Month: August 2010 (Page 2 of 4)

Devotions on Brokenness from Fil Anderson’s book, Breaking the Rules

Henri Nouwen said,” Nobody escapes being wounded. We are all wounded people, whether physically, emotionally, mentally, or spiritually.  The main question is not ‘How can we hide our wounds?’ so we don’t have to be embarrassed , but ‘How can we put our woundedness in the service of others?’  When our wounds cease to be a source of shame, and become a source of healing, we have become wounded healers.”
We are all broken people living together in a broken world.  If we bury our pain and sadness deep inside, it will simmer and stew and gnaw at our peace and joy. And in the process we become more broken and evidences of our hidden brokenness will seep through and leave its mark on all of life.

Jesus was at ease with broken people but unlike him we often condemn those whose lives are messy, broken, and out of control. Jesus never distanced himself from people’s pain and was open and receptive to those the religious people had cast aside. Perhaps it is because those whose hearts were broken were willing to let Him inside. Those who already felt righteous were so full of themselves that even the Gospel had little effect on them.

“The only cure for our brokenness is to stop playing charades, acknowledge our own and each other’s brokenness, and become united by the only One who was broken in order to make us whole.”

Devotions based on Fil Andersons book Breaking the Rules

Jesus encountered religious people who were caught up trying to be the gatekeepers of the truth and wound up being self-righteous rather than genuinely righteous. Some today use religion for their own personal agendas and end up reflecting their own personal prejudices and practices. They presume to know how Jesus would think and do and get disappointed when He doesn’t do it their way.  But He is mysterious and unpredictable. He often turned things upside down.  He shocked people who thought they had God in their pockets.  Instead of a God who they thought was predictable and quick to judge, He showed himself to be unpredictable, gracious and forgiving. He is impossible to control! He breaks all social etiquette in relating to people. He connects with people that others disregard
Some today who claim to be followers of Jesus alienate others by their fundamentalist bullying, never listening but giving their “right views” etc. But none of us are in the position to judge another and know what is in the heart of another.

We live our lives more authentically and confess our faith with greater integrity when we openly confess our uncertainty.  Faith is all about trust not certainty. His thoughts and ways are different than ours. Let’s not presume we know what God would do in every situation for He is divine. May our focus shift from ourselves to God, sensing His grace in our lives.  As we are in intimate union with Him we will know more what to say and what to do in our daily lives..

Devotions from Fil Anderson’s book, Breaking the Rules

Has our religion given us rules, systems and formulas to live by?  Does it give us a god who is obligated to provide the things we want if we hold up our end of the bargain by believing and going the required things? Some of our habits and churchy routines that we think is building a bridge to God, may instead be erecting a wall between us and Him. God is interested in our hearts and wants a relationship with us where He is the giver and we are the receiver.  He wants us to KNOW Him, not fix our selves up to impress Him or win Him over. We can’t mend our ways and achieve a relationship with Him by keeping all the impossible rules and being very, very good!   He invites us to come to Him, to walk with Him, to keep company with Him. We can give up all our masks and drop all our disguises with Him.  In the story of the prodigal the father welcomes his wayward son home even before the son could recite his plea for forgiveness. His unconditional love was lavished on his son. We are his beloved and let us stop running and follow Him and  become our real selves. There is a huge difference between religion and an authentic life with God. Let us live from our hearts, not our heads, from the inside out instead of the outside in!

Devotions based on book by Fil Anderson “Breaking the Rules”

The author was worn out with religious strivings and rule keeping that left him with guilt when he failed. His religion was characterized by a code of requirements and activities that were deemed necessary to gain good standing with God. He felt like he was God’s biggest disappointment when he failed.  But he traded his life of performance for intimacy with God and is convinced that rules are unnecessary when love guides our hearts. Like Augustine said, “ Love and do what you please.”  Jesus never made rule breaking a worthy goal in and of itself, He made clear the point that the rule keeping is pointless if it’s not an expression of something deeper. The author embraced his brokenness and allowed God’s power to flow and transform his life, which led him in the way to freedom.  As we give up striving to fix ourselves, we find that the cracks in our fragmented lives will become illuminated with the power of God’s love that shines through into the lives of others. Jesus came to call those who knew they were sinners, not those that think they are righteous. As we find the courage to confess our fears and insecurities, we will fall into the depths of God’s love for us. Let us quit trusting in our own ability to live for God, and simply trust in Him instead!

