It’s not surprising to see the in-between show up all over the Bible. Maybe our lives consist of these spaces in between precisely because they show up in God’s story first. Take the lives of Isaac and Ishmael or Jacob and Esau, where blessings and inheritances live for a short time in between the oldest sibling: the rightful heir, and the youngest sibling: the unexpected inheritor. Or how about David’s anointing as the God-chosen king happening well before the end of Saul’s people-chosen reign? God moves in and through it, but there is a moment in time when both kingships are propelled forward simultaneously. Then there is the time when the prophets Elijah and Elisha overlap, one fading out while the other rises up. We even see it in the engagement period in the Song of Solomon — a space between the bride being chosen and being wed – the in-between is where most of the book’s drama unfolds. 

But the ultimate transitory space in God’s story can be seen in the lowly backwater town of Bethlehem. Jesus of Nazareth is born as poor and weak as any infant who had come before him, and yet his birth begins the transition from the old covenant born at Sinai to the soon-to-be-born, new covenant when his blood will pour down an old-rugged cross. It’s easy to forget how his life is one big transition, an “already, not yet” moment in time. It is the fleshing out of the book of Hebrews’ insistence that “what is becoming obsolete and growing old is ready to vanish away” (8:13). Before he dies, the Law hangs over the heads of God’s people, but Jesus methodically begins to dismantle its curse, urging his disciples to pick food for themselves on the Sabbath, touching and healing lepers and insisting that their cleanliness came from his mere word and not from the priest’s levitical rituals, and even stepping in between an adulteress and her law-demanded stoning.

These three years where he moved in and among not only the people of God but also the Gentiles is the space between the inhale and the exhale. The Israelites had spent thousands of years inhaling, hoping to take in enough air on their own in order to be able to live in the presence of a perfect and holy God. While the incarnated feet of God walked upon our earth, our breath was held, until it was irreversibly intertwined with the last breath of Lamb of God that trickled through his tortured lungs on the cross. And that’s when we could finally exhale too, but in a different way. It’s when we could release our white-knuckle grip on the idea that our salvation, our reconciliation to our Creator, was up to us.

The old gave way to the new that day, which led to a short but important transitional period where Christ lay dormant in his grave for three days. The power of sin and death had been broken, yet followers of Christ were left in the in-between space between death and life. Their encounters with the risen Lord would firmly place them in the “after”, forever closing down the possibility of going back to the “before”. 

And so we live our lives now, post-death and resurrection, but pre-full and complete redemption. Our sin continues to boil over, harming ourselves and those around us. We often find ourselves caught in the chaos of the “middle,” like Paul’s existential confession in Romans 7. Our desperate need for Christ remains, and always will. And yet, we can take comfort in this space because of how faithful our God has been in leading his people from one era to the next. Christ stepped willingly into the tomb, into this groundbreaking space in between. His willingness to breathe his last allows us to take our first breath on the other side, inhaling his grace instead of working our lungs to death in a fruitless attempt at making things right with our works. It is with our death in Christ, in our figurative burying of our old selves that we see in our baptism, where our final transition begins, which will end in the full light and embrace of the eternally scarred hands of who was, at one point in history, just a squalling child birthed by an unknown woman in an uncared for town. And so, all along we’re reminded that it’s not up to us to resolve the tension of the “in-betweens,” but to believe in the one who steps into it himself, who bears our “old” and who becomes our “new,” so that we can walk these last few miles on a road paved with the grace-filled blood of Christ, unburdened and unchained.

The post The Space In-Between appeared first on Red Tree.

Usually, conversations around these matters orbit around why we cancel plans (cue talks about introversion and social media). But I’m more concerned about plans that are canceled for us, by extenuating circumstances, with a tinge of a surprise to them. Why do those kinds of things often feel so refreshing, whatever generation we’re a part of?

An internet meteorologist I follow on Twitter helped shed light on this for me. He posted a forecast for rain, followed with: “I love a rainy morning sometimes. No pressure to save the world today. Just a good day to be lazy after a busy week.” His take, and I’d agree, is that unforeseen weather events lower expectations on us. They take the pressure off.

