The Church Rising — http://thegodjourney.com/2015/02/06/the-church-rising/?fb_ref=Default&fb_source=message

Outside the box of religious obligation lies a road less travelled into the heart of the Father's affection, swinging freedom all over the place. This is the God, Jan, the God, Jan, the God. You know, after just a letter or two, we are going to move on. This is not going to become the sexuality podcast. I did one and then we did some further stuff and for some people that was really touching and helpful and I'm grateful it was. For other people, it put me in the camp of the Antichrist because I dared it to talk about those things and tried to communicate a way to have love and compassion for folks who are trapped. And some people just don't want to extend any kindness or compassion. It absolutely astounds me. It does. Even if you disagree with me, I have lots of friends I don't see eye to eye with. In fact, I think one of the joys of a friendship is we don't see this the same way. So let's talk about it and I want to understand what you're saying and maybe you'll move me to a better place. Maybe you won't. Maybe at the end of the day, I'm still going to live in the light I've got. But man, when people turn mean because you don't say it the way they want it said, you know what? You've got to live that journey but I'm not sure it's a God journey. Hi, I'm Wayne Jacobson and this is The God Journey. We kind of talk here once a week or so about things going on in my life. Sometimes we've got other people with me. Sometimes I do it alone and hopefully in all of that, you find some encouragement for your journey. If you do great and if you don't, there's a few other million podcasts out there and you might find one that's more helpful to you and that's fine. Well it looks like I'm going to be in Atlanta and Clemson coming up at the end of the month. And if you haven't connected with us yet about those things, it's kind of spreading out now. Atlanta for the weekend. It looks like moving south of Atlanta for a few, a couple of nights and meeting with some people a little further south before I head up to Clemson. So if you're interested in that, please let us know. I'm just going to read you a couple more emails that I've had on the sexuality thing because I think they make some important points that I want to make before I leave and I'm going to recommend a little, it's about an 18 minute sharing online. If you haven't heard it before, you would do well to listen to it. This gal just captures some of this stuff in a wonderful way in her own personal journey of living as a loved child of God dealing with same sex attraction in her life. So she's funny. You'll enjoy it and that link's already below if you want to go look at it. But I'll talk to you about it in just a moment. I just want to read you a couple more things kind of stemming from our discussion about homosexuality and the challenge it provides for people and the challenge even this conversation provides. Because even though some of you think it's incredibly courageous and some of you think it just really pushes the envelope in a horrible way, others feel like it didn't push the envelope far enough and it's still discriminatory even if we didn't want it to be. Jeff wrote this in the blog, I am sad about what the main context of this post seems to be instead of, and it is sorry, still full of discrimination. Love the gay person, the homeless, the alcoholic, the promiscuous, the liar, the cheat, even the murderer. Named in one sentence, can you imagine how it hurts even if it was not intended? We love you, even if you are a degenerated person, like a murderer. I am a cancer. Do you know how it feels trying and trying and trying to be normal? Praying, crying, shouting to God's silence. You know how it feels to live absent your whole life, to live without physical tenderness because my Christian stamping would damn it. I can't claim that any of you would understand me. But do you really know what do you expect from me? Graciously you accept that I am ill or a degenerated person who perhaps had really no choice. And often in the past I hope this by myself too, instead of to be a hopeless outcast person damned by God. But that's not enough. You withhold me what you claim for yourself as a normality. Human closeness. Could you endure what you are expected so easily from others by branding it as sin? I find my rest and affection more and more in Abba with less and less performance. With decreasing shame about myself, I still live bodily abstinent. There's still a great longing for a human partnership and tenderness. Perhaps Abba takes away this longing. Perhaps I will be like you one day. I hope people read that or hear me read it and feel what this young man feels. I mean my heart breaks for this. And I don't know the best answer, the good answer. If it seems to be outside God's provision for us as people and that's your affection and drive and hope for human tenderness. I hope we're you're wrong Jeff and I hope we really try to communicate this. We've got to separate ourselves from the places where we're broken. I wouldn't call you a cancer. I wouldn't say you're unloved. I wouldn't damn you to hell for whatever struggle you've had in this life. I just want to invite you into the space where God gets to have his way with you. And I guess you wanted that too. I understand you're praying and crying and reaching out and feeling all alone still in this and man, that's the stuff that just breaks my heart that we're not having the kinds of dialogue that help you see you are not your brokenness any more than the rest of us are. And I wouldn't see you even in the lists of murderers and you