The Father's Heart

“I am the prodigal son every time I search for unconditional love where it cannot be found.” 

― Henri J.M. Nouwen, Return of the Prodigal Son

The prodigal son is my favorite parable. There’s so much to learn from the viewpoint of the younger son, older son, and the father. Jesus presented a story which challenged the religious society’s belief system. His words continue to speak directly to our hearts today.

The entire crux of the story is the father’s heart. The angry younger son showed his resentment and bitterness by demanding his inheritance. An action which stated their relationship was dead. Such a request was a slap in his father’s face. What a gut-wrenching, painful event. A father’s heart torn to shreds and a family shamed by this dearly beloved child.

How did the father respond? By giving his immature, reckless son what he’d asked for and allowing him to leave home. There’s no indication the father begged his son to change his mind and stay. No stern lecture about disrespect and disobedience. Just a sorrowful acceptance of his son’s choices.

Later when he was out of resources, this son meditated on his father’s merciful, compassionate, loving sacrifice. Was he wrong about his father’s heart? The guilt and shame over his actions must have been tremendously heavy. Yet remembering how his father responded gave him hope for redemption and he headed for home. