How Does God See Me?

As we move closer to our identity the question will become, “How does God see me?” That’s a great question and should become the basis for our actions going forward, but the first two questions discovered here in Primacy don’t go away. We must answer them repeatedly to stay on track for an abundant life.

Question #1 is: Can I really trust God? As I pointed out before, there’s the intellectual answer, “I’m a Christian, of course I trust God.” AND there’s the wholehearted answer:

“I believe he’s all-powerful. I believe His grace is sufficient to overcome my sin. I believe God desires a relationship with me so much that He let his son live the way I couldn’t and then die in my place so that He can ignore what’s wrong with me. I believe that He wants to spend the rest of my life training me to live in my new life. I really believe that He doesn’t even see what’s wrong with me, only what’s missing, and He only wants to heal me.”

Question #2 is: What is God trying to be for me in this season? That’s a crazy-sounding question, but if we accept that we are colanders and God’s grace pours through us, then we already share God with everyone in our broken state. God’s agenda for us is only that we would heal for our own sake. God’s abundance will continue to flow into us relentlessly, but we will begin to overflow with his goodness instead of just leaking it out. We get more experience of him as we are transformed from glory to glory. So in each season, God gently nudges us toward healing.

Man in Three Parts

We exist on three levels, Spirit, Soul, and Body. I go a lot more into this topic in my book, “On Becoming a Man.” I’ll also go into it a lot more in the upcoming book, “Walking the Path of the Postmodern Cleric.” In short, our spirit communes with God and drinks in the fullness of his Grace, but our soul is our willpower, emotions, and intelligence. It’s the level of our self-concept.

We often think of our soul as the deepest thing about us but that’s not true of the saved man or woman. It was true when our Spirit was dead (severed from God by sin). Back then our soul was the deepest thing about us, and we lived according to our own understanding of right and wrong.

While fallen, we became deeply wounded by the words and deeds of others. We built an identity for ourselves that worships our own intelligence or feels inferior to everyone because of our failures. Our daily actions were based on our scar tissue (experience) instead of real wisdom.

But as saved/born again/redeemed children of God our Spirit is restored. God has a spirit, yes, but so do we.

Our fallen nature/separation from God plays out a little differently on each level of our being. (To get a better explanation of this consider Psalms 32:5)

• Sin
• Iniquity
• Transgression

Definitions of Sin include:

• Galatians 5:17 Doing the opposite of what’s right.
• Proverbs 24: 33-34 Doing what turns out to be wrong.
• James 4:17 Failing to do what you know is right.
• Exodus 10:16 Sin against another person, not just God.
• Romans 3:23 Ultimately it’s just falling short of God’s Glory.

Transgression is:

Transgression can be thought of as willful trespass. There’s a decision to do wrong. Still, we could have a reason. We can disobey an authority we believe has ordered us to do something immoral. We are deliberately in violation, but not necessarily trying to be evil. Like running a stop sign in a parking lot when there is no other car around to be harmed.

Then there’s Iniquity!

When David plotted to kill Uriah the Hittite in order to take his wife, the Bible describes this as iniquity. David calls it that himself when he writes his prayer of repentance (Psalm 51:2). He indulged in his lust for a woman married to a friend, plotted the man’s death, (it took two tries to make it happen) then he takes her as his own and doesn’t even repent it until he’s called out for it all by a prophet. That’s a whole chain of wrong!

A Symptom of Separation

Sin, for all the hype, isn’t even the deepest crime against God; it’s just a symptom. One reason the scriptures might make this distinction is that the problems occur at different levels.

Ask the world about levels of sin and you’ll get distinctions like it’s worse to do something that hurts another person than what hurts only you. Or, it’s less sinful to envy what someone’s got than to actually steal it.

Institutional Christianity also spends a lot of energy on what I call, “sin management.” Some sins get labeled redeemable and others, like pedophilia, are so terrible that you must be put out of fellowship.

3 Levels of Sin/3 Levels of Human, Coincidence?

I think sin levels match up to the different levels of a human. I used to have ringing in my ears. I went to the doctor and he said it was just a symptom of my hypertension. He gave me pills which treated that underlying disease, but he didn’t treat the real reason I had high blood pressure. The reality is that I had a high-stress job, I didn’t sleep well, I didn’t eat well and I seldom exercised.

Sin is a physical symptom of transgression, which is rooted in not knowing who we really are. We lack identity because we aren’t connected to God. That’s the root cause of all our issues.

The deepest place in us is the place of our spiritual connection to God and, when that informs how we see ourselves, it heals our soul. Then our physical actions (level 3) improve and eventually we steer a different course in our daily lives. It seems obvious, but when you think about it–we overcome sin from the inside out.

Am I Healed or Am I Forgiven?

It always drove me crazy that Jesus never drew a line between being forgiven and being healed. But there really isn’t a distinction. If you’re connected to God by accepting His forgiveness, then you just have to learn to accept His Love in every broken place until you become complete.

The path of the postmodern cleric is about walking with God, receiving his healing forgiveness, and becoming who we are designed to be. Then we’ll have abundance in our physical reality. The last part actually becomes less important to us as the inner reality grows, which is good because until Christ returns life will always have hardships.

So, “who is God trying to be for me,” is a pivotal question to pursue daily. The physical world is going to feel more real during a lot of this process. Things like pain–whether physical or emotional–tends to snap our attention back to physical reality. But staring at a wound doesn’t heal it, nor does ignoring it. What we can do is stand before God pointing at it and crying, “Daddy fix, Daddy it hurts.” We can take everything to God.

Comparisons

Adam and Eve had everything. As long as they looked at God they felt loved. When they shifted their focus to themselves they felt inadequate and pursued pain & darkness in order to gain equality. All it did was further open their eyes to their inadequacy. So they put on fig leaves to try to cover their own shame. Compared to God they were adequate, but who cares?

When the spies of Israel entered the Promised Land, ten of them compared themselves to the giants who inhabited the land. They saw themselves as inadequate, as insects. You can’t enter the Promised Land by seeing yourself compared to others, or even compared to God.

Where the Question Reverses

You enter the Promised Land when you receive your identity from who God says you are. Two spies who entered the Promised Land carried God’s presence with them. They existed in a state of grace where the work of delivering God’s gift to them was God’s problem. They saw the bounty God was trying to give them, not the boundaries between it and them. You can’t receive abundance from Christ by staring at what stands in your way. It takes grace. It takes KNOWING that God is trying to give you something from every perceived hardship.

Genisis assures us that God made Adam in His image (male and female he made them.) We are image bearers of God. The question, “who is God trying to be for me today,” becomes “how does God see Himself in me?” Every time a broken place is healed His image in us is further restored, and hardships have a way of revealing broken places. Places we’ve tried to heal our own problems.

Respond to every situation by asking God what He’s up to. Before you even start your day, God already knows what’s on the way: try asking Him what His plan is for you. Ask from a place of confidence that He’s partnering with you on your experiences. His goal is to shrink the holes in your soul so that you can experience more of His goodness in your life.

 

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Hearing God

So much has been written lately about hearing God, or maybe it just seems like it to me. I grew up in a denomination that was founded in part by a woman with prophetic gifts, yet the ability to hear God for yourself was never discussed. I feel like it had less do with disagreeing with it doctrinally and more about culturally discouraging lay people from doing any thinking for themselves. That’s probably harsh but honestly, that’s the spirit of institutionalism that’s grown like a cancer in organized churches today.

Regardless, there’s plenty of stuff out there that can teach you ways to hear God for yourself. I’ll include a few ideas here, but I don’t want to really pump it up as a thing, because I know how stressful it can be to try to hear God. It gets built up in our minds as this spiritual gift that you either have or don’t have. Like if you can’t hear God you’re a second class Christian. I want to avoid that at all costs.

