Easter All Year: The Yielded Journey

If we could have been there, sandaled toes sifting dusty paths, with Him that week, I wonder if we would have noticed.  I wonder if we would have realized something was up, not right.  I wonder if we could have sensed an intensity about Jesus in the days that preceded his arrest.  Would his hair have shown a stray grey strand or two that certainly weren't there the week before?  (Like the presidents who enter office auburn, black, and blond, shades, but leave dyed the same shade--stressed grey.) Would one eye have sagged slightly, like my grandfather's, under the emotional weight?  Though the sky was blue, barometric pressure fine, and the pollen count low would he have complained just once of a headache--an ache only death would alleviate?  And I wonder how it must have been for him in that hushed upper room as he sat side by side, surrounded by twelve and yet entirely, utterly alone?

Sometimes I suspect it wasn't the fear of physical pain that caused capillaries to burst, a face to sweat blood.  Don't you think that just maybe it was the relational pain of knowing he would be betrayed by the very man he had poured years of ministry into?  The only way I can relate to Christ this weekend is to imagine something similar.  What if, when their bones have reached the extent of breadth and height and their shoulders are broad, one of my sweet boys-slivers of my heart, chose to walk from our family?  Turn their back on me?  Believe they could do better elsewhere?  Sold out for some silver?  What if it was my son?  Because though Jesus bore none biological, weren't the disciples really like his children?  He poured his life into them, teaching them, feeding them, guiding them, preparing them.  Isn't it probable that he could bare the wicked strap he knew they'd use to punish Him for His deity, but what caused him to go back and pray three times in one night was the suffocating sadness of surrendering his relationships with those twelve who would scatter when soldiers came?  Oh, Jesus, if my own children scattered at the moment I needed them, how I would crumble, disintegrate. Yet you stood.

"My Father, if possible, let this cup pass from me!"

That was his plea, and I'll never fully grasp its depth.  As though he said, "God, I can't fathom baring this plan You have asked of me. I want to run in the other direction.  I want to hide, go to another city, keep a low profile for a while.  I want to live."  What if he really did want to live?  What if he knew that he would conquer death, conquer hell, conquer the grave, and get the prize of a return trip to the heavenly presence of God in the end, but somehow still . . . he wanted to live? Because it is hard to understand the reality that this temporary life is only the casing of eternal souls in mortals frames.  The everlasting living? The real party? That begins when we shed these frames and enter the realm where moth and rust no longer destroy.  But that's all heady knowledge--fills me with understanding.  To live out that knowledge.  That is hard.  Was it hard for him too?   He had a mother.  A father.  Twelve disciples.  He had people he loved.

If those were his feelings--even a teensy weensy little bit--then I understand that God/Man.  I do.  Because I know the end of the story.  I know in the end, I get the prize of the presence of God, the streets of gold, the gate of pearl, the face of Creator God. I mean can you even begin to fathom what the face of God will be like?  He speaks and mountains literally melt.  He utters words and birds of a thousand colors stretch wings, fill air.  So I get it.  I do. And yet I long to linger here a little while.  Long to keep loving those I call mine--sweet, sweaty, summer-freckled boys with dirt glued beneath their fingernails and a man whose square jutted jaw still makes my tummy somersault. 

He himself said these words:  "Anyone who loves his father or mother more than me is not worthy of me; anyone who loves his son or daughter more than me is not worthy of me . . ." (Matthew 10:37) And being God, he had to know when he spoke them it would be he that would have to walk away from his mother and father.  It was him who would never have the chance for a son or a daughter.  Surely when he "threw himself down with his face to the ground and prayed . . . "  (Matthew 26:39) he recalled the very words he had uttered about loving fathers, loving mothers.  Are we to assume that because he was a man filled with God-head deity, he was exempt from the very things culture dictates, temps us with throughout all time?  Was he exempt from the longings of earthly things?  Scripture tells us he was tempted in every way.  Surely, he was tempted just to live an ordinary life, like all the other people.  Just to live.

Father if it be possible, let this cup pass . . .

