BREAKING FREE

SEVERAL years ago, I was coerced into going with a group of guys to a men’s retreat in Hot Springs, Arkansas.  My friend Steve had instituted this sort of Mecca for a number of guys around our church.  I talked to a few of the guys who’d been going for years about what it was like, and they all gave me raving reviews about the experi­ence.  I have to admit they were pretty convincing, and the brochure was a fairly slick marketing piece that had a man’s hands breaking free of chains.  I knew there were a few things I needed help dealing with, so maybe this would be worth it.

The first night of the event, the retreat leader Tim dove right in. He was brash, hon­est, to the point, and blunt to say the least. He told us that we men had a lot of issues that we needed to identify in our lives like: lust, pornography, drinking beer, and playing fantasy football. It was time to examine ourselves and deal with these issues “once and for all.”  We were going to walk out of that retreat set free.

I like most of the men there were like, “Sign me up.”  To start this process, Tim handed out blank hospital bracelets and Sharpies to the group of 200 or so men. He told us to write our struggles on the bracelets, then flip the writing face side down and snap it onto our wrists. He said we needed to be constantly reminded of our is­sue.

Shortly after that first session was over, our group of guys reconvened.  Danny, a heavyset, George Costanza look-a-like walked up to me with elation on his face and said, “I’m going to get set free from everything this weekend.”  He held up his arms; both of his chubby wrists were bearing at least 13 of those hospital bracelets, and his hands were already turning purple.

Session after session passed.  In each one, Tim drove home the point that our sins were serious issues that needed to be resolved. We needed to admit and confront them.

Following session 72 on this 3 day retreat, I was too exhausted to leave my plastic lawnchair for the 15 minute break in between floggings. My friend Brian was sitting next to me looking just as exhausted.  He looked around nervously as though there might be a rat who would turn him in, and when the coast was clear, he leaned over and said: “Well, Paul, what do you think?”

I said, “I feel like I’ve had the hell beat out of me, but I’m afraid I’m no different than when I walked in here.  I know what my issues are.  I know they’re bad.  I don’t want them.  But there’s no application here except that I need to do something about it.”

The final evening of the retreat finally rolled around.  The finality of all the brow­beating was that it was decision-making time.  Did we want to continue struggling and living in sin or did we want to break free?  The moment of truth is now.  At the conclusion of the session, Tim directed us to a bonfire down the hill.  Jesus would be waiting for us there – next to the cross.  If we were ready to give up our struggle (that we apparently still liked), then we could walk down the hill to Jesus and leave our bracelet with Him.

I got up and walked to the congested exit and joined the other cattle who were being herded towards the cross.  I walked up to Jesus who was standing a few feet away from a 10 foot tall cross.  Jesus slipped a pair of scissors out of the sleeve of His robe, snipped my bracelet, and I tossed it into the fire.

I walked up the hill and sat on bench with profound sadness as I watched man after man walk up to Jesus to have their struggle removed.  I thought about my George Constanza friend and wondered if he would really be able to kick his smoking habit when he got home. The burden had been placed on these whipped, broken men to change.

The entire scene was summed up by the conversation of two guys who walked past me in the shadows.

First guy: “Are you free now?” Second guy: “I guess so.  Jesus did His part; now I’ve got to do mine.”

That conversation just cut me.  It hurt me as deeply then as it does now just recalling it. It was the conversation of this man’s heart, and it’s a reflection of the heart of most Christians who still live in their struggles.

Jesus did His part; now we have to do ours.

I believed that for a really long time.  I quit trying to follow Jesus for years, effectively walking away, not because I didn’t believe in Him, but because I was tired of failing. I knew He’d done His part in bringing me into a relationship with God, but I couldn’t manage to keep my end of the deal.  I just couldn’t change.

Is that the deal God made with us though?  He gives you grace to enable you to step into a relationship with Him.  That’s His end? Go out and do right.  Live above sin and do great works for Him.  Is that how you understand your end?

I’m not sure where we came up with that, because Scripture doesn’t reflect this kind of arrangement at all.

Ezekiel 11:19

And I will give them one heart, and I will put a new spirit within you; and I will

take the stony heart out of their flesh, and will give them a heart of flesh…

God said that he was going to give us new hearts. Our new hearts would be alive to God.  We would experience His love, be changed, and realize our identity.  His law would be etched into our hearts. We would despise wrong and desire right.  And God completes His work in us by grace – unending favor – by the power of His Spirit.

