Recently I was reading the New Testament encouragement from the Apostle Paul to “Rejoice always, pray without ceasing, and give thanks in all circumstances” and it hit me that I fall far short of living up to that standard most of the time. If my Apple Watch measured the urgency and vitality of my prayer life instead of my standing hours or the number of steps I take in a day, I don’t think I’d appreciate the technology very much, and the findings would be ugly. In fact, whenever the topic of prayer even comes up, my thoughts usually devolve into: “I’m terrible at prayer, I don’t pray enough, and I’ve got to get better at it.” While all of that may actually be true, I was recently relieved to see that Jesus doesn’t think about prayer in the same kind of me-centric, measure-y way that I do. And contrary to my approach, he doesn’t simply tell me to try harder.

In Luke 18, Jesus shares a story of a persistent widow. In so doing, he decidedly does not take the “close your exercise rings” approach to improving our prayer life, nor does he put forward a “how to hack your way into regular prayer habits” like you might expect to hear today. Instead, he uses story to slow us down and help us see underneath the many reasons we don’t pray. He paints a portrait of a widow who continually seeks justice from a self-involved judge who eventually caves to her demands due to her persistence. He surprises us by relating God to the unjust judge in the story and pointing out in a lesser-to-greater style argument that if the judge will grant the requests of the widow, how much more will a good God will listen to the cries of his chosen ones and care for us.

What’s unexpected for “spiritual vitality measurers” like myself about the approach Jesus takes is what Luke tells us the point of the story is meant to teach us. In Luke 18:1 it says, “Then Jesus told his disciples a parable to show them that they should always pray and not give up.” Luke tells us that Jesus wants us to learn to pray continually and not give up. But he “shows” instead of tells. He isn’t a solicitor at our front door trying to sell us something to improve our lives, rather, he’s like a family member or close friend who always uses the side door.

Jesus knows that our wills are often more resistant to the things of God than we like to believe, particularly because an appeal to our will normally teaches us to look to ourselves. The words “try harder” give us a fresh chance to buckle down and finally be more spiritual. But a story doesn’t work that way. Instead, a story compels us to respond. When I watch the beginning of the movie “Up” and see the love story between Carl and Ellie, including the pain of the loss when Ellie dies, my heart is compelled to love, cherish, and appreciate my wife all the more. 

But reading the Bible goes a step beyond example-setting – and so does the story of the persistent widow. The main character leaves the screen and enters our lives, making the story not about our prayer life but about his, and that makes all the difference. In the Garden of Gethsemane Jesus prays “Father, if you are willing, take this cup from me; yet not my will, but yours be done.” He is the true persistent widow who tirelessly assumes our place and receives the justice we deserve on the cross. It’s this story of God’s one-way love that knocks at the side door to our hearts and compels us to turn from self and experience in Jesus a greater joy and refreshment than we could ever find on our own.

The post A Knock At The Side Door appeared first on Red Tree.

One of the best parts of watching one of these movies is that if you’ve seen one, you’ve seen them all. I’m telling the truth here, there are even bingo cards because the plot points are that predictable. 

Even if you haven’t yet seen one, you know the story: 

• A busy businessperson visits a small town with the intent to destroy it.
• They, then, serendipitously meet the person they are supposed to be with.
• But they’ve also lost sight of the meaning of Christmas due to a dead relative, typically the mother.
• But they find old letters from the mother that remind them of the spirit of Christmas and together with their newfound love interest they save Christmas for the small town, just in time.

Why do I nestle into my couch to watch these movies annually – especially if they’re this predictable? Maybe it’s because they offer an expected escape. For two hours, I can step away from the unpredictability of my life and the perpetual moral incongruence that comes with being alive. I can forget all the ways I don’t live up to the ideal self I’ve concocted in my mind. I find respite in these movies where everything slows down, moral lessons are simple, and consequences for wrongdoing are easily mitigated. I want my life to be neat and tidy, like I’m living in a snow globe, where even when things get stirred up it is always beautiful and I remain completely put together. Like the perfect kiss as the snow falls at the end of a Hallmark movie, I want things to be pristine and simple.

My longing for simplicity often shows up when I think about what it means to have a relationship with God. Specifically, the mechanics of sanctification or what it looks like to be growing in grace. I want my growth in Christlikeness to come to me in an easier, more controlled, and morally clear way. I don’t want to keep taking two steps forward and three steps back. I want my life to play out like a Hallmark movie. I want easy “snow globe” sanctification, where I control the severity of my problems and the outcome is effortless and expected. I don’t want to be pushed over limits I didn’t know I have with surprise car maintenance or a sick baby screaming at 2am with an overloaded work day waiting on the other side of this sleepless night.

In my pursuit of simplicity, I stack up unbiblical performance metrics like IHOP pancakes and continually assess myself against a growth chart that the New Testament doesn’t prescribe. Where Jesus and the apostles talk about sanctification in the slow terms of agriculture like mustard trees (Mark 4:31-32), and bearing fruit (Gal 5:22-23), I insert mental charts and self-imposed data analytics into my walk with Jesus to quantify things and to make sense of myself.