Yet not what I will, but what you will.
(Matthew26:39b)

And sometimes I wonder if, though he had no biological children of his own, Jesus isn't the best model of parenting we could follow.  He lived with one singular purpose--to accomplish God's will.  God's will.  That was it.  What if, as we coaxed the growing up in our children, we followed this singular mantra:  You were made for God's purpose; yield to it.

alive, they were like helium balloons and time was the gas that filled them.  Once time ceased, they would deflate and sink to the ground.  They were not HIS LIFE.  His life was a narrow path that carried him through the hungry, the thirsty, the diseased, the crippled, the destitute, the sinful tax collectors, the pharisees, the Sadducees, Pilate, Golgotha's hill, and a cross.  All things that appeared like death but in the end meant life.  He yielded every single time to God's will.  And I wonder how often yielding might seem like death to us too; I wonder how often the very thing that would truly fill us, elevate us, is clothed in a road so narrow few will truly travel it.

Jesus himself said, "My food is to do the will of Him who sent me." (John 4:34)  The very thing that sustained him was actually doing the very things God sent him to do.  That sustained him like food.  And I think of SEVEN, and how right in this moment, I'm hungry.  Hungry because I've chosen to change a few things for just thirty days, an emptying of myself so that there is room to be fed by the purposes of God. And Jesus ate the will of His Father.  Hungry and yet full.  Full because when we live out God's purposes we enter the realm of spiritual food--a manna of the heart.  When in John 10:10 Jesus said, "I have come that you may have life and have it to the full,"   did he mean this kind of eternal fullness of yielding?

Because knowing that we are made for a purpose isn't completely enough.  Knowing is not a substitute for yielding.  Jesus knew the cup--even wished it away--and yet he accepted that He must drink it.  If my purpose is to glorify God (Is. 43:7) then am I yielding to His glory?  Am I living to make him famous?  Am I buying things that will reflect him?  Am I treating my neighbors, my family, my children in such a way that they want that great God?  Am I? 

Gosh I get torn.  Do you?  I want so many things sometimes my life must resemble a refrigerator turned on it's side, rolled down a hill, and then opened.  Pick up where I left off with piano lessons when I was ten years old.  Mozart is still throbbing behind my finger tips, isn't he? (Okay, probably not.)  And what about learning water color?  And a bed and breakfast?  What about an organic orchard?  I drove by one--dilapidated, trees untended--and longed to make a career out of it.  Apple Juice.  Apple Pies.  Apple turnovers. Apple Butter.  And traveling to every continent?  Where is the line, the boundary?

Sarah, I made you for my plans.  Seek me.  Yield. 

 But what about our goals?  Our ambitions? What about finding more work to make more money to give my kids more opportunities?   What about amassing more?  Just yesterday I squawked to Jeff, with if-I-am-being-honest-tears-clogging-my-vision, "Do you know how long it has been since I got to spend an entire day in Atlanta shopping without interruption? I can't even remember!" Jeff is clothed.  The boys are clothed.  I am clothed.  We need nothing.  What in the world would I even spend an entire day in Atlanta shopping for?  Yet I long for it because somehow it has become a Grizzly that growls in the face of my heart. 

What about ME?

God, I want to have fun too.  It can't all be serious and straight as an arrow, can it?

"He who loses his life for my sake will find it." (Matthew10:38)

Will find it?

Will find it.

And there, my friends is the crux of this thing.  Somehow, we think if we choose a narrow path we will lose out, miss out, have no fun.  There's no wrong in abundance of life here--in the thrill of new pursuits, new learning, new hobbies, new things.  We are blessed with all things.  But if we wish to find our life,  then the choosing needs to be sifted through the purposes of God--the keeping of our eyes fixed on Jesus.

The eye is the lamp of the body. If your eyes are healthy, your whole body will be full of light.  But if your eyes are unhealthy, your whole body will be full of darkness. (Matthew 6:22,23)

We are a nation of parents with unhealthy eyes, aren't we?  We try to stuff the balloons of our children's lives with year round sports for our children, music lessons, gymnastics, art lessons, Iphones, pods,  and pads, with bigger homes, summer camps, programs, opportunities, and . . . more opportunities.  And in the end, they don't fly.  They're not filled with life.  They . . . WE . . .all sink under the weight of it.  We don't keep our eyes fixed on Jesus. 