know, some of it, not all of that. The homeless, I wouldn't necessarily put a whole heap of guilt on the homeless for hurting. I get how Christianity has made you feel that way. I get the shame internally. Some of it foisted by society. How much of it just because without Christ and the cross, we're consumed with shame. All of us until Jesus breaks. Hold on, I'm glad it seems that you're on a good journey and my heart hurts for you. I didn't read the letter necessarily to try to fix you. I read it because I want people to understand the cry of that heart. And I want you to say this is one way to deal with it. That leads to brokenness and despair and you're going to deny me what you want for yourselves and it's not. I don't know that we consider ourselves denying it. I think we feel like scripture is clear about God's purpose in us and what gets twisted in the creation and how God heals and touches. But there's hope for this, even if the same sex attraction never changes. Someone sent me a link to a young woman's story. Her name is Julie Rogers. She works at Wheaton College. Surprisingly enough, she admits to being gay. She also admits to choosing a celibate lifestyle in the face of that identity, which she's taken for herself. And it's a compelling, compelling 18 minute video. Let me just play you a clip of it here. I had been told, you know, just gay is bad. And so I felt all of this shame because I couldn't rid myself of the gay. I couldn't pray the gay away, get rid of the gay. And so I kind of said, OK, this makes sense then. This is livable. There's nothing here about love. Like love is a good and beautiful thing. I believe that my desire to love another woman is a beautiful thing, just like it's great to love another man. And men should have solid, strong friendships, love for other men, brotherly love for other men. But those are good things that hadn't really been celebrated in our culture. But certainly there's a context in which love between two women is blessed and beautiful. And that is not a marriage. It's a close, intimate friendship. So I began to see there was a lot more freedom to embrace my sort of experience and to submit that to the Lord in a way that could lead to intimacy and flourishing. But there just hadn't been many people thinking about this with very much nuance. So I said, OK, celibacy, celibacy. Celibacy is the path for me. Part of the reason that sounded really awful to me is because me and a lot of my friends were looking around. And we were seeing so many people in the church living out this sort of like American dream, right? And there's been this story that was told about love and about belonging that was primarily found in the context of a marriage and the context of sexual relationship in a marriage. So those who didn't experience that were left kind of looking like they were going to be alone. And they were also going to wonder if they just weren't pretty enough or if they weren't funny enough or they weren't cool enough. Like what was wrong with them that they had ended up alone? So I believe one of the ways that you can begin to change this conversation about sexuality is by telling a different story of what it means to be known and to be loved and to belong. Telling a different story about the beauty of a life that's sold out to passionately following Jesus and living out the vocation that he's given to us, celebrating the unique vocations he's given to us. Many of those being about service in the church and service to a hurting world that's dying for love. Meanwhile, we're over here going, oh, nobody loves me, what's wrong with me? But there's all these places that we can be giving our love away. And we need to be told more of those stories of how we can give our love away as single people, how we can love and be loved as celibate men and women in the church. Because up until now, the conversation has looked like telling gay people they kind of have to settle for less, right? It's not been fun to have a lot of people who seem very happy, you know, like the mom, the wife, the husband and wife are kind of holding hands over here, like, oh, I'm so sorry. Must be hard for you. Yeah. And I'm like, yeah, it's hard. It is hard. I am denying myself and taking it my cross and following Jesus in this way because I believe this is the life-giving path to flourishing, but I wanna do this in community. And I don't think I'm like the only person that's ever had a sort of like challenging path of costly obedience, but I believe that there is a heightened sense for many of us, especially those who are LGBT in the church. You feel like we're having to do that alone. That is not what God intends. I would encourage you, if you have an interest in this thing, to listen to the whole thing. Her appeal to how the community of faith can have conversation and extend human closeness, that it's okay for a woman to love a woman and for men to love men. We all navigate that. I have close friends, men that I love. And we kind of corrupt the love word that just because we love somebody doesn't mean it necessarily leads to romantic attraction. And she's navigating her life in that space and doing it, I think, courageously and wonderfully. What she shares, I think, gives hope to all of us that no matter where we're broken in life, no matter where our appetites may drive us, there is a life of freedom inside God and it may not be the freedom we all want with, just we're free to do whatever we wanna do, but we're free to live inside the growing reality of Jesus Christ as he unfolds in us. But going back to our larger discussion, remember, this is something she freely chose inside a relationship with God. It's not something society demanded