Blind Faith

So the blind man, to use an example, really has a problem, at least as far as his faith is concerned. He stands on the side of the road, crying out to Jesus to mercy. And Jesus must answer him or his faith will falter.

But his faith will falter anyway when Jesus speaks. 

Jesus must answer because if He does not, how long will the blind man continue to stand on the road? How long will he cry out to a God he cannot see? At some point, any reasonable man turns away. That's just human nature. We can't hold on forever when there's nothing to hold onto. We can't keep believing when we've been given no reason to believe. Jesus must answer the man, in some fashion, or He loses the man.

And if Jesus does not heal the man as the man has asked, therein lies another problem. He has not healed the blind man. Can He not? If the passing Jesus does not have mercy on the blind man, does He have mercy at all? Can He? If the passing Jesus does not open the man's eyes, who has the man believed in? Whatever he thought about this Jesus must not be true because here is this Jesus and He cannot do what the blind man believed He could. Jesus must heal the man, or He brings into question His own reputation, His very nature.

Jesus must answer the man, and indeed, He must heal Him. And yet, the moment that He does, He still becomes something other than the man has sought. He is no longer the Son of David from whom mercy is sought; He is now the Son of David from whom mercy has been given.

Which doesn't sound like a big problem except that it is. I mean, what do you do with Him now if you're the blind man?

The blind man has received the very things he came seeking. He has received his sight, of course; his eyes have been opened and he sees not only his world, but his Lord. And he has received good reason to believe in that Lord; Jesus has done what He says He can do. He has healed the blind man. It is safe to believe in Him. Except, of course, the blind man no longer has a pressing question in which to believe that Jesus must be the answer. He's not blind any more. What does He need a Lord for?

This is why I posed the question yesterday, and it really is the underlying theme to this entire discussion: the question is, will the heart continue longing when it has been satisfied? That is the essence of our faith. The question is not whether we can believe Jesus when we need to. It has always been whether we can believe Jesus when we have no pressing need of Him.

Can the sighted man trust the Lord just as much as the blind man? 

And it's not that this is a question that defines our faith. It's not about where we stand or any measure of our belief. This question is the root of our own concerns about this Christ. This is the thing that keeps us up at night. This is the thing that keeps us wondering. It's the crisis of the crucifix. We love God as an idea, as a promise, as a man passing by. But when He stops to look at us, takes the time to touch us, it forces a question to rise within us. How do I love the God I have seen as much as I have loved the God I have hoped in? Can I? Is there a way to keep believing?

This question is critical. I'll dive more into that in the coming couple of days. Stay tuned.

Bigger Things

There's a pattern that emerges throughout the Bible, although we see it most clearly in the four Gospel stories. It's the pattern of what happens when God changes a story. Which is really cool, of course, except that...we never get the whole story.

Men and women, young and old, blind and lame, bleeding and broken make their way to Jesus and are healed. There are a couple of things we need to recognize about this. First, Jesus heals indiscriminately. He doesn't care who you are or what's wrong with you or the stigma that's attached to it or what other people might think of a God who associates with people like you. But (and this is the second point), He only does so when belief is present. That is, you have to believe in Him before He will heal you. 

Sometimes, this belief has already been there. In these cases, we see the wounded coming to Christ, seeking Him out, crossing the country and crossing the seas to get to Him. Sometimes, it's in the blink of an eye. It's a moment that's just sort of naturally developing, a woman at a well, perhaps, and Jesus presents the choice. Believe in Me. Then, it's either a yes or no. And what's cool about this is that it doesn't matter how much your voice may be shaking when you say that yes, it's enough. Like the man in the story, it's a confession Lord, I want to believe; help my unbelief. And it's enough.

Then Jesus heals the blind man, and he rejoices in his sight. He walks away, leading himself down the road for the first time in years. Maybe looking back every now and then to see again this Savior, but free to see. Then the paralytic leaps off his mat, picks it up, and dances away, leaping for joy. Then the demon-possessed man dresses himself and sits down to dinner. And life is good. Right?

We wish.

Anybody that's ever had a powerful encounter with God knows it's not that easy. We wish it was. But here's what you don't see in the Gospel stories: change requires change. It's not so easy as walking away, leaping for joy, and dressing yourself. It's not so easy as I once was blind, but now I see. When one thing changes, everything changes. Most of us, by now, understand this. And what changes most powerfully, and most dramatically, is what you believe about God.

That's hard. For me, it's...scary. You have this idea of God and it's the very thing that drives you to Him (or draws you to Him), and that means you have found in your life some reasonable semblance of faith. You have some way that things work out, some understanding and relationship that allows you to believe enough in God to go to Him. What's weird is that it is so often the case that it is brokenness itself that makes this relationship possible. Think about it. You came to God because you needed Him. That's how most of us got here. There was an emptiness, a nagging, a brokenness upon which the foundation of our faith was built. Because we needed a bigger, better, believable God to handle it. 