We are a people with unhealthy eyes too.  I am.  I focus on the things and people in this world when Jesus whispers Seek me first.  Nope.  I don't always fix my eyes on him.

And if I did, would he remove all the things and people?  I think that's what we're really afraid of, isn't it?  Missing out? Losing relationships?  Surely, it was this loss that caused Jesus to resist the cup His Father offered.

What does it profit a man, if he gain the whole world, and lose his own soul?

What.Does.It.Profit?

And I came to give you life to the full.  If you lose your life--what you see as life--you will gain the great Life, the abundant Life.  Unless a kernel of wheat cracks open and dies, there is no fruit, no life. 

Isn't this what Easter is really about?  Whether or not you celebrate this holiday, isn't commemorating the resurrection--whenever it occurred--about gratitude for the Man who lost his life?  Offering thanks for the man who cracked open?

On Good Friday, we circled around the restored elm table we rescued from an Ontario barn and shared the communion of Jesus' death together.  In church, when we take communion, there are these little wafers (they taste like sawdust and wood glue) and we pick them out of a silver platter.  We don't break them.  But, as a family, we broke the bread we shared.  It was significant to me.  I broke Jesus.  My choices.  That was part of his purpose--paying once and for all time for every single one of the times I would choose not to yield. 

We say we want to live life to the fullest, but how can it be full if it is apart from God's purposes?  Apart from me, you can do nothing.

This narrow path, this keeping the eye healthy by fixing it on Jesus, this yielding to the Creator's way, it is life. 
It.Is.Life.
It.Is.Abundant.
It.Is.Joy.
It.Is.Hope.

Taking the cup, the cup offered of God, and drinking it, slowly, one day at a time, one decision at a time, one moment at a time, is the way we celebrate Easter year round.  Measuring my decisions based on their return value in eternity despite the roaring grizzly in front of me--it may in the end, make all the difference.  It may.

It will.

May I yield to Life.

Pray with me: 
Jesus, thank you for breaking open for me, for mankind.  Thank you for showing me the way to parent.  Thank you for yielding.  Thank you for staying the course though the loss was great.  Thank you for gaining LIFE for all mankind, for me, through your brokenness.  Help me, Jesus, to yield. Amen.

Are You Striving?