As vital as it is that you stop having a faith journey based solely on second-hand information if you’re stressing about “hearing” God or “Prophetic” gifting, etc. then you’re missing the whole point of this book.

God is sovereign. He doesn’t pick one person to just never speak to. He doesn’t give or take away based on his opinion of you. He talks to everyone, sinner or saint. He gave dreams to Pharaoh (not a Christian). He wrote on the wall for Nebuchadnezzar (not a Christian).

Jesus, in person, dined with the IRS agents of his day, spoke to prostitutes, spoke to single non-Jewish women (which was taboo). Etc. Okay? God’s not going to single you out to be the one person He doesn’t want to communicate with.

So, ” why don’t I hear him?”

God likes to shake things up. He didn’t make eight billion people and then decide he’s only got one way to speak. He’s infinitely creative and likes to reach out to you in a way that you hear best. In fact, how God likes to communicate with you can speak to how He sees you which can be a big clue to your identity.

I’ll give you a list of things to try but go wild–use them all and anything else you can think of. Let’s start with the least controversial, and move out to the fringe.

1. He can speak through scripture. He loves to make verses come alive, but he’ll often have other ways to get you a message.
2. He can speak through other people. I’ve almost never had a message from other people or given a message to other people, but I know it happens.
3. Sometimes you’ll see something and God will unpack it for you. Like a stop sign or a boulder. I know a man who looks at pictures and then God asks what that picture means to him. He writes down his answer on the back of the picture and later that day God will tell him someone who needs that message.
4. It could a vision. I’ve had full-on visions, but not very many. A picture is worth a thousand words and sometimes God likes to fill in the blanks with a picture rather than chat at you all day.
   So I don’t get visions that establish my new doctrine to teach others, but maybe someone else does. I tend to get visions that fill in my own understanding. For example, I’ve seen Eve. I’ve seen the most beautiful woman ever, naked, and had zero attraction to her. (That’s a topic for a blog post. Back to this topic.)
5. Sometimes God speaks through miracles. I’ve had a sickness vanish when I asked God if He was listening. I tried it again when I had the flu and it didn’t work.
   Sometimes place matters: He once told Gideon to “go down into the enemy camp,” to hear a word. Then God gave one of their enemies a dream with the answer.
6. Which reminds me, He uses dreams. If you do find that God consistently likes to connect someplace make a practice of going there. I’ve got one friend who hears God best in the bathtub. He’s a grown man, ex-military, not prone to taking full-on baths, but…anyway he takes a lot of baths these days.
   For me, it’s driving, or hiking. Or right before I fall asleep, or when I’ve just woken up.

I honed my prophetic talents by attending a “school of prophecy.” There I learned to think about someone and then craft a prayer uniquely for them. It was amazing. I’d start to write someone a blessing and I’d hear God prompt me with information I wouldn’t have known otherwise.

This is a good time to remember that we must align our hearts with God when engaging in a prophecy. God is never condemning and often the first thing you hear about someone is so that you’ll empathize with them, not so you’ll judge them.

As Graham Cooke says, “don’t prophecy the problem. God doesn’t call out our sin, what he sees in us has no sin in it.”

Perhaps the most telling Bible story about hearing God is is when Elijah heard God in a “still, small voice.” Everyone I’ve spoken to about the topic agrees that God is seldom boisterous. The level of electronic interference, distraction, and busyness we allow in our lives these days is insane.

I’ve read recently that cell phones are increasing our stress exponentially. I read it on my cell phone.

So get out into nature, turn your phone off, and just listen.

Journaling. It sounds counter-intuitive, but God likes to look over my shoulder when I’m writing the jumbled thoughts from my brain and then comment in response. Not sure why, but if I have to do handstands to get access to the comfort, encouragement, and wisdom of God I’ll do it.

Oh! One last thing.

This is an inadequate list. I could write all day. You’re free to look up the topic and get other books about it, but honestly, it’s not about what you know.

Don’t worry about your imagination either. God’s reality is so much bigger than your imagination. God will say things that are too good to be true, don’t weed that out. Just practice listening and expecting that God is more likely to communicate with you than your spouse is. Okay? That’s how much He wants to connect!

One last thing. 80% of what God speaks to me isn’t about other people, or his will for the future, or anything from my past. It’s about who I am. He calls me his Cleric. He calls me a righteous man. He calls me strong and wise. So stop stressing and start listening!

P.S. Perhaps the best book I’ve found on the topic of hearing God is, “Hearing God in Conversation,” by Sam Williamson. (http://beliefsoftheheart.com/)

 

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Expected update 4/19/2018

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The Actual Work of Healing:

One of the best resources I’ve come across is called the “Father’s Love Letter,” (http://www.fathersloveletter.com/). It’s really good. I had a different recording speak to me along these lines, but I don’t think you’ll be able to find it. Perhaps God will provide you a unique message of your own. Maybe not a recording at all, but this is my story.

My Story:

The church I attended was hosting a school of prophecy by Graham Cooke. I was pretty hard up for cash but wanted to go. The guy doing AV was also recording the event so that it could be sold to participants on the final day. He paid an assistant to help at the show and I was lucky enough to be picked to help so I ended up making money and attending.

It was a great event and at the end, the A/V guy pulled me aside and said he felt lead to give me a recording from an event that Graham had spoken at earlier that year. He made me promise if he gave it to me free I’d listen to it. I promised I would, and I did.

I listened to that recording, repeatedly. I decided I’d listen to it every night for a month so that it would become a part of me. I ended up listening to it every night for a year.

I’m not a personality type who does that. I’ve seen a couple movies more than once, but mainly I do not redo things. [Friends have asked if I reread a book because I could quote a line from it and even know what chapter it came from, and I always say the same thing, “I’m a slow reader and the more I like something the more I take my time with it. So I generally don’t need to reread something to be able to quote it any time in the next couple years.”]

I was obsessed with this recording, and I’d never heard anything like it. Graham spoke prophetically over the audience of that event while music played in the background. I’d done some “soaking” in God’s presence to worship music before, but this is the first and only time I heard someone speak God’s heart while I’m in such a state of worship.

I can’t explain why it worked so powerfully on me, but God knew it was the exact thing that would reach me.

I’ll discuss hearing God in more depth in the next chapter, but if you’re from a more conservative background (which I was) don’t be scared off by words like Prophecy. It just means hearing God on someone else’s behalf.

Prophesy: It just means hearing God on someone else’s behalf.

See God is very relational, so he likes to give people messages for each other. He’s not above giving you a word for a stranger or even an enemy.

The big thing here, and I mean critical, is that the person speaking must align their heart with God, with all they’ve got, before speaking it to the person it’s meant for.

Even in our flesh, we have some discernment. It’s rather easy to see what’s wrong with another person. It doesn’t take God’s divine power for you, or me, to have an opinion about what a brother or sister ought to do or avoid doing.

When we hear God for someone else we do get a window deeper into their circumstance. That’s not to make us feel vindicated about our assumptions, it’s so we’ll have empathy when we speak with them. A lot of damage has been done in the name of God, just by telling people what they already know—how screwed up they are.

Stop and think about it. You know when you did something bad. God knows about it too, and you’re aware that He does. Do you need a third party walking up and saying, hey God told me you did this bad thing and you’d better knock it off?

Would that bless you? No, not me either.

Our Healing Begins with a Restored Picture of God:

God’s character is demonstrated in a lot of scripture (I especially like 1 Corinthians 13:4-8), but we actually don’t need to know anything beyond the fact that he gave up his son, and his son willingly died, in order for us to be restored. That’s Character! It also demonstrates how he feels about us.

This is the crux of the entire debate, isn’t it? Did God bail us out begrudgingly? I mean we believe all sorts of things about redemption that are ludicrous when spoken out loud. Crucifixion is a terrible way to go, a father who lets his son die that way either doesn’t care or is cruel himself, right? Did God save us so that one day he could personally shake his finger in our faces? Did he really let something like that happen from apathy or anger?