I used to spend a lot of time on the golf course. And as much as I enjoyed playing, getting rained (or, lightning’d) out would come with a sigh of relief, especially at a tournament, as there wasn’t any pressure to perform at a high level anymore. The stress of competition could wait for another day. “Until then,” the rain said, “go home and rest.” 

The meteorologist’s tweet probably didn’t mean to dip its toe into the theological, but it reminded me of when Jesus, not long before his arrest, predicted his disciples’ flight and abandonment, saying, “The hour is coming when you will be scattered, each to his own home, and will leave me alone.” There’s something about the sufferings of Jesus that send people to their homes, literally and figuratively, like a sudden crack of loud thunder (Lk 12:54-56, Jn 19:27). 

And there’s a reason for this. Every step that Jesus took toward Calvary made it all the clearer that he was accomplishing the salvation of the world on his own. Single-handedly. This is why it was so dark and stormy and even earthquake-y when Jesus was dying — because the cross is the loudest demonstration ever of “You don’t have to save the world today; Jesus already has.” It’s the great plan-canceler of history, for all ages and generations. It interrupts our efforts at saving ourselves and sends us to our homes — not onto great pilgrimages or perilous adventures, but to rest.

When it comes to salvation, it’s 100% better not to work for it than to work for it. And through Jesus, the one who makes it rain on both the righteous and the unrighteous, this is precisely the message the gospel brings to bear: the surprise rainstorm of the gruesome death of the Son of God gives shelter to the good and the bad alike, for it’s by his grace we’re saved, not by our works.

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The story takes place in a small, impoverished Pennsylvania town, and revolves around Detective Mare Sheehan, a woman with layers and layers of unresolved trauma, including a son who killed himself and a missing girl case she was never able to solve. But that’s not the main crime of the show. In episode 1, another teenage girl is murdered, and Mare dives headlong into trying to solve what she couldn’t solve before and to distract herself from her sorrow in the process.

From there the show is, well, a veritable rollercoaster — one of those coasters that twist, drop, and even move backward at times. I think my wife and I both used the phrase, “That show wrecked me.” But my purpose here is not to summarize or spoil, but to highlight a surprise, well-placed nugget that caught us off guard toward the end of the show. One that underlines perhaps the main layer to the story.

After running into some initial obstacles, Mare’s boss calls in some help from the County, another detective named Colin Zabel who made a name for himself by solving a tricky cold case single-handedly. Mare is hesitant at first, as she likes to work alone, but eventually they become friends and work well together. As the show progresses, we learn they both have similar story arcs: significant past victories that led to present-day sputterings. Zabel solved the cold case but has found little success since then. Mare, when she was in high school, made an incredible basketball shot to win a game that she’s still recognized for at pep rallies and community meetings, even though she’s now in her late 40s. But since then? Failure, dysfunction, addiction, and disappointment. Both of their lives started big like fireworks with a spectacular burst of color and excitement, only to fizzle out into a disappointing, anticlimactic finale.

But that sets up the climax to this particular subplot. Zabel at one point confesses to Mare, “I just want to do something great,” to which Mare responds: “Doing something great is overrated. Because then people expect that from you all the time. What they don’t realize is you’re just as screwed up as they are.” 

Ahhh, ok. I didn’t know it was going to be that kind of show — more than a crime drama, and a welcome one at that. In a turn toward the existential, even theological, Mare says doing something great comes with further (unsolicited) expectations that you can never measure up to. If it’s not an exponential growth curve upward, something must be wrong, the prevailing thought seems to be. But Mare of Easttown shows the folly of such a way of thinking. We’re all just as screwed up as everyone else is. Why do temporal successes blind us to the truth?

In Christian theology, salvation is positioned as something that is given by grace, not as a reward for past successes, nor as an expectation of a new level of greatness. It doesn’t say “What else you got?” but instead whispers unconditional love to screwed-up sinners, by way of a bloody cross. Sometimes it’s in our pursuit of greatness that we miss God on the ascent. Jesus’s disciples once asked him who would be the greatest in his kingdom. But he pumped the brakes on that way of thinking by saying to be great is to not be that great and to be ok with that. In God’s kingdom, the pursuit of greatness isn’t required, nor is even the pursuit of God, but coming to terms with our limitations and resting in the fact that he pursues us, relentlessly, at great cost to himself.