The school year and a full season of family getting together, apples bobbed and birthday songs sung, curriculum and gardens,--they've all left me with little time for recording here the words God speaks to my heart. And today is as full as all the rest so I'll only tell you briefly the outline of a melody I pray God is setting to music within me. The book of Zephaniah is a short one--short enough for me to read each day for a while now. And a beloved sister in Christ shared a verse recently in her own blog that turned me onto the book. (http://jewelsightings.blogspot.com/2009/08/ache-of-love.html) There's this third verse in the second chapter that gives me pause when I pass through. "Seek the Lord's favor, all you humble people of the land who have obeyed his commands! Strive to do what is right! Strive to be humble! Maybe you will be protected on the day of the Lord's angry judgment." And I can't help but wonder how many of us are committing our lives to seeking God's favor. I can't help but ask how many of us are waking up each day insisting it is a fresh start and that today, on this new day, we will strive to do the right thing. Today we will strive for humility and pray for God's protection. I can't help but consider how many of my greatest efforts include striving and seeking after God. And I can't help but picture Jesus, hands pierced, side scarred at the right side of God uttering prayers so intense, so full of pleadings and grief saying, "Father, Father let them cease. It was already finished so long ago. I paid for this already, Father. I ended the striving. God, open their eyes that they might see the truth. Father, was my death in vain? Father, was the suffering in vain that they would walk still as uncertain, unloved people seeking the favor that was already bought with my life? God make them see." So often when we read old testament passages we take them to mean we too should follow their advice. In context though, they are generally the reality of the Israelites and if we continue on we will discover as is the case in Zephaniah, that God knew all along humanity would never attain his favor, would never measure up. We will discover that He had a plan to restore all mankind to himself that didn't include human effort. Towards the end of Zephaniah God starts talking about the bigger picture when he tells the Israelites that "they will find safety in the Lord's presence...they will graze peacefully like sheep and lie down; no one will terrify them." What a beautiful picture of peace--a sheep who grazes to fullness and lays himself down on a bed of sweet swaying grass! Sheep don't strive, they don't stress, they don't attempt and work. They eat, and they rest. Do I? Is that my life's chief purpose when I rise? To drink in the goodness and sweetness of my Father and to rest in His capable, powerful, loving, perfect character would appear to be all that He ever intended for me. Let me just say, Satan may not know you, but apparently he knows me well. He is very clear on one point with me--I tend to like to buy the striving material and ignore the resting stuff. I tend to love to work, to do, to aim for, to seek after and that is his golden ticket with me. It goes a little something like this: Sarah, why aren't you teaching Sunday School? Sarah, shouldn't you volunteer for the nursery? Sarah, shouldn't you make a cake for the ministry staff and drop it off at the church office? Sarah, shouldn't you pray longer? Sarah, why aren't you getting up even earlier--reading more scripture? Let me just be clear on this: acts birthed from guilt or obligation have not found their origin in a loving, living relationship with our Savior. It's as though he's literally saying, Sarah, God doesn't love you because He created you, He loves you when you do the right things. And that, my friends is a lie from the very pits of hell. He LOVES us because we are his fearfully and wonderfully made creation. He loves us because He invented LOVE, because to not love us would mean He was no longer God because GOD IS LOVE. We have His eternal favor because Jesus said one evening in a garden of surrender, "If it's possible, let this cup pass from me, nevertheless not my will but thine be done." And then only hours later while breathing his last He said, "It is finished." In those moments the curtain in a temple that signified the holiness and righteousness of God and the pathetic attempts at reaching and appeasing Him, was literally shredded in half forever removing the barrier between us and our Father. Long ago, it was finished. Why in the world would we continue then, to bring modern day sheep and lamb and doves as offerings to a God who is no longer waiting in the holy of holies, but is literally walking beside us as we carry our ridiculous cages filled with atonement offerings to present before Him. He's not waiting at the alter for our efforts. He's just not there. He's not hungry for the aroma of burnt lamb, his nostrils are full of the fragrance of His Son and that is all he smells when we stand before Him clothed in the garments of our Savior. Zephaniah goes on to say, "Shout for joy, Daughter Zion! Shout out, Israel! Be happy and boast with all your heart, Daughter Jerusalem! The Lord has removed the judgment against you; he has turned back your enemy. Israel's king, The LORD, is in your midst! You no longer need to fear disaster." To live as a sheep involves some serious release--release of our preconceived ideas of religion, of Christianity, of God. It also involves some letting go of our own personal pride--we'll never be good enough. We need to just decide that now. Never. We'll always come up short. So, we might as well stop trying. Here's the beauty though--a life that has ceased to try is free to be the new creation it already is in Christ. Yesterday the boys and I were bouncing on the trampoline. Up and down we bounced and bounced never really getting anywhere, just bouncing. Eventually I bounced myself into complete exhaustion and I lay down on that big stretchy black circle. I looked up and the leaves were floating in the sky, their green backs saturated with the sun. I thought what would it be like to hang from the branch with my only job being to take in The Son? There's something to be said for exhaustion--it forces us to lay down and look up. Pray with me: Lord, you already earned our favor before God. I'm so sorry for trying to continue to get what you already paid for. Show me where I'm striving and teach me to cease. Teach me to graze and rest in who you are. Let the rest be an overflow of that grazing and resting. Amen. Read with me: Romans 5:18-21 II Corinthians 5:17