of her and that makes more difference than most people are willing to admit. And then this, not really part of the homosexual discussion, but it springs from it. And it's a tender story and I wanna read it to you. It's from Anonymous, obviously. I would like to say that your words have also softened my heart and given me more grace, not just for homosexuals, but those who struggle with anything in their lives, particularly sexual immorality. And that's really what I wanted to share. I talked to you last year about the struggle my wife is having. After seven years, 24 years of marriage, she's having yet another affair. This has been going on for almost 10 years. No amount of prayer or counsel has changed her. She's come to the point of being diagnosed bipolar, borderline schizophrenic, and hypersexual nymphomaniac. And in parentheses, I kid you not. Labels aside, she's broken. And people have wondered and asked how I can put up with it. How come we are not divorced? My common answer has been because for years the only answer I get when I pray is father asking me to love her through it. I will say it is not me and only with supernatural strength. Last year I prayed for God to please let me divorce her and since the Lord saying that he wanted me to do was much harder. Recently she had another affair and my heart is breaking once again. And when I listened to your podcast, I broke down in tears and realized something. My wife is broken in the same way. It is a struggle for her. She has begged God to free her from it. She fights it, sometimes winning, sometimes losing. And when you talked about parents with a gay child, that's me, I love this woman as much or more than my own children. Would I put my child out if they were gay? No, I would love them through it even though through heartbreak and tears. How could I treat my wife any differently? That really is what God showed me through your words. Does that mean I accept what she does? No, but I have my own sins and struggles to focus on. In fact, I don't know what the ending is for this book. I just know this is the middle of a chapter and not the end. And to be honest, she breaks my heart every time this happens. And I pray that God will heal her and change her heart and desires or lead me to be free. But until then, I just love her the best way that I can. One of the amazing things I get to see in this journey is people who choose to live in ways that are the opposite of their own self-interest. And in a case like this, not only opposite that, even if he wants an out, Scripture clearly gives him an out. That you could divorce here and no one that you know would say you should stay in that marriage for God and country or whatever, or queen and country. He is broken every time his wife cheats on him, broken. And he wants to get out of it. He's asked to get out of it. And he feels like God just keeps nudging him to stay. Now that's nothing you could ever put on another individual. And if you're listening to this podcast and you've got a cheating spouse and you feel like it's time for you to walk away, believe me, that there's a place for that in God as well. I don't hear from this anonymous writing me saying, everybody should do this. This is God's order for marriage. Stick with your partner no matter what they do to you. He's not saying that. And I don't want people to hear that and be filled with guilt over it. I just want people to hear. Father keeps asking me to stay and to crawl into the brokenness of this woman. And brother, I pray that that will bear the fruit of the kingdom. I pray that the love God has given you for your wife, which you said, supernatural. I pray that would someday win over the brokenness in her life. I mean, the stories that we've read, the things that I've heard over the last couple of weeks since we kind of opened the door to converse about sexual things and sexual brokenness and pain and hurt and Jeff's blog post, this letter, there's just so much pain in this environment. And how do we think it gets better by not talking about it and not contemplating it and not asking God to open our hearts and learn to love and even in this kind of situation. Man, my heart goes out to you. And yet at the same time, I honor you. I honor just like Julie Rogers shares in her piece and hear this, I'm in a difficult spot. What I want to do is not the same as what Jesus is inviting me into. And what is life really about? Is it about doing what we want to or is it about finding our way into what Father has for us and embracing that reality and finding our fulfillment and joy. Not that my every desire will be fulfilled by God, but that God will fill up the biggest desires in my life. And that allows me to say no to those things that I might want, I might prefer, I might desire with everything in me. But to say yes to God, love the tightest to language. It is the grace of God. It is His love. It is His affection. It is His freeing us from shame that teaches us to say no to worldly appetites and Godless living. It's just, we've always thought it was law that would teach us to say no. And law never did. Law only increased our temptation. When you tell somebody, no, you can't. You just want to do it more and more. All of a sudden you think about, well, why wouldn't I? And the human fight back for what I desire is my freedom. And I love, I just want to add these two people's stories to it of people who are saying, boy, I know what I could do. I know what it would be I would like to do. And yet I'm finding a relationship with God real enough to say, I want to do things His way, even if that means certain desires. And in this case, romantic notions, whether it's to be a gay woman who's