Life in Christ and growth in grace is not simple, linear, or congruous. Snow globes are at rest but not fully beautiful until they get shaken up. It is precisely when things get messy that they can become beautiful. When I stop measuring my life and let grace shake me up, I realize that God isn’t interested in my performance and my own efforts to make myself holy. 

It’s also worth noting that easy life lessons never actually change people. What we need is a rescuer, not a teacher. The cross of Christ looms large here because his death for sinners like me means that God is not pacing the throne room of heaven, worrying about the messes we make or waiting for us to figure out how to better ourselves. The only one who was ever morally congruent put on our incongruence and mess. He became bloodied, bruised, and was ultimately killed — you could say he was the true snow globe who was shaken up and disturbed — because he understands the transformation process for people requires new life, not moral ladder climbing. 

Instead of focusing on how to make my life more predictable, I’m reminded that God has invested his Spirit to move like the wind (John 3:8) in my life, and to make me like his son Jesus (Rom 8:29), and he will complete his work (Phil 1:6). In the meantime, I get to continue allowing grace to shake me up. As I behold the overwhelming beauty of Jesus again and again (2 Cor 3:18), I find the simplicity and rest I long for and begin to experience God at work in transforming me.

The post Living In a Snow Globe appeared first on Red Tree.

But within two minutes of passing through the security gate, in a place where I expected to be overtaken by joy and excitement, I brought only stress and an argumentative spirit toward my wife. I began to complain about where to go and what foods to try, all in an effort to best optimize our experience in order to have maximum amounts of fun. 

This isn’t new for me. Whether it’s the State Fair, a night out, or a vacation, my tendency is to act like a jerk even though deep down I really want to create a nice environment for my family. If the point is to have fun and make memories, why do I do the opposite?

For starters, it’s hard to resist the promise that experiences are what I’m really missing in life – travel is the key I’ve been missing to unlock the true capacity for positive change and self discovery. I regularly buy what the industry is selling: Travel makes us free, joyful, human, whole, and alive (see here and here). No matter how much I know it isn’t true, it’s compelling. Their ads work on my heart:

“The new tagline, ‘Where Can We Take You?’, evokes not only the physical destinations one reaches when they travel, but the personal and spiritual destinations travel lifts them to. The line and the campaign underscore the brand’s belief in travel’s ability to help one grow, heal, and find common ground.” 

Now, add to my expectations time and monetary investments and I find myself feeling entitled to the most optimal experience complete with curated photos and curated joy. It’s a feeling I earned! Even more, I end up feeling entitled to find myself.

But the truth is more like the SNL sketch, “Romano Tours” where Adam Sandler plays a tour guide of famous Italian sites, who wants to temper expectations for excited travelers. The most poignant joke of the sketch reminds us of the limits of travel and experiences: “If you are sad where you are, and you get on a plane to Italy, the you in Italy will be the same sad you from before, just in a new place. Does that make sense? There’s a lot a vacation can do. Help you unwind, see some different looking squirrels. But it cannot fix deeper issues, like how you behave in group settings, or your general baseline mood.”

My expectations become solidified in the hope that a trip to the State Fair, a date night, or a trip to California to see the Sequoia trees is going to bring me to new ‘personal and spiritual destinations.’ I’m looking to travel and experiences to change me, but the truth is, they can’t. I’m the same person on vacation that I am every other day. Travel shows me more of who I really am, so I guess in a way, I truly am finding myself, but the picture isn’t pretty. Realizing travel hasn’t healed me, but has actually revealed to me that I’m still me (just in a different place), snaps me back to reality like an overstretched rubber band.

Where is the hope, then, for a burned out “experience seeker” like myself? I can work harder to temper my own expectations for what an experience should be. I can spend more time planning to create a better schedule. But isn’t that just more attempts at optimization? Adding more behavior modification to my already wearied life seems to be the cause of the problem, not the solution. 

The deliverance I seek from the burned out, self-seeking, optimized life of travel experiences isn’t to come up with a better plan but to be shown the grace of the one who traveled to me, and to us.  

Jesus coming down to earth reveals that life isn’t about optimizing or travel hacking our way to heaven. Instead, it’s about coming face to face with the rest and relief that only the Son of God can bring. Grace teaches us that relief and rescue come not from inside, but from outside of us, from the Son of God who willingly comes to us to lay down his life, in order that we would let the well of our endless striving to be better finally dry up. 

The cross of Christ pronounces the expiration date on all forms of self-optimization because, in the end, Christ’s greatest work was his death. There’s no experience that is less “optimized” than that! It is his costly and horrible experience on the cross that becomes the pathway to true life for all of us who are tired of trying to fix ourselves with the next experience and are ready to simply believe. Only in Jesus do I find the one who truly makes me free, joyful, human, whole, and alive.

