What's Next, Papa?

This resurrection life you received from God is not a timid, grave-tending life. It's adventurously expectant, greeting God with a childlike, "What's next, Papa?" (Romans 8:15, MSG)

I was out last week celebrating my daughter-in-law's birthday. She had worked all day and needed a break, especially from cooking for the children. So, my wife and I met her and our three grandchildren at a restaurant. There's always much expectancy while waiting on a meal of Mexican food, getting ready to sit together and eat with those you love.  

While waiting for a table to seat the six of us, five-year-old Mason, came to sit by me. After we greeted and hugged, I began to point out the things to him which were around us in the waiting area - like the flower etched into the wooden bench we were sitting on and it's lack of roots. I then pointed out a potted plant nearby and mentioned that it had roots. Mason responded, "Or it couldn't grow."  I shared how Jesus' love is "planted" into our hearts to make us grow. I then asked what he wanted for Christmas. He showed me how he would operate a WE Game that he was hoping to get. I always have as much to learn from my grandchildren as they do from me.

We finally got seated, ordered and ate our meals. It was such a blessing to spend time with my family. The table conversation was generally about the issues of the day and how things were going at work and school. After the dinner was complete and the bill paid, we got up to leave. As I was putting on my coat, I overheard Mason say to his mom, "I want to go home with grandpa." My heart melted right then and there. It was like God tapping on the shoulder to get my attention. Mason's words rang in my ears the glad joy of little children and their simple faith. I hugged him and said, "We'll be getting together soon at Christmas." His eyes gleamed at the prospect of that day. So did mine!

Today I have been especially happy in the Lord. My love relationship with my heavenly Father is growing and showing. My roots are deep in God's love. The hard times I've been going through lately, in my prayerful search to better understand and accept the importance of the cross of Christ in my life, are beginning to meld into joyful realities. It is all about the resurrection life made possible by Jesus' death on the cross, new life growing up from the roots of God's love in my heart. It's adventurous and expectant! It's a childlike questing for more of Jesus, like my grandson, Mason, asking "What's next, Papa?" 

The best part is knowing that there is more to come, that my heavenly Father has such wonderful things ahead for me. He's really looking forward to my time with Him. He promises He's going to give me the most incredible, unbelievable inheritance, all coming by His grace through my faith in Jesus. And even better - I get to share it with Mason!

When the Dark Days Come

Dark days are hard to bear, but I'm learning that they're an important part of the cross-bearing life. The times of testing continue to come. Just when everything seems on the up-and-up and almost as a surprise, the bottom to falls out and whatever understandings I had experienced of God's goodness and grace go with it. My ego is purged and my heart purified. And it hurts! I'm learning that this is the interior life of a disciple. It is, for me, a hidden and invisible experience. It's the Spirit of Christ calling me from the shallows to the deep. 

I'm thankful the dark days don't happen very often. There have been many who have gone down the dark path before me. I'm not alone!  It's also reassuring to learn that growth-in-faith is not far away. The clouds may cover in darkness, but the sun shines through. Praise God! His mercy never fails and His steadfast love endures forever. 

God is working in the darkness. If I surrender in trust to this truth, I will find Jesus in a new way. It marks the beginning of a deeper life of faith, where joy and peace abound even in the darkness - the deeper life of faith that Jesus is the same, yesterday, today, and forever. The new way of finding Jesus is realizing that God is in the darkness. It is there I go to meet Him. It is there I pray in peace, silent and attentive to Him whose love knows no shadow of change. It is there I celebrate the darkness in the quiet certainty of my maturing faith. 

What happens to me in the dark day is simple. God strips me of my current understandings of His grace, so He can enter more fully into my heart. Maturing faith in Christ comes when I allow God the freedom to work His sovereign will within me, neither letting go of my attained life of prayer in frustration nor giving in to the distractions of the world. Prayer, humility, detachment and faith are beautiful graces, but I can only have them through the purging of God's grace. It's in this purifying process that I'm prepared to more fully receive God's gifts. 

I know, but often forget that the humility of Jesus is most clearly seen in His forgiveness and acceptance of others - even His enemies. In contrast, continuing resentments show that the cross-bearing life is not fully mine yet. The surest sign of union with Christ is my forgiveness and acceptance of others. Without this action on my part the dark day moves into the dark night, resulting in my troubled heart. Forgiveness is the key to everything.* Through my forgiveness the mind of Christ is formed within me and the darkness is prevented from becoming an ego trip. Forgiveness guards me from feeling so spiritually advanced that I look down on my struggling brothers and sisters. It's in humble forgiveness that we have the mind of Christ. 