remaining celibate, whether it's to be a man who remains in a marriage with a very broken woman and taking the pain, he's not having the romanticized view of marriage either. You hear a little bit, you hear, oops. And you'll hear a little of that in what Julie shares too, that it really isn't that we stake our desires and go to the world and fulfill them everywhere we can. It's finding our life in Jesus. And as we find it in Him, He navigates us to live a life that honors His work in us, even if that runs counter to the things I want. And I would assume even the things God wants for this man, God would want him to have a marriage filled with honor and being true to the promise and a romance of life. And as Julie paints the romance of marriage, we do paint that pretty broadly sometimes. A lot of marriages are just two people learning to live together, working through people's pain and hurt and brokenness, whether it's sexual problems like in that marriage, whether it's just the struggle, depression, brokenness of a mate going through a difficult time. We need to honor those who love each other in the most difficult places, who crawl into each other's pain and not necessarily the thing we always champion, the couple that stands up front and pretends great joy in their marriage and then find out that that was all a sham too. And that's, I've seen that often. People stand up and boast about how close they are, how tight they are, and then a year later they're getting married and turned out their whole relationship was a bit of a fraud. It was something for the stage, not something in their heart. But I want to switch to the thing now. We've done a lot of sexual stuff here for quite a few days and I really want to kind of shift the thing. Someone sent me a link to this. I'll post it down on the blog as well. And it's just an open letter to all the people writing and sharing open letters about what's wrong with the church. It's by Whitney Caps. So if I can read anything from these open letters, it's this, maybe people, my people, millennials are leaving the church because we are spoiled, selfish, easily satisfied, hyper-critical, consumeristic, and socially enlightened but biblically lightweight. Well, that's a kind approach there, Whitney. Now if it's not already clear, I love the church. I'm crazy obsessed and slightly obnoxiously in love with the church and her leaders. I'm not objective, I'm not impartial. Stop reading it if you need to. At least I've owned it. I've been married for 14 years. I adore my husband but our marriage isn't perfect because neither of us is perfect. I know my faults and his and you may be my best friend but if you come to me and say, listen, I know you love Chad and because I love you and Chad, I feel I need to tell you the truth about him. I don't know if you see what I see. I don't know if you're aware of all his flaws so I'd like to tell you of my opinion of those and really because I think it's so important, I'd like to write an open letter to post on social media about him and it's because I love him and I love you and I want him to be the best version of himself. She said, don't pretend to love me but disrespect my spouse. Don't pretend to love Jesus but damage the church. You can't love Jesus but hate the churches. I'll post the whole column so you can read it. I get her angst, to be honest with you. I watch my own Facebook feeds go by of this social media stuff where people want to pick at religion, pick at the church and it just seems like every post is picking at something that your friends probably really find valuable and meaningful and you want to keep kind of showing them why you don't go anymore and maybe they shouldn't go either. Where I disagree with Whitney is to identify the church as that Sunday morning thing that we can't talk about the frailties of a system that fails to hold the beauty and power and life of Jesus and it's not just a matter of exposing its flaws. I think that's where I part ways. I think the church is so much bigger because when I read what Whitney says about how much she loves the church, you know what, I do too. I love the church. I love the community of God's family as it's alive in the world. The bride Jesus is shaping for himself and I'm gonna read you something at the end of this podcast that I think will blow you away. At least it did me. And to look at that. But to think that that is the same thing as our Sunday morning institutions and hired guns who are pastors who are leading those things and are more at times committed to keeping the business model alive, then they are doing what needs to be done so that the community of Jesus Christ breaks out among people. And look at the flaws of a system that leaves so many people who try to find it, bereft of it, often blaming themselves and hurting in it. So someone I know sent me a list recently of their kind of journey through the life of the church. They just did it, what we call a church. They just kind of just show me where they had been and why they were so disillusioned with going somewhere else and looking yet again. They began in the way, got saved I guess in that and the kind of cultic system that that was. And then into a time and some Catholic attempts to find God there, from there to a Methodist home fellowship system for a significant period of time. And then they got kind of glommed on to the charismatic renewal into a charismatic church and said one Sunday morning we were asked from the pulpit to find some other place to fellowship where we could agree with the leadership. And he said, we went from our being in our first paid staff position to out the door in four years. And then from there, they landed an assembly