The scriptures are clear on this. While we were yet his enemies Christ died for us. (Romans 5:8).

The point I’m driving at here is that we struggle to understand God. His ways are above our ways like the stars in the sky (Isaiah 55:8-9). If you read the accounts of Jesus on earth you’ve probably been struck by how far out of step Jesus was with the culture of the day. People are people and they haven’t changed that much.

God’s character is different than the people around us. He’s the King of kings and his Kingdom runs differently than the world. So as long as we’re imagining God as some idealized version of man we’re utterly failing to grasp what He’s like.

We can’t really understand the cross unless we can grasp His character and we can’t appreciate it personally until we have a personal relationship with God.

I was raised a Christian and for ages, my connection to the cross went like this: some ancestor of mine screwed up and the highest authority of the universe had to suffer to set it right, but it was pretty much his responsibility and he bounced right back in three days so…

I can tell you that if that’s your personal connection to the cross then the power of God to work in your life right now is limited.

Now I’m not saying you aren’t saved. God pretty much idiot proofed salvation, but being forgiven and living like it’s your reality are different things. In Luke 13:27 we see many people on the Day of Judgment saying they did things in His name and God saying, but I don’t know you.

Do you want to squeak into heaven eventually or do you want to have your life right now transformed by abundance?

So who is God? What’s He like?

Well, there’s no way for me or anyone to write something here that will reach past your brain and connect adequately with your heart. I can give you my answer, and I can give you what the Bible says about him and hope it might inspire you.

Ultimately, you’re going to have to have your own encounter and build your own thing. Maybe you already have. Even then, there’s always room for expanding.

So I’ll close with who God is for me and what the bible says about him for you to meditate on, or help you take a few first steps.

I recommend you get away to the wild, or the sea, and seek him for yourself. It’s not going to be a short thing. In my experience, it takes three days just to shed your life at home (obligations, family, job thoughts, etc.). So plan it.

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What the Bible says about God’s character…

1 John 4:8 Whoever does not love does not know God, because God is love.

1 Cor 13:4-7. Love is patient, love is kind. It does not envy, it does not boast, it is not proud. It does not dishonor others, it is not self-seeking, it is not easily angered, it keeps no record of wrongs. Love does not delight in evil but rejoices with the truth. It always protects, always trusts, always hopes, always perseveres.

Galatians 5:22-23 But the fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace, forbearance, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness and self-control. Against such things, there is no law.

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The God I know…

God has been irreverent with me. He’s been clear in what He says even if I don’t know what it means initially. Without losing his Kindness, he’s quite blunt. It comes off as honest and without guile. He’s utterly confident and consistently positive. I’ve never known Him to be curt with me, concise yes, but not as though He’s losing patience.

He’s often over the top. Expect Him to say things that are too good to be true. We suffer from black and white thinking, (so do demons by the way); God is super creative and when presented with Option A or Option B questions He’ll suggest Option W. To that point, I used to get frustrated at His silence, but now I expect it when I’m asking illegitimate questions. He doesn’t bother answering trap questions even when we don’t realize that’s what we’ve asked. When He does answer them it’s with a question in return.

For example, if you ask God why He hates you, he’ll probably not answer because He doesn’t hate you. Instead, He’ll ask, “how you’re feeling.” This can be aggravating–like he’s changing the subject. Answer him. When you do, expect more questions like, “why do you feel hated?” Then, “do you think I’m doing that to you?” At some point, you’ll start to feel silly, like when He asks, “do you really think I’d spend the last 20 minutes talking with someone I hate?”

God is the only person I know who gets angry without losing control. He might say, “I’m angry right now with you, beloved. You are carrying around grief and you won’t talk to me about it. You think you need to handle it before we talk so I don’t find out about it. Like I’ll see it as a character flaw in you. I’ve wanted to tell you that I’m the cure for your grief but you avoid Me because you’re embarrassed. We’re closer than that. I don’t care what it is, we handle these things together. Only your will can keep us apart, nothing you do or fail to do can keep us apart. I died so that there is no shame between us.”

That’s a window into the God I know.

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How to plan your encounter: set aside four days to a week by yourself with as little electronic connection as possible.

• Bring a bible & journal book/pens, maybe a book like “Wild at Heart.”
• Try to pack your own food or consider fasting.
• Most importantly, expect God to speak to you because he wants to and actively does.
• Read the next chapter for a lot more great advice on hearing God for yourself.

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THE Church

The first reason we don’t trust God or like God is because Religion told us not to.

Remember the chickens in the box. Well, Christianity is meant to be a personal relationship with God. It’s not about how you practice it, although you will have certain traditions pop up.

For example, I like to walk and talk with God. I call it ponder walking. It works for me and I recommend it to everyone I run into.

When a group of people starts to live out their faith-walk together–there’s a drive to create agreement. They have “their way” they do what they do–which they may not even be conscious of–and they gravitate toward people who use similar practices. I’m really okay with personal choice, and I believe God is gracious in this area, but I don’t believe that it reflects his heart for people in living in community.

I think God meant family to represent community. I think one of the biggest disservices we’ve done to the world, Christian or non-Christian, is creating the label Church instead of translating it as “the people’ or ‘congregation.’

A lot of authors have tackled this topic, far better than I could do it here. Look up Frank Viola, “Redeeming the Wine Skin,” or anything else he wrote (http://frankviola.net/). Look up what George Barna has been writing lately (https://www.barna.com/), it’s really compelling.

We’re meant to have unique ways of shining God’s light into the world. The gifts of the spirit don’t manifest the same in everyone and that’s by design. God doesn’t do anything by accident. We’re meant to have discussions about our differences and be gracious with each other. We’re meant to pull in so tight that the rough spots on us poke each other and cause relationship to happen. Some people are harder to love and, guess what, you need to ask God for more love for them.

Instead, we have a church policy and procedures manual. It’s a big turn off for most people. You don’t get to volunteer to be something that God put you on earth to do unless it fits criteria for which church leadership is looking. Want to lead song service? Great! Want to teach orphans to fly fish? Well, we don’t do that sort of thing here.

If I become influential, someday there will be a club of Christians who’ll believe that the path to Heaven is found from walking at least 100 miles a year while asking for guidance. They’ll have forgotten that my purpose in Ponder Walking is to hear from God. Like so many other Christians they’ll have forgotten you actually do hear from God at all because he might say something they disagree with.

You think I’m kidding? Wait, and see.

God–Twice Removed:

My point here is that we look around at the way people are doing Christianity and we interpret what God must be like from that.

Imagine that your going to have an arranged marriage. Your dad works it out with your neighbor. Then they work to be sure you never actually get to meet your wife. Then you meet briefly for the ceremony, but before the honeymoon you’re torn apart again, and you only find out about each other through letters your dads write each other.

Sounds ridiculous, but that is the Christian journey for most of us. One brief encounter with someone we’ve heard about, but don’t know. Just enough firsthand experience to think this might actually be the answer to the longing in your heart, then poof, your intermediaries step in and regulate the relationship again. It’s not what God wants. We must stop blaming him for it.

Agreements–Your Personal Deal with the Devil

The second reason we don’t trust God is our agreements.

One of my mentors, although he’s never met me and doesn’t have a clue I exist, is John Eldredge.

When my father died in 2003 and the roof was torn from my world, a friend from high school gave me a copy of “Wild at Heart.” It was an amazing book that I read straight through at least twice back to back. I highlighted the thing with two different colors. I absorbed that book and I attended a weekend “boot camp” based on it. It was a phenomenal experience that I recommend to any man whatever stage you’re at in life, but especially if you are in a place of searching and ready for a change.

Eldredge handles a set of topics he calls wounds and agreements. He does it well, and I recommend you read that book and attend a boot camp for yourself to dive deeper into your wounds and agreements. However, I’m going to spend more time here dealing with the impact of agreements and where it fits into the scheme of your life. I provide only a brief synopsis of the concept of wound/agreement topic below for convenient reference.

