Tag: love

Own Your Struggle

On By Tim EhrhardtIn Christian Spirituality Blog1 Comment

sisyphus struggle

In this social media driven world, we know all too well the temptation to sanitize our respective life experiences and stories.  Even the cloistered folk who refuse any social media will often not give you a straight answer when asked the sincere question, “How are you doing?”  “Fine” is not an acceptable answer, in my book.  The reason I say we need to be more honest in our responses and presentations to one another is:

Hiding large swaths of our lives and stories from others is not the path to spiritual wellness, emotional healing, and personal peace.  However, owning our internal struggles through embracing weakness, humility, vulnerability, and faith opens to us the way of grace.

Far too often you and I have ongoing struggles within because we don’t own them.  We struggle because we don’t struggle.  I’m the expert on stuffing feelings.  I learned it well early in my life.  Yet, feelings never evaporate just because we ignore them.  Just the opposite, like a forgotten half-carton of cottage cheese in the back of the fridge, our feelings only gather moldy bacteria and crust over with nastiness.  We need to understand that feelings really do have an expiration date to them.  If not openly confronted and dealt with, they’ll fester into bitterness.  It’s much better to get down and dirty with our present struggles instead of living with the wishful thinking that they’ll just go away.

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Holy Scripture and 2,000 years of church history have given us a path to wholeness.  Lent is the season which draws out grand themes of the Christian life from the Bible.  Prominent is our need for confession, repentance, faith, humble prayer, and forgiveness.  Spiritual disciplines exist to put us in a position to confront our deepest struggles – even ones we didn’t know we had.

There are 52 references to “one another” in the Bible.  “Love one another” (John 13:34-35); “Be kind to one another” (Ephesians 4:32); “Show hospitality to one another” (1 Peter 4:9); “Forgive one another” (Colossians 3:13); “Encourage one another” (Hebrews 3:13); and “Bear the burdens of one another” (Galatians 6:2); are just a few of the exhortations Scripture gives us to “spur one another on” (Hebrews 10:24) toward spiritual well-being and healthy community relationships.

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Nowhere in Holy Scripture will you find references to hide from one another, pester one another, or put up a false front toward one another.  Some folks live as if the author of Hebrews said, “Some people have gotten out of the habit of meeting together for worship and edification, so just let them go, slackers they are.  Forget about that encouragement thing, especially since Jesus is coming soon anyway.”  Here is what the verse says, for real:

“Some people have gotten out of the habit of meeting for worship, but we must not do that.  We should keep on encouraging each other, especially since you know that the day of the Lord’s coming is getting closer”. (Hebrews 10:25, CEV)

There were confessing believers in the ancient church who drifted away and dropped out.  They had legitimate internal and external struggles with outward persecution and inner doubt.  What they needed most was an infusion of faith and perseverance, which would only come if they owned their struggle through sharing it with others.  Like a charcoal briquette which falls off the pile and loses its fire, so there were individual Christians who separated themselves from the warmth of genuine fellowship and lost their faith.

hot charcoal

The ancient believers had some of the same struggles we had.  They just couldn’t make sense of why things in the world were so bad.  The people had little money, no respect from government authorities, and, most of all, family who were telling them they were crazy for following Jesus.  It wasn’t supposed to be this way.  Rather than embrace the struggle and work through it, they just sat in the back of the fridge, I mean in the back pew of the church, and slowly gathered mold.  Doing nothing is usually a bad idea.  If you try and fail, there is grace.  But if you do nothing, there is only nothing.

Freighted within the definition of biblical faith is risk.  Faith is stepping out and taking a chance on love, encouragement, help, support, comfort, and kindness.  No risk it, no biscuit.

“Keep on being brave! It will bring you great rewards.  Learn to be patient, so that you will please God and be given what he has promised.  As the Scriptures say, ‘God is coming soon!  It won’t be very long.  The people God accepts will live because of their faith. But he isn’t pleased with anyone who turns back.’  We are not like those people who turn back and get destroyed. We will keep on having faith until we are saved.” (Hebrews 10:35-39, CEV)

william penn quote

God desires you and me to take a risk on betting the farm on Jesus.  Embracing Christ involves owning our struggles, to him and to one another.  Yes, you may argue that it isn’t helpful to wear your feelings on your sleeve.  But I’m not talking about emotional diarrhea; I’m talking about something far worse: emotional prostitution, where we sell ourselves to others in a cheap façade of who we really are and how we are really doing.  We want to be liked and we want to be loved, and we mistakenly believe that keeping up false appearances will get us what we long for.

You might fail? Join the club. I’m willing to wager that I’ve been fired or let go from more jobs than you’ve even had in your life.  I’ve some wild ministry successes, and I have had some spectacular failures.  I have been at the lowest of the low in a major depression, and I’ve been at the top of the mountain where every prayer gets answered.  I have had God be silent for months on end, with me having no clue as to why.  I’ve had literally no money to my name, and I’ve had plenty in multiple accounts.