of God, restart up church with a lot of us who were publicly asked to leave the other place and then moved to a new state to join a fellowship under Christian international and was set up to be the prophetic half of a apostle profit team to establish a regional hub for Christian international. Then the late nineties, that group hooked up with the World Prayer Center, Peter Wagner and Bunch. And I hooked up with their statewide prayer coordinator and became the regional prayer guy for our area. By early 2000, we were to gathering in Philadelphia, connected by Gene Edwards, read several Watchman knee books with several other house church guys launched seven years of Saturday nights in our home. He said, I wrote an email in 2012 moaning about the discovery that one of our seven year house church members left the group to join a spanking group at the end of their time. And said, my brother-in-law still ribs me about this development saying, I guess if you spend a lot of time in your group at your house, you're gonna need a spanking group to straighten you out, sad enough. Lastly got involved in 24 hour harp and bowl prayer endeavor that only lasted two years and then vanished. And then after this litany, here's where his journey's gone. He said, he used Paul's story to show me the dilemma, the frustration, the work involved in fighting against the drift back to religiousness that quickly wants to wash away real freedom. And then there's Jesus who seemed to reveal something awesome about trusting in the sent one after spending only three years with a dozen working stiffs. He turned them loose, says it's better for them and us that I go away so I can send him to be all you'll need to live freely and within a generation. The drift carries the people of God back into this long standing captivity that my story is an example of. How long it takes and how much of a piece of work we are to actually get deprogrammed for the work in our father's business with him. But the time we begin to get free and help our spouses to get free, it's difficult to muster enthusiasm for the work that's really got some gold, silver and precious stone rather than wood, hay or stubble. But maybe that's is as it should be. The reason I read, look at that story. I think that's so many people I've met over the years. When you're really hungry for the something more and you go to every conceivable ministry, things over these last 40 years, I read over his list, those last 40 years of people who were looking for something different kept getting dragged into something different yet again. A new way of doing it with a different man upfront and a different one doing the work and creating these regional prayer center counselors, apostolic, prophetic teams. Man, I know at least 100 people that could have written that list. Maybe a little bit different, but pretty much the same. Kept going from here to there and each one a little at some point excited to get involved and shortly thereafter feeling like something's not right, seeing through the corruption of leadership and power oftentimes and then finding themselves tossed out or walking away and then glomming onto something else and trying that and realizing that a lot of that in, out, struggling looking is this drag back in to something that is more religious, trying to earn it, get back to works and performance. And I agree, that's always the draw. The early church is there 10 years into the journey. We're back into doing by works what Jesus escaped by grace instead of following the life of the Spirit. We're following some man's sense of rules and principles and it just doesn't work. And yet Jay writes me and he's kind of on the other side of this. Here's what he said, we were aware that the model of church that we knew was failing or that God was changing it and we were actively seeking what the next model would be and several of us felt God wanted us out of the box and slowly we all left even though we loved each other and we were especially fond of the pastor and his wife and out in the world without the tie down to our box we all kind of drifted apart and for some of us it was the isolation of my job and personal schedule. It was hard to meet for lunch or find time in the evenings to get together and I just didn't see many of these folks on a day to day basis. My wife and I were also tending to too many family issues and the less encouragement we had from others the more we began to drift away from seeking God himself to the point we really put him on a back burner. And if you ask me if my relationship with God was still rich I would say yes, but not really seeing how far I had drifted. I had slowly stopped doing many of the things that kept us close to Father and even let us some of the old man creep back in on us. This lasted several years. A few months ago both my wife and I just looked at each other and said, what has happened to us? And we both got up and started seeking the Father's heart anew. We were kind of embarrassed to go back to the box we had slipped away from knowing that we slipped away had inadvertently hurt some folks and there of course been some rumors about why we'd left and though none of them were true we didn't want to dig up any hurt feelings. We just kept telling folks we needed a break and this was the truth but it didn't stop people from wondering what had happened to us. And then something strangely wonderful happened the pastor of the church we loved dismissed the congregation sold the land and buildings even his own home which was adjacent to the church. This was both sad and wonderful to us and we had many good memories there we've just met with this group several times having simple times