The Sonship Diaries

It is never fun to die. To rip through the dear and tender stuff of which life is made can never be anything but deeply painful. Yet that is what the cross did to Jesus and it is what the cross would do to every man to set him free.
A.W. Tozer, The Pursuit of God

 It's never fun to die. Never fun to take our dear little sins, our precious little pleasures, our delightful little dark "things", drag them out of their closets and hiding places and out to the woodshed, and murder them. When they die, it feels like we are dying. Our flesh squeals, grovels, and begs not to go... its last stand is to persuade you with crooked semantics and lustful fantasies that you can't live without it... that you need it. 

I generally like to write as though our battle against sin were a heroic one. It is not. It's not particularly a victory-march by still waters and pastures green. Most often it's a very undesirable crawl through the black and thorny corridors of my sinful little blood-pumper. When it comes to my sin, I am a real groveler. Like ROFG - rolling on the floor groveling... Like, GMFAO... ya. When I'm feeling particularly dirtied by my sin, I medicate with self-pity and netflix. God couldn't possibly love me, could He?  I stuff another chocolate in my mouth and try to forget how pitifully sinful I am.  

A year ago I was groveling about my sin with a friend. He sympathized and then went to the store. He came back with... well... a shark hook. Kyle, this is your sin... it's not just a little vice... you can't man-handle this... He hooked it around my neck and pulled my head towards his and gave me a talk that every man needs to hear. Sin is out to KILL you, Kyle. It wants to MURDER you. Barbed fangs and twisted talons... and in an instant it would pull you to the bottom of the ocean and break you to bits.

The battle is not heroic. Not if I'm the hero. 

The war is set to kill you. Rip your soul to shreds. Destroy your family. Shame you. Defecate on everything you hold dear. Smear everything sacred and holy. Kill your reputation. Make your Savior look like a fool. Chew you up, spit you out, and bury you. Then on your epitaph it cuts the stone to read in gangly lettering: "Failure." 

Your flesh will kill you. Unless by the grace of God you kill it.

Kill your sin or it will be killing you.
Jonathan Edwards, The Mortification of Sin.

But really, it's not as if this battle was yours in the first place. Christ started it, Christ will finish it. Even the desire to be free from sin can be riddled with self... "This is MY struggle." And then our prayers reflect our pithy little self-battle: Lord, help ME kill MY sin...  So we relinquish every particle and tendril of responsibility into the hands of our Dad... with abandon and recklessness. And here still at the same time we give it our all... We fight like dying men, we give it our dogged all, we don't stop, don't let up, don't quit until we see our flesh breathe it's last. But all this we do by the power and for the pleasure of our Papa. 

Grace is not opposed to effort. Grace is opposed to earning.
Dallas Willard

Yeah, it's a brutish war. Good thing Jesus Christ is a brutish warrior. Fighting a battle that's already been won... clothing you with His righteousness... filthiness for a king's regality. King's eye's hit sinner and His voice cries "My Child!"

I used to think that John 15:1 was a pretty verse. I am the True Vine and my Father is the Vinedresser. That's nice, isn't it? Poetic. Charming. God's got a little set of pruning shears and He's at work in the flowerbed of your heart... right? A couple years ago a friend told me a story of a real "Vinedresser": 

Walking through the family vineyard and her Dad turns to her... "Do you understand that if I want these vines to bear any worthwhile fruit, I have to prune 90% of their growth?!" WHAT. THE. HECK.... Hold the phone... NINETY PERCENT? This isn't a game anymore. God isn't a kind, neighborly groundskeeper anymore... He is the proverbial Merchant of Venice out to take His pound of flesh... 

A pound of flesh here, a pound of flesh there... pruning blades and blow torches well at work on your flesh, bleeding it of everything that starts with the word "self". Self-righteousness, self-pity, self-confidence, self-sufficiency, self-admiration, self-love. He is out to murder them ruthlessly. With blood, with broken bones, with fire, with affliction. That is why the Flesh is called "flesh" - because when God takes it from you, it hurts like Hell. 

I think we often welcome God in to change us and then notice that life's junk hits the fan... suddenly we tap out before God can even start answering our prayers for heart-change. We start crying out for God's mercy to end the pain rather than crying out for Him to do what He must to take us deeper. A man has been taught wrong if he believes that the removal of flesh is anything short of excruciating. 

The groveling must stop.
The pruning must go on. 
So welcome Him with a gritted grin and clenched fists. 

 "Choose this day whom you will serve," says He.
 "Oh Papa, give me grace to choose You each day," says I. 

Shadow Sons, Desert Daughters

Here's an excerpt from a recent guest post to another blog:

The most furious longing, the most ravenous jealousy, the most tenacious pursuit is that of God’s longing, jealousy, and pursuit for lost sheep. Put your hand to God’s chest, soon you will discover how His heart beats. In thunderous palpitations His heart screams so loud it breaks: boom boom “Seek and save the lost… seek and save the lost…” Come close enough to the fire of God’s heart and all at once He may consume you with the same ravenous desire. Soon the blood transfusion you had with Jesus takes its toll on your desires and priorities – His sense of urgency overwhelms you, His mission consumes you, His passion melts you. And then, in booming rejoinder the palpitations of your heart begin to march to the same beat: “Seek and save the lost… Seek and save the lost.”

I’ve seen it happen to the most unsuspecting hearts. It happened to me.

My heart began to break. I got a little too close to God and His longing for the lost hit my heart like a branding iron. Red-hot jealousy on once-calloused-now-raw flesh. The call of The Great Commission became as urgent as the clarion calls of air-raid sirens at midnight. Time to wake up.