The post Wherever You Go, There You Are appeared first on Red Tree.

We are surrounded by moral messaging. It’s inside us too — we love good stories that present us with a good challenge. In reality, though, my attempts to apply the moral always seem to fizzle out. I might learn humility from Bugs Bunny and apply that lesson for a minute, but then I find myself on the highway muttering about the slow car in the fast lane and abruptly realize I’m not up to the challenge.

This is one reason why reading the Bible grows stale for many of us. We tend to think about Bible stories as moral challenges. But reading them this way can make the Bible exhausting because rules and laws are not meant to save or heal us, but to reveal the depth of our spiritual desperation. God doesn’t want us to read his story looking for a simple moralism. In fact, he wants to put our moralistic, rule-following thought patterns to death so that they can be replaced with something else. The story of Jesus forgiving and healing the paralytic in Mark 2 brings this startling reality into view.

One sign that we’re reading Mark 2 moralistically is when we find ourselves asking, “What type of person is this asking me to become?” This can lead us to a number of outcomes, such as “I should be a better friend” or “I should reach out more to the sick and suffering around me,” or “I should be more willing to evangelize and bring my friends to Jesus like the paralytic’s friends are here.” It could even lead us to think “I should not be like the teachers of the law who question Jesus and his power, but instead I should work harder to have faith, because the stronger my faith, the more likely it is for Jesus to heal me.”

Now, these things are not necessarily all bad to pursue. It would be wonderful if I could be a better friend, and I feel that even more acutely when I scroll my text message threads and see friends I love whom I haven’t reached out to in months or even years. I’d love to be more evangelistic because I really do love Jesus and people, but if you were to look at my schedule, I don’t think you’d put evangelism high on my priority list. I’m so darn bad at it. I’ve even led seminars on the subject and still find myself feeling like I’m doing a crummy job.

But here’s where reading stories about Jesus and looking for the moral lesson breaks down: moralism says the answer to my problem is that I must look to myself. I’ve got to be a better friend. I’ve got to try harder to share Jesus with others. I’ve got to have more faith, then Jesus will bless me. Instead of looking to Jesus and his power and grace, we look to ourselves and our weak efforts. And like cutting into an onion, we end up teary-eyed and disappointed as we find ourselves falling short yet again. So, how do we stop reading the Bible looking for another fruitless lesson? How can we read the story so that we can actually see Jesus clearly and rest underneath the true moral that God intends us to hear?

Let’s consider a few things from Mark 2. First, note that Jesus forgives the paralytic before healing him. Picture the scene. It’s laser-focused. All eyes are on Jesus. But instead of healing the man, he does the unexpected, saying, “Son, your sins are forgiven.” If we went inside the mind of the friends, the paralytic, or the teachers of the law, they must all be thinking…”What?!” 

Jesus wants them, and us, to see something. He wants us to see that we need something more than physical healing. We need forgiveness. We need grace. We don’t need to try harder or do better in response to a wave of fresh inspiration — we need a Savior. Take him at his own word: “But I want you to know that the Son of Man has authority on earth to forgive sins.” Jesus uses the opportunity to turn our moralistic minds upside down and reveal that our situation is far more dire, and our hope to be saved is much nearer than we imagined. We are not in need of a greater moral effort from within ourselves. We are in need of someone outside of us to work a miracle on our behalf.

Much to the relief of observing parties, Jesus does heal the paralytic. Previously unable to walk, and at the mercy of others to carry him about, he is now by the word of power from Jesus’ lips capable of walking. The people are left in awe. But the story doesn’t end there. Remember, Jesus has the authority to forgive the sins of the paralytic and does in fact declare this man’s sins forgiven. But how do we know? How can we be certain that the paralytic has his sins forgiven?

The answer lies in what happens to Jesus later in Mark’s gospel. The paralytic was carried to Jesus by his friends in order to receive healing. But, looking ahead to the cross, we see something different. Jesus wasn’t carried by his friends. He was carried away by his enemies. He wasn’t carried to forgiveness and healing, but to condemnation and death, like a lamb to the slaughter. In our place, he didn’t resist but allowed himself to be carried away, and to be “cut into” like the roof in Mark 2 to make room for our salvation. This is why we have to stop reading for the moral of the story and start reading for Jesus. Because the real “moral” of the story is that Jesus took the brunt so that spiritually paralyzed people like us — people unable to change no matter how hard we try — could be healed and experience real forgiveness. 

The story of the paralytic confronts our love for neatly packaged Looney Tunes lessons. God has a plan for moralists who are tired of fizzling out under new challenges. The grace of Jesus reveals a better story by showing us that God doesn’t want a bunch of people who have made themselves well. Instead, his desire is to forgive and heal the sinfully sick, needy, and desperate, which is every one of us. In God’s story, the true moral is not to try harder, but to gaze upon the cross of Christ that says to us, “That’s all folks!”

The post Cutting Into the Onion of Moralism appeared first on Red Tree.