When we Live as Though we are Loved

Recently when I logged into my email there was waiting for me a 'check-up' email from a very dear friend. An area with which I have been wrestling was the topic of the email and I had asked my friend to hold me accountable. The truth is that I hadn't had a lot of success in this area in the last week and typically I would be dreading the faithful accountability my friend offered but when I saw the email sitting like a candle in my inbox I felt encouraged--even happy. I thought to myself, "How odd that I am happy to see that email when I have so little good to report." The truth of the matter is that I know her heart so well that I know without a single question that this person loves me to pieces and her sincere hope is for God's goodness to come about in my life. I also realize that she does not judge me based on failure or success, but based on my heart. She knows my heart's intentions and loves me for the contents within my soul. Though I knew I'd have to report some failures I also knew that her disappointment would not be "in me" but "for me" as I had before me this week the choice between God's very best and some mediocre counterfeits. If she suffered any grief over my report it would not be in me as a person but a sincere sadness that someone she loved made poor choices. Few humans can separate people's actions from people's hearts. But her unconditional love changed how I felt about her faithful encouragment in my life. Here's the thing--God's love for us is that way times a million, and most of us just don't live like we believe that. We say we believe it, but we do not live like it. God used my friend's email to remind me of His own feelings towards me despite my inadequacies. Ephesians 1:4 says, "For He chose us in Christ before the foundation of the world that we may be holy and unblemished in his sight in love." That verse packs a whole lot of truth into one relatively short sentence. For the God of the universe, of all creation, of you and of I, chose us -before the earth was formed, before the sky shone light or dark, before the stars were strung--to be encased in Jesus. When God sees us, He sees two things--a person who is holy and a person who is unblemished. Do you follow that with me? As a follower of Jesus, standing before God with our failures, our lists of mess-ups and our relative unrighteousness God still sees holiness and an unblemished creation. I know. I know. He sees holiness because we are in Christ and Christ is holy. He sees unblemished people because we are clothed in Christ's righteousness and therefore we appear like a spotless lamb. And none of that is really us. That's all Christ. But when He really looks at just us....WOE. Stop right there. That's the point. We've got to get our heads around this reality--it's NOT just us anymore. "I have been crucified with Christ, and it is NO LONGER I WHO LIVE, but Christ lives in me. So the life I now live in the body, I live because of the faithfulness of the Son of God who loved me and gave himself for me." (Gal. 2:20) From the moment we become a follower of Jesus we are never again seen alone in the nakedness and shame of our sinful and broken state. When God looks on us He sees Jesus--every single time. We are dressed in Jesus. We may not behave like Jesus, we may not think like Jesus, we may not act like Jesus, but we are in Him nonetheless. We need to know that because so much of our theology comes from the words we hear instead of The Word and we don't always realize the two don't line up. We hear things like, 'we don't want to disappoint God' and assume that somehow if we can disappoint him we must also be able to please Him. He is pleased--trust me--He is "well pleased." He's well pleased with us, but not because of us, because of who we are in--Christ. "I do not set aside God's grace, because if righteousness could come through the law, then Christ died for nothing." (Gal. 2:21) The thing is that we are loved in such a way that is completely apart from ourselves and anything we will ever do or not do. We are loved without condition because we are not loved based on our own righteousness, but based on the perfect spotless lamb of Jesus and if we think that in anyway we can appear before God in a pleasing way in our own merit we sell short all that Jesus did for us on the cross. When we say with our mouths that we can't earn God's favor but then turn around and nearly deify people who appear to have it altogether. The question must be asked, if God's pleasure in us can be related to our good doings, then, as believers, can it not also be related to our wrong doings? The answer, I believe--however controversial, is NO. Like a candle glowing in a windowsill over the holiday season, God's love is an everlasting love. It's presence in our lives is not in anyway conditional on how we behave, how together we are, or how much of a failure we are. And when He checks up on us, like my friend did, it is for our good. It is not God's intention to condemn us but to empower us. His desire is not to point out our failures, but to spur us on toward love and good deeds. When we sing of God's amazing grace we are singing of God's amazing "unmerited, unearned, undeserved favor" not His grace that saves us and then somehow becomes conditional. It's my hope that in a world where even amongst Christians we can feel a spirit of condemnation and a sense that in some way we need to perform in