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Walking in a New Way
By Linda Rex
PEACE—I awoke this morning to negative news. Apparently last night the law-abiding citizens of this city were put in danger by the exploits of those who defy the law as our law officers sought to bring them to justice. Then I read that some friends of the family lost a loved one—another loss in my list of recent losses. There are times when it seems like it’s safer to be in bed than out of it.
Seeing and experiencing the evil and pain in this world can really weigh us down. Though I would never want to grow indifferent to suffering and loss, there are times when I wish I could always keep an eternal perspective about such things. It would be nice to be able to only focus on the benefits of such things rather than on the pain and grief they bring with them.
This morning my daughter called up the stairs to let me know her almost grown kitten had found a new toy. She was tossing it around and hiding it under things and playing with it. She was really having fun. But what disturbed my daughter was that it wasn’t her favorite mouse toy—it was the real thing.
There was absolutely nothing evil or bloodthirsty in what the kitten was doing. She was just enjoying her new toy—embracing the joy of play. But the poor mouse, on the other hand—it had an entirely different perspective. It had merely been doing its thing—finding a warm place to hide during the winter—when suddenly, its life was over and it had become an object of delight.
In this instance we can see two completely different perspectives as to what has happened and to what is currently going on in a situation. Perhaps this can help us to understand a little better what it means for us as human beings to live in a world where we are constantly experiencing the results of our human brokenness while at the same time we are participants in the entering of God’s kingdom into this broken world. We may only feel pain, suffering and grief, but we are actually participating in God’s joyful dance of love, grace, and peace.
Loss, separation, pain, evil—these cause suffering, anxiety, fear, and grief, and a host of other feelings and consequences we were not originally intended to experience. We were created for joy, peace, hope, and to share in the love of our heavenly Father and his Son Jesus Christ in the Spirit. This is the “way of peace” we were created for.
C.S. Lewis, in “The Problem of Pain,” talks about how human beings were created to live in joyful obedience to and full dependency upon God. We were meant to be and were masters of our flesh and our world, as we drew upon God for our life and our strength of will. But we decided in Adam that we would take to ourselves the prerogatives which were solely God’s. We became self-sufficient, self-centered, self-directed. And rather than walking in the garden to commune with our Creator, we walked away from the garden and began to establish for ourselves a new way of being.
The problem is, we chose a way of being which was non-sustainable. We do not have the capacity within ourselves apart from God to properly manage ourselves or our world, much less to live in harmony with one another or to continue our existence. What the incarnation, which we celebrate at Christmastime, means is that God took our plight seriously, took on our humanity, and reformed it in himself. As God in human flesh, Jesus lived a human existence which was fully dependent upon his Abba and completely and joyfully obedient to his Father’s will. He redeemed us, forging for us “a way of peace.”
The enemy of our soul has always sought to destroy us by the incessant lie that we do not need God and we most certainly do not need one another. He deceives us into believing that our human perspective about everything is the true reality—that our experience of what is occurring is what is actually at work in this world. He tells us there is no life beyond this life, or that what we do now does not affect what comes after, or that if we work hard enough and achieve a high enough standard, we’ll receive abundant rewards in the hereafter.
Notice how all these lies we are bombarded with us tell us we are sufficient within ourselves for whatever is needed in every situation. To live in full dependency upon God and in joyful obedience to his will is something contrary to our broken human way of being. We resist this, and seek a multitude of methods to avoid having to surrender to the reality God is God and we are not. And we experience suffering, grief, pain, and sorrow as a result.
Christ has come. He has reconciled all things with God and has brought humanity up into the love and life of the Trinity—by faith we participate with Jesus in his perfect relationship with his Father in the Spirit. As we participate with Jesus, we find ourselves walking in the “way of peace” he forged for us, and we find by the Spirit we have the capacity for self-control, other-centered living, and joyful obedience to God we would not otherwise have.
