyday life, not some crazed, event-driven emotional pursuit.

Why would I allow man’s abuse cause me to reject that offer?

A statement. A Question. A Person. This is what I brought home from Israel. How does it resonate with you?

My four-year old son loves to create random rules.

We can’t just throw a ball.  Every catch has to have a point value (usually starting at gazillion).

We can’t just shoot baskets.  All missed shots must be swallowed in a bubbling pool of hot lava.

There’s no such thing as enjoying a leisurely bike ride.  The first to the park gets top dibs at the ice cream truck.

You never just eat the cereal.  Ingesting three Lucky Charms marshmallows of the same color in a row makes you the big fat loser.

Rules. Random rules.

These rules give him structure.  A way to wrap his mind around a mindless activity, or to add the thrill of competition to a mundane task.

It’s cute and imaginative.

And…

It’s manipulative and controlling (a subtle way for an ambitious four-year-old to begin his hostile takeover of the free world).

Rules aren’t necessarily bad.  They bring order to chaos (ask any 2nd grade teacher or mother of three).  Clarity from ambiguity.  Solid form to the otherwise incomprehensible .  But when that Incomprehensible happens to be the Creator of the Universe, our desperate need for clarity, form, and order can lead us to create some things we may regret later.

In the Old Testament, the people of Israel just couldn’t seem to get a comfort level with God’s revelation.  So over the centuries, they added hundreds of their own rules and interpretations to the commands God had already personally revealed.  Rules that, perhaps initially, were just an innocent attempt to paint a clearer picture.

But over time, these rules became a means of control. Manipulation.  Comparison.  Condescension.  Arrogance.  Instead of clarifying, they actually expanded the cavernous divide between God and man.

And we do the exact same thing today. Sometimes without even realizing it.

As we grapple with understanding a God so far beyond our comprehension, we turn the “Who” that God is into a “what” that we can quantify.  The Creator who longs to know us intimately becomes a religious game to be won or lost.  And slowly but surely, the God of the Universe transforms into a list of obligations, rituals, and expectations that manipulate our lives from the outside in.  When all along Jesus is waiting to transform us from the inside out.

Don’t eat those three green marshmallows!

And we sort of like it that way. It gives us a strange sense of comfort.  Control.  A way to make sense of life’s chaos.

All it’s missing is…

Life.

What crap do you make up to try and make sense of God? Maybe it’s time to drop the rules and find some Real Life.

“This new plan I’m making with Israel isn’t going to be written on paper, isn’t going to be chiseled in stone; This time I’m writing out the plan in them, carving it on the lining of their hearts.  I’ll be their God, they’ll be my people.  They won’t go to school to learn about me, or buy a book called God in Five Easy Lessons.  They’ll all get to know me firsthand, the little and the big, the small and the great.”

Like most of humanity, I watched the globally anticipated Tiger Woods apology press conference a few short weeks ago.  Never in history had a sports icon demanded such non-athletic attention (Wall Street trading actually slowed notably during his 14-minute statement!).  Unbelievable.

Many of you may have been surprised to hear Tiger’s Buddhist profession and his admission that he’d lost his way as it pertained to his faith.  But through a little research and a few conversations with people much smarter than me (those aren’t usually too hard to find), I’ve uncovered something:

I am a Christian that sometimes lives like a Buddhist.

Yep.  You can unsubscribe now, or you can hang with me (I’m hoping to eradicate some potential heresy, not promote it).  You just may find some of yourself in this, too.

By it’s own admission, Buddhism seeks to eradicate want, to achieve nirvana through freedom from all appetites. According to Buddhism, the only way to live well is to kill desire (and Tiger Woods has some misguided impulses he undoubtedly would like to bury).

As a Believer in Christ, I completely understand that perspective.  At my core, I’m broken and sinful. My motivations are self-oriented, and my life prone to inexplicable evil (I hope I never lose sight of that reality). But Jesus didn’t come just to kill my sin, He came to resurrect in me a new life.

“My old self has been crucified with Christ. It is no longer I who live, but Christ lives in me. So I live in this earthly body by trusting in the Son of God, who loved me and gave himself for me.” -Galatians 2:20 NLT

Some Christians are half-dead. Like Buddhists, they become focused solely on the eradication of their desires, and they never truly embrace the gift of resurrected life that Christ offers.  Efforts center on control and quickly spiral into a cesspool of religious death.  These people become like walking zombies, spiritual corpses with only a grotesque illusion of life.

Jesus didn’t come to suppress your desires, He came to redeem them. Yes, He calls us to die (“My old self has been crucified with Christ”).  But through that death He offers us life (“It is no longer I who live, but Christ lives in me”).

Real life.  His life.

Does your life reflect a focus on death or life?  Jesus didn’t stay in the tomb. I don’t want to live there either.

I find myself somewhat reflective today.  CityCom is one (as in years old).  This “grand experiment,” this “adventure in Indy” we call City Community Church officially came to life one year ago today: March 1, 2009.  It’s still so surreal in such a beautiful sort of way.

But today there is no cake, no gifts, no party. Some birthday, huh?