order to prove our worth, I may walk as one who is loved. Loved not for what I've done but because I am God's creation and I am dressed in God's Son. Those two things will never change and therefore, I am forever loved. If we can learn to walk in that truth, I believe the world will inevitably be drawn toward the irresistible warmth of the God whose scripture insists that above all "the greatest of these is love." (I Cor. 13:13) Perhaps Christ Himself said best what I fear happens all too often among sincere people who desperately want to obey and honor their heavenly Father. "Therefore pay attention to what they (experts in the law or scribes) tell you and do it. But do not do what they do, for they do not practice what they teach. They tie up heavy loads hard to carry, and put them on men's shoulders, but they themselves are not willing even to lift a finger to move them..." (Matthew 23:4) If after walking away from a sermon or a book intended for spiritual growth we feel weight like a burden or that there are a list of things we need to do to improve upon ourselves could it be possible we have misunderstood the intent? Consider again Christ's own words, "Take my yoke on you and learn from me, because I am gentle and humble in heart, and you will find rest for your souls. For my yoke is easy to bear, and my load is not hard to carry." (Matthew 11:29-30) Jesus Himself insisted He came not to condemn the world but to seek and save those who were lost. And the question must be asked if as Christ followers we are walking with a sense of failure and condemnation, then by whom are we being condemned? Many years ago I lead a Bible study on women's character. We went through a book and many were affronted by the contents of the book. Many of the ladies said it felt next to impossible to carry out the author's instructions. I followed the instructions laid out in that book to the letter for a very long time. And I'll be frank with you, I felt like I had something finally figured out. It was a difficult pace I can promise you, and after a couple of years I realized that while her ideas were excellent and well intended they were not a miraculous formula for achieving spirituality. My most spiritual moments in those years were probably on the days when I bombed big time and sat before my heavenly Father looking into His eyes soaking in His love. When I get to heaven I know that God will not commend my efforts in those years as any greater than the years when I basked in His presence and drank up His love like a warming wine. I'm ashamed to have to tell you that I remember looking into some of those women's eyes and saying, "I know this is difficult, but it is right, and your life will be better if you live like this." That I was sincerely trying to obey God and honor Him goes without saying. But as I look back on that study, my heart aches for those young mothers who were struggling to follow a God who seemed so unattainable, so righteous and perfect that to bring Him joy would be nearly impossible. For some, sadly, I believe they came to the conclusion that the goal was too lofty and that the exhaustion that resulted from their noble attempts was just not worth it. They could be better moms and wives if they just focused on their families and quit worrying about trying to please God. Man if I could have a do-over! I'd take those women's hands in my own and I'd say, "God does not care about how perfect you are, He is madly in love with you right now--while you are completely imperfect. He loves you when you are tired from being up all night with that new baby and He loves you when you fall asleep trying to pray. He loves you when you snap at your children and He loves you when you intend to make a romantic dinner for your husband and have the kids in bed early and in fact you end up eating hot dogs with kids crawling under the table. He loves you because you are His creation and He sees in you the perfection of His Son." I'd say it every single week that they came to that study because if we don't believe, live and breathe the reality of God's love in our lives we will not experience the freedom and fullness of life God intends for us here on earth. I write all of this at the risk of being criticized for not discussing James' words about being "doers" of the Word. I write all this knowing people will say you are selling God's love as a ticket to live life as you please. Knowing that people will ask what about the "working out of your salvation?" I know. Trust me, I know it's all in there. But I believe that when a person knows they are completely, madly, unconditionally loved their lives will be transformed. Do we want to live lives that are full of God and discover that we can be more in this life than we ever imagined? Paul prayed to that end when he said, "I pray...that Christ may dwell in your hearts through faith, so that, because you have been rooted and grounded in love, you may be able to comprehend with all the saints what is the breadth and length and height and depth, and thus to know the love of Christ that surpasses knowledge, so that you may be filled up to all the fullness of God. Now to him who by the power that is working within us is able to do far beyond all that we ask or think, to him be the glory in the church and in Christ Jesus to all generations, forever and ever. Amen. (Ephesians 3:16-21) God's love changes everything. Do we know that love? Really know it? I pray we do. Amen.