The final repudiation of the ego is the surrender of our need for vindication, the handing over of the kingdom of self to the Father, and the forgiving in our heart of others. When we do this faithfully, we're not being afraid of the dark, but celebrating the light that shines though it and give us all life in Christ.
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* From The Signature of Jesus by Brennan Manning

Thinking About the Cross-Bearing Life

Jesus says that to be His disciple, we must take up our cross daily and follow Him. That means we accept our own wounds and limitations as being nailed to the cross of Christ and fully surrendered to Him. Jesus completely takes on Himself all our pain and suffering. So, we completely identify our lives with Jesus - what He stands for and what He wants to accomplish through us. Our human frailties, which have caused us many painful experiences, we now fully accept and surrender to Christ. He has experienced our pain and suffering and made it His pain and suffering. Our lives are made fully complete through faith in Jesus - and in Him alone. 

In identifying with the crucified Christ, we enter into the work that He finished on the cross for us - His taking upon Himself all our sins and transgressions. It was all included in His cry, "My God, My God, why have You forsakened me?" (Mt 27:46) This was the moment of our redemption. His cry upon the Cross was our cry of alienation from God. And now, by completely surrendering to Him, our cry is taken up into His cry and transformed by His resurrection. Rather than condemning ourselves for our weaknesses and making self-conscious efforts to try to be better, we surrender ourselves completely to the crucified Christ who shed His blood on the cross for us. There is no way of healing from our pain and suffering except through the love of Jesus that forgives seventy times seven and keeps no score of wrongdoings. 

The unmistakable sign of Christian disciples who have actually experienced the forgiveness of Jesus is the Spirit-given capacity to forgive their enemies. Jesus says, "Love your enemies and do good, then you will have great reward and be a child of the Most High, for He is kind to the ungrateful and to the selfish." (Lk 6:35) Jesus, the crucified Christ, is not only an example to the people of God. He is the living power and wisdom of God who empowers them to reach out hands of healing to those who have hurt them. As we more clearly hear Him pray for His murderers, "Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do" (Lk 23:34), He will turn our hearts of stone into hearts of flesh. At the foot of the cross of Jesus we are all forgiven enemies of God, who are empowered by His love to extend forgiveness to others. 

In the agony of the cross Jesus said: "I know every moment of the sin, selfishness, dishonesty and degraded love that has disfigured your life. Yet I do not judge you unworthy of compassion, forgiveness and salvation. Now be like that with others. Judge no one." It's only when we claim with heartfelt conviction the love of the crucified Christ and risen Lord, that we can overcome all fear of judgement. As long as we continue to live as if we are what we do, as if we are what we have, as if we are what other people think of us, we will remain filled with judgments, evaluations and condemnations. We will continue to feel the need to "put people in their place." To the extent that we embrace the truth that our core identity is not rooted in our successes nor our popularity but in the passionate, pursuing, "reckless" love of God embodied in His crucified Son - to that degree we let go of our need to judge others. We become free from the need to judge others by claiming for ourselves this foundational truth: "I am a child of God." We are loved by our heavenly Father. This is what Jesus means when He says, "Do not judge, and you will not be judged." (Mt 7:1) John says it this way, "In love there is no room for fear." (1 Jn 4:18)

The only true wisdom we have is our own experience of the love of the crucified Christ. It's our awareness that nothing - not the negative judgments of others, not our wrongful perception of ourselves, not our scandalous past, nor our fear, guilt, and self-loathing, not even death - can separate us from the love God made visible to us on the cross of Calvary. This awareness is where our true wisdom resides. There is no substitute for the gospel. It is the power and wisdom of the crucified Christ. When we are dying, we shouldn't want some trendy words given by someone for our comfort. Instead, we should want a priestly minister of God. We should want one who has struggled with his or her faith and still clings to Jesus. We should want somebody who has looked long and lovingly at the crucified Christ and experienced the healing only found in our risen Savior and Lord. 

It's the suffering Christ who "loved us and gave Himself up for us" (Eph 5:2) on the cross. The love of Jesus Christ on the cross is the divine reality. Our true lives are utterly incomprehensible except in terms of Jesus' love. Would we have remained with Mary Magdalene and John at the foot of the Cross as Jesus was murdered in the most brutal and dehumanizing way? And if we would've spoken to Mary and John of Christian life, ministry, prayer or discipleship, we would've surely spoken of Jesus nailed to the cross and now risen in glory - or not at all. We wouldn't have burdened them with our theological insights, or bored them with our ministerial successes or our gifts or anything else. We would be certain that they would've had only one question for us: Do you know Jesus? 

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* As a faithful Protestant, I'm coming to terms with Brennan Manning's The Signature of Jesus. I believe that many of Jesus' disciples don't have a clear understanding of the crucified Christ. I'm  thankful for clarifications made by Robin Riggs in The Lifestyle of the Cross and Rankin Wilbourne in The Cross Before Me.