Don't Be Dead Any More

I am basically going to just transcribe the words straight from my journal, which might be a tad rambly and/or incoherent, so let me give you a little bit of context first. A few weeks ago, I heard probably the best sermon of my life on this passage from John 11. You can read the whole chapter here, but the following is the part I'll be focusing on. Y'all, this has changed my life, which is exactly what the Gospel should do whenever you truly encounter it. I hope it changes your life too.

³⁸Jesus, once more deeply moved, came to the tomb. It was a cave with a stone laid across the entrance. ³⁹"Take away the stone," he said.
      "But, Lord," said Martha, the sister of the dead man, "by this time there is a bad odor, for he has been there four days."
 ⁴⁰Then Jesus said, "Did I not tell you that if you believed, you would see the glory of God?"
 ⁴¹So they took away the stone. Then Jesus looked up and said, "Father, I thank you that you have heard me. ⁴²I knew that you always hear me, but I said this for the benefit of the people standing here, that they may believe that you sent me."
 ⁴³When he had said this, Jesus called in a loud voice, "Lazarus, come out!" ⁴⁴The dead man came out, his hands and feet wrapped with strips of linen, and a cloth around his face.
      Jesus said to them, "Take off the grave clothes and let him go."

Roll the stone away to expose the death in your heart, no matter how ugly it is or how bad it smells. No matter how offensive it is, roll the stone away because it's the only way you can walk out of death and into new life. Come out of your death. Come out into the light no matter what you look like or how badly decayed you are.

Come out of death and show everyone freely that you were dead - talk about the sins it's "not ok to talk about." Expose them to the light so they can end - you're not dead any more. And then end them. Stop living as one who is still dead! Walk out of the tomb.

What are your tombs? What's dead inside of you? What stones is Jesus trying to roll away? Are you resisting the exposure of your death because you think you'll be embarrassed or that others will be offended by it? They're involved too.

God says to those around you that they are to remove your grave clothes. You don't have to do anything but come out of the grave. That's it. Jesus has already called you back to life. Just take the step out and let your community take off your grave clothes. Then get to living without even a hint of death around you. You're finished with that.

Stop living as though you're still dead. What in the world could possibly be stopping you? As you work through this, write down any "buts" that come to mind, and let Jesus deal with those. Just one chapter before this story of Lazarus in John, Jesus says, "I have come that they may have life, and have it to the full" (John 10:10). He didn't come to die so that you could stay dead inside, but rather, He has called you into abundant life and made a way for you to live it. So get on it.

It Doesn't Depend on Me (Thank Goodness)

Well thankfully Jesus doesn't depend on me blogging regularly to get His work done or we'd all be in real trouble. Especially me. I won't go into what sparked or caused such a lengthy absence. I'll just say this: The Gospel has been relevant, alive and active the whole time I've been inactive. Hallelujah.

I want to pose some questions to you all today that were posed to me at church this morning. We were reading the story of Jesus at the banquet in Luke 14. Now in this passage, those slimy Pharisees are trying to trick Jesus into doing something bad. Again. And not only does he outwit them (again), he then starts pushing all their buttons, trying to get at the heart of their actions. And he gets onto the topic of status, saying:

"When someone invites you to a wedding feast, do not take the place of honor, for a person more distinguished than you may have been invited. If so, the host who invited both of you will come and say to you, 'Give this man your seat.' Then, humiliated, you will have to take the least important place. But when you are invited, take the lowest place, so that when your host comes, he will say to you, 'Friend, move up to a better place.' Then you will be honored in the presence of all your fellow guests. For everyone who exalts himself will be humbled, and he who humbles himself will be exalted" (vv. 8-11)

I don't know about y'all, "humbling myself" has always made me feel self-righteous, and it just occurred to me today that that cannot possibly be what Jesus wants from us. He's going for two things here:

