Category: Wildman Journey (Page 73 of 85)

Steve Jobs died on Oct 5th at 56.  As I write this blog, his book is hitting the book stores today.  I read a post today on the interview given by his biographer Walter Isaacson on “60 minutes.”  The post talked about some of Jobs’ religious views.  I want to draw attention to two quotes and them make a couple of comments.  The first quote: “Sometimes I believe in God, sometimes I don’t.  I think it’s 50-50 maybe.  But ever since I’ve had cancer, I’ve been thinking about it more.  And I find myself believing a bit more.  I kind 0f – maybe it’s cause I want to believe in an afterlife.  That when I die, it doesn’t just all disappear.  The wisdom you’ve accumulated.  Somehow it lives on….Yeah, but sometimes I think it’s just like an on-off switch. Click and you’re gone. And that’s why I don’t like putting on-off switches on Apple devices.”  The second quote: “I saw my life as-an arc.  And that it would end and compared to that nothing mattered.  You’re born alone, you’re gonna die alone.  And does anything else really matter?  I mean what is it exactly, is it that you have to lose Steve?  There’s nothing.”

God bless the memory of Steve Jobs.  I along with many other Christians have committed him to the mercy of God.  We are all deeply in debt to Jobs for what he has given us.  Yet in these few comments on religion we see that in the end, Jobs is left with some deep questions about the meaning of life.  For all his fame, fortune and genius, Steve Jobs could not find the answer to the basic questions of life.  In the first comment, he equates a relationship to God to that of “an on-off switch.”  Men, never forget, God made you for a loving relationship without himself.  He is passionately desirous that you know his love for you.  Jesus tells us that he came to seek and save those who were lost.  He also said that he came to give us life, life that was abundant.  We live in a personal universe.  The truine God of love, invites us into the “great dance” of everlasting life.  There need not be any doubts about this.  Remember we are not talking about nothing.  God has revealed who he is in Jesus.  Jesus said, “He who has seen me has seen the Father.”  Don’t get you eye off of Jesus.  He makes life real and personal.

As for his second comment, he compares his life to that of “an arc.”  You begin with nothing and you end with nothing.  You die alone.  This is a classic statement of a truly modern man.  One whose life is self-enclosed, self-contained and with the absence of any sense of transcendence.  As “self-made” man who seemed to have it all.  But like some many in our culture, living with a deep emptiness.  Again we were meant to be filled with the life of God.  Jesus died, rose again, and ascended into heaven so that the very presence of God might come and fill our hearts.  He said he would not leave us orphaned, but that he would come.  He compared the life of the Spirit to that of a river. “Whoever believes in me, as Scripture has said, rivers of living water will flow from within them.” 

Men, may the life and death of Steve Jobs be a “wake up” call to any man who is caught in the deadly trap of wanting to be a follower of Jesus but also being pulled into the obit of what the world admires and desires.  Listen to these words from I John 2:15-17 ( The Message). “Don’t love the world’s ways.  Don’t love the world’s goods.  Love of the world squeezes out love for the Father.  Practically everything that goes on in the world – wanting your own way, wanting everything for yourself, wanting to appear important – has nothing to do with the Father.  It just isolates you from him.  The world and all its wanting, wanting, wanting is on the way out – but whoever does what God wants is set for eternity.”

In my last blog I talked about the appeal in our day of the Desert Fathers.  As one observer stated, “The flight to the desert represented both a protest and an affirmation – a protest against a decadent and overly institutionalized ecclesiastical body and a restatement of the gospel teaching to fit the changed conditions of the times.”  The movement into the desert was not so much to escape problems but to engage them.  The desert actually became a place of combat.  Those who went into the desert considered themselves ” bloodless martyrs” and “athletes of God.”  They felt they had to escape  a worldly church and a corrupt society, while facing the greatest battle of all, that is, the battle of the soul. 

The desert was a place of solitude.  Solitude suggests Henri Nouwen, “is the furnace of transformation.”  In the desert many things that we believe are vital for life are stripped away.  It is just you, God and the desert.  Y0u have to face your real self.  This is the battle.  Most men feel from such battles.  Nouwen observes, “in solitude I get rid of my scaffolding: no friends to talk with, no telephone calls to make, no meetings to attend, no music to entertain, no books to distract, just me – naked, vulnerable, weak, sinful, deprived broken – nothing.  It is this nothingness that I have to face in my solitude, a nothingness so dreadful that everything in me wants to run to my friends, my work, and my distractions so that I can forget my nothingness and make myself believe that I am worth something.” 