When we were dead to God and unable to save ourselves, Jesus stepped in to do what we could not on our own.  But what God began in bringing us into relationship with Him, He has to finish.  Absent from the power of Christ in us, we are still weak.

What Jesus began, only He can finish.

RELATIONAL CHANGE

Jesus explained this relational dynamic between Himself and us through a vine and branches metaphor.

John 15:4

Abide in Me, and I in you.  As the branch cannot bear fruit of itself, unless it

abides in the Vine, neither can you unless you abide in Me.  I am the Vine, you

are the branches. He who abides in Me, and I in him, bears much fruit; for

without Me, you can do nothing.

Jesus tells us to remain in Him because He is the Vine.  And there’s a really good rea­son for that – we cannot produce on our own.  Jesus even restates it: “You guys are just branches. Branches don’t produce on their own!”

Imagine how stupid a person would be if they wanted to produce grapes, and they walked into the field of a winery, pulled out a machete and hacked off a branch think­ing they could bring it home and produce their own grapes.  Should they be surprised a week later to find the branch dried up, withered, and producing nothing?

I don’t think that we fully grasp our relationship with Jesus.  The beginning of our re­lationship with Him began with our dependence on Him to do what we couldn’t do ourselves.  Trying to live above sin, “breaking free,” living victoriously, thriving, changing, transforming, is only possible through this vital connection.  We are de­pendent on Jesus to enable these things to happen.  We don’t walk up to Jesus and thank Him for what He did, and say “now I’m going to change.”  In that very moment, we disconnect ourselves from the life-giving Power that enables change to take place.

I believe that we need to break free.  We need to be delivered.  I think we have a num­ber of our own vices that are holding us down.  I also think that a lot of issues of sin are not just our own.  There is sin that was committed against us.  People who strug­gle with doubt, frustration, anxiety, anger, depression – these are real struggles that we have to be set free from. We can’t just suck it up and go on with our lives.  Will­power, self-denial, positive thinking, “pull ourselves up by our bootstraps” – all of these things are what they Bible calls “works of the flesh.”  It denies grace. It invali­dates and makes a mockery out of what Jesus did at the cross.  It denies our need for God.  It cuts us off and separates us from His power.

RELATIONAL WORKS

I often ask people, “How are things going in your relationship with God?”  I tell them to give me a rating on a scale of 1 to 10, 10 being the highest.  Most of the responses are varied.  The answers are always based on what they are doing.  For instance, some person might say, “I’d give myself a 4 because I haven’t read my Bible much lately.”  Another person might say, “I’d give myself a 6 because I’ve been going to church every week, but I haven’t been praying enough.

In Galatians 5:22, Paul provides us a much better indicator of how that relationship is going:

…the fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace, longsuffering, kindness, goodness,

faithfulness, gentleness, self-control.

Works aren’t indicators of life.  That’s an old system that denies grace.

If our relationship with God is going well, then we should see something.  We should see fruit.  You know what fruit is an indicator of?  It’s an indicator of life.  Only things that are alive can produce fruit, right? But what produces fruit?  Do we produce fruit?  No, we don’t.  Fruit is produced by the Spirit.

So follow this with me: if we are vitally connected to God in relationship, fruit will be produced.  If we’re not, then nothing will be produced.  But even what is produced is not because we worked it up and made it happen.  Remember what Jesus said: with­out Me you can do nothing.

WHAT ABOUT FAITH?

I find it interesting that we call Christians believers and we call non-Christians non­believers. Often we’re one in the same though.

Have you ever noticed how difficult it is to “just believe” or to “just have faith?”  It’s tough. We beat our brains out trying to convince ourselves or other people for that matter to trust or believe in God.

I don’t advocate checking out your brain to believe in Jesus, but here’s the problem with faith – it always falls a little short when it comes to explaining things.  There is going to be a place where our knowledge is incomplete.  We have a deep sense that something is true, but we don’t have tangible evidence.  That’s faith.  It’s the felt ex­perience of the reality of something without being able to see it.