Sometimes it twists in my stomach, my spirit lurches and heaves over the task. So much to do, so little time. How is it that after 2,000 years of active evangelism over 2.5 billion still haven't heard the Name Jesus? These are the hard-to-reach peoples of the world. Children of the 10/40 window. Daughters of the desert. Sons of the shadow. Living under an iron curtain of spiritual darkness and estranged in a far-off country with none to rescue.

I suppose it's time I circle back to the question: "What will I do with Jesus?" Suffocate Him under the weight of cultural normality? Muzzle Him so that I won't offend anyone? Perhaps I will listen to Him when it suits me. Or perhaps I will just leave Him be. I don't pet Lions and I don't gallivant into foreign wars. It's much safer if I leave Jesus at the dinner table - that way He'll bless my food... a spiritual butler with no commanding force upon my life. God forbid He ask me to serve Him. 

The truth is that any response other than "Here am I, send me" is unworthy of Him. I heard it once said that this is the language fit for the King: "Yes Your Majesty, King Jesus." That's it. Nothing less will do. To do anything with Jesus other than bow to His Lordship and advance His Kingdom is to make His cross no cross at all... a valueless relic, a powerless symbol of some nice idea.  

What will you do with Jesus?  

We can exaggerate many things, but we can never exaggerate our obligation to Jesus.
- A.W. Tozer

bride-loving-bloggers.

A few years ago I started writing a book… it was called “I hate christianity”. I know, I started writing a book … I’m too young, too inexperienced, too immature in my faith, too… a lot of things. 

The first promise I made to myself as I set out writing was:

Promise #1: I will not deal verbal spankings to Jesus' Wife just because I can.

… My writing didn’t last very long. The honest truth? I ran out of things to “hate” about Christianity. If you get close enough to the heart of Jesus Christ your heart starts saying, “yeah, I’d die for her.” Broken, Branded, Cold, Cantankerous – You would die for her too, because Jesus did.

But recently I’ve noticed within myself an inevitable leaning towards the negative. It’s easy to get at least a few words of criticism in from your armchair. It is easier to withdraw into the safety of a coffee shop, put your head in your hands, and “write the wrongs” rather than “right the wrongs.”

In fact, the more Christian blogs I read the more confounded I become. Time and time again I am finding it hard not to gravitate towards the “issues.” My generation’s Christian bloggers love to sit down at the feast of the church’s deficiencies and gorge themselves. The table is vast, there’s no denying. At this point I'm pretty sure that blogs on Rob Bell’s Utopia, Homophobic Bishops, and Religion vs. Relationship are the re-runs they'll play in hell.  They're easy targets when you want something to write about… There’s always some pastor acting the fool or some church program that shouldn’t be. Always something to nitpick always some quibble to quack over.

Christian blogging has, as a whole, become a shark-feed that has managed to mutilate every beautiful aspect of the bride of Christ, de-limb every strain of doctrine, and turn everyone into a cynic. Where one blog sings praise another breathes curses. Were every Christian blog Truth I should be expected to walk away a religiously-paranoid, profanity-slinging, American-missions-hating, program-snobbing, self-taught-and-self-proclaimed theologian. There would be no preacher, no denomination, no tradition, no creed, no form of worship that could stand under the weight of some blogger’s “two-cents” and certainly none that I could trust. No one is safe when there’s a blogger around. No one.

Where are the main-stream bloggers that clack about the beauty of creation? Where are the Christians that have something to say about the lavishness of the love of Jesus? Where are the grown ups who actually listened when their parents said, “if you don’t have anything nice to say, then don’t say anything at all”?

They call themselves “faith-bloggers” but often their faith in God’s redemptive power for the sake of His Wife is more or less yet to be seen. Where He says, “If you are faithless, yet still I remain faithful” their elegantly written letters would condemn their weaker brothers and sisters and whisper behind their backs in dark corners of the web that they will never see: “My Brother is going to hell in a hand-basket! And my sister to the pit!” How is it that faith-blogging culture has so bread a movement of faithlessness that we could monopolize on the misgivings and weaknesses of our own family?

It might be accurate to say that the most trending Christian blogs, the most cultured, and the most read are also the least reflective of Jesus Christ’s love for His Wife… “But his blog is a wake-up-call to the church.” “But her writings are prophetic!” some will say. To which I rebuttal and rebuttal with a clinched jaw – show me a prophet or messenger of God, who when proclaiming wrath cannot help but also proclaim, even in the same breath, the redemptive hope and promise of the love of the Bride-Groom. Show me, please.

Computer-chair prophets? I never heard that term used in Bible College… I must have missed that lesson. 

For all these scribbles, these prophetic-slams I’m just going to say: “shame on you.” Jesus didn’t die so that you could make a living off of writing hate-letters about His Wife. All this “do as I blog, not as I do” bull-crap has become itself the disease it hates in the church. It is hypocrisy. It is as blasé as Obama’s drama, as non sequitur as the prosperity Gospel, as ugly as sin.

Admit it, you’ve thought it at least twice – “So wait… He’s blogging negatively about blogging negatively?”

Darn tootin’.

I say this all from a blog… Resolute to see with new eyes the beauty I find in the love Jesus has for His Bride and skimming the horizon for any mainstream blog that is hell-bent on scribbling it for the masses.

Calling all Bride-Loving-Bloggers. The masses await you to tell of the love of Jesus. Feed them.

“If you love me, feed my sheep.”
John 21:17