For the men who read this blog, a flight into the desert is neither realistic nor necessary.  But there is a real sense in which we need solitude, that time alone with ourselves in the presence of  God to examine how attachment and plugged in we are to the world around us.  We lose our real sense of who we are in God, because of the constant need and pressure to be someone other then who God sees us to be.  We live life through the presentable and acceptable veneer of the false self, which is a product of our own making.  We need the desert experience to see how  conformed we are to this world.  Our focus is so often on what I have, who am I, and what do others think of me.  This is all self making.  It comes so naturally that we forget who we really are.

A man has to come to the place where he will fight for his heart.  It will take a desert experience to bring us to the place of vulnerabilty, that allows us to let go of the attachments to our false self.  Abba Antony, one of the desert father once said, “The man who abides in solitude and in quiet, is delivered from fighting three battles – those of hearing, speech and sight. Then he will have but one battle to fight – the battle of the heart.” 

My encouragement to the men who read this blog, is to find a group of men who will “fight for your heart.”  Join a group of guys who want to do the work of dying to the practices of the false self, so that they can find their true self in Christ.  I find the principles of AA give permission for men to fight for each other’s hearts.  In an AA group men know that they have to escape the temptations of the culture and find life in God.  They know what the desert is life.  “The wisdom of the desert is that the confrontation with our own frightening nothingness forces us to surrender ourselves totally and unconditionally to the Lord Jesus Christ” (Nouwen).  An athlete for God is will to do the hard work of “soul care,” coming to grips with the real condition of the inner life.  Listen to Paul’s words in I Cor 9:26-27, “I don’t know about you, but I’m running hard for the finish line.  I’m giving it everything I’ve got.  No sloppy living for me!  I’m staying alert and in top condition.  I’m not going to get caught napping, telling everyone else all about it and then missing out myself” (The Message).

Back in the early 80’s I read a book by Henri Nowen entitled “The Way of the Heart” in which he introduced me to the desert fathers of the 4th and 5th centuries.  At that time I was just beginning to understand the need for silence and solitude in my life.  He gave a quote from Thomas Merton that had a deep impact on my way of looking at life.  Merton wrote in the introduction to his “The Wisdom of the Desert, “Society…was regarded [by the Desert Fathers] as a shipwreck from which each single individual man had to swim for his life….These were men who believed that to let oneself drift along, passively accepting the tenets and values of what they knew as society, was purely and simply a disaster.”  They believe they were moving to the edge of society, to be a voice and influence on a decaying culture and badly compromised church.

Merton goes on to say these desert fathers “were men who did not believe in letting themselves be passively guided and ruled by a decadent state, and who believed that there was a way of getting along without slavish dependence on accepted, conventional values.”  In leaving the world, they were helping to “save it in saving oneself” observed Merton.  Leaving the ship wreck of the world  did not mean just saving themselves.  “They knew that they were helpless to do any good for others as long as they floundered about in the wreckage.  But once they got a foothold on solid ground, things were different.  Then they had not only the power but even the obligation to pull the whole world to safety after them.”

I can confidently say that there is a significant movement in our culture among sincere followers of Jesus to learn again from the desert fathers.  This new movement, which is called “the New Monanistism” is being embraced as a means of deepening one’s walk with God, while still trying to effect change in the decaying culture.  It could be thought of as “a Third way” when compared with conflicting voices heard on the left and right of the church.  I for one have embrace this movement.  As many of you know, Judy and I live up in the woods of Northeran Minnesota.  I call the two of us “a monk and a nun.”  What give me the most clarity for ministry and service in the kingdom at the ripe, old age of 70, is to think of myself as a monk on the edge of the culture, trying to be a voice that speaks back into the culture. 