Wounds: There isn’t much room to argue about the fact that we are all impacted by the words and deeds of others as we develop into adulthood. When mentors, parents, teachers and even peers say things that hit us at a deep heart level, those can be wounds to our understanding of our spiritual identity. That mainly results from the agreements we make in trying to deal with the pain of the wound.

Agreements: We respond to the wound by embracing, rejecting, or both. There’s some controversy among Christian denominations about the impact of Satan and his minions. Eldredge takes a balanced approach and I’ve come to adopt a similar outlook. We can’t give the enemy credit for every bad thing that happens to us, but we can’t pretend like there isn’t a bad guy in our story. The reality is that dark forces come alongside you when something awful has happened and they try to help you interpret what it means. The degree to which you adopt their view of it is the degree to which you come into agreement with an outlook that isn’t God’s. More on this in a moment.

Theme: Finding your wounds tends to be a process. God will lead and mentor you through it, but when we do summon the courage to go looking for wounds we often uncover later wounds first and then stop looking. Wounds must be unearthed a layer at a time–tracing them back to similar wounds at a younger and younger age. You’ll find there is a theme to your wounds.

Most likely, there were people who said or did terrible things to you in your life, but the punches that landed were the ones that lined up with a certain theme.

The enemy seems to be able to read the unique purpose and gifting that God intends for you and he spends most of your life trying to derail that. He can’t allow you to become who you were born to be. So he has spent your entire life trying to substitute his own narrative. In the Kingdom, every problem is a set of stairs to climb to the next level. The enemy wants you to view it as a tsunami wave, overwhelming and cruel.

Some people are completely taken out by this war for their identity. It can easily lead to a mental illness that causes you to spend the rest of your life in therapy or on medication for the trauma. (I’m not saying that’s a ‘game over’ thing, nor am I saying that it’s a small thing. I’m just saying that, if he can keep you staring at yourself because of the pain, you won’t function for the Kingdom of God.)

Flesh: Self-preservation causes most of us to stop the bleeding from our heart wounds. That doesn’t mean that the wound isn’t properly healed. It gets covered in ugly scar tissue. All that scar tissue surrounding your heart acts like a shroud between the presence of God in your life and the life circumstances you encounter.

That’s the flesh. When we end up living from our flesh it distorts the glory of God we’re reflecting into the world.

Signs we’re living out of the flesh include:

• Fear based decision making causes us to lower the bar and stop trying if we’re not likely to succeed.
• Anxiety attacks because we must salve our problems in our own strength.
• We over celebrate areas of victory to hide inadequacies. Example, a husband works 50 hours a week to provide well for a family, who never get to see him.

However it plays out, scar tissue is not a sign of a healed wound. Just because you’re not hemorrhaging blood from a wound doesn’t mean it’s not impacting your life. When God fixes something, its as good as new.

Healing: God wants to heal your wounds perfectly. That involves restoring your true identity, which means restoring His image in you. It’s a process. A journey which you must take with God.

But how can we take a journey of healing with a God we don’t like or trust?

This is why Primacy of God comes first. We must find our own answer to our questions about God like, “Does God love me even though…” or “Can I trust God when…”

It’s easy to put off dealing with these questions when we have a formal church organization telling us “right from wrong,” but I urge you to have your own connection place to God. That’s going to be a vital prerequisite to living abundantly.

As Promised–Back to Agreements

Religious Agreements: One final thought combining religion and agreements. The dreaded religious agreement. These are false philosophies that work there way into the informal church culture.

Here are some examples:

• The Lord helps those who help themselves #notinthebibleanywhere,
• God will never give me something that I can’t handle #BS.
• God doesn’t speak to people directly anymore #getthebehindmesatan.
• I just need to keep reading the scriptures because all the answers are in there…

I know that last one pissed off at least some of you. So let’s look at these briefly.

God does want us to be the decision-makers in our lives. We steer the ship of our daily lives, but He wants to be there with us–guiding us–like a dad showing his teenager how to drive.

BTW, God’s goal is to give you more than you can handle. 1 Corinthians 10:13 is misquoted more often than not. God wants a relationship with you. Verse 13 continues on to say, “He will also provide a way out…” How can you ever grow as a person if you don’t take on things that you need his help to do? It’s a critical factor in entering the Promised Land.

God speaks to us in many different ways. He didn’t stop speaking to man directly at some point in history. If God put all the answers in the Bible and intended to only communicate that way then why does nothing in the Bible say that?

And the one that probably angered you most…

When I left the particular denomination that I grew up in, every time I read the Bible I heard their way of reading it. It’s a lot like brainwashing. I wasn’t in a cult, but I’d grown up listening to them tell me what all these verses meant. I couldn’t shake their interpretation.

So, I had to step back from the scriptures and listen to a variety of mentors for a year. I call this my reboot phase when I was recalibrating my filter of the Gospel. I was blessed to have mentors who wanted to point to Christ and actually wanted me to learn to hear God for myself. I ended up experiencing a creative variety of ways in which the Lord can, and does, direct me. As a result of my reboot phase, I returned to the scriptures with a renewed filter.

Does God ever contradict the Scriptures? No, but our understanding of the scriptures often needs to grow.

 

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An interesting side note here, which will help you if you have heartburn with anyone saying don’t go to the scriptures when listening to the “voices” in your head.

I absolutely encourage checking everything you “hear” against the scriptures. However, I count on grace, a lot. We have permission to make mistakes. It’s almost more dangerous to believe that our theology is so sound that it protects us from leading someone astray.

We all share the Gospel we know, intentionally or not. You can’t give anyone a word from the Lord that’s accurate unless you first take a moment to align your heart with the heart of God, and you can’t share a God you’ve never met.

So, to the degree you’re still learning who God is, that’s the ceiling on your accuracy. And guess what, we’re all still learning who God is. Too many of the “authorized” evangelists share a Gospel that doesn’t really reflect God’s heart.

For example, all the brimstone crowd scaring people to Christ. Perfect love casts out fear. The fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom. It’s okay to realize fear at your place outside grace and repent, but it’s become a go-to technique to scare sinners straight. All those sinners need love more than fear, and they’ll respond to love even better.

Arguments about superior doctrines aren’t God’s heart either. Even when a congregation is actually right it doesn’t bless the Kingdom unless their individual and corporate relationship with Christ remains more important than that truth. Time and again I see religions circling the truth God gave them and making it the central point of life. It’s a congregational disease Frank Viola calls Koinoniaitus. When we’re all in one spirit because we agree with each other, not because we all rely on grace from God through Christ Jesus. Either way, when it comes to sharing your Gospel, the light of truth only matters when people think you give a rip.

________

Okay, one more quick anecdote, in case the above doesn’t quite cut it. On the subject of exercising your prophetic muscles to hear God’s voice, one of my mentors recommended asking God for an “inheritance word.” It’s a verse or something that’s true about me in Christ, which God wants to unpack with me so that I can begin to see myself through his eyes.

During that time period, I was single and deeply steeped in a masculine gospel. For the first time in my life, Christianity wasn’t in conflict with the design of God for me as a man like every other version of churchianity I’d grown up with.

So I prayed hard that God would guide me and I opened the bible to Ruth.

I tried again and again, and each time I got Ruth.

I said to God, “REALLY?” I felt him gently confirm to me that he wanted to spend time with me in Ruth. The whole book! One of only two books in the whole bible that’s named after a woman.

I hadn’t spent much time in the scriptures for almost a year and now I’m going to read Ruth. But, I did it. I read it three times.

Aaand, it didn’t do a whole lot for me so I bought a more transliterated version of the scriptures.

I strongly recommend reading things in a variety of translations because they have different strengths.