Now, say that God heals that wound. Do you wonder if you can ever find Him again?

I do. The deeper I get into the wilderness, the longer I walk on the path God is leading me on, the closer I get to Him and to that very thing He's created in me, the more I wrestle with this. Because the closer I get, the clearer it becomes that depravity is the foundation of my faith. I'm not saying it should be, but let's be honest here. It is. And I don't think I'm alone in that. It's this fallen world, this broken spirit, this wounded heart that has come to define how I see God. How I find Him. How I come to Him. Why I, with shaky voice, believe when He says He wants to do bigger things.

And yet, the bigger things God wants to do are healing things. He wants the blind to see. He wants the lame to walk. He wants the demon cast out and the flesh healed and the ears opened and the bleeding to stop. He wants to take the very thing that makes you so desperately need Him...and He wants to heal it. 

It's necessary, of course. No true relationship can ever be based on need; it is only without such need that we are free to truly love Him. But from the inside looking out, the question hangs heavy: can I love God when I don't need Him? Or more specifically, will I love God when I don't need Him? 

So it's hard. You think you know God; that's why you come to Him. He offers to give you the very thing you most need, the answer to the question you arrived with. That's what you thought you wanted. And yet, if ever He actually does, if ever you let Him, you understand how little you knew of Him in the first place and you find yourself in this awkward place of trying to learn to know Him again. Trying to learn to love Him again. Trying to learn to believe in Him again. Or...trying to remember to know, to love, to believe. 

It's very precarious, as the flesh sees it, this relationship with God. It is designed to change and yet, it is already precious. Could it be more precious? Less? Is the heart strong enough to keep longing when it is satisfied? That is the question, isn't it? It is. And the answer isn't easy. 

I'm going to be working through this one for several days, so stay tuned.

The Gift and the Giver

What's weird about this rest that we find in Christ, or anything else we find in Him, really, is that we can never truly own it. We must embrace it. We must enjoy it. But we can never fully claim it or it disappears. I was thinking about this in terms of authority not that long ago, but it's really true about anything God decides to do in our lives, every gift He gives us. We can never own it.

The minute we make it ours, it isn't His any more.

I think this is where it's so easy for most of us to get off-track. I know that's been the case for me for a very long time, and to a degree, it still is. God speaks these things into our lives and we want them so desperately to be true. We want the peace. We want the rest. We want the authority. We want the approval. Whatever it is God speaks into us, whatever it is He gives us, it's usually something we've been longing for. And now, it's ours. 

It's easy to take off with that. It's easy to grab the gift of God and try to run. Like when you feel like you want to do this very big thing and God finally says yes, and you're excited because you actually get to do it. But all too quickly, you start to see the big thing and you start to see yourself doing it but you forget that it was God who gave you the opportunity to do it at all. It's become your thing. When it was only meant to be His thing.

It matters because when it becomes my thing, I think it's in me to do it. I think it hinges on me whether this thing lives or dies, succeeds or fails. I start to rely on the strength and authority that I have to get it done, and I forget that all of my strength and all of my authority comes from God. The same is true about peace or rest. The minute I think that I have peace or rest, that it is mine, I'm tempted to become lazy and complacent. Because I have forgotten that peace and rest are a gift. They are God's grace to give, not anything I am entitled to have. 

That's why so much of what we do fails, I think. It's because we take the gift and leave the Giver. We embrace what we've been given but forget that it's been given at all. We start to think it begins and ends with us, that it's for our goodness that we have such a thing. It leads to arrogance, to pride. It leads to a dependence on what we have and who we are and it's too easy to forget that what we have is a Giver and who we are is a gift. 

And that's when we start to lose it. We lose our peace and rest because it's suddenly become up to us to keep it. We've put that burden on ourselves by thinking it is ours. Now, we have to labor to keep our rest...and we can't do both. We cannot both labor and rest. We cannot fight for peace. The two just butt heads in our hearts. Or we lose our authority because it becomes the only thing that ever affirmed itself. We try to use our authority to say that we have authority, but if our authority is coming into question, our word is not enough. And it slips away....

But when we remember that God is the Giver and that everything we have comes from Him, we remember it's not up to us to keep it; it's only up to us to receive it. As long as He keeps giving, it will be there. As long as we keep asking, He will answer. The very peace, the very rest, the very authority, the very whatever that it is we want to hold onto drives us back to God because we know He's the only way it's possible. He's the only reason it exists. And if He is the reason it exists, He is also the reason we have it. And if He is the reason we have it, it is because there is something He wants to do with it. We have to keep asking Him for that reason, in the same breath we keep thanking Him for the gift.