To say it differently, and maybe more controversially: grace doesn’t expect anything of us. That’s the key. And when we come to understand this, everything changes. Far from paralyzing us, it frees us. We can celebrate wins, but also not be crushed by our losses, as God’s love is given (and maintained) completely apart from our circumstances, work, and reciprocation.

Doing something great can be a good thing, but it’s overrated. Especially when we centralize it. Believing, however, in the one who did something great for us will never go out of style, and he’s the one who is able to meet the follow-up expectations. As Romans 8:32 says, “He who did not spare his own Son, but gave him up for us all—how will he not also, along with him, graciously give us all things?” See, with grace, there is no exponential growth curve, just a downward pointing arrow, from heaven to the Easttown of our souls, signaling God’s willing, self-effacing descent to become “un-great” like the sinners he loved and was bound to save.

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One inflammatory opinion gets tossed to the other side of the table and before a reasonable response is given time to form, another grenade is lobbed from the adjacent corner. The contrasting viewpoints suck the air out of the room, but the reason for the title of the skit is soon revealed when a savvy child steps over to the radio and blasts Adele causing the group to break out in harmony together, bonded by a song about heartbreak and relational debris. Perhaps, it takes a child’s eyes to see how only weakness is powerful enough to tear down the walls that divide us. 

What is it about gathering around a table with people who have different views than us that creates such inner instability? Why do we feel a need to put on armor or dig a trench when an opinion is raised we disagree with or find offensive? Maybe we’re afraid of being wrong, exposed, or found out. Maybe that article we read or video we watched that convinced us about the right opinion to hold isn’t even sturdy enough to handle the scrutiny of our delirious uncle. 

Nick Cave, the author of the title track for the famous mob-show on Netflix, “Peaky Blinders,” has a newsletter he started which answers questions from fans, but perhaps is moreso his effort of making sense of the world in light of the grief the comes from being human. Cave is familiar with grief as one has undergone the indescribable pain of losing not one but two children. In a more recent response to the question of whether or not someone should speak up or hold their tongue, he writes about good faith conversations:

“A good faith conversation begins with curiosity. It looks for common ground while making room for disagreement. It should be primarily about exchange of thoughts and information rather than instruction, and it affords us, among other things, the great privilege of being wrong; we feel supported in our unknowing and, in the sincere spirit of inquiry, free to move around the sometimes treacherous waters of ideas. A good faith conversation strengthens our better ideas and challenges, and hopefully corrects, our low-quality or unsound ideas.”

We are prone to unsound ideas because we can never see the whole picture on any topic. By recognizing we all start from the same foggy position of not having everything figured out about anything (see 1 Corinthians 13:12), we can begin to build something with the people we talk with, and bypass the common conversational cancers of seeking to win, inform, or instruct. 

Conversations aren’t math problems. The purpose of a discussion is not to bring our previously discovered right answers to the table and then prove our work in front of others. When we make this mistake, and we all do, we buy into a lie as old as time that we can garner admiration (and even love) by how correct we are – but in reality, we only feed a dynamic of superiority that always breeds disconnection and distance. 

At the end of the day, what we want is to be wanted at the table with no one to impress and nothing to prove. There is an obscure story in the Old Testament that shows us how. In 2 Samuel 9, King David is looking for descendents of Saul, the former king, who had previously made assassinating King David his full time job. Viewers of any big name dramas involving a throne would expect ill will in David’s hunt for a rival challenger to the crown.

Only one descendent is found. His name is really hard to pronounce (Mephibosheth), and he’s a crippled man who is unable to make a living for himself. He is summoned to the palace, and as he is placed before the king, he trembles in fear as one found to be on the wrong side of history. 

But instead of receiving the guillotine, he is shown supernatural kindness. The king restores to him the fortune that would have been his, had his grandfather Saul not perished, and he even receives a nameplated seat at the king’s table for the rest of his life! 