As I write this blog today, I have a sense that I might write more about this movement and how it is effective the lives of sincere followers of Jesus.  But for now – for this blog- I guess the thought I want to leave with the men who read this blog, is the need to be counter -cultural.  While we need to remain connected and engaged in the culture lead there is a real also the need to be disconnected in spirit and outlook.  I like to think of Jesus as “the third way.”  I will just give one small example in my life.  I am still connected with the ELCA  branch of the Lutheran church.  God has placed that on my heart.  I know that I am part of a sinking ship or, changing the metaphor, part of a body that is sick spiritually.  But from where I am on the edge of things, I still can speak a prophetic word from within.  So my word today, men, is don’t abandon the ship, but rather flee to the edges of the church and culture, so that you can be renewed and made alive in Jesus. 

A watchword for us men might be the last words of the Old Testament. “See, I will send you the prophet Elijah before that great and dreadful day of the Lord comes.  He will turn the hearts of the fathers to thier children, and the hearts of the children of their fathers; or else I will come and strike the land with a curse” (Malachi 4:5)

As I was working on the sermon for Sunday from Matthew 22:1-14, I was reminded of something that David Benner pointed out about this text.  It is the parable of the wedding banquet.  The king prepares a banquet for his son.  He sends out his servants to tell those who have been invited to come because the banquet is ready.  But they refuse.  “They paid no attention and went off” to do others things.  In Jesus’ day it was unheard of to turn down an invitation to the wedding banquet. 

So the king sends his servants out to invite anyone they can find to attend the banquet. “So the servants went out into the streets and gathered all the people they could find, the bad as well as the good, and the wedding hall was filled with guests.  Benner suggests that we use our imagination to visualize an invitation to bring our whole self to the banquet.  That is, be honest and open before God about who we really are.  There is both the good and the bad in our personal make-up and story.  We are conditioned to bring only good parts of who we are into the presence of God.  But he invites us to bring all that we are; that good, the bad and the ugly.  I know that I spent many years hiding the bad.  It made for an unreal relationship with God, in which I never experienced his unconditional love and mercy for me

By bringing the bad into the banquet one can find a new freedom and acceptance before God.   Our tendency, which is the result of a life long conditioning is to always present our best face or side to others, including God.  So what happens to the bad.  It gets buried.  But the bad is still a part of who we are.  This is reality.  God sees all of who we are.  He waits for us to bring both the bad and the good to the banquet.  Again, men I tell you from experience, it is not until we bring our whole self into the presence of God, that we can experience and know his unconditional love.  When you experience acceptance in all your shame and vulnerability, you will know that you are home in the presence of a loving Father, who calls you are his beloved. 

A new insight that come to me as I pondered the bring of the good and bad into the presence of God, is that this invitation is to a celebration.  What does this mean for us as men?  I know for myself  it means that I can come as I am, both with the good and bad, and celebrate in the presence of the Father.  The parable also includes a guest who came without wedding cloths.  This never happens at a banquet put on by the king.  Wedding garments were provided for those who did not have them.  For us this means that we can come to the banquet, with the good and bad, and know that we are robed in the righteousness of Christ.   Jesus makes me worthy to be with the king.  The king accepts me as I am, because of what Jesus has done for me.  He covers me.  I can really celebrate in the presence of the king, because of Jesus.  To me this is joy, knowing that I am free to be me, with all the good and bad, in the presence of the king because it has nothing to do with me, but it has all to do with what Jesus did for me.

Last sunday the gospel text that I preached on was from Matt 18:21-35.  It is the parable of the unforgiving debtor.  I sensed the urgency of communicating the joy and freedom of living “a lifestyle of forgiveness.”  After over forty years of being a pastor among Lutheran folks, I know there are many who live in a deep, dark cave of their own making, because of unforgiveness.  Church people can be some of the most unforgiving people on the planet, because they think their good behavior can cover their dark side.  My greatest challenge has been forgiving church people. But at the ripe, old age of 70 I sense that I have been able to embrace a lifestyle of forgiveness.  It has not been easy. I know I will be tested in the future.  There were years when I lived in the “far country” of anger and resentment because of my unforgiving spirit.  But by the grace of God I have tasted something of the freedom and joy of living in forgiveness.  I pray that each man who is reading this blog today will know the freedom of forgiveness.

We have the choice, says Father Albert Haase, of either being “a velcro personality” to which all hurts stick or “a teflon personality to which all hurts slide right off.   For the velcro personality, “treasured emotional wounds and scars become like fish bones stuck in the throat.  Even the smallest bones can be excruciating,” observes Father Haase.  The teflon personality might not forget, but they choose to forgive.  They decide it is better to stop picking and nursing the scab.