1. This whole scene is very rat-race-ish to me. There's a lot of jostling and fighting for position, for status. Everyone wants to best seat in the house - the seat of honor. And while that is a foreign concept to our society, don't we all do this? We are all seeking approval, acclaim and honor for something from somewhere, and the fight we are in to get to the top is killing us. It's not helping us at all. It's just making the whole thing feel worthless, and we're getting burnt out.
2. He's not asking us to "take the high road" or "be the bigger man." When Jesus tells you to humble yourself, he's telling you you've gotten too big for your britches. Later in the same chapter, he says, "When you give a banquet, invite the poor, the crippled, the lame, the blind" (v. 13), and then he tells a story about a man who was hosting a banquet and how the people who were invited to the party all made excuses as to why they couldn't come, and how the master of the house then invited all the infirm and derelicts off the street instead, and the people with the stupid excuses were off tending to their stupid excuses instead of eating roomfuls of delicious food.
   
   And what he's saying is that his parties are full of the poor, the crippled, the lame and the blind. Some of us just haven't realized yet that we fall into those categories. We're still trying to do it all on our own without any help, and in that case, of course we're too busy to make it to the party. That's a lot of hard work! 

If we could just see ourselves in light of who God is, we would realize that we are the sick, we are the poor, we are the lame and blind and crippled. And we are invited to the party. Humbling ourselves isn't letting someone merge in front of us on the highway, and it isn't volunteering at a soup kitchen once a month (although there's nothing wrong with those things). It's recognizing that God is GOD, and we are absolutely not. It's understanding that we are no better than anyone else, and that our status in this world is ultimately meaningless, effectively eliminating the jostling. And when we humble ourselves in those ways, He has promised to lift us up. 

Our problem is that we have a million excuses as to why we're not broken. "Look God," we say, "I just got this new job! See? I'm doing fine. I don't need you to feed me. Plus, I'm too busy working to buy my own food. Please excuse me from your bounty." Or perhaps our relationships get in the way: "Oh, sorry God. I just got married, so clearly I'm doing great. And I'm far too overwhelmed trying to keep my spouse's approval to be available for your little get-together. Please excuse me from your community."

But if we would stop making excuses to get out of God's presence and provision, if we could own our inability to do it all ourselves, then we could feast at the banquet and be personally ushered by Jesus to a place of honor.

So my questions are as follows:

• How/Where am I jostling for position? How do I stop?
• What does this look like practically? 
• How can I humble myself, trust solely in Jesus for my worth and honor, yet still work hard and apply myself, using the gifts He has given me to do the work He has for me to do?
• What excuses am I making up for not doing these things?

Feel free to join in the conversation in the comments or on your own blog (and send me a link if you do it that way). 

The Truth About Worth and Worthiness

It seems there’s a fine line between thinking yourself worthy of something and finding your worth in it. The example that leaps to my mind most forcefully is romantic relationships. I can have a healthy self-esteem that would lead me to believe myself worthy of a man’s affection, but it’s only a tee-tiny step away from allowing that affection or lack thereof to define my worth. It works with your professional life too. You can know that you’re completely qualified for a job – that you’re worthy of it – and then you can feel that you are more or less valuable as a human being depending on whether or not you get the job. It’s so subtle a difference, so sneaky and slick, that it can trip you up every time if you’re not aware.

The only thing it doesn’t work with is God’s love, which I would say is ironic except for that it’s not. It’s the only truth of any of the examples. All those other things – romance, marriage, professional advancement, kids, material things – can never define your worth no matter how worthy of them you are, no matter whether you get them or not. God’s love, on the other hand, is the only true determiner of your worth, we’ll never be worthy of it, and we’ll always have it. It doesn’t seem to make any sense, but it’s the truth.

I think that’s how you can recognize truth a lot of times. It’s the option that seems the most unlikely, the most paradoxical, the furthest out there, the one you would never have thought up on your own.

Campfire Girls

I'm going to go ahead and post twice today because they're both written, and who knows when I'll get another chance to use the internet on my own computer? Here you go...