What does this have to do with Thanksgiving turbulence, Adele, and good faith conversations? Everything. In the New Testament, King David is shown to be a small picture of what King Jesus is like ahead of time. This means our place in the story is not the one who wears the crown but is instead the crippled man who is an enemy of the throne. We are uncertain of our lot in life and afraid of the King whose allegiance we betray. But the former enemy of the king, whose physical incapabilities resemble our human incapability of knowing all things and justifying ourselves, is brought into the dining room of royalty to eat with and enjoy the company of the king for the remainder of his days. 

God’s kindness is extended to the treasonous. He prepares a table before the presence of his enemies and makes them family. He bleeds and even dies for traitors so that their invitation to the table is irrevocable and everlasting. 

Jesus was nailed to a tree naked and exposed, absorbing our great fears of being the same. The need to self protect has been dismantled and replaced by the unshakeable safety that there is now nothing to prove, things are settled. Heaven’s heart broke when God himself was crucified, but it became a song that unites enemies of every stripe. We can even take a deep breath and be proven wrong at the dinner table, then go throw more stuffing on our plates. Happy Thanksgiving!

The post Afraid At The Table 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.

And because we live in an age where everyone carries a megaphone in their pocket, it’s easier than ever to go public with any form of news or announcement. Share it, spread the word, tap into the algorithm, release the dopamine. 

And even if we don’t like or use social media, we’re not immune to accomplishments breeding a desire for recognition. We redirect conversations to share the things that we’ve learned or done. It can be like an itch that needs scratching.

Of course, this isn’t necessarily a bad thing. After all, celebrations are meant to be a joint project. Why then does Jesus seemingly always oppose our intuition when he does something impressive? Why doesn’t he go public? There are many examples of when he hushes miracle witnesses, but here are three:

• Mark 1:43-44 – Jesus sent him away at once with a strong warning: “See that you don’t tell this to anyone…”
• Luke 8:56 – Her parents were astonished, but he ordered them not to tell anyone what had happened.
• Matthew 9:29-30 – Then he touched their eyes and said, “According to your faith let it be done to you”; and their sight was restored. Jesus warned them sternly, “See that no one knows about this.”

After taking away people’s most significant ailments, Jesus would ask (even command) them to not share the news. Not to go public. Curious right? Why not allow at least one selfie with the miracle worker? 

It’s worth noting that the Apostle John doesn’t include these interactions in his Gospel account, likely because he is much more upfront with his agenda (John 1:29). He’s much quicker to lay his cards on the table than Matthew, Mark, and Luke in pinpointing what Jesus is about and why he came to earth in the first place.

However, John’s gospel is not without parallels to Jesus concealing impressive achievements. The most prominent example is in John 6 when Jesus miraculously feeds thousands on a hillside. The crowd instantly wants to make him king. Their thought process is practically jumping off the page: “This guy can really do something about our problems! Hurry, start the campaign – get this guy into a position of power so we can finally do something!!” 

But Jesus won’t have any of it. He withdraws from the masses. He won’t be crowned on their terms. They are looking for a particular type of king, but the Messiah has other plans in mind. On his pathway to the crown and the throne, he will operate on a different playing field.  

But even here, Jesus begins to show his playbook when he quiets the crowd with a disconcerting invitation: you have to eat my body and drink my blood (John 6:55-56). Without missing a beat, the same people who wanted to put a crown on his head, now want him in a straight jacket. 

But Jesus stands by what he says. He doubles down on this invitation at a dinner party a bit later in the story. The night before he dies, in fact. It’s the eve of his death and he tells his friends to eat bread and drink wine for this is his body and his blood, given for you.  

Here is where we’re given the reason for the prior shushing of all the miracles. Jesus is essentially saying “I am going public on terms that don’t impress people but confound them. I am being crowned in weakness, not strength. By death, not life. With a broken body, and shed blood. And all of this is for you.” His prior privateness reveals the inauguration of a kingdom decidedly not of “be impressive and know all of this information to change the world!” but instead a kingdom wrapped up around Jesus’s self-denial, humility, and one-way love shown most fully at the cross.

Here is what he is ultimately crowned under, namely, the banner of die-in-your-place grace. The first time in the gospel of Mark where he doesn’t tell someone to hide a miracle is when he saves a man from a demon and a herd of pigs hurl themselves off a cliff as a result (Mark 5:13). We can conclude he doesn’t hush the witnesses on this one because this is the story Jesus came to tell — one of substitutionary healing, at the death of another. The surprise is Jesus identifying with the lowly pigs in their rushing off the hill. 