Father Haase paints a sad picture of the velcro personality. “It takes a lot of emotional and psychological energy to keep a wound open, to keep a grudge alive.  And the more we work to keep it alive, the more emotionally drained we become as the grudge saps us of our strength.  The longer we allow a wound to fester, or the longer we keep picking its scab, the more bitterness, anger and self-pity poison our blood and eat at our hearts.”  I personally identify with the experience of Ann Lamott when she describes her experience. “I went around saying for a long time that I am not one of the Christians who is heavily into forgiveness – that I am one of the other kind.  But even though it was funny and actually true, it started to be too painful to stay this way… In fact, not forgiving is like drinking rat poison and waiting for the rat to die.”  I had a hard time admitting that I was drinking rat poison.  I had to come to the place of humility and repentance before the cross.

Why do I say before the cross.  When I look up at the Lord Jesus on the cross, I see him taking into his body my sin, opening the way for my forgiveness.  “He canceled the record of the charges against us and took it away by nailing it to the cross” (Col 2:14).  Granting me forgive, was very costly.  But Jesus did it all so that I might be set free from my sin.  He paved the way so that I might have a forgiving heart.  Paul tells us in Ephesians, “be kind to each other, tenderhearted, forgiving one another, just as God through Christ has forgiven you” (Eph 4:32).  When Jesus lives in my heart, he is the one who is forgiving others through me.  He gives me the ability to have a telfon personality.

I have been reading Richard Foster’s new book entitled, “The Sancturay of the Soul.”  I assume that most of the readers of this blog are familiar with the writings of Richard Foster.  I stumbled unto his first book back in the late 70’s entitled “The Celebration of Discipline.”  In those days I was fully immersed in the Charismatic Movement.  His book was an early wake up call, forcing me to examine the shallowness of my experience of God.  I consider Foster one of the early pioneers in the evangelical movement that has gone ahead as a scout informing us that there is much more to the Christian life.  What was needed was a new awareness of the great contemplative tradition that had existed from centuries.  Many of us, including myself, had never been introduced to this tradition.  Most was to be found in the Catholic tradition.  Then in the early 80’s I jumped into this vast spiritual stream of historic spirituality.  I have never turned back since jumping into the stream.

Anyway, Foster’s new book talks about “heart work.”  He quotes a 17th century Puritan writer by the name of John Flavel as observing that the “greatest difficulty in conversion, is to win the heart to God, and the greatest difficulty after conversion, is to keep the heart with God….Heart-work is hard work indeed.”  In Rev 3:20 we hear Jesus tells us, ” Here I am!  I stand at the door and knock.”  He is really speaking to  followers, wanting to be welcomed at the center.  He longs to have intimate communion with each of us.  We, however, are easily  distracted and preoccupied with outward affairs.  We content ourselves with good thoughts about God.  But God does not simply dwell in our thoughts.  Think of how limiting that would be.  We cannot contain God in our thoughts.  Intimacy of relationship is a matter of the heart.   We need to practice keeping our heart open to his Spirit.

So there will need to be a renovation of our hearts in order to make the heart a dwelling place for his Spirit.   There is much cleaning up that needs to take place.  As Terea of Avila reflected on the evil in her own heart, she observed, “O my Lord, since it seems You have determined to save me, I beseech Your Majesty…don’t You think it would be good….if the inn where You have to dwell continually would not get so dirty?”  When the Spirit of God comes into your life, he goes to the center.  It from the center that the Spirit radiates out into the rest of our inner life, cleaning the house.  This occurs as we allow him into the dark corners and the hidden cellar of our sin. 

But there is something in us the flees from the light.  “Everyone who makes a practice of doing evil, addicted to denial and illusion, hates God-light and won’t come near it, fearing a painful exposure.  But anyone working and living in truth and reality welcomes God-light so the work can be seen for the God-work it is” (John 3:20-21 – The Message).  These words of Jesus help us to see that heart work is God’s work.  We can’t do the renovation work.  Our task is to be willing to expose the darkness and let the light do the rest.  Trust me men, it works.  I know from my life and many who I have prayed with over the years.