In Christ, we are new creatures—experiencing a new way of being—Christ in us, the hope of glory. We find as we die with Christ to ourselves and our old way of being that Christ’s new “way of peace” finds greater and greater expression in us and through us. And we begin to experience real peace—peace within ourselves, peace in our relationships and in our communities.
As we turn to God in real dependency upon him in every situation, heeding the Word which tells us to “cast all our cares upon him” (1 Pet. 5:6), we begin to experience that peace “which surpasses understanding” (Phil. 4:6-7). We find a deep joy even in the midst of our sorrow and grief. This is the blessing of the amazing gift of God in his Son Jesus Christ we celebrate during the Advent season.
Abba, thank you for not leaving us in our brokenness and our stubborn resistance to your will. Thank you, Jesus, for forging for us “a way of peace” which we have not known and which we desperately need. Holy Spirit, enable us to turn away from ourselves and to Christ, trusting in his perfect relationship with Abba, and enable us to walk in the “way of peace” we were created for through Jesus our Lord. Amen.
“Blessed be the Lord God of Israel,/For He has visited us and accomplished redemption for His people, … To grant us that we, being rescued from the hand of our enemies,/Might serve Him without fear, In holiness and righteousness before Him all our days. … To shine upon those who sit in darkness and the shadow of death,/To guide our feet into the way of peace.” Luke 1:68, 75, 79 NASB
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When Truth of Being Hurts
By Linda Rex
In this discussion about truth and the truth of our being, it occurs to me that just having truth or being people who value truth is insufficient. God, who is truth, has sent the Spirit of truth through Jesus who is “the way, the truth, and the life” to us to dwell in human hearts. So we have the Spirit of truth available to us at all times.
But the reality is that even though we have the truth at our disposal, we also need a huge helping of God’s grace to go with it. Truth without grace and love is dangerous and destructive. Being truly open about one’s self or being authentic about who we are can bring about deeply painful and horrific consequences when it is told to the wrong person, and/or at the wrong time, and/or in the wrong way. Anyone who has been the victim of malicious gossip or Internet bullying is well aware of this fact.
Living out the truth of our being does not automatically ensure that the people in our lives are going to accept or embrace this reality when it appears. Jesus lived authentically his whole life and look how he ended up!
Sincerity, integrity, authenticity were a part of his nature, but the people around him often did not appreciate this, especially when it exposed their own hypocrisy, insincerity and deceitfulness, and their own prejudices. In fact, whenever we find Jesus pointing out the truth of who he was and the truth that the listeners were not living in agreement with their truth of being as God’s children, we also see them plotting his death and destruction. In these situations we see the huge contrast between, as Paul puts it, the expression of fleshly wisdom and the administration of the grace of God through holiness and godly sincerity.
Fleshly wisdom in this area is the natural human response of self-preservation and self-protection through image-management, manipulation of others, pretense and hypocrisy. Soon we become like the white-washed tombs which Jesus talked about—they look great on the outside, but on the inside is only death and dead men’s bones. We may think we’re fooling everyone else, but we’re really only fooling ourselves.
Because all the pretense, image-management and spinning of the truth in the world cannot remove the reality that we are completely and thoroughly known and loved by a God who knows us down to the very depths of our soul. The Spirit of truth doesn’t just dwell in heaven, but in human hearts—and he knows the truth of who we really are. In fact, the Spirit of truth is the very Breath of God who breathes life into our human bodies so we live and breathe every moment of every day.
The reality is, if he decided to do so, the Holy Spirit could just stop breathing life into you or me and we would simply die. When Peter pointed out the truth to Ananias and Sapphira they both had conspired to lie to the Spirit of truth, they died on the spot—their breath left them. They had been trying to be something they were not by impressing the early church with how generous and good they were when in reality they were hedging their bets because they didn’t truly trust God to care for them and provide for them if they donated all they had to help others.
I don’t know about you, but I know that I have on occasion been equally guilty of image-management and being generous under false pretenses. It has only been due to the love and grace of God that I am still breathing and doing ministry today. I’m reminded by all this to treat the Spirit of truth with a great deal of respect—honoring him by being sincere and truthful—but I am also reminded that in the end, it’s all of grace.