They call them the “Campfire Girls” because in the winter, they build fires on the side of the road to keep them warm while they work. They need extra heat to stay warm because they are roughly the size of pencils, and they are not wearing a whole lot of clothing. The Italian Campfire Girls work the side of the highway while the Nigerian and Filipino ones work smaller roads. Prostitution is illegal here, but every day you will see cars stopped on the side of one of these roads, negotiating.

It breaks my heart every time I see them or even think about them out there for so many reasons, but largely, I think, because I can identify with them. Because when I run after worldly desires, I too become like a prostitute running after other gods, and it just absolutely breaks God’s heart, but He just keeps on pursuing me and bringing me back and loving me, and I wish that those girls on the side of the road knew that kind of love.

I wish they had a Hosea to continually go out and get them and bring them home, to love and provide for them and show them in every way that they don’t need to live like that – not even because it’s dangerous or dirty or immoral, but because it’s degrading, and they are worth so much more.

And then I realize that when I turn away from God, I am degrading my very soul. I’m counting myself unworthy of the best available option and choosing a lesser generic god – one that might put food on the table for a few days but is ultimately starving me to death.

It is here that Satan wants to come in and say, “But you DON’T deserve Him,” and he’s right...EXCEPT that Jesus has made me worthy. He has made me clean and perfect, and to continue to live as though I am worth only a pitiful excuse for a god is to devalue myself, my worth, and the death of Jesus that made me worthy of more. To steal C.S. Lewis’s analogy a bit, it’s settling for making mud pies in the backyard when I could be on a luxurious tropical beach vacation.

There’s a fine line here between being worthy of God and feeling entitled to wealth. It’s an easy step to take over that line, but the instant you do it, you’re right back where you started, whoring yourself out to money and materialism when the good God just wants to love you.

If those other things come, praise Him, and if they don’t, praise Him for that, and if you never get that dream job or marriage or to kiss or be held by anybody ever again, praise Him for all those things, too, because you’re not entitled to them. They are, in fact, just mud pies, and you’re worthy of the Caribbean. You’re worthy of God because He has made you worthy.

I don’t know how else to describe this notion of being loved by God without either comparing it to having some earthly thing or saying that He’ll give you earthly things, so I don’t really know how to convince anyone that being loved by God is better than...stuff. I guess it’s just better because it means you don’t need the stuff.

All the other things that we want apart from God – relationships, experiences, material things, wealth, etc. – are just things we want because we think they will validate us somehow. They’ll make us either more likely to be loved by other people, or they’ll be an indication that we are loved by other people. I mean, that’s really what we’re after, isn’t it?

But with God, we already have love, and it’s infinitely greater and more pure than any love we could possibly get from a human being who has their own agenda and desires and selfish reasons for doing so many of the things they do.

Why is it so hard to want God’s love more than human love? Is it just because He’s not here physically? Because he can’t literally hold us when we cry? Because he doesn’t stroke our hair and tell us we’re beautiful and make us feel all giddy inside?

If marriage is a reflection of God’s relationship with the church, and we are the body of Christ, then when the body comes around us and supports us and hugs us in hard times, He literally is holding us when we cry. And when a godly husband tells his wife she’s beautiful, it’s not just an affirmation of her physical beauty. It’s God Himself affirming her soul.

When you put it that way, it’s hard NOT to want God’s love and the community that comes with it.

This has been sort of a stream-of-consciousness post, so I hope you’ll forgive me if there are any connections or leaps that don’t make total sense, and I hope you’ll jump in and clarify for me or pick up where I trailed off or just add your thoughts.

"Sacrifice" and the art of being yourself

Naples is both completely beautiful and absolutely filthy. There is trash everywhere, and then you look up, and there’s Mt. Vesuvius, standing firm and lovely and always reminding you that in its beauty, it was also once deadly, for just on the other side of the mountain lie the ruins of Pompei. Naples is the perfect, most vivid illustration possible of the two sides that exist to every coin. It’s like a caricature, really, with certain elements exaggerated to really make them stand out. The vineyards, the lakes, the mountains, the sunsets – everything natural is breathtakingly gorgeous. But the buildings, the streets, the graffiti and the trash make the place look like some Eastern European communist leader came in and built it, was convinced to paint everything in pastels, and then left it to fend for itself during a war. And now, years later, he still has not returned to clean up the debris, so life was simply built on top of it.