Listen again to Foster on the inner change. “We are utterly, utterly dependent upon God to do this transforming work in us: the work of heart purity, of soul conversion, of inward formation, of life transformation.  This solitery and interior work within the heart is the most important, the most real, the most lasting reality in human life.”  God gives us a new heart and spirit. “And I will give you a new heart, and I will put a new spirit in you.  I will take your stony, stubborn heart and give you a tender, responsive heart.  And I will put my Spirit in you so that you will follow my decrees and be careful to obey my regulations” (Ezk 36:26-27 NLT).

To be trully human and fully alive involves enormous vulnerability and risk. It is a journey into maturity.  Most men choose the bondage of addiction over the anxiety and freedom that comes with being fully alive, fully awake and fully aware.  David Benner has pointed out that “the primary function of any addiction is to numb and desensitize.  Task number one is to keep us asleep and unaware”.  Our egos work hard at anesthetizing us to the terrors of real living.  For in real living we will come face to face with the unavoidable mystery of being human.  This we cannot manipulate or control.  We simply are who we are, in all our glory and fallness.  But we are addicted to the illusion of control in our attempt to manipulate the image of self.  It is like being addicted to playing God.  Again it is not reality.  “It is this terror that we most want to control and from which we most want to escape” says Benner.  “The demon in the dark of our inner basement is nothing more or less than our fear of being fully alive.” 

Not only does the need to control distract us from our deep inner fears of being found out,  but addiction help us avoid the “longing to surrender.”  But if men listen to their deepest longings, they point in the direction of surrender to someone bigger then themselves.  For men surrender feels more like defeat or failure.  The ego never wants to admit to surrender.  From early childhood we learned that if we are to receive the love and esteem of others we needed to be in control to seem successful and presentable.  The primary task of the ego is that of controlling our drives and impulses, control of emotions, control of our behavior and control of how others see us.  The ego become like the CEO in the organization of the self.

The key to finding our true self, the self that is created in the image of God, that has been rescued and redeemed by Jesus, and in the process of being restored in our life, is to surrender.  We have to give up the need to create an image of self that fits our sense of reality.  Remember our sense of reality is limited and distorted.  All that work we have done to create an image of self that we think is presentable to the world and who we would like to be has been built on sinking sand.  It takes an enormous amount of work to keep up.  I know – I did it for years.  I am still being set free from my imaging making.  The more I can be truthful about the good, the bad and the ugly in the presence of a loving God, that more I can let go of the image making .  I can testify that it bring freedom and authenticity.  I don’t fear all the dark stuff in my tank nearly as much.  Once you taste the fruits of liberty and freedom, you will not want to go back’  The risk of being more fully alive is worth the surrender

Listen to these words from Jesus in the Message. “What I’m saying is, If you walk around with your nose in the air, you’re going to end up; flat on your face.  But if you’re content to be simply yourself, you will become more than yourself” (Luke 14:11  –  The Message)  I take the idea of “walking around with my nose in the air” as a metaphor of taking pride in my image making.  Sooner or later I will fall on my face, since I have my nose in the air, living in my illusions of self making.  But if I am simply content to be Al Hendrickson in all my glory and woundedness, I can then become more of myself.  This is the self that was created before the foundations of the world.  “Long before he laid down earth’s foundations, he had us in mind, had settled on us as the focus of his love, to be made whole and holy in his love” (Eph 1:4 – The Message)  Wow, God had my image in mind before time.  “No, we neither make or save ourselves.  God does both the making and saving.  He creates each of us by Christ Jesus to join him in the work he does, the good work he has gotten ready for us to do, work we had better be doing.”  (Eph 2:10 – The Message).  Remember God does all the making and saving.  Praise the Lord!!

The novelist Walker Percy once observed, “To live in the past and future is easy.  To live in the present is like threading a needle.”  Think about that statement for a moment.  We might think that living with the pain and regret of  the past or the uncertainty and fear of the future is our greatest challenge.  But in many ways it is more difficult to live in the present moment because of our preoccupation with the past or the future.  Preoccupation becomes our enemy, for it causes us to become focused on ourselves.  Men as I have mentioned before it is all to easy to live in and from our “control towers.” In a confusing cultural environment, where the voices of so many opinions call for our attention and the need to make our way through the spiritual wasteland of modern life makes God’s presence seem so distant, we can so easily find ourselves living by our own wits.  While thinking  we are fully engaged, we are in actual fact falling asleep spiritually. We can go through our days as sleepwalkers.  George Gurdjieff maintains that the fundamental human problem is that we keep falling asleep. 