So in receiving God’s grace to be sincere, authentic and a person of integrity, I also receive the grace to love and forgive others who are insincere, inauthentic and lacking in integrity. In receiving God’s love in the midst of my mess, which is who I really am, I am able to offer to others the freedom to be the beautiful mess they truly are.
God is always at work to bring the truth to light, because it is in his nature of truth. He is the Spirit of truth, and Jesus is the truth of our being. God will not stop working to bring us all to the place where we are people of integrity, honesty and authenticity, because he is conforming each one of us to the image of Christ, who is truth. This is why we put our faith in Jesus Christ, in the Truth, and not in ourselves or in any one or anything else. May God complete his work in each of us to bring us into all truth, and may he grant us the grace to love and forgive others as well.
Thank you, God, that you are our God of truth, our Spirit of truth, our Messiah who is the way the truth and the life. Thank you that you are gracious and loving at the core of your Being, for we are fully dependent upon your grace and love. Thank you, Spirit of truth, that you overlook our shortcomings, for without you we would not live and breathe. Finish, Lord, all your work of transformation so that we may reflect you as you really are, in truth. In your name, Father, Son and Spirit, we pray. Amen.
“For our proud confidence is this: the testimony of our conscience, that in holiness and godly sincerity, not in fleshly wisdom but in the grace of God, we have conducted ourselves in the world, and especially toward you.” 2 Cor. 1:12
Being Truthful vs. Truth of Being
By Linda Rex
I don’t know if there is such a thing as social dishonesty, but I think there ought to be a term for fudging the truth for the sake of one’s relationship with others. Maybe it’s called telling a white lie. I guess, in reality, the real term for it would be hypocrisy. But none of us want to be accused of hypocrisy when all we want is to avoid hurting someone or to keep other people’s good opinion of us.
One of the most powerful tools of destruction when it comes to domestic violence is silence. In destructive relationships there is a rule, unspoken or not, that what happens within the relationship or family stays within it. Nobody is allowed to tell the truth about what is going on, no matter how hurtful or wrong it may be.
This type of silence and our “social dishonesty” create relationships based on a lie. It becomes very difficult to determine exactly what is true and what is false, because what is being said and done does not come from a place of safety, transparency and authenticity but from a place of fear, shame, guilt and/or manipulation. Rather than living out of truth, we live out of something we are not.
At some point God will bring all of us to the place where we have to face the truth of who we really are inside. And most of us are so terrified by the thought of what we might find there that we will do anything we possibly can to avoid this confrontation.
What if we discover, or worse yet—if someone else discovers—we’re not the image we’ve been trying to portray all these years? What if the truth about who we are is that we are a smuck, a selfish, thoughtless idiot? What if all the hateful things that have been said to us over the years are true? What if we really are worthless, useless and deserve only to die like our mom or dad told us over and over as we were growing up?
We so often seek to be what we are not, or believe that we are not, because that is what is expected of us. We hold each other to impossible standards, which none of us are capable of fulfilling—this is the result of a society built on the lie that to be truly human is to be attractive, charismatic, athletic, clever, smart and talented. Just like the Greeks who worshiped the perfect human form—we worship the superhuman who can do impossible feats.
Even though there is no such thing as a supermom, women still feel driven to “do it all”—have the perfect body, the perfect family, the perfect job, and the perfect home. Even though Superman is just a story, men feel the pressure to have the perfect physique and to be a person of presence and power in the marketplace or industry—wherever they work and live.
For those who seek to be moral people, there are the impossible standards that we hold ourselves and other people to. I know from personal experience how destructive and self-defeating it is to try and live up to someone else’s or my own interpretation of the Bible’s commandments. The best we can do is to keep up appearances and to hope that no one finds out the truth about who we really are.