• NRSV = word translated,
• The Message = thought translated, (opposite end of the spectrum)
• NIV = a great balanced approach for daily reading.
• KJV = My favorite for memorizing, but I love Shakespeare so, that’s just me.

The NRSV made it pop.

I came to realize that Boaz had been burnt by a woman before. Loyalty was a big turn on for him. He “heard about” Ruth because of her faithfulness to her mother-in-law. He secretly wanted a chance to meet her. He began providing for her by proxy, instructing his servants to leave piles of grain for her. It progressed to a point where, even though all his workers are sort of eating lunch together, she’s the one sharing his bench and dipping her bread in his bowl. He’s putting himself in her situation with both feet and her savvy Jewish mother-in-law, Naomi, spots it in a heartbeat.

What happens next is one of the most perplexing things in a Bible full of conundrums. It’s harvest and everyone gets drunk and sleeps in the field. She sleeps by him. There’s a cultural barrier to our understanding here so it always baffled me, but here’s what I learned reading it over and over.

She forced his hand by making herself vulnerable. She put herself in a place where he could choose to be a bad guy without fear of blame in the eyes of society or he could choose to be a good guy and step up. Her vulnerability called out his masculinity.

This is not a message that sits well with modern women. They’re told to be self-reliant, savvy, independent, and well, “macho.”

Suddenly, God opened my eyes to hundred shining, gem-like, facets to romantic relationships. AND:

• That strength and being impervious were not the same thing.
• That two people falling in love can bring out the best in each other.
• That societies conventions don’t always establish the best course of action and sometimes following our hearts–or God’s heart–will require personal risk.

From that time forward the Scriptures came alive for me in Technicolor, and it began with fasting from reading them.

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There’s a group called the “Red Letter Christians” and one of their beliefs is that you should get a version of the bible where every time Christ speaks it’s printed in red. They suggest reading only the red letters for the first couple years that you’re a Christian, in order to give you a better perspective to read the rest of the Bible. It’s an interesting idea and it would probably have worked to reboot my filter better than relying entirely on second-hand inspiration. But in the end, I encourage everyone to rely on grace and stop fretting the doctrinal minutia.

_______

P.S. If you’re interested in attending a boot camp based on Wild at Heart look up Ransomed Heart Ministries to find a list of them. If you’re in the Pacific Northwest I can personally recommend Boot Camp NW at BootCampNW.org.

 

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So, a quick recap; All good things come from God. Jesus promised abundant life and, as we’ll soon get into, the character of God is to be over the top generous. The flow intended by God is to give us good things so that we can be transformed by them, by the renewing of the mind, and so that we’ll overflow with these things into the world around us, this is often called reflecting his glory into the world.

Chapter 4

While we had to deal with pride/humility first because they blind us to the other constraints, by far the biggest reason we don’t receive the good from God is that we doubt His heart toward us. There’s a two-prong approach to changing your beliefs about how God views you.

We’ll need to examine the two big reasons we doubt God’s heart for us, and then we’ll deal with healing our view of God. However, before I go there I want to address the concerns of those who are thinking, “but I don’t doubt that God is good, so I can skip this chapter and move on.”

If you were raised as a Christian like I was, it’s pretty easy to accept that God is perfect as a religious fundamental belief. Even if you’re new to Christianity it’s pretty obvious that we all believe our God isn’t flawed like the gods of other religions.

Not that I’m slamming those other religions, but take the ancient Greeks for example. They had a pantheon full of immature, but ultra-powerful beings that were hard to look up to. They were often petty and lustful. If nothing else, this served the purpose of explaining why your fate might be fickle. By claiming our God is perfect Christians open ourselves up to a lot of doubt when things don’t turn out the way we think they should.

What do we make of stories in the bible? Take Daniel in the lion den. He survived, as a miracle, but what if he’d been eaten? Would that mean that God didn’t like him?

This is the real reason for such a lofty title for this book as, “THE PRIMACY OF GOD!” There’re three aspects to putting God first:

1. Understanding how to receive good from God in order to receive our identity from Him.
2. Learning ways to put God first in our lives.
3. Accepting God’s perfection and authority as a basis for our faith.

Chronologically, we’ll cover the second point last in this chapter, because the third point is the most pivotal.

It’s pretty easy to accept God is all powerful, all knowing, and ever-present as a religious doctrine. It’s not so easy to believe that he loves me personally when things don’t go as I thought they would. The Bible assures me that God is love (1 John 4:8), yet sometimes I don’t see what He does as very loving. How does he allow cancer, or a baby born with a birth defect?

I can’t answer those questions. There are other, wiser men than I who have better answers for them. I only have this answer.

Until the question of God’s authority in your life is a settled issue you’ll be like a rudderless ship.

When we accept that God is perfect and all powerful, that he knows the end from the beginning, then we have to follow a certain chain of logic.

• He knew man would fall before he made us. He decided to deal with the fall of man by sacrificing His own son in our place…again, before he made us.
• Jesus knew every sin you’d ever commit before he came as a baby.
• God understands suffering because he walks every path with every one of us every day.
• God is not surprised by your sin, in fact, the purpose of confessing our sin to him is so that we might have a changed heart about it–not so he knows them.
• That sin isn’t even an issue with God, it’s just a symptom of the separation between He and I.

We can go deeper into this when we deal with healing our understanding of how God sees us, but for now, let’s accept that God is not an angry faraway person. That because of the work of Christ, which was the plan all along, God’s perfection and my imperfection don’t create the rift between us—unless I believe that it does.

In order to let God be God in our lives, we have to forgive him as much as be forgiven by Him. The idea of forgiving God is antithetical to religion, but it’s vital to relationship. Every single human being I’ve ever met has a beef with God about something, even if it’s just the fact that sin exists. We’ve got a lot of book left and things will be easier to accept once we’ve taken a better look at God’s character, but if you want a shortcut through this material, just accept that God knows what he’s doing and stop limiting His work in your life to only those things you understand and agree with. By the time you’ve finished reading this book, I pray that you’ll be ready to let God be God.

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The Question of God’s Goodness

You may have noticed that I don’t differentiate between God’s power and His goodness. I have a whole section on God’s goodness coming up, but, for the left-brained among us, here’s a quick paragraph.

Good and bad are generally relative terms. What’s good for me is good and what’s bad for me is bad. I’m not personally a big fan of any kind of moral relativism, but in this case, it’s true. If you’re all powerful then what you say is good/bad becomes the standard for anyone else who isn’t all powerful, which is everyone. If you are all-knowing then you know what is Good/Evil and can choose to abide by it or not. Therefore, if you are both you need only decide if you’re selfish or selfless. Will you act in your own self-interest or will you uphold a universal right/wrong even if it causes you harm? If you are all powerful then you can accomplish your desires despite any constraints, so why would you violate the right/wrong standard?

This dips a little bit into those unanswerable questions like, can God make a rock so big that He can’t lift it? Except, that in this case, we have an example that gives us an answer. Sin. So many people are angry at God because of the wages of sin when in fact the fall of mankind proves that God doesn’t force anyone to behave. The fact that He created humans knowing we’d fall speaks to His character also.

He’s willing to sacrifice himself, heroically, to restore things to what he intended. He doesn’t have to avoid making humans, because he has a solution. All knowing combined with all-powerful equals always accomplishing goals. Therefore, God has no motive to be anything but good because abiding by any laws doesn’t prevent him from doing or having anything. It does, however, cause him pain. He suffered to restore us because He loves us, and therefore He’s selfless. Therefore He is good.

_________

In reality, we can stop worrying about questions like why God allows wars and diseases. The bigger issues we suffer from are actually the smaller, more personal questions, like does God care about me in this or that place of my heart.

• Does He care if I get a better job?
• Does He care if I ever get married?
• Is He at all concerned with my weight problem?

People say they’ll never believe in God because children die of cancer, but what they really mean is, I’m angry because my dad died.