I realize this has been kind of complicated, more than it needs to be. We're talking about two very different things here - peace and rest, and authority and ability. But more broadly than that, we're talking about every good gift of God, every single thing He is doing in you and me. We're talking about whatever it is our hearts have longed for that God has seen fit to provide, and how easy it is for us to lose those things when we forget what a gift they truly are. That's the point. I'm thinking of it in terms of authority because I have been thinking about that for awhile. I'm thinking about it in terms of rest because that's where yesterday's story leads me to start thinking. Maybe you're thinking about it in different terms, whatever it is that God is speaking into your life. Can you remember that He gave it to you? 

God is truly pouring His blessings out on me lately and it's beautiful and incredible and overwhelming and a little intimidating all at the same time. Because I know me. I know how easy it is for me to forget what a gift these things really are. Things like hope and faith. Things like peace and rest. Things like strength and mercy. Things like yes and no. Things like this very breath I am taking right now. And I've been kind of lost, pulled back and forth between remembering it is a gift and thinking it's up to me to hold onto it. 

But when I remember it's a gift, I am drawn to the Giver, and I hold it anew in my heart and my hands. And I can't help but smile amidst it all. Amidst the trials and troubles that sent me looking for these things in the first place. Amidst the things of this world that sent me running to God. And now, amidst the incredible gifts of God that keep drawing me back to Him, knowing it is only because He gives that I can ever receive. 

Yoked

Come to me, all who are tired from carrying heavy loads, and I will give you rest. Place my yoke over your shoulders, and learn from me, because I am gentle and humble. Then you will find rest for yourselves because my yoke is easy and my burden is light. - Matthew 11:28-30

If you've been a Christian for any length of time, particularly if you've been a Christian with burdens, you've heard this verse. And it often invokes for us this beautiful, freeing image of us stumbling toward Christ under the heavy load we've been carrying, sliding that load off our shoulders, and letting Jesus start to help us carry it. 

Which is all well and good except that's not what this verse actually says. What this verse actually says is "Come to me with your heavy weight, and I will put My yoke on your shoulders and share My burden with you." We do not share our load with Jesus; He is sharing His with us.

And yet, it still promises rest, ease, and a lightness. How is this even possible?

To understand, we have to start to thinking about what exactly Jesus' burden is. And if His burden is anything (and it is many things), it is primarily this: that He knows the fullness of God in a fallen world in which fullness is not possible.

Jesus knows more than we could ever see. His eyes behold the world not just the way it is but the way it was meant to be and the way that it will be again one day. He takes in the brokenness, but it it not without tenderness because he knows the wholeness. He knows that things were never meant to be this way, and He can't escape that knowledge. So Christ's burden, which He is so willing to share with us, is brokenheartedness. It is grief. It is angst. All built on a foundation of perfect love and confident assurance. 

It doesn't sound beautiful, but it is. And the implications are huge.

What happens when you try to share your burden with God? If we're being honest, it often sets us up for disappointment. Things don't change as much or as fast as we'd want them to. We're sharing our burden freely with God, but it doesn't feel like He's carrying His weight. We've set up this relationship where we're hoping God makes us less broken in a broken world and yet, it is a broken world we can't escape. So it really starts to feel like God fails us. Now, we have a brokenness and a breaking spirit and it's hard in these situations to find life or God again. We're left with nothing. We're left empty. With plenty of space for resentment and bitterness to settle in.

But when Christ shares His burden with us...that actually draws us closer to life, closer to God. We come straggling in, stumbling under the weight of our burdens and collapse in the presence of Jesus. He reaches down tenderly, helps us to stand, and places His burden on our shoulders with a whisper: I want you to know what I know. And suddenly, we start to develop an understanding of the fullness of God. We start to conceptualize what it is He wants for us, what He intended all along. We see the brokenness in this fallen place even as we understand that it was never meant to be this way. We know who God is, what He says about all this, what He longs for in us. And we can't help but smile. 

Now, we're not thinking about the God who can't carry our burdens; we're thinking about the God who makes it possible for us to carry them. We're not thinking about a God who we've set up to let us down; this world has let us down and it is God who raises us up. We're not thinking about this heavy burden; we're thinking about the glorious Promise. Life is just life. And God...is God.

It makes it harder to struggle, I think. By that I mean it's harder to feel the struggle. When the world is just broken and God is still God, it's harder to feel like the hard things are such big things. They're just things. They're just one more broken thing we're healing, one more fallen thing we're raising up, one more step toward redemption. One more big little thing God is doing in our lives. It's really, really hard to do anything but tenderly love a broken world when we have the burden of Christ on our shoulders. It seems to make anything possible.