I appreciate people who are highly analytical and brainy.  For them we have a whole system of apologetics – meant to give more scientific answers as to why we believe what we believe.  But there’s a fundamental problem with all this convincing and proving.  It’s that belief in Jesus – faith – doesn’t happen in your mind, it happens in your heart.

When it comes to faith in Jesus, our hearts know something that our mind does not.  The mind can be changed; we can be convinced of things, but only after the heart has been changed first.

A great example of this is in Mark 9, when a man with a demonized son brings him to Jesus for deliverance.  Jesus responds to him by saying, “all things are possible to him who believes.” And the man responds with a paradox: “I believe; help my unbe­lief!”

Doesn’t that sound just like us?  We believe, but we need help with our unbelief.

In Romans 1, Paul described thinking as futile.  There is all this living proof of God, but until the heart is brought back to life and illuminated by God, it’s impossible to believe.

It’s difficult to admit unbelief isn’t it? Especially when you’re supposed to be a be­liever.

HOW DO YOU BECOME A BELIEVER?

Long before he became world famous on the internet as “The Fart Preacher,” Robert Tilton had a highly profitable daily broadcast called “Success N’ Life.”  On this show the 800 number would be permanently affixed across the bottom of the TV screen while Tilton encouraged people to make a “vow of faith” – make a promise to God with the exercise of it being your financial gift to the ministry.

As this story has been highly documented by the press as criminal usury, it still un­derscores a common belief among Christians – that faith is an effort on our part to move God into action on our behalf.

If you do this. If you claim it.  If you speak it. If you give money. If you…

We’ve applied this action to everything from healing to finances.  But what is faith?  Is it just an action?

Growing up in church, they used to do this two-person faith illustration. One person would stand in front of another.  The first person would be told to just fall backwards without trying to catch himself in total reliance on the other to catch him.

Most people would try to catch themselves – at least a little bit. Our teacher would always point out that they tried to catch themselves because they didn’t have any faith, which was somewhat inaccurate.  What was faith based on? Is it based on something you could work up or something you could sike yourself up into believing?  No, faith is based on relationship.

Little people who would just fall backwards would always get praised as people with a lot of faith, while the biggest person in the room would be chided as being weak be­cause they’d always chicken out and catch themselves.  It made sense to our feeble minds then, but we today cannot keep going on like the little person produced some kind of superhuman faith.

The illustration was relational.  The first part of relationship is whether or not this guy actually wants to catch me.  Is he a good guy? Would he let me fall just to get a laugh at me?  If I can’t trust him, at some point I’m going to try to catch myself.

But let’s say you don’t know the guy that well.  You look him over, and the only thing you know to do is make a comparison.  If I’m bigger than him, it doesn’t matter how nice of a guy he is, I’m hitting the ground.  If we’re the same size, I’m still not that confident.  But if I’m little, and he’s big, then maybe I can just fall and be caught.

When the little guy in class dropped without thinking twice about it, we really shouldn’t have been so blown away.  He understood the relationship between himself and the catcher.  It was an accurate response to relationship, not some great human feat.

In the New Testament, the Greek word for faith that we often see used is the word “Pistis.”

The word stresses relationship of knowing the character of God.  Because I know the character of God, I know that I can trust Him.  If I don’t know God, then I can’t trust Him.  If I’m not convinced that God loves me despite my own flaws, then there’s a chance He won’t catch me.  If I don’t think God is good, then maybe God will let me drop just to have the enjoyment of seeing me fall.

All of this is born out of knowledge.  Where knowledge of God is incomplete, we’re go­ing to be short on faith.  It makes sense that we try to catch ourselves, because we don’t know God well enough to just drop.

There are some people we know who just fall on a whim for God. We struggle with that in ourselves because we know we’ve never been able to do that. We regard those people as “people with faith” while we apparently have none.

I know a guy named Bob Obert, and everywhere that Bob goes he prays for someone to be healed.  And you know what happens?  A lot of people are healed.  Bob has out­rageous even impossible stories about God.

Me?  I have a few.  I believe God heals, and I pray for people.  I’ve been a part of some cool stories, but I’d say overall it’s been a lot more miss than hit. What’s the differ­ence between Bob and I?