So, here’s the humble observation: It doesn’t matter whether your circumstances are to your liking or not, whether you have all you feel you need, or don’t ever seem to have enough, whether you have well-behaved kids and family, or wayward children and messed up uncles and cousins.  What matters is faith expressing itself through love (Galatians 5:6).  It takes risk to have faith.  It takes two (or more) to have love.

Own your struggle.  Don’t live in denial.  Grab it and face it squarely.  Face it with God.  Face it with others.  If you’re mad as hell at God, tell him so; he’s big enough to take it (please go to the psalms and pray them as your own).  If you need prayer and/or help, ask for it.  Don’t just expect someone to read your mind or your emotions.  If someone asks you to pray, stop what you’re doing and get on your knees with that person and pray like there’s no tomorrow.

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Life is too short to sleepwalk through it with a constellation of emotions that need dealing with.  Being overwhelmed is common to the human condition.  “How are you?” “Busy!” Tell me something I don’t know.  It takes no relational effort to give a pat answer.  Let’s get down to why you feel you constantly need to express how busy you are, even when you’re not really all that busy.

I think you get the idea.  Scripture doesn’t call us to hide, but to love one another enough to both give and receive God’s grace.  Maybe you don’t need to let it all out on social media, but there is a place and a context for you to bring your struggles before God and others.  Take advantage of the privilege and the opportunity which has been provided for you through the cross of Jesus Christ.

The Morality of Caring

On By Tim EhrhardtIn Christian Spirituality BlogLeave a comment

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Every individual person I meet is interesting.  Everyone has a story.  Each person has values which are important to them, and you can usually tell what a person treasures.  For example, my wife cares about kids.  Children are a high value to her.  You can tell immediately when meeting her that that’s true.  When engaging a family for the first time, she will inevitably talk to the child before addressing the parents.  Mary cares about any kind of issue in the world which has to do with children.  She has a strong sense of morality for all of them.  She loves kids.

Have you ever thought about what is of most importance to you?  What we care about most is where our sense of morality lies.  Jesus put it this way:

“Where your treasure is, there your heart will be also.” (Matthew 6:21)

Perhaps you have discovered, like I have, that everyone is moralistic.  That is, each one of us live by a certain code of ethics.  There are morals which we will live and die by.  These are values we esteem above all others.

Although there are hundreds of laws in the Bible, the highest standard of ethics and morality is contained in just a few chapters of Holy Scripture: The Ten Words (Commandments) found in the Old Testament chapter of Exodus 20; and, Christ’s Sermon on the Mount found in the New Testament chapters of Matthew 5-7.  Furthermore, these few chapters can be distilled into a few short ethical phrases: Love God with all your heart, soul, mind, and strength; and, love your neighbor as yourself (Matthew 22:37-39). In other words:

Every moral teaching found in Holy Scripture comes down to love (Mark 12:30-31)

Throughout the history of the church, the highest ethical values have always had to do with knowing and loving the Creator, Sovereign, triune God – Father, Son, and Spirit – and the majesty of his creatures, humanity, created in his image and likeness.  The imprint of that image is deep within us, even if marred or forgotten.

The movement and trajectory of Holy Scripture is a good and benevolent God making and keeping promises to his creatures.  Even when they fall and try to create small petty worlds of their own, a gracious God is active, wooing lost people back to himself.

The Bible is an unfolding drama of redemption in which a loving God goes far out of his way to bring back straying, hurting, helpless people. (Luke 15)

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Which is why, for me, attending to the inner person of the soul, teaching people the words and ways of Jesus, and providing spiritual care to others is a high value.  I love God, and I love people.  It’s easy to understand, then, why I: treasure times of retreat in which there is solitude and silence; connect with God daily in contemplative prayer and meditative Bible reading; pay attention to hurting people and seek to bring them grace, mercy, faith, hope, love, and gentleness; seek to act with civility and respect toward others I disagree with, or just don’t like very well; and, actively engage others who don’t share my values of faith in God, hope for healing and wholeness, and love for the common good of all people, no matter who they are.

I have a deep conviction that the care of the soul is just as important as the care of the body; that attention to exercising the mind with Holy Scripture is just as important to overall health and well-being as cardio workouts and sensible eating; and, that the ultimate hope of the world resides with knowing Jesus Christ, and not with a lesser hope that wishes things will work out in the end if I’m sincere to my personal ethical beliefs.

The rub to all of this is that I have my ideals and ethics, my morals and mores, my values and convictions, yet I don’t consistently live by them. *Sigh* I’m sure you relate.  The Apostle Paul certainly did:

“I don’t know what I’m doing, because I don’t do what I want to do. Instead, I do the thing that I hate…. I don’t do the good that I want to do, but I do the evil that I don’t want to do.  But if I do the very thing that I don’t want to do, then I’m not the one doing it anymore. Instead, it is sin that lives in me that is doing it.” (Romans 7:15-20)

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If honesty and being real is of high value to you, then you and I can admit that we blow it, a lot!  But we can come back to the love of God which is there waiting for us to confess our need and receive grace:

“I find that, as a rule, when I want to do what is good, evil is right there with me…. It wages a war against the law of my mind and takes me prisoner with the law of sin that is in my body.  I’m a miserable human being. Who will deliver me from this dead corpse?

