Archives for September 2016

Just a short post this week. As I was on a 17 hour non-stop flight from San Francisco to Singapore earlier this week, I didn’t feel like watching a movie, and I wasn’t sleepy, so I decided to read the gospel of John. I have a lot of underlines and highlights – but here is one that stood out.

In John 12:42ff, John tells of many authorities that believed in Jesus, but out of fear that the Pharisees might take away their authority and their positions, they would not confess their belief in Jesus. They became duplicitous. They compromised their integrity. Why? “For they loved the glory that comes from man more than the glory that comes from God.”

What is going on here? As leaders climb the ladder of success and with the success attain power and prestige and all the perks that go with it…the temptation to compromise their character increases exponentially. The temptation is to hide your weaknesses because there are subordinates who covet your position and will use your weaknesses against you.  There is the temptation to use your power to hold on to your position – even if it hurts others. We become more focused on what is best for us rather than what is best for those we are leading. When this happens, we might retain our position, but we have lost our influence. People trust leaders with integrity. It is easy for leaders to forget that their leadership is for the benefit of those they are leading.

To preserve our integrity and character, we may need to take the risk of losing or giving up our position, our role, our titles – and all the perks that go with it. We may never get back what we have given up. But we have gained something much more important, the character and influence that God designed for us to have, and the freedom to become who He intends for us to become. Our greatest impact on others will never come from our position of from what we do, it comes from who we are…and from why we are that person.

 

This summer on my blog sabbatical, I read Lewis Smedes’ book Shame and Grace. Understanding that the gospel of grace is the only power that deals with my shame, I was  immediately curious. I would say some things differently than he does, but I love his pastoral approach and understanding of grace. I particularly enjoyed how he compared the heaviness of shame and the lightness of grace, and how shame depresses us and grace lifts our spirits. Smedes writes “If our spiritual experience does not lighten our life, we are not experiencing grace.” With Smedes’ help, let me try to capture some of the ways that we experience grace bringing lightness to our steps. Eugene Peterson in The Message quotes Jesus saying, “Keep company with me and you’ll learn to live freely and lightly” (Mt 11:30).

Grace eliminates the heavy burden of shame.

Shame is heavy. It is like carrying a lead weight in my stomach. It always lies, never telling me the truth of who I am in Christ. It tells me I am filled with not-good-enoughness…and that I never will be no matter how hard I try. As Paul, a student at Fort Lewis College in Durango, CO, wrote in his journal, “I could not longer ignore the possibility there was something very wrong inside of me…I cannot tolerate another day of pain…I will never experience light-heartedness…I feel like they swept the floors of the people factory and pasted the leftovers together to make me.”

The gospel of grace is my assurance that the lies shame tells me have no validity, “…and its message of shame has no threat” (Shame and Grace, p. 154). It carries no weight. As God looks at me through the work of Christ, I am never so unacceptable as to be unaccepted. Never.

Grace eradicates the burden of perfectionism.

The gospel eliminates perfection as the criteria for God’s love and acceptance. I can’t look to my obedience and expect it to do for me what only His amazing grace can do. I don’t establish a relationship with God based on my behavior, Jesus establishes a relationship with God for me based on what he has done.

Grace lightens the weight of criticism.

The lie that I so often hear being whispered in my ear is this, my worth is dependent on what people think of me. When I don’t negate that by the truth of the gospel, I carry the heavy weight of pleasing people to find my worth. And it is a weight that never goes away. For people-pleasers, criticism is an unthinkable terror.

The apostle Paul, understanding grace, said this, “I’ve got a job to do and what is asked of me is that I do it as faithfully as I can. What is not required of me to do is to please you. So what you – or anyone else for that matter – thinks about the way I am doing my job does not matter much to me…The only thing that really matters is what the Lord thinks about what I do and how I do it.” (I Cor 4:2-4)

And I know what He thinks – he loves me just as I am, not as I should be.

Keep company with Jesus and live lightly.

 

PS: I constantly need to remind myself of the lightness grace brings to my life. I have a hunch you have friends who need to hear this good news as well. And so again, share this with your friends. Post it on your social media. Let’s not keep the lightness of grace hidden.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

I have an embarrassing confession. I misunderstood the meaning of prodigal…as in the parable of the prodigal son. Now I get it and want the same quality. My understanding was of a son that wandered…skipped school, lied, into drugs and in trouble with the police. Uncontrollable. Rebellious. A heartache to mom and dad. I would hear statements like, “Oh – their oldest son is a prodigal,” meaning he was defiant and unmanageable, perpetually in trouble. For me, that definition fit the behavior of the younger son in Jesus’ parable in Luke 15.

I was wrong. Prodigal is an adverb meaning to give extravagantly, to spend lavishly. with abandon. We can do this wisely or we can do it foolishly and recklessly. The prodigal son choose to spend his inheritance extravagantly, but in his undiscipline he wasted everything he had. Probably on lots of bad women and good wine. Jesus says the young man “spent everything” and did it recklessly (Luke 15:14).

But there is another prodigal person in the parable – a prodigal father. What if the focus of this parable is not on the wasteful extravagance of the son, but on the prodigality of the father? If this is true, I love what David Benner writes is his book, Surrender to Love, “It reminds me that far from focusing on my sins, God sees me through the eyes of love. All my fears about how God will respond to me in my sin wash away as I see the Father running to meet me.”

Several years ago I had preached an entire Sunday morning sermon on the gospel truth that God will NEVER punish a believer for their sin. If God still punishes us for our sin, then the cross did not work…or only partially worked for some sins. After the second service as Sue and I were walking out to our car, in front of us was a couple busy roasting the preacher…not aware that I was right behind them able to hear every word. Their summary was, “If God doesn’t punish us for our sin, we will never obey.” How sad. They had grown comfortable fearing an angry God that still punishes.

The reality is we have a prodigal Father that is running to us – extravagantly and lavishly loving us.

 

Remember:

Let’s get this good news of the gospel on the move. Share this with with your social media friends.