I don’t think Bob is a faith healer.  I don’t believe Bob heals people. And Bob doesn’t think that either.  Why does it happen so much around Bob?  It’s because Bob prays for everybody.  He prays for people to be healed probably a hundred times more than I do. He does it because he has this knowledge of a loving God who desires to heal people.  He was healed of a drug addiction cold turkey some 25 years ago.  This is an intimate, very personal understanding of God, and it thrusts him to act on what he knows.  For him, it’s not some giant faith feat on his part.  He’s responding to God in the way that he knows Him.

Me?  I want to know God like that.  I’d have to admit that I’ve prayed very half­heartedly for people most of my life, because I really wasn’t convinced that God wanted to heal people.  Besides that, I thought it had something to do with me and my faith.  My efforts always fell short, so I knew my faith would.

Faith is relational. We respond in trust with God according to how we know God.

But there’s another way we respond.  When we stepped into this relationship with Je­sus, we had no knowledge of Him at all.  We couldn’t have been more darkened in our knowledge of God.  But something happened. What was it?

We recognized God as God and ourselves as frail human beings.  It wasn’t some great feat of faith to begin a relationship with God, it was admitting our weakness, our smallness compared to God. As long as God is bigger than us, we can fall and know we’re going to be caught.  That’s how relationship with God always begins.

How does our faith increase?  It increases as our knowledge of God increases.  Our knowledge of God is still dark in a lot of places. We’ve not seen God’s character tested in places we’ve never been with Him before.

FEAR

I have a friend of mine that told me that fear is going to be ever-present and we have to have courage to move in spite of it.

I sort of agreed.

Is fear going to be ever-present?  I think it is, but it was never God’s intention.

Going back to the Adam and Eve story, fear was the first emotion experienced after the heart of God and the heart of man and woman was broken.  When this broken­ness happened, knowledge of God was lost. They feared loneliness and judgment.  We still fear loneliness, judgment, and even rejection to this day.

God never wanted that.

I John 4:18

There is no fear in love. But perfect love drives out fear, because fear has to do with punishment. The one who fears is not made perfect in love.

Where there is still fear in us, it is where we our hearts have not been illuminated by God’s love.  Where there is love, there is no fear.  They can’t co-exist.

If we still fear, then we still don’t fully know God’s love.  God isn’t okay with our not knowing His love.  He will always bring us to places where our knowledge of His love is incomplete, where we have to fall, be caught, and be embraced by His love. That’s the work that faith really does.  We know God more fully, and He’s able to embrace us. We know a freedom that we’ve never known.

FAITH IS A GIFT

Hebrews 11:6

And without faith it is impossible to please God, because anyone who comes to

Him must believe that He exists and that He rewards those who earnestly seek

Him.

I used to really struggle with this Scripture. My best guess was that God simply wasn’t pleased with me because I didn’t have any faith.  I still doubted.  I’d never proven my faith. I couldn’t even bring myself to send $25 to Robert Tilton.  I was miserable.

It really seemed to me that faith was something that I needed to work up – to prove to God so that I could earn His pleasure.  But that can’t be right can it? That would mean that it’s not about grace anymore.  It’s about what I do. But doesn’t it say that God’s not pleased if I don’t have it?

Let me ask you this: who creates this faith?

I’ve come to the understanding that faith has never been ours to begin with.  The Apostle Paul understood faith as being a gift from God.  In Romans 12:3, he says that God deals – or imparts – faith to us.  It’s His faith. Paul further elaborates on this thought  when he talks about the Fruit of the Spirit. One of the Fruit being – you guessed it – faith. When the Holy Spirit is active in a person, when we remain in Him, the result is going to be faith.

Now tie it all together, and what we find is a beautiful relational dynamic of intimacy and dependency on God.  We know God more, we experience His love, and we can trust Him.  Faith is produced not by us – we’re branches – but by Him when we re­main vitally connected to Him.

When is God not pleased? When we don’t have real faith. More specifically: When we’re trying to work up faith on our own, when we deny grace, when we’re trying to earn His love, when we’re trying to con God into giving us something that He already wants us to give us (vow of faith), when we want to catch ourselves because we don’t think He’s good, when we try to produce independently of Him – these are all indica­tors of separation from God, brokenness, lack of knowing Him, the absence of His love, and it’s not pleasing to Him.