The most public act Jesus ever accomplished was his death on the cross. He broadcasted himself as the Messiah through a public execution. It’s the type of thing we don’t like to have details about. And yet, it’s exactly what we all didn’t know we needed. This is why there is no longer any shyness about miracles after the cross, but instead a “tell the world!” posture towards the miracle of the cross. The parable of the necessity of the death of the Son has given way to the clarity of the gospel itself. But we’re the ones who put it on display. We glory in the act of another, and not in our own.

The post See That You Tell No One appeared first on Red Tree.

When the socks arrived and I inspected them for the first time, I was surprised to see that the company with a bee for a logo had sewn into the side of each of the socks the phrase “Be(e) better.” 

Be better? At what exactly? At life? Or at buying more socks to support their charitable work? It felt like a ploy. Can’t a sock just be a sock?

Bombas are great socks. Five stars. But it felt like I slid into supporting something I didn’t intend, and then got the surprise left hook from the sock itself telling me I’m a terrible person. In the end, though, my heart wasn’t in it. Maybe it should have been. They’re doing good work. But I just didn’t have the care inside me.

The broader conundrum here is that there are a bazillion things going on in the world that we can involve ourselves in, give financially to, or champion as our cause. Facebook has 90,000 non-profits on it alone. The 24-hour news cycle, the internet in our pockets, and the globalization of culture at large all amplify the problem. How do we choose? Do we even get to choose or do others choose for us by telling us what we should care about? 

My teenage daughter recently felt this messaging at school where you need to know about everything going on in the world, and you need to not only care but also be the solution to the problem, or you’re a bad person. She laughed it off, seeing the folly of it all, especially as someone who is just trying to get her homework done. But others might not. 

Here’s where this realization led me: my heart is too small to care about everything in the world. I want to care, especially when others are inviting me to, but I just don’t. Or better yet, I can’t because my heart is spent elsewhere. As a finite being, the capacity I have for love is also finite. When I love a few things really well, I pour myself out, and I leave little left for something (or someone) else. 

This isn’t an excuse for sin or extreme laziness. In one sense my finite love could be a moral problem. I don’t mean to ignore that. But this has more to do with limitations, and, in that, theology. Because in one sense saying, “You must care about everything” is implying we have a capacity for world-changing love on our own — to “be better” on our own. It’s not that far from the more religious notion of “You can save yourself.” Or, “You are the solution.” 

Biblically speaking, it’s the voice of what we call the Law. That voice of conditionalized spirituality that puts the brunt on our shoulders, and beckons us toward tireless performance, perfect obedience, and outward religiosity. Even the biggest, arguably most summative law of the Old Testament comes with it an unachievable scope: “Love the Lord your God with all your heart.” All? Eesh.

But the gospel speaks a better word. My heart will never be big enough, nor does God ask it to be. But Jesus’s heart is big enough. When the Bible says he loves the whole world, it’s not exaggerating. He has the ability to do it. And the desire. And he backs it up by giving away his own body on a cross, with outstretched arms, to poor sinners like us. As the Apostle John says, “This is love: not that we loved God, but that he loved us and sent his Son as an atoning sacrifice for our sins” (1 John 4:10). 

Though we have not loved God with all our heart, he has loved us with all of his. And the new heart we are given when we believe isn’t a bigger heart per se, but a softer, God-facing heart. Said differently: newness for the Christian doesn’t come with some hopeless second chance at doing better this time, but a heart that owns our limitations, stops striving, and looks away from ourselves toward the one who always had (and always will have) the capacity for big love.

The post My Heart is Too Small appeared first on Red Tree.

Hopefully, we let the majority of these wrong impressions calibrate as we actually get to know this person, but we are all well acquainted with instances where that change is not favorable. The verdict isn’t always positive. We swipe left. 