of sharing with lots of interaction with each other simple worship if we feel like it breaking bread once a month or when we have leftovers after the holidays we're trying to be cautious and not recreate the old box but just learn to love one another and then one more thing I just want to add into this this came on our comment line. Hi Wayne, good evening my name is Eric I am from San Gabriel, California which is a suburb here in Southern California not too far from you just wanted to say I've been following your blog or your podcast for about a week now I've listened to over 10 podcasts I want to say and I'm actually a recent graduate of Fuller Seminary a part of a church plant in downtown Los Angeles a multi-ethnic multi everything multi-generational multi-forshton economic church and I was also recently part of another church plant having gone through both of those things and I know that in your podcast you share about how church plants you don't really see that word in the Bible having gone through both of those experiences while I do see God at work through those institutions and I am beginning to lose sight of Jesus in the middle of all of it and I really appreciate your blog and it's really helping me to just dwell or rest in God's love and yeah I just have to be honest and share that I'm not quite sure what to do at this moment and one hand having the occurred some debt from Fuller and feeling like this full-time ministry thing is not really worth pursuing Hey Eric, thanks for your comment man sorry this is a rough stretch of the journey for you but you're close enough if you want to get together sometime we could see about working that out if you want to give me a call and I realize that having the education you had it may be the vocational dream you hope that would lead you to may not look like it's fitting right now but it's amazing that God puts things in our lives even this man's journey through all these different expressions of somebody's idea of religion but at each point we're growing we're learning, God's shaping and I found in my life that God takes so many things that were part of my life and keeps threading them together in a way that makes sense for him so it'll be interesting to see how he does that with you in the days that I had but this is why my heart is so passionate to find our way into the bride of Christ that really breathes lives and breathes in the world all kinds of ways we try to do it all kinds of movements to join and then get burned out and then sometimes without a focus for some people they just get lost in family and work and their relationship with Jesus withers and then they look again for something else or a brother that's put so much time and money into getting a degree and now wondering boy every time he wasn't saying that the quote-unquote church plants were bad he just was saying that somehow in there as they got going he lost his own sense of relationship and resolve and I guess I want the young ones to know this is a long story if you need it to be long this can wear you out with trying to find out what's next and yet through it all God keeps shaping us I read the end of the earlier chronology of going through all these different movements and he just said by the time we get to a place or we really get whole and really get free and it seems like too late to jump into the things that matter this went by me the other day on Facebook posting it's a quote from the velveteen rabbit and I'm not even sure the context of this particular quote says you become it takes a long time that's why it doesn't happen often to people who break easily or have sharp edges or have to be carefully kept generally by the time you are real most of your hair has been loved off and your eyes drooped down and you get loose in the joints and very shabby but these things don't matter at all because once you are real you can't be ugly except to people who don't understand what a great quote this journey of teaching us to live inside the love of the Father and extend that love to other people which to me is where the church takes shape it's not in a movement somewhere it's not in a building somewhere it's where people who are loved are learning to love and share a journey of graciousness, kindness, compassion, yes and unrelenting desire to be who Jesus wants us to be in the world to follow his ways, not our own it's that church and yeah maybe it just takes an awful long time to get through all the other stuff our soul seeks and what we try and other ways we try to satisfy it I had someone write me this is Anne from the United Kingdom I met Anne a few years ago and she's occasionally writes some wonderful things but she wrote about the podcast we did on the new creation and do we oversell it do we create expectations for people that can't be solved she wrote this, she said when you see the possibility of change and see that it could be possible that the abundant life that Jesus lived could be lived by us there is for many who embrace that a first extreme response into license it's as if you spent your life in a cage the extent of which depends on the institutions you come out of where movement was heavily curtailed in any attempt to test the waters brought instant retribution now with a suddenness that is starting you see that the cage was a lie in reality you are in a wide open space with only love is the limit and some need to go to extremes to test the reality of the space to test the truth of the space but because his life is written on their hearts you don't stay there long they come back to the center because they trust now that this abundantness is true this freedom is exactly that absolutely some take longer than