God is pleased when we seek Him in those places where His love has not been re­vealed to us.  God is pleased when we’re authentic enough to say: “God I just don’t trust You with this thing, but I want to.” God is pleased when we declare that we’re afraid or hopeless, and He gets to come save the day.  That’s what He does best – He’s a Lover, a Fighter, a Savior.  You’re letting Him be who He is rather than trying to prove something.

THE BEAUTY OF CRISIS

It sure seems like faith would be a lot more appealing if it could be produced by God in really comfortable circumstances.  Some of us would like to think that if everything was going perfectly that we’d know God more and we’d see His beauty and love.

My personal story of multiple tragedies and being bent, pulled, and contorted will be for another book.  What I can tell you from watching a respiratory monitor while sit­ting at my wife’s bedside in the hospital as she gasped for life for 72 hours straight is that sometimes we have to come grips with our smallness in order to know His Greatness.  It goes against everything we know in culture to say “I’m weak.  I’m needy.”  Sometimes it even goes against our Christian culture to say, “Help me with my unbelief.” But it’s the truth.

I don’t think that God creates difficult circumstances. I don’t think He creates trag­edy. I think He grieves when we’re hurt.

But God will seize the opportunity for us to know Him more. He’ll go to the depths of our personal hell shielding us from the flames, proving He is still good, that He loves us, and that His power will enable us to overcome.  And He produces a hope in us that defies logic, that even mocks the threat of our present circumstance.

I don’t want life to get simpler.  I want to rely on God.  I’m not sure that I would be­lieve in God if life was just carefree.  I feel for people who’ve never had to go to dark places, or who have caught themselves and tried to make a way for themselves.  They have missed God’s best.  They’ve missed getting to know Him.

I want to keep pursuing God to know Him, to be continually surprised at how He’s going to respond in the most dire circumstances, to allow Him the opportunity to re­spond in an amazing way.

I seem to know what I’m talking about at times in this book, but I’m only now starting to see how God is so worth even difficulty.  He’s what I get at the end – the knowledge of Him as I experience His breakthrough, His power, and the creativity in how He an­swers all things.

All I can say is: Let Him love you.   Know Him.  Respond. Depend.  Let His overcom­ing power bring peace, trust, and strength.

YOU EITHER BELIEVE IN GRACE OR YOU DON’T

Let’s take it one step further though.

A couple of months back, I was asked, “I realize that we’re not supposed to try to ‘work up’ things, but what about loving and having passion for God.  Is that some­thing we do on our own?”

That’s a great question.  And here’s what I believe. I believe that even love, particu­larly the kind of perfect love that God is worthy of, is not something we’re even capable of working up.  It is a divine love.  We are unable to love with all our hearts without the power of God.

It’s perfectly alright to ask God to give us a passion for Him. We should ask Him to enable us to love Him more.  It’s not something we can do on our own.  We’re de­pendent people.

Grace is either everything or it’s nothing.  Grace is sufficient or we are self-suffient. If it ever falls short, if there is an ounce that we have to contribute on our own, then I think we should all question whether or not what Jesus did could really save us.

The bottom line is that we either believe in grace or we don’t. If there is any place in our life – doing good things for God, overcoming sin, changing, having faith, – any­thing that is human effort, if we are the source of power, we deny grace, we separate ourselves from the power and love of Christ, and we wither.

Acts 17:28

…in Him we live, and move, and have our being.

COMMITMENT TIME

If you’ve ever been to church, a camp, or a retreat, you may have had your own ex­perience with the infamous “commitment time.”  Maybe you’ve heard these words before: “I’m going to ask you to make a commitment…”  Being an insider to the whole church service planning process, I’ll tell you that this is what everything drives to­ward – a commitment by you.   The assumption is that you’ll make a commitment and, when you get back home, you’ll change.

For me those were always intense, scary moments.  Normally, it takes a while for people to respond, especially if it’s some kind of altar call.  A few people start trickling down to the front followed by more and more. Eventually – if the speaker is a guy who really brings it home – the seats will be emptied and everyone will be up front making a commitment.

Maybe you felt pressured, obligated, or coerced to join in.  Or it’s possible that you were encouraged by the fact that other people seemed to be able to make a commit­ment, and it strengthened you to be able to do it.