Even beyond these first impressions, the same “unfree” feeling begins to make its presence known within all of our relationships. Why do we feel the way we do about anyone? What charges us with a sense of superiority in certain relationships and inferiority complexes in others? What’s behind our inability to celebrate that coworker getting a promotion or that feeling of my-life-would-just-be-better-if-such-and-such-person did not exist? The closer we get to these questions, the more we find we are locked up under affections and apprehensions we do not choose for ourselves.

C.S. Lewis once observed how much easier it is to be enthusiastic about capital “H” humanity than it is to love individual men and women, especially those who are uninteresting, exasperating, depraved, or otherwise unattractive. Loving everybody in general can always serve as a great excuse for loving nobody in particular.  

Consider the ease with which we typecast friends and family around us as if they were characters in the drama of our own story: “of course Uncle Charlie made the night about him, he’s such a narcissist” or “that’s so like Stacy to take your things without asking, she’s been doing that for years.” The labels we receive and stick onto others cement more quickly than we notice, locking us and them into categories with little hope for release or redemption. 

There’s a subtle parable in the fifth chapter of the book of Acts that puts this interpersonal imprisonment on display.

The religious high priest and his entourage, controlled and compelled by an unrelenting sense of jealousy and resentment, literally imprison the apostles for preaching the gospel. One flash of their religious ruler badge, and the apostles are thrown behind bars in the local penitentiary. 

But during the night an angel of the Lord opened the doors of the jail and brought them out. “Go, stand in the temple courts,” he said, “and tell the people all about this new life” Acts 5:19-20

God sneaks into the prison undetected and unlocks the door. But he does more than just release them. They are to go back and communicate to their captors that everyone is behind bars that can’t be seen. No one is free, all are imprisoned. Though we can’t see the chains that bind us, we often feel them weighing on us in our own jealousy, bitterness, and even hatred toward people God himself made and delights in. The religious rulers proudly wear their self-righteous resentment, but it’s shown to be a noose tied by their own hands. 

God sends the apostles back to the temple courts to share how the law has no power to liberate. Even the temple, despite all of its ordinances and commitment toward transformation, can only condemn perpetrators. This is what makes the rope-removing, prison-releasing salvation in Jesus so surprising. It’s the death of God that holds the power and promise of this new life. And he is making his way to everyone who is held captive to the tyranny of self, locked behind the bars of judgment and judging one another.

The angel of the Lord effortlessly breaking the apostles out of prison is like neon letters presenting “the how” of Christianity. In the death of Jesus on the cross, he willingly redirects all the scorn you’ve ever felt toward someone onto himself. Moreover, he receives and even becomes the righteous indignation anyone, including God, has ever felt toward you.  

Martin Luther says that God receives none but those who are forsaken, restores health to none but those who are sick, gives sight to none but the blind and life to none but the dead, he has mercy on none but the wretched and gives grace to none but those who are in disgrace. We might add that he sets free none but those who are bound.

Someone will be critical of you today. You are powerless to stop them. But the gospel is news that God is decidedly not critical toward you today and everyday. He does not judge you based on his first, second, or 10,000 impression of you. Perfect love casts out criticism. And the love that brought Jesus to Calvary rests at the very heart of reality. It’s of the prison-breaking, judgment-absorbing variety, and it’s given for you.

—

This post originally appeared on mbird.com

The post First Impressions and Snap Judgements appeared first on Red Tree.

Maybe you can relate. And these are the “good” things. What about the bad things? (Wait, is Alexa listening to me right now?) 

This reminded me of one of my favorite interactions Jesus has with a disciple when he calls Nathanael from underneath the fig tree in John 1. Sometimes a disciple gets a rather simple “Follow me” from Jesus, but Nathanael gets something more: a doubt-eroding demonstration of his omnipresence and a glimpse into his absolving grace.

When Jesus calls out to him, Nathanael is rightly taken aback at how he knew his name. Jesus’s response is invasive: “When you were under the fig tree, I saw you.” This would be the equivalent of me telling my friend who lives in North Carolina (I’m in Minnesota) that I saw him eating Honey Nut Cheerios that morning for breakfast. It was a miracle, an early demonstration of Jesus’s divinity. So the whole ordeal is enough to make Nathanael exclaim “You are the Son of God! You saw me when I was alone.”