It's still strange to think about in this way, especially for those of us who have always read this verse wrong. But the truth is the only burden we ever know is the burden of knowing God. If we didn't know our Creator, didn't have a Father, didn't see the Cross, weren't looking to the Grave, didn't embrace a Savior, life would be hard and we wouldn't even know it. It's precisely because we believe in something better that there is any burden at all. And this is Christ's burden, too. 

When we're struggling under the weight of this world, He promises to share that burden anew with us. To give us a glimpse of God as Christ knows Him, the fullness of everything as it was intended to be, a stark contrast to whatever we're feeling. And it is only through being connected with Christ that we're able to bear that burden at all. For it is Christ who gives us the hope that there is an answer. It is He who knows intimately that answer. It's in a Cross and a Grave and a Coming. 

In those promises, indeed, we find rest. 

It's going to be okay.

Blessed Are You

Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of Heaven. These are the opening words of Jesus' famous "Sermon on the Mount," recorded beginning in Matthew 5. And what's easy to miss if you're not really thinking about it, is just what the "poor in spirit" means.

Most of us today read this verse, and those that follow, and we think these are the words of God telling us what we ought to be. We ought to be, we think, poor in spirit. We ought to mourn. We ought to be gentle. We ought to hunger and thirst for God's approval. We ought to keep pure thoughts. We ought to be peacemakers. We ought to be persecuted for the sake of God's name. We ought...we ought...we ought.... 

But I don't think that's what Jesus is saying in these words. He's not giving us some commandment on how to live. He's not telling us what we should be. He's talking to us as we already are. Because here's what is likely most true about this whole scenario:

The poor in spirit were the audience.

He was speaking to persons who were poor in spirit. He was speaking to those who felt like they didn't have enough of the very spirit of life that they needed. He was speaking to those who longed for the greater things of God but could not escape the emptiness they felt in their souls. They'd gathered to hear Him speak, hoping...hoping He would somehow speak into their emptiness. And He does. Right off the bat. Blessed are you, the poor in spirit who have gathered here today, for yours is the kingdom of Heaven.

He was speaking to persons who were mourning, those who were grieving over their lives. Losses, maybe. Haunting echoes in the vacancies of their souls, maybe. Whatever it was they found themselves without, they were mourning, hoping...hoping for something better. And Jesus tells them it is coming. Blessed are you, those who mourn who have gathered here today, for you shall be comforted.

He was speaking to the gentle, those who lived what we might call quiet and tender lives, but who weren't getting much of a payoff for their gentleness. In a cutthroat world of merchants and politics, they felt like they were falling behind and they wondered, maybe, what it was worth to be a gentle spirit. They came in their poverty, unable to get ahead in this world, hoping...hoping that it wouldn't always be for naught. And Jesus assures them it won't be; their reward is coming. Blessed are you who are gentle, for you shall inherit the earth. 

He was speaking to those who hungered and thirsted for God's approval. That's why they'd come to the mountain in the first place. All the rules and regulations of the old law, all the authority and domination of the Pharisees, had left them longing for more in their spirits. They desperately wanted to be able to fulfill something, anything of God and were struggling because the demands were so high. If there was any chance that there was something more satiating for their spiritual appetites, it had to be in this Jesus, so they came hoping...hoping He would feed them. And He promises He will. Blessed are you who hunger and thirst for God's approval, for you shall be satisfied.

The truth is we could keep going through this list, and we will always find these very persons amidst the audience on the mountain. Jesus was talking to the merciful, who maybe felt like they were just giving it away without much of a return on their investment. You shall receive mercy. Jesus was talking to those with pure thoughts who maybe thought this world might have more to offer them if they could be a little more corrupt. You shall see God. Jesus was talking to the peacemakers, those who refused to be drawn into the drama, who maybe wondered if their efforts were even noticed, let alone appreciated. You shall be called children of God. Jesus was talking to those who were persecuted, likely by the leaders and authorities of the church itself, for doing what God approves of, who maybe wondered if they were really doing the good thing. You will receive the kingdom of God. He was speaking to those who were insulted, persecuted, lied about, and gossiped about who had gathered there on the mountain in the hopes of something more.

It's easy for us to read these words and think that God is telling us how to live, that Jesus is laying down a new guideline for the heart of man. To be poor in spirit. To mourn. To hunger. To be persecuted. To make peace and extend mercy and be gentle. And maybe there is a little bit of that. But there's something else going on here, too; there's Jesus, meeting men and women just as they are and speaking life into their empty spaces.

That's more common of Jesus. That's more true to what we see Him doing throughout His ministry. God, particularly the God of the Old Testament, was all about telling people how they should live; the law required it. But Jesus...Jesus came to break that law (by fulfilling it), and He...He was always about meeting people right where they are. Right on the mountain. Poor in spirit and all.

And He tells them the greatest of all truth, the generous word of God Himself:

Blessed are you, right where you are...for I love you and call you blessed.