Let’s face it, most Christians have come to terms with the fact that God doesn’t prevent evil people from causing pain to others even when they’re Christians. He seems to intervene sometimes and not others. Are the people in third world nations just on God’s crap list? I say, no. And for the same reason God wasn’t playing favorites when he saved your uncle and not your dad. I’ll explain in a second.

Another place we struggle is where it comes down to things we feel like we ought to be able to influence and yet we’re somehow never able to find victory. Why can’t I pay off debt, get pregnant, fix my marriage, find a mate, and on and on?

Is God actually withholding these from me?

The answer is mind blowing—God knows what He’s doing.

I’m going to blow your mind a little further and remind you that everything is meant for our good. Why the hell am I suffering if an all-powerful God is trying to bless me? Because God knows what He’s doing!

Edited this far

A Closer Look:

More specifically there are two reasons for our struggle. First, the stoic reality is that this world is full of sin, we’re in the process of dying, nothing will ever be perfect. Second God’s blessing often comes in the form of redemption. He takes what was meant for evil against us and profits us (Gen 45).

If we try to figure out if God is good, or powerful enough to fix things, based on what we see around us we’ll come to all sorts of conclusions. If we start from a place a faith and accept that God loves us perfectly, and uses everything we’re going through to bring about the perfect answer for us, then we begin to see new opportunities in even the worst scenarios.

Like Superstitious Chickens:

B. F. Skinner was a behavioral psychologist. He created what is now called the “Skinner Box.” It’s a box with four shoots through which chicken food pellets might enter the box. He put chickens in the box and observed them, quickly learn when and where to expect food. When he randomized when/which shoot the food would come from, each chicken came up with its own explanation. Some only turned left when pecking, some stood for long periods on one foot. They became superstitious.

We do the same thing. We associate some things with certain results and we interpret them with all the accuracy of an ancient priest reading the entrails of a cow. Sorry for the imagery, but I do want to make a point. The only way to get an accurate picture of what’s going on and why is to ask one of the humans outside the box. In order to do that you’d have to realize that you are a chicken in a box and believe that humans are behind it all.

See we’ve got the cart before the horse most of the time. You must believe in God first and then you’ll find answers. That’s the Primacy of God. Not because God’s mean, or holding out on you, but because we lack the perspective to see what’s going on.

It’s a Process, not a Snapshot:

Here’s how Graham Cooke explains the process. In every circumstance, there is a promise, if we look around for it. Sometimes it’s just that God is moving in a different spirit than we’re perceiving. When we focus on our standing in Christ instead of our circumstance we can claim the promise and look for provision–God’s solution to things.

Ultimately, no matter how bad it gets we’ll come to a place where we’re thankful for it. We can claim a pearl from it.

Life will exact a high price from you, regardless of your belief system, but if you accept and believe that God is good and He loves you perfectly, you have the opportunity to have your hardships redeemed.

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Chapter 3

Of course, there’s more to developing our relationship with God than just, learning humility. When God talks about Christian development in the Bible he uses metaphors about construction or farming. My favorite is John 15:5, “I am the vine and ye are the branches.”

One of my mentors, Mike Galeotti, combined this verse with Isaiah 53:5 “by his stripes we are healed.” Pointing out that we are like orphaned branches, cut off from God by our sin. Christ is like a perfectly good tree that is cut in order to graft in a branch from another tree. By Christ’s wounds, we are grafted back into the family of God.

The path of the postmodern cleric is all about being a conduit for God’s glory. Taking the nutrients that God provides, being changed by them, and ultimately handing them off to others as fruits from our branches.

Here’s the metaphor as I see it. We are like a tree with branches, leaves, etc. Even a trunk, but not roots. Our roots are now in Christ where we are grafted back into God.

Our identity, by the way, that happens in the trunk. We can’t know who we are without being grafted. The other option is lying on the ground dying. Then your identity is more like a rock in a stream that used to be part of a big boulder. Sure we can use a name and characteristics to distinguish it from other types of rocks, but its still not a living object and it doesn’t have an identity. Your identity is about how you will shine God’s glory.

To do that you must receive it, that’s why Primacy comes first. If there’s no water coming out of your garden hose, first make sure the hose is turned on and the right hose is hooked up.

The next book, about identity, will cover how the good from God transforms you. That’s all about the wilderness. We actually can glorify the Kingdom before we know who we are, but the process is much more rewarding after we find our unique identity.

God desires to be worshiped in Spirit and in truth (John 4:24). That means knowing yourself and being present to God as you are. By the way, in order to see yourself clearly, you’re going to need humility. It boggles the mind, huh?

The focus of the rest of this book will be on the constraints which hamper our ability to receive what God is handing us. You’ve already been exposed to the first constraint, pride, and in the appendix, you’ll get a better look at it.

But wait! Shame

We can’t leave the topic of humility without discussing shame. It’s pride that causes shame, not humility. That’s sure not what we grow up believing, huh?

God never shames us. In fact, he wants to shine his Glory out through us uniquely. Can he shine his own glory without us, sure, but we actually dream of doing this for God. In book two we’ll discuss this concept further, but for now, the short explanation is that bears like being bears and eagles like being eagles. There’s a great joy in simply being who you were meant to be. Most of our feelings of shame come from being a bear who believes in order to matter he must fly, or worse an eagle that believes in order to be happy he must be safe and that means he must never fly. To make it worse, we’re often motivated by fear of something that may not even happen. But more on that in book 2.

Shame is rooted in pride. When pride informs our expectations, our vision of who we are and what we want is skewed. So first, pride skews what we think we deserve by marring our vision of ourselves and the world around us and our relationship to God. Then pride lands on our failure to get what we think we deserve with a shame attack that says we didn’t try hard enough, or maybe God doesn’t love us as much as we love ourselves, or he’s holding out on us, etc.

Shame in Men & Women

As men, it generally comes down to feeling inadequate. We respond to not getting what we want by agreeing with Satan that we aren’t enough, that we don’t have what it takes.

As a response, because pride tells us we’re on our own to fix it, we lower the bar and try for less. Or sometimes we simply stop doing things at which we might fail. Without really saying it aloud we accept twisted ideas like–if I make enough money it won’t matter that my wife cries herself to sleep every night.

How can we enter a promised land—where we can’t go in our own strength—if we’re on our own to fix our situation?

Pride takes a different course with women, but it still blinds them. When women feel like they aren’t getting what they deserve they often feel like they are too much. They are demanding more from the people in their lives than those people want to give them, and that means they aren’t loved as much as they thought they were. They stop seeing the signs around them that they are loved.

The truth is that your situation isn’t anything compared to your standing in Christ. If God is working all things to your benefit (Romans 8:28) then your circumstances can never be bad. That’s another book entirely (written by my mentor, Graham Cooke).

I know we’re covering a lot of territory in this chapter. I’ll bring it back full circle before the chapter ends.

Rough Situations Happen

Sometimes our situations are serious. When someone dies, you need to grieve. We can’t live in denial of the pain around us. Living from your standing in Christ instead of your circumstances doesn’t mean ignoring reality, it means not reverse engineering your problems to mean you’re not loved.

Whether man or woman when we land in a situation that makes us feel unloved it’s our definition of love that must change. Being a grown-up means that being hurt by life, by a fallen and unfair world, by not getting what we thought we needed, doesn’t change a thing about how God feels about us. We are loved. Period.

Sure, God could have done something about the harm that came to us. Sure, he could give us what we believe we deserve. Our promised land doesn’t have to be filled with giants—but it is. I can only tell you what I know by faith, that God can redeem any situation. He can bless you for, and through any suffering. Heaven is glorified by your suffering, and Jesus always acknowledges your faith.

In Luke 8:43-48 a woman believed that touching Jesus robe would heal her, and it did. But Jesus felt it, stopped, and acknowledged her faith. That’s something He always does.