Scripture warns us about falling asleep. “But make sure that you don’t get so absorbed and exhausted in taking care of all your day-by-day obligations that you lose track of the time and doze off obvivious to God.  The night is about over, dawn is about to break. Be up and awake to what God is doing” (Romans 13:11-12 – The Message).  Listen to these words from George Gilder who has studied men’s issues for years. “Men lust, but they know not what for; They wander, and lose track of the goal; They fight and compete, but they forget the prize; They chase power and glory, but miss the meaning of life.”  All of what Gilder is discribing is all built on our effort and energy.  We become preoccupied with our effort to control and understand our lives.  In the meantime we go to sleep spiritually.

Mary Oliver has noted the the soul is built entirely out of attentiveness.  Attentiveness allows us to live with depth; you could say soulfully.  To be inattentive, that is, to be in a spiritual slumber, is to live very shallow lives. Ricard Foster talks about people living on the surface.  Richard Rohr describes it as living on the circumference.  We deprive our inner life, the life of the soul, from the essential ingredients that is needs to be in alive.  To be alive is to live in reality.  Reality is living as we truly are in the present moment.  Any other posture is an illusion.  This was very hard for me to admit to myself, since as a “professional holy man” I was trying so hard to be “good.” Reality become something of my own making. Instead of having depth, I lived a shallow life, operating on  “auto pilot,” working hard to maintain some kind of equilbrum, but all the while going to sleep spiritually.  I have been learning to wake up, as I pay close attention to my soul.  “Let me know you, O God and myself” said Augustine, “that is all.” 

The challenge men is the desire to stay awake.  Here are a few things I have learned the hard way, so that I might stay awake.  First, I have to give up the control.  Otherwise, I get stuck in my small, egocentric world, going around sleepwalking.  Second I have to surrender to someone bigger who truly loves me as I am.  That means Jesus has to be first.  Thirdly, I need to allow myself to get touch with all that is going on in my soul, the good, the bad and the ugly.  Sometimes it is not very pretty. But remember this; it is reality and not illusion.  Fourthly, it is imperative that I spend time with Jesus.  That is, I need to get still and listen to His voice speaking to me deep within.  Fifth, to recognize his voice I have to spend time meditating on the life of our Lord in Scripture.  I can testify that  being willing to stay awake, bring freedom, authenticity and grace to for the journey.

Thomas Merton warns us when he states, “There is no greater disaster in the spiritual life than to be immersed in unreality, for life is maintained and nourished in us by our vital relation with reality.”  I have found that facing the reality of my sinful nature has been the most difficult part of the spiritual journey  To finally come to the place of accepting the good, bad and ugly found in my heart has not been easy.  I have lived most of my life with an illusion of self  rather then reality of self.  Instead of accepting who I really am, I have denied my real self, trying to present an image of a “spiritual” man who has it together.  That practice robbed me of authenticity, that is, living with others as I really am.  I did not have freedom to be me and live in the joy of the present moment.  My focus more often then not was on my image of self rather then who I truly was in God.

Men, we can in confidence and humility come to know and accept all the parts of our inner life, especially those parts that are most shameful and fearful.  Why?  Because God know all about who we are and yet loves us in our stink.  “But God put his love on the line for us by offering his Son in sacrificial death while we were of no use whatever to him” (Rom 5:8 – The Message). I can not stress to you the joy and freedom in coming to accept all aspects of who you really are before God.  When you come to the inner knowing that God loves you with unconditional love, you are able finally to accept yourself as you are.  Knowing God and knowing self are intimately related.  As David Benner puts it, ” Knowing ourselves must therefore begin by knowing the self that is known by God.  If God does not know us, we do not exist.”  In other words, we  can live with an illusion of self, rather in the reality of who we are.