“Thank God through Jesus Christ our Lord!” (Romans 7:21-23)

It simply isn’t helpful to tell other people to “get over it.”  All people need deliverance from the power and presence of their inner (and outer) brokenness.  A person cannot remove destructive vice and heal their own soul any more than someone could remove their own cancerous tumor and heal themselves.  We all share the common human condition of needing the living healing water of Jesus Christ.

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Which brings me back to God and the care of souls – being with Jesus has led me to grace and faith, hope and love, mercy and encouragement, forgiveness and reconciliation.  These are values for which I embrace and will not deviate from.  Even though I live them imperfectly, there is a perfect God who has my back.  He loves me, and He loves you.  I’m okay if that’s labeled as moralistic.

Galatians 5:2-15 – Faith Expressing Itself Through Love

On By Tim EhrhardtIn Daily Bible Reading Blog, Year BLeave a comment
Faith, expressing itself through love, is the grace others need from us.
            I didn’t grow up committed to learning the Bible or following Christ.  I pretty much went my own way throughout my childhood, and especially my teenage years.  I still remember what it feels like to not be a Christian.
            I think that people who have a past where they didn’t live by grace but only looked out for themselves have a temptation to embrace strict rules when they become Christians.  They know what it feels like to not have Jesus in their lives, so they sometimes can go beyond Scripture and impose standards on themselves, and then others, to keep on the straight and narrow.
            If, and when, that happens, the Apostle Paul has something to say about it.  Embracing certain practices to obtain or maintain righteousness mean nothing in God’s kingdom.  Here is how Paul put it, for the church who went down the path of strict outward rule-keeping:
“You people who are trying to be made righteous by the Law have been estranged from Christ. You have fallen away from grace! We eagerly wait for the hope of righteousness through the Spirit by faith. Being circumcised or not being circumcised doesn’t matter in Christ Jesus, but faith working through love does matter.” (CEB)
 
            Christianity which ignores God’s grace in favor of controlling one’s own faith through certain rules is no Christianity at all, and Paul would have nothing to do with it.  His position was clear and pointed:
“You were called to freedom, brothers and sisters; only don’t let this freedom be an opportunity to indulge your selfish impulses, but serve each other through love.” (CEB)
 
Grace is the currency in God’s kingdom, flowing freely through love.  God has your back.  His grace forgives, and never runs out.  His love endures and never withdraws.  When we get a hold of this essential and beautiful truth about God, the only rule we want to keep is the continuing debt to love one another.
            So, are there any practices, rules, beliefs, or doctrines which you hold to that you impose on yourself which are burdensome to you?  Why do you do them?  Do you expect others to do so?  What would change if you threw grace and love in the mix?

 

Gracious God, your love has extended so far as to give your one and only Son on our behalf.  Through Jesus, I embrace the faith and love gifted to me through his redeeming work.  Help me to daily die to myself and my propensity for outward rule-keeping, and to live the gracious life you died to procure for me.  Amen.

1 Corinthians 8

On By Tim EhrhardtIn Daily Bible Reading Blog, Year BLeave a comment
            Consider an issue you care about.  Likely, one of the big reasons you care is that you either see some abuse, neglect, inattention, or lack of love applied toward someone or a group of people.  So, you want to see it be different.  Now, here comes the interesting part: We are motivated by love, but we often end up addressing the problem or issue in the realm of thought and/or belief.  We rely on the political, theoretical, and intellectual to solve the problem.  In other words, our hearts are attuned but we turn to knowledge and rules to achieve a change.
            The Apostle Paul knew that we are primarily lovers – not thinkers or believers.  Thinkers and believers traffic in knowledge and faith in belief systems.  These are of great significance, yet they are not the primary or ultimate ends for Paul.  Instead, Paul took on a divisive issue in the Corinthian church (whether one can eat food which was originally sacrificed to idols, or not) by saying this:
“Knowledge makes us proud of ourselves, while love makes us helpful to others.”
 
Paul begins with love and ends with love.  This issue of certain kinds of food was neither an intellectual nor a faith issue – it was a love issue.  Paul’s answer to the problem dividing them on food was that food is a secondary issue.  To look at it through the lenses of love makes it clear what you ought to or ought not to do.  This doesn’t make thinking and believing irrelevant, it just places it in its proper place and supports love.
            Whenever our opinions and thoughts, and our faith and belief structures are handled without love, then special interest groups begin to form.  Then, division occurs based upon what we think and believe about certain things.  But when love is supreme, knowledge is no longer the tail wagging the dog.
            Love is meant to enlighten us not only to the problems among us; love is also the answer to those issues we care about most.  Let that statement be added to your knowledge so that you encourage and build-up others, and not discourage and tear them down.  It really is all about love.

 

Loving God, you demonstrated your own love for us through sending us your Son, the Lord Jesus, who is the perfect embodiment of love.  May He be so manifested within me that love becomes not only the motivator to change, but also the answer to change; through the power and help of the Holy Spirit.  Amen.