Devotions from Henri Nouwen’s book, The Inner Voice of Love

 We all face choices daily if we will choose for God or for our own doubting self.  We know the right choice but our emotions and feelings may suggest we choose the self-rejecting way. The root choice is to trust at all times that God is with us and will give us what we need most. Our emotions might say we haven’t changed at all.  But God says He loves us and is with us and He wants us to experience the joy of His presence.  He wants to give us a new heart and a new spirit that we may speak with His mouth, see with His eyes, hear with His ears, touch with His hands. He wants our full trust and that we move toward the Light. We can think ourselves into depression, talk ourselves into low self-esteem, or we can think, speak, and act in truth.   Let us not be distracted by our anxious emotions . What is of God will last.  He began something new in us and He wants to bring it to completion.  Our future depends on how we decide to remember our past. Remember we are loved and we are held safe!

Devotions from Henri Nouwen’s book, The Inner Voice of Love

As we find the treasure of God’s love we may not be ready to fully own it. Many attachments keep pulling us away. If we fully owned our treasure we would hide it in the field where we found it, and go sell everything to buy the field.

Only when we have let go of everything else can the treasure be completely hours. Just finding the treasure puts us on a new quest for it. If we expose the treasure to others without fully owning it, we can harm ourselves and lose the treasure.  The spiritual life is a long search for what we have already found. The desire for God’s unconditional love is the fruit of having been touched by that love. A newfound love needs to be nurtured in a quiet , intimate space.  We must hide the treasure and buy the field where we have hidden it. This is often painful as the sense of who we are is so connected to all the things we own: Success, friends, prestige, money, degrees, etc.  But we know that nothing but the treasure can satisfy us. May we journey to the place where we can truly rest…and that is in His love.

Devotions from Henri Nouwen’s book, The Inner Voice of Love

Today’s devotion is about living our wounds through.  We have all be wounded in many way and it may seem like the more we open ourselves up, the more we discover how deep our wounds are.  But the fact that we are more aware of our wounds shows we have sufficient strength to face them.  The challenge is living through our wounds instead of thinking them through.  It is better to cry than to worry, better to feel our wounds deeply than to understand them etc. We need to take our wounds to our heart rather than our heads. With our heads we can analyze then, find their causes and consequences, but no final healing is likely to come from that. We need to let our wounds go down into our heart. Then we can live with them through and know that they will not destroy us. Our heart it greater than our wounds.
Going to our heart with our wounds is not easy’ it demands letting go of why we were wounded and how and by whom.  The answers to these questions don’t bring relief but just give us a little distance from our pain. We have to let go of the need to stay in control of our pain and trust in the healing power of our heart.  There our hurts can find a safe place to be received, and can lose their power to inflict damage and become fruitful soil for new life. We can think of each wound as we would a child who has been hurt by a friend. As long as that child goes around ranting and raving, trying to get back at the friend, the one wound leads to another. But when the child can experience the consoling embrace of a parent, he can live through his pain, return to his friend, and forgive.  Let us be gentle with ourselves, and let our heart be our loving parent as we live our wounds through.

Devotions from Henri Nouwen’s book, The Inner Voice of Love

Henri talks about the fear of death and dying alone. He wanted to have the inner freedom to let go and trust that he would die well. He felt like the passage from time into eternity, from the transient beauty of this world to the lasting beauty of the next, was to be made now. And that he didn’t have to make it alone. God sends us people to be close to us and to help us make the lonely passage in the knowledge that we are surrounded by a safe love. The more we can trust in the love of those God has sent to us, the more we will be able to lose our life and so gain it. We must not cling to success, affection, future plans, satisfying work, emotional support and even spiritual progress as essential for survival. Only as we let go of them can we discover true freedom our heart most desires. That is dying, moving into the life beyond life.  We must make the passage in a sense before we die. With the love of those who are being sent to us, we can surrender our fears and let ourselves be guided into the new land forever with Him!

Devotions from Henri Nouwen’s book, The Inner Voice of Love

Today’s devotion is about giving our agenda to the Lord.  We can get very concerned with making the right choices about our work, about how to respond to the many needs of others, and about issues that want our attention etc. But we cannot allow people and issues to possess us. As long as we think that we need them to be ourselves, we are not fully free. Much of their urgency may come from our own need to be accepted and affirmed. We need instead to go back to the source, God’s love for us!  In many ways we want to set our own agenda and choose many things, which all seem equally important. But we need to fully surrender ourselves to God’s guidance, and not fight with Him over who is in control. We need to say, “Thy will be one, not mine”   Let us give every part of our heart and time to God and let God tell us what to do, where to go, when and how to respond. God doesn’t want us to destroy ourselves. Exhaustion, burnout, and depression are not signs of doing His will. The more we give our agendas to God, the more “clock time” becomes “Gods’ time” and God’s time is always the fullness of time.