Again Pride Blinds

If we aren’t feeling God working in our circumstances it can be that our pride demands relief. When we beg God to end our suffering and he does for a time, we delay the redemption of that lesson which will bring the blessing he wants to give us. When we play the martyr, we aren’t waiting upon God to redeem the circumstances. Instead, we settle for half payment.

If we can just step back, humbly, into God, then we can have His solution to our problem and it will be accompanied by a huge blessing.

That is the next big constraint to receiving our abundance and entering our personal Promised Land. Our way of squirreling out of our situations in our own power is a major constraint on our ability to receive the Good that God is trying to give us. We pray without ceasing that God would stop the situation He created to give us what we couldn’t receive through any other means.

The Silver Lining

The good news here is that God isn’t saying you must be poor. He’s not demanding that you perform in certain ways in your own strength, even in response to situations where he wants to bless you through hardship.

What I’m pointing to is simply that we make agreements of self-concept that says I need X to feel okay. I need to make $X per month. I need to live in this neighborhood to be safe. I need to be married to be happy and secure. I need to be physically fit in order to be healthy and feel good about myself. We manufacture a list of circumstances in which we can feel okay and if God doesn’t come through with those then he doesn’t love us or we’ve blown it and he isn’t blessing us.

Sometimes God pulls one of these legs out from under us so that we’ll lean on him. That has the effect of moving us closer to Him. It builds intimacy. How can you enter the Promised Land and abide in the abundance due to Christ if you won’t live in a state of dependence on God?

Would you rather have the right situation or would you rather have a red phone to the most powerful being in the universe?

Put simply, Pride blinds us and leads to shame. Shame leads to a false self-concept where the situation we want becomes our source of feeling okay. When you humbly accept who God says you are and your relationship with him is all you need to feel okay. Then you become impervious to spiritual bullets and primed to receive good things from God.

This is a major reason to elevate God to first priority in our lives. A.K.A. Primacy.

 

 

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Chapter 2

I know I promised you the core reason for Primacy before Identity, and I’ll go there ASAP. One quick note though: If your response to the last chapter was any form of negative emotion, let’s deal with that.

The nature of this journey is from Glory to Glory (2 Corinthians 3:18). We will constantly be learning better ways to do this thing called life and there’s a tendency to be ashamed of where we’ve been. Our transition is eased greatly by humility. Or maybe more on point, it’s wounded by pride. If this is you, I recommend you take time right now to read the appendix entitled, “Humility: the secret to accelerated learning.”

Let me lead by example for a moment. God convicted me recently, of my own pride. I didn’t really think of myself as humble, but I didn’t think I was prideful either. I have a big perfectionism issue that I fight, which is why the last chapter went straight to the issue of needing to launch before you feel ready because if we wait to be ready we never will. We won’t feel ready and we won’t be ready. I’ll explain.

I was a slave in Egypt until my father died. I grew up a Christian and by that I mean I was raised to believe in God from childhood. In truth I never really knew Jesus personally nor did I really “grow up.” My earthly father sheltered me. He did his best and gave me tons of love and good advice (which a humbler man would have listened to).

After his death, I tried to cope, but nothing worked. When I realized my efforts were hopeless, I turned to God, said I wasn’t ready to be without a father, and asked him to be my father. What I didn’t realize at that time is that I was in a moment of humility. I had realized that I couldn’t do life without God and I asked for help.

That’s when God said, “I’ve been waiting your whole life for you to ask me that. Yes, I will Father you, but know that things will change.”

In a flash of brilliance or more likely desperation, I told God I would follow his instructions and withhold nothing from him if he would just be my dad.

My Journey into the Wilderness

That started my journey into the wilderness and its been a great, though often difficult experience. I am guilty of being upset with my own progress. I have to repent often of grumbling at the challenges in the wilderness and at God’s unwillingness to just march me straight to the Promised Land. However, when I’m seeing/thinking clearly I don’t regret a second of my time in the wilderness.

A friend gave me a book called “Wild at Heart,” by John Eldredge, and it was the first time I saw a way to be a Christian and not turn in my man card. The way I was trained to do religion made my masculine heart cry out for mercy, but now I had a way to transverse the desert. It felt great. The purpose of wilderness time is to die to the slave mind. A big part of my slave mind was religion.

I met a great group of people to fellowship with and we journeyed together through all manner of challenge, from heartache to jubilation. I learned some key tools that I’ll discuss in future chapters.

Pride (& Being Blinded)

The big reason I catch myself resenting my time in the wilderness is pride. When I stake my self-concept on being right then I’m not looking for any reason to doubt my position on things. My interactions with others happen only to try to convince them of my truth, and that includes my concept of God. We actually turn down greater revelation from God in the hopes of not feeling ashamed of being wrong about something.

Pride blinds us. One season’s truth can be useless in the next season, like wearing an overcoat in the summer. There’s a time for everything, reaping, planting, tilling, pruning, everything (Ecc. 3:1-8). How can we be in sync with God if we’re camped out in last season? The fire cloud moves on and we must break camp and follow it.

Here’s a brief example: When I went to a retreat based on “Wild at Heart,” they correctly pointed out that you shouldn’t rush the field. But in chapter one of this book, I said that you must enter the Promised Land wildly unprepared. Which is correct? Both, it depends on where you are. How do you know the difference? You walk with God.

Put more cleverly:

“The early bird gets the worm but the second mouse gets the cheese.”

We live in a paradox where our Spirit is reborn our body is still dying and between them lies the battlefield of the soul. We must ‘lean not on our own understanding’…and so on.

If you’re starting to get the picture that your relationship with God is the key factor in living as a Christian then you are ready for the reason I had to write Primacy before a book on Identity.

Let’s do some definitions. I’m big on definitions. How do you know you’ve succeeded for example, if you haven’t defined success? So here’s a couple definitions I consider important.

Definition 1: a successful day is one spent with God, learning to bear His image.

Definition 2: the Promised Land is a place God wants to give you that you can’t enter in your own strength.

The Promised Land is not necessarily a physical place. It could be losing 100 lbs. It could be finding a spouse or having a child. It could be getting a dream job. The point is that God is dreaming this for you and it’s been on your heart for as long as you can remember. The Promised Land is a state of flow, where you daily reflect God’s heart for you, and it transforms you into that reality.

If you can’t think of something like that, just remember pride blinds.

Fear and Trembling, and Grace

If what you thought of as your Promised Land scares you, perfect. That’s probably it. For me, I was aware of my Promised Land although it was shrouded in fog. What I couldn’t do is conceive of getting there in my own strength. Well, if I could get there myself it wouldn’t be my Promised Land, would it?

I also didn’t feel like it counted if God just gave it to me. How’s that for a demonic agreement? We can’t work out our own salvation (Phil. 4:12 really means “continue to live from your salvation”). Salvation is a gift through Grace.

So why would God say, I saved you now go slay the giants yourself and maybe you’ll amount to something? No, all of this is an adventure of relationship. We never stop needing God and the moment you think, “it’s okay God, I’ve got this,” well, you can imagine how well that works.

Remember, it’s a journey from Glory to Glory. From Justified by God and sinning heavily to shining God’s love into the world, but still sinning and being justified by God. If we despise our status as dependent on Grace we not only resent God’s way of providing salvation we can’t receive the abundance that he set aside for us in His favor.

Finally the Answer

The theme Glory to Glory will come up repeatedly, but I promised you an answer so let’s get to it…

You can’t know who you are, your identity, without knowing the one whose image you’re created in. Whether you’re wandering the wilderness or abiding in the Promised Land your dependency on God doesn’t change.

So, is there a difference between the two? Oh yes! Though we always live in a state of dependency, the purpose of the wilderness is to die to who we are not, while the purpose of the Promised Land is to live abundantly with Christ as who we are.