I can completely understand his joy in this moment. He feels seen, known, and pursued — and not just by anyone, but by the Promised One himself. And yet, when I put myself in his shoes, I experience a wider range of emotions as well, including confusion and fear. “He saw me when I was all alone under a fig tree? What else did he see me do that I thought was private? Did he watch me last Thursday night when I did that thing I’m now paralyzed in shame over? Did he see me being short with my kids? Or clicking on that website? Or gossiping about my friend? Or — gasp! — does he see inside my heart as well? (How deep does the rabbit hole go here exactly?)”

If I’m Nathanael, and I’ve had a chance to process what just happened, I’m thinking, “Of all the things you could have chosen to say you’ve seen me do, you chose to say you saw me sitting on a park bench under a tree? That’s it?” In a day when one wrong mistake can be amplified online and held out for all to see and cancel us over, Jesus’s actions here are setting the stage for the gospel he’s going to inaugurate and the relief we all desperately long for. Relief is the result of an experience of grace. The law exposes sin, but grace forgets it and sends it far, far away — as far as the east is from the west.

And that’s really where this story is pointing us. Jesus even mentions that he (and we) would see “greater things” than this. Greater than Jesus seeing Nathanael sitting under a fig tree is Nathanael seeing Jesus hanging on a tree. Greater than the idea of God watching our life is us watching Jesus’s life — all the way to Calvary — because salvation and forgiveness are found in him, not in the works of our hands, the circumstances of our lives, or the shame we carry on our shoulders.

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This post originally appeared on mbird.com

The post From Whom No Secrets Are Hid appeared first on Red Tree.

Early on, we meet Timmy Keane, the have-it-all neighbor, who becomes the object lesson in how our desires actively work against us. Timmy becomes the only one in school with the means to acquire the Power Glove, Nintendo’s then revolutionary wearable controller that elevates your gameplay beyond the mere use of your thumbs.  Every kid in the area code (and even some adults) flock to Timmy’s doorstep, desperate to even see someone else wield this digital holy grail. The growing crowd offers bribes to be on the shortlist of those selected to watch one kid play the one thing everyone else wants.  But the Power Glove is more like a Monkey’s Paw, only delivering on its promises with unexpected consequences. Rather than equip Timmy with superior fighting skills in the game, the controller is a flop, which gives rise to a type of wrath in Timmy that leaves no small wake of destruction. He high kicks the big screen TV — which then falls on and crushes the family’s tiny terrier. The kids are horrified, and the feelings only multiply. Timmy’s tantrum soon incites a mob of protesting parents who think the Nintendo is to blame. The result? Every kid in the neighborhood is told there will be no Nintendo under the tree. After one kid’s blowup, the hopes for an 8-Bit Christmas are unplugged. 

What does this parable teach us? Where are we in this short story?  For starters, the belief that we can “be like God” has been the human problem since the serpent first “inception’d” the idea in the minds of our ancient parents (Adam and Eve). It’s our universal desire to slip on a type of Power Glove of control over not just the games we play, but our very lives. We think we can be master and commander of our own ship, no matter how much irrefutable evidence demands the opposite conclusion. Numerous stories and teachings of scripture reveal that a cosmic Power Glove does exist, but it’s too big for us to wear. It’s on the hand of God, whose right hand protects, delivers, and rescues his people. Christmas is wrapped in an offensive message. It says to us that we all play the part of Timmy Keane. We betray our own selves and communities in our regularly making a muck of that which matters to us. We throw tantrums and high-kick the things others love. Maybe you didn’t literally kick a TV this year, but you probably said something in the heat of a moment that harmed a relationship. Or maybe you’ve made a habit of talking behind a coworker’s back, with the real hope of heaving them under the metaphorical big screen of the contempt of public opinion. Perhaps our wakes are wider than we realize.  But underneath the offensive wrapping paper, packing tape, and packaging, lies the gift of Christmas. God puts on his power glove by laying in a manger. His tiny hands will soon grow into young man’s hands that will touch and heal many until they ultimately catch a nail when he is pinned up on a tree to die for the Timmy Keanes of the world. The goalposts are no longer moving. Enjoy your forgiveness. 

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This post originally appeared on mbird.com

The post The 8-Bit Power Glove of God appeared first on Red Tree.