When we drive around sometimes, I see these buildings, and I can’t tell whether they are inhabitable or not. They look like everything in them was burned out at some point, and now they’re just shells of buildings, but then I’ll notice that there are clotheslines on the balconies, so people must be living there. Then there are buildings that actually are completely empty. They were never finished, in fact, because apparently the builders began building without the proper permits, but instead of destroying the structure once construction was shut down, they were just left there, half-finished.

I live in a really nice area. The houses are big and completely secure, and most of them are in parcos, which are sort of like loosely guarded gated neighborhoods. And yet, outside of our gate, there is graffiti all over the walls. It’s not violent or gang-related at all. Several of the messages are of love and romantic desire (very Italian, no?), but still, it’s there. It’s not even artistic graffiti. It’s just crudely spray-painted graffiti.

And as much as I dislike the trash and graffiti and bad roads and inconsiderate drivers everywhere, I really sort of admire the Neapolitans for their ability and willingness to just be exactly who they are. They don’t try to cover up their problems or relegate them to certain areas of the city. They don’t try to keep the touristy parts clean and just forget about the rest. The whole place just is what it is, and the people are who they are, and you can take it or leave it.

I want to be more like that, if not with other people, then at least with God. I mean it’s not like He doesn’t know me completely already, but I find sometimes that when I am journaling, I’m censoring myself. I might say it’s because I don’t want someone else to read it, but there’s plenty of stuff in there I don’t want people to read, so what’s a bit more? The truth is I’m trying to hide it from myself because if I don’t acknowledge it, then it’s not really a part of me, and I don’t have to deal with it. That’s what I think anyway.

But when I do acknowledge the sin in my life, it provides God with an opportunity to remind me that it’s not really a part of me, that He has made me perfect already, that He has already dealt with it, and that all I have to do is live without it. Is it really even a sacrifice to give up something you didn’t want to claim as your own anyway?

Dear Everyday Gospel,

I haven't forgotten about you. In fact, I have a lot to say, but it's really, really a lot, and my internet time is limited, so I can't do it today. I will prepare better for next time. Things are good, though. God is good. Unbelievably good and gracious and generous and forgiving. And my heart breaks for those who don't know it. More to come...
Love,
Beth

People Are People (Even in Switzerland)

I am always amazed, when I travel, to find that people are people all over the world. I don't know why this comes as such a shock, why I expect them to look different or have different sorts of brains or feelings, but looking around the Zurich airport, I am struck by this fact. Cultural differences occur, yes, and fashions change as do worldviews, but people are people all over the world. They have the same kinds of bodies and the same kinds of emotions and the same kinds of problems and the same kinds of pain. And they all need Jesus. And He wants all of them to know Him.

In the U.S., we go to great lengths not to step on anyone's toes or hurt anyone's feelings or give our opinions where they are not wanted, and sure, it's respectful not to be a jerk. And in cross-cultural missions, we ought to take every precaution to be sure we're building the Kingdom and not western culture. But in either case (foreign or domestic), we ought to be building the Kingdom because people are people, and we all need Jesus.

It's so weird to look around the Zurich airport and think That guy with the fanny pack – I wonder what's going on in his life, what makes him happy, how he might be hurting. He needs Jesus. And the guy behind me with his feet up on a cart, looking at his phone – I wonder who he's hoping will call. He needs Jesus too. And the girl over there napping – well first of all, I'm jealous that she's able to sleep and I'm not, but still, she needs Jesus. Because we're all people, and regardless of language or culture, we're all somehow the same sort of being. We all have broken, dead, messed up things in our lives, and we have all rebelled against the perfect, pure life of God. And we all need Jesus to restore us to life.

The Gospel is for everyone.