Think about it for a moment.  How is change going to come to a part of our self that we do not even accept?  Living with an illusion of self takes a lot of work.  We know that Jesus wants us to be crucified with him.  But when we live in illusion we end up often crucifying part of our true self in God.  Living in the reality of who I really am, means living in the light of God’s love and acceptance.  Take it from a fellow traveler, there is grace and mercy to crucify, that is surrender and give up control, of those bad habits and diseased atttiudes when they are exposed to the light.  In the clear, bright light of God’s grace I can then rejoice and be accepting of who I really am in Christ.  This is the real authentic me, giving me energy to live in joy and freedom.  Illusion simply is not an option once you taste the freedom and joy of living in your true self in Christ.

So here is a simply practice that has been very helpful for me.  I learned this from David Benner.  Spend time imaging God looking at you.  All those negative feelings and images you have of yourself, allow to flow out of yourself into the presence of God.  It might help to see them going into Jesus’ body as He died to healing you of your sinful condition.  You can bring all your inner junk to him at the foot of the cross.  Then visualize God the Father receiving you in love.  “Those who enter into Christ’s being-here-for-us no longer have to live under a continuous, low-lying black cloud.  A new power is in operation.  The Spirit of life in Christ, like a strong wind, has magnificently cleared the air, freeing you from a fated lifetime of brutal tyranny at the hands of sin and death” (Romans 8:1-2 – The Message). Like a strong wind the Spirit clears to air of our inner life.   “If you’re content with simply being yourself, you will become more than yourself” (Luke 18:14 – The Message).

Today I preached on the gospel lesson for this Sunday.  The text was from Matthew 16:13-20.  Again I was struck with an application for men as they follow Jesus.  In the text Peter makes his confession of who Jesus is by saying, “You are the Messiah, the Son of the living God” (v 16).  This was the best that Peter could offer on behalf of the other eleven.  He was making clear that he and the others thought that Jesus was God.  He was the promised Messiah.  Peter still had a long ways to go in his understanding of what this meant for him.  But he offered would he know to be true. Remember Peter stumbled badly later.  Yet the Lord was able to use him.  Take courage from one who was “a fragile stone.”

Jesus’ reply to Peter was to encourage him, “God bless you, Simon, son of Jonah!  You didn’t get that answer out of books or from teachers.  My Father in heaven, God himself, let you in on this secret of who I really am.  And now I’m going to tell you who you are, really are. You are Peter.  This is the rock on which I will put together my church, a church so expansive with energy that not even the gates of hell will be able to keep it out” (vs 17-18 – The Message).  Jesus understood that Peter and the others where moving from acquaintance with him to a heart felt commitment.  Something was getting internalized.  God the Father was revealing to the disciples that this was indeed the Messiah, the promised one.  In this regard I appreciate a quote from Soren Kierkegaard: “In order to fully understand what it means to be a Christian, you must stand in the crowd, point to a man and say ‘He is God.'”

What is noteworthy for us as men, is Jesus calling Peter a rock (Petros) and on this rock (petra) I will put together my church.  Jesus names Peter as the rock and maintains that on petra, that is Peter’s confession, He will build his church.  The thought I have for men is this.  By our heart-felt commitment to Jesus we are placed on the rock.  This is the most secure place we can stand in our day.  While much around us will fail and crumble, the rock will remain.  So the question for each of us is, “Am I standing on the rock.”  I know there are times when I feeling I am slipping, when in fear and uncertainty I loss my focus on Jesus.  But the rock is till there.  As I repent of my self-focus, crying out to him in mercy, he hears my prayer and lifts me up back unto the rock.  Like Peter instead of being a rock I am more like “a fragile stone.”

So men, when you are on the rock you are in a stable place.  Furthermore you get connected with folks who are building on the foundation of Jesus; folks who are on the rock.  Listen to what this means. “This is the rock on which I will put together my church, a church so expansive with energy that not even the gates of hell will be able to keep it out” (v18 – The Message).  Now that is real protection.  This should be motivation to be connected with others who are on the rock.  But there is more. “And that’s not all.  You will have complete and free access to God’s kingdom, keys to open any and every door: no more barriers between heaven and earth, earth and heaven.  A yes on earth is yes in heaven.  A no on earth is a no in heaven” (v19 – The Message).  You will see the hand of God at work in your life.  All this is possible because we are on the rock and have found others who are on the same rock.