Regardless, it’s scary.  You’re going up front.  You have no idea what’s going to hap­pen up there.  But you’re even more unsure of what’s going to happen when you walk away.  After all, you’ve known your track record, your weaknesses, your shortcom­ings. You even know what happened the last time you made one of those commitments.

I think if we’re honest, we’re most terrified in those moments because we’re making a commitment to God.  After all, God’s huge.  He’s perfect. He knows everything. And we just don’t feel like we measure up to Him at all.

In the Old Testament, it was customary for commitments between people to be fol­lowed by a bloody ritual. We understand commitment to be described as covenant. When two people would make a covenant, stipulations as to the requirements of each person are laid out as well as penalties if the commitment isn’t followed through.  If the stipulations are met, then blessings and harmony would follow; however, if one fails, the end will be judgment.

Following everything that is spelled out, a ceremony takes place where an animal is cut in two, separated from head to tail. The two walk through symbolically sealing the commitment. With the bloody pieces of the animal on either side of them, they are each saying “May what has happened to these animals, happen to me if I break this covenant with you.”

I found in Scripture a great example of this. In Genesis 15, God told Abram to go out and bring back some small livestock.  Later on, Abram brings these things back to God and cuts each of them right down the middle. He takes the two pieces of cow and puts them across from one another.  He does the same thing with a goat and a ram.  It’s difficult to picture an animal being cut in half, but it must have been a tedi­ous process. Even if it had been a perfect, precision slice, there would have been blood everywhere. But when he was unprepared for the moment, he had to use whatever he could find.  So I can imagine that by the time he put pressure out the animal’s body and forcefully cut through its flesh, fat, muscle, and bone that blood was gushing out everywhere.  After 3 animals, Abram is physically exhausted.  But it’s time to go through the ceremony of covenant.  It’s time to seal this thing. It’s commitment time.

And then God does something really odd right at this defining moment.  He causes Abram to fall into a deep sleep.  In Abram’s state of utter weakness when he’s physi­cally unable to go on anymore, God awakens him just enough to spell out who He was, the stipulations for the commitment, as well as the details of the promises.  Through tired eyes, Abram watches as God Himself walks through the blood and guts of the animals that were sacrificed.

And Abram is startled.  Maybe he even rises to his feet and respectfully says: “Hey God, wait a minute.  I’ve seen this ceremony before.  I know how this works. I’m supposed to be walking through that with You, right?”

Wrong.

Abram couldn’t have passed through and made a commitment like that to God. God was far too superior.  And even if Abram had made a commitment to God as a servant would in those days, he could have never lived up to the stipulations.

So what God did has mind-blowing implications.  God was saying, “”May what has happened to these animals, be done to Me if you break this commitment with Me.”

And you don’t have to be a theologian to know how this commitment played out. It literally was done to Christ what was done to those animals.  He was broken. He was sacrificed. God knew it all the way back then. That’s why God made a commitment that could only be fulfilled by Himself.

I think Abram was overwhelmed.  I think he understood: “God knows I can’t make this commitment to Him, but He still wants to make it to me.  He still wants to have a relationship with me.  He wants to be bound to me despite my failure, even at His own expense.”

Abram experienced grace. He knew it wasn’t cheap, but it wasn’t costing him any­thing.

What does all that mean?  I think it means that God is asking us to make a commit­ment even today.

But it’s not what you think.

We know those non-committal types don’t we?  Maybe we are one of them.  People don’t commit to things when there is a large degree of failure. Often people don’t commit to people they really care about because they can’t deal with the pain they’ll cause if they break the commitment.

Commitment brings with it this sense of straining and effort doesn’t it?  Just saying it makes us uncomfortable.

Here’s the thing though: strain and effort are feeble human attempts that are inde­pendent of God.  Committing more or re-committing is anti-grace.

God does tell us to commit.  He asks us to commit our ways to Him, to commit our lives to Him, to commit our hearts to Him. But this kind of commitment is different from human effort.

Psalm 37:5

Commit everything you do to the LORD.  Trust Him, and He will do it.

When God asks us to commit, He is asking us to submit, hand over cleanly, depend, give away, trust in total reliance on Him to walk through everything for us.

Commitment isn’t our increasing what we do, it is as John said, letting God be more for us and in our lives.

We must decrease.

God must increase.

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