others to come back to center to the plumb line but I do trust that the deposit of God in them to bring them back I love that view the idea of the new creation what she calls abundantness that when you catch a glimpse of who God is even if you think grace as license even if you think you're going to test the limits there's something about the drive for wholeness let's say drive let's say desire for it there's something that's real in God and when you've tasted it then you might try other things you might get lost for a while but like Jay and like others you keep coming back to there's something in my heart that I know is real that I know I'm going to find and that's learning to live in the middle of Father's affection letting him rewrite and transform do I ever expect this abundantness to be perfect and I don't, it's not in my life but I love the place where that abundantness is engaged I love where I get to live in the new creation I love coming out of a conversation with someone and going man that was part of the new creation it doesn't necessarily be a believer it's not performance not because we did something right it was because God made himself known in a transcendent way I wish my whole days were filled with that they're not for those of you who think they are now when I'm traveling I get in a lot of that which is fun but around here home responsibilities, duties there's things that go on that just are part of life and that's fine but in those whether it's something I'm reading or a conversation I'm having a thought God gives me a walk in the woods whatever we're something transcendent that new creation that abundantness that my life is bigger than the circumstances I'm in that God is more real than Wayne's desires and what Wayne thinks life needs to do to be fulfilling and that's why I mean, gee I love inviting people into that space I love what people have tried movements and come out of them and they look back and say gosh, what all the failure the joy of that is there's something real in your heart that keeps inviting you or you would have stayed in one of those things and made the best of it not moved on that you would have for Jay who got out of the accoutrements the sideboards of having some kind of godly life by the things that you do and practice every week give you some kind of definition of that and then find that that got lost without the box and then finding maybe going back to find some better fellowship that will help that because I think fellowship always does but the real fix is somewhere inside I connect to something real he becomes the endearing draw in my life someone posted on our blog about not focusing on people's sin giving them enough of a glimpse of Jesus that their participation in that will drive out every sin in broken places I think that approaches the incarnation but as close as it can approach it it's not that God doesn't care about sin people who get in the new covenant think well God just doesn't care you can do whatever you want now because Jesus fixed all that no the incarnation God inviting us into love he knew that would heal sin in a way that rules and obedience would never win it's not just here's what you should do now go do it it's here's a father who loves you so much and when you crawl into that reality with increasing freedom and joy and whatever you know what he his light moves the darkness out you don't have to go take on the darkness we have done sin management far too long in what we've called the church well this is how Ann ended her letter she sent me this this was out of a prayer time she was reading in Jeremiah and one of the little phrases was for this is what the Lord says and something about that phrase captured her heart and only captured her heart she began to write even more broadly about it that she saw the church taking shape in the world I'm not talking about man's attempts to build it but the reality of Jesus' family growing in the world is now and Jesus was the last word spoken he's the word made flesh for sure but we are his words Paul says things to that effect listen to what she wrote that came to her as she was contemplating this this is what the Lord says this the church she is the bride glorious without spotter wrinkle beautiful born out of brokenness out of grief bearing in her body the sufferings of her beloved full of joy and hope and glory she has been quiet unseen her beauty hidden behind steeples and bells behind long-winded words and hellfire with brimstone behind false shepherds and false gospels behind strange fire and witchcraft behind well-intentioned but shackling care and control it's been a long time but now he calls her forth he says her name you hear it like a whisper on the wind it echoes in your dreams she is this she is what the Lord is saying in every moment he is sounding her name until every rock and tree lamb and lion shake with the sound for this has been there groaning for so long and she is rising shaking off the dust and mothballs of her fear-induced coma she is his beloved and he is hers to her he makes known the unfathomable riches that are in him through her he makes known the manifold wisdom of God to all those who sought to keep her hidden quiet and afraid can you hear your name beloved? hear your name for you or she wow let that capture your heart and thanks thanks for sharing some really incredible words she's been hidden under a lot of stuff but God's calling her forth in this day and he calls her forth by calling your name and inviting you to be a finder thank you for traveling with us today on the God Journey you can join this conversation by visiting thegodjourney.com or add your voice by calling our comment line at 805-539-6980