In Matthew 16:18 Jesus calls Simon Peter by his new name, Petros. He establishes his new identity, and with it, he gives him his life’s mission. Your identity is much more than a name, or who you’re related to, or what you do for a living. It’s a way in which you’ll shine God’s glory into the world.

Definition 3: your identity is the unique way God wants to shine His glory into the world through you.

Peter was the disciple who declared Christ as the son of God when asked, “who do you say I am?” Christ said, “upon this truth (rock) I will build my church.” Of course, he meant that He is the son of God, but more than that. Christ built his fellowship, his church community upon our personal answer to the question, “who do you say I am?”

The “Primacy of God” is a book about that calling and our response. Jesus asks you, “who do you say I am?” Your response to the question will reveal much about who you are, and scary as this may be, your answers will change some with each season.

Who is Christ being for you in this season?

That’s a question you must answer before God shows you who you are in this season. In order to see who God is for us clearly, we need to humble ourselves before him and pray. (2 Chronicles 7:14)

 

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The Primacy of God

“Every good and perfect gift is from above, coming down from the Father of the heavenly lights…” James 1:17

Chapter 1

By now hopefully, you’ve deduced how important it is to discover your real identity.

Finding your authentic self is key to:

• Accomplishing everything you’re hoping and dreaming
• A big shortcut to lowering your stress
• A major cornerstone for the entire Path of the Postmodern Cleric

Let’s call ‘real identity’ Secret #2, even though I’m misusing the term “secret,” because no one is hiding it from you. I’ve seldom talked to anyone who wouldn’t admit that identity questions need answers early in your life and often need to be redefined repeatedly throughout your life.

So why didn’t I start there? I purposefully wrote Primacy of God first because it’s even more foundational and even more overlooked as a secret to an abundant Christian life. Without understanding the secret of God’s primacy you’ll quickly hit a glass ceiling in your pilgrimage toward the Promised Land. For lack of understanding God’s primacy the children of Israel circled the wilderness for 40 years before getting another attempt at something they wanted—and God wanted for them.

Let that sink in. What can possibly hold back a blessing that God wants to give you and you want to accept? How heartbreaking to march in circles when everything is lined up and ready for the big win.

I’m going to get right into Primacy in this chapter, but I have to first tell you how I stumbled into this secret.

I came across secret #1 because I was frustrated by conversations I had with local institutional Christians. For every authentic person who loved the Lord with all their heart, I found two who had a religion instead of a relationship with God. I started having tough conversations with God and, of course, He started talking about something else entirely. I notice in my conversations with God that he doesn’t stick to my agenda. Like when the disciples asked Jesus the theological question of the day regarding a blind man, “whose sin resulted in his blindness from birth, his own future sin or past sins of his parents?” Jesus responded, “you’re asking the wrong question. All that matters is how can the Kingdom be glorified?” Then he restores the man’s sight. (John 9).

 

Quick side note here—the disciples aren’t shamed by Jesus. It’s not wrong to take whatever I’m thinking or feeling to God. In fact, it’s exactly the right thing to do. It’s being childlike. I think we’d heal much faster if our response to “negative” emotion was to drag it in front of God. Pretend for a moment that God isn’t shocked by your anger, hate, disappointment, lust, impatience, etc. He actually understands sin, and He’s kind of over it. He gave his son to fix it, and I think we’re often throwing all this in his face by trying to clean up our own mess before we bring it to him. Nothing says thanks for Jesus, but no thanks, for trying to handle your own problem.

 

So I’m having this conversation with God, telling him how frustrating people are, and he says, “They don’t know me.”

That was an eye-opener. Did God really just boil sin down to simply not knowing him? I didn’t quite know what to do with that, so I let in compost in my brain for a while.

A day or two later another ingredient came from God when I read a book about process management titled, “The Novel,” by Eli Goldratt. It’s a good read. The author treats processes according to the laws of fluid dynamics and draws an interesting set of principles out of it, creating the Constraint Theory of Management.

Reading that book, which is in no way a Christian inspirational book, put an idea in the compost pile of my brain next to God’s comment.

Later a mentor of mine spoke about the concept in James 1:17. All good things come from God and nothing good comes from anywhere else. This was the third item in the compost pile that really brought the heat.

Part of my identity, my superpower, is smashing things together unrelated things and seeing a new thing created in the mess and destruction.

So God began drawing on threads in the back of my brain. I realized that, if I wanted more good things in my life, and God was the source of good, there had to be one or more things constraining my ability to receive those things.

Over the course of the next five years I journeyed with God pushing for more about this topic, and it opened up so many amazing things that I could write for the rest of my life just on the topics I’ve already explored.

Imagine for a moment that you want to pick tomatoes from your garden, but they never seem to grow. They get plenty of sunshine and fertile soil. You decide they aren’t getting enough water. So you drag a hose over and turn it on. A trickle of water comes out. You double check that the water is on, and it is. Then you start looking for kinks in the hose. You find about ten. Even when you straighten them out, nothing seems to be coming out the hose. The more time you spend with it the more frustrated you get. You’re throwing good time after bad, and even if you get the water on you still need the tomatoes to grow. You feel powerless. You feel discouraged.

Then it hits you. You had this problem last year and decided the hose was beyond repair. You bought a new hose. In fact when you check you find water flowing out the new hose into the street and down the storm drain.

You didn’t throw away the old hose. Why on earth would you keep the old hose? I’ll tell you. Because part of you still identifies with that hose. It’s the only hose you’ve ever known.

Alright, I’m not talking about hoses anymore. Clearly, I’m talking about a human life. We get a new life in Christ, this shouldn’t be news to anyone. But when we’re stuck in the wilderness it’s about letting go of our slave identity. Leadership in Egypt (the world) is about doing the work and receiving just payment. As in just the minimum, they can give you to sustain you. It’s an abusive have/have-not relationship.

Leadership in the Kingdom is servants leading and leaders serving. It’s counter-intuitive to the mind stuck in slave mode. The wilderness is about literally dying to a mindset of slavery. God isn’t being a jerk when he doesn’t let you into the Promised Land as an imperfect human. It’s not about your perfection at all. It’s not about anything you do or fail to do. That’s slave mindset right there. You actually can’t enter the Promised Land with the mind of a slave. It’s a new Kingdom. You must submit yourself to the King or you can’t be received into the His Kingdom.

I’m not saying you won’t go to Heaven for lack of figuring this out. Not at all, remember the Promised Land isn’t Heaven. It’s abundant life. It’s being the real you by living as the restored person not the old hose, er, I mean the old dead sinner who can’t be a conduit for the glory of God.

The Promised Land isn’t Heaven. It’s abundant life.

That’s a rough statement and I’d get yelled at if I left it there. I know God uses broken sinners to do amazing things. Absolutely! In fact, that’s a big part of entering your Promised Land, launching imperfect and unprepared.

It’s not about your being prepared. It’s not about your status as a sinner. It’s not about how long you’ve been walking with God, who your mentors are, or even of which truth God has convicted you, or how well you can convince others that your truth is the “real truth.” It’s not about any form of religious sophistication or achievement. You can’t earn the Promised Land. It’s a gift.

Whew! Seriously Andy, what are you on about? Stop telling me what it’s not and tell me Secret #1 already!

The very first constraint preventing abundance in your life is using the wrong hose. It’s realizing that your new life is an intimate partnership between you and God through the sacrifice of Jesus Christ. You enter the Promised Land when you can carry the presence of God with you into the face of what you know you can’t do in your own strength.

Sweet! There it is. Either you feel elated because you’re recognizing something you already knew but seeing it in a new light, OR you’re a little underwhelmed that I made such a big deal about something so obvious. Maybe you knew this but hadn’t thought about it in a while, is that really such a big deal? Why all the fuss?

Because when you read Chapter 2, I’ll tell you the number one reason people aren’t able to consistently remember Secret #1.

P.S. also you’ll discover core reason why Primacy comes before Identity.

 

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Expected update 4/13/2018

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