At this point, I think it might be helpful to reevaluate our self-concept. We are so resistant to people finding out the truth about who we are because we believe the truth of our being is that we are awful, horrible monsters. I appreciate William Paul Young’s observation that when we try to live out of this lie—that the truth of our being is that we are evil and depraved—we find ourselves unable to become what we ought to be. We expend a lot of effort hiding, self-medicating or self-destructing as a result. We need to change the way we think about ourselves and about what the truth of our being is.
As I was reading 2 Corinthians 4 this morning, it struck me that if we could truly grasp the reality that Jesus is the truth, the truth of who we are, our lives and how we think and act would be entirely different. When we look deep inside ourselves, often all we see is evil and depravity. But God calls us to look further.
God shines the light of his Spirit in our hearts because he wants us to see ourselves honestly and in reality. We need to see that the evil and depravity, whatever form it may take, is not the truth of who we are. Whatever evil and depravity may lie at the heart of our being, along with all the good stuff that we are as well, died with Christ and rose with Christ.
The truth of our being is that we are made in the image of God and declared to be very good—and so God in Jesus Christ redeemed and redeems us so that we, in truth, are and can be that very thing. We need to see the truth of our being as being defined by Jesus Christ, who is our life and the truth of who we are.
This does not mean that we stop being ourselves, but rather that the ourselves that we are have been redeemed and made new. When we find ourselves living in ways that do not coincide with the truth of who we are in Christ, that is when we are living a lie. Evil and depravity no longer define us—no matter what anyone may say—Christ does. So our entire life now is sacred, devoted to God, to be lived in agreement with the person God has declared us to be.
This is why I love the Voice translation of 1 Cor. 1:6 which says that our life story confirms Christ’s life story. How we live now is a confirmation of the very nature and life of Christ. We are uniquely ourselves but we live in and with God in Christ by the Holy Spirit—a life surrounded by, filled with, and defined by God, and no one else.
This makes living authentically a whole lot easier. We’re not held to any standard other than the life of Christ. Since his life, death, resurrection and ascension is ours and we are united with him, our faults, failures and idiocyncrasies are redeemed. We are new creatures.
We can have hope in the midst of our faults because we can know that, as the apostle Paul points out, we have the treasure of God’s very presence and life in these “jars of clay”, right within our humanity. When we are criticized or ridiculed by others, we can look at ourselves with honest eyes, with a willingness to see the truth. Are we indeed what they say we are, or is there some part of us that is in the process of being redeemed by Christ and we need to participate in that process?
Because there will always be some brokenness in us that God is working with as long as we are in this human flesh. We will have the appearance of being faulty as long as we are not yet fully transformed into Christ’s likeness. It is a process—from glory to glory. We cannot just focus on what is seen, but must trust in what is unseen—that God is at work, transforming us and making us what he means for us to be.
This creates the groundwork for authentic, transparent relationships that are truly loving. In a relationship based on this foundation of Christ, both parties are able to be honest and truthful with one another because there is always Christ between them. They each live and walk in truth, leaving no room for “social dishonesty” or destructive silence, because at the same time, they are walking in grace and love. And this describes the Triune life we participate in through Christ and in the Holy Spirit. May we each experience this blessing of authentic relationship today and every day, and forever.
Thank you, God, that you have included us in your divine life and love. Thank you that you define who we are, and that you are at work redeeming us by the Spirit, renewing us and making us what we were meant to be. Grant us the grace to trust you, allowing you to work your process of renewal in us and participating with you as we live in agreement with the truth of who you have declared us to be. Through Jesus our Lord and by your precious Spirit. Amen.
“… we have renounced the things hidden because of shame, not walking in craftiness or adulterating the word of God, but by the manifestation of truth commending ourselves to every man’s conscience in the sight of God.” 2 Corinthians 4:2 NASB
“Therefore do not go on passing judgment before the time, but wait until the Lord comes who will both bring to light the things hidden in the darkness and disclose the motives of men’s hearts; and then each man’s praise will come to him from God.” 1 Corinthians 4:5 NASB
Our Life in the Trinity 