Maybe we’re overly-sensitive, but we’re cautious of celebrating existence. Existence, just being here, really doesn’t mean much in God’s Kingdom.  In fact, God doesn’t really look too kindly on just existing.

Check out Jesus’ words from Luke 13 (emphasis mine):

^6-7Then he told them a story: “A man had an apple tree planted in his front yard. He came to it expecting to find apples, but there weren’t any. He said to his gardener, ‘What’s going on here? For three years now I’ve come to this tree expecting apples and not one apple have I found. Chop it down! Why waste good ground with it any longer?‘

^8-9“The gardener said, ‘Let’s give it another year. I’ll dig around it and fertilize, and maybe it will produce next year; if it doesn’t, then chop it down.‘”

To put CityCom’s birthday in Jesus’ terms: we don’t want to celebrate that the tree is still standing, we only want to celebrate if it’s actually producing good fruit.

So, no church growth statistics today (although a few of them might impress you). Just people. Beautiful people. That’s what I want to celebrate.

People taking “one step closer to becoming fully devoted followers of Jesus Christ.”

People accepted for who they are, but challenged to become all God created them to be.

People embracing a journey of risk, adventure, and transformation.

People longing to know what it means to be The Church, not just go to church.

This is the fruit. The fruit we long for.  The fruit that we celebrate.  The fruit we desperately hope is pleasing to God.  And we’re seeing signs of it.  Beginnings.  “Buds.”

I’m so grateful to all of you who, in one way or another, have made City Community Church come to life.  May we bear much fruit. One year down, and the adventure is just beginning.

I love to see people dream.  To use their imagination.  To create things that don’t yet exist.  To watch someone rise to their passion and purpose is exhilarating, and to play even a small role in releasing that potential is intoxicating.

But what if I’m drawing that stream out of a polluted well?

One of the dangers I personally face as a spiritual leader is creating and communicating via isogesis. Now there’s a fun theological word.  Isogesis refers to starting with a specific belief, and then searching (typically Scripture) for evidence to support my already pre-determined supposition.

This can be a dangerous way to approach God because it starts with me and then makes a vain attempt to bring Him into the equation.

A lot of us dream that way, too.  And as you can see from this passage of Scripture, I can be a dangerous origin.

“What is causing the quarrels and fights among you? Don’t they come from the evil desires at war within you? You want what you don’t have, so you scheme and kill to get it. You are jealous of what others have, but you can’t get it, so you fight and wage war to take it away from them. Yet you don’t have what you want because you don’t ask God for it.  And even when you ask, you don’t get it because your motives are all wrong—you want only what will give you pleasure.” (James 4:1-3 NLT)

I’m messed up. And while the things that naturally reside inside of me are undoubtedly part of my God-design, they’re also polluted with misguided motivation and selfish agendas.  With sin.  My dreams need redemption right along with the rest of me.

Jesus calls us to repentance, to realignment with Him. And not just as a one-time event, but a daily surrender.  Then my imagination begins to emerge from a healthy well.  My dreams naturally become sourced by God and I stop desperately seeking a “blessing” for things that originated with me.

So what about you?  Do you dreams emerge from The Source, or are you “isogeting?” Starting with you and desperately hoping God will come along for the ride?

Tough one for me.  But that’s the problem with dreaming.

I have an uncanny ability to over-correct. Like a car that’s lazily drifted onto the beveled sing-song concrete of a highway median, I can jerk the vehicle across three lanes of traffic in an emotional panic (somebody must have been texting while driving).

I grew up in a charismatic church movement (yes, there is therapy available). My particular church didn’t fit the stereotype to a tee, but I was definitely absorbed in a culture that embraced a pentecostal perspective. The good and the…uh…interesting aspects as well (I’ll leave the details to your imagination).

Over time, I began to resent some of what I felt were cheap and shallow explanations of the Gospel. Burying the unexplainable realities of life in cheap, spiritual catch-phrases (that usually rhymed). Defining an encounter with God solely as an event-driven, emotional experience. I became a bit disillusioned.

So I swung the pendulum.

I began to pursue God intellectually. To ask and wrestle with hard questions. To become more cerebral with my faith. And some of that was very healthy and healing.

Until it wasn’t. Until I over-corrected and jerked the car hard to the right.

I turned God solely into a logical pursuit, a concept or philosophy to be figured out. I eliminated the supernatural and the unexplainable aspects of my Creator.

I missed the median and headed straight for the ditch.

“While Jews clamor for miraculous demonstration and Greeks go in for philosophical wisdom, we go right on proclaiming Christ, the crucified…Christ is God’s ultimate miracle and wisdom all wrapped up in one.” (1 Cor. 1:22-25 MSG)

I hate to admit it, but I want a God that makes sense to me. So I form him in my image. I teeter back and forth between aspects of His character that appeal to my current circumstances or explain my past hurts. I swing the pendulum in an attempt to find peace, and in the process miss the Prince of Peace standing right there in front of me.

Jesus is not a philosophy to be embraced (Pentecostal, Lutheran, Presbyterian, Catholic, Baptist, Anglican, non-denominational…pick your poison) He’s a person to be encountered. Daily. In the reality of my every moment.

I’m off the teeter totter. How about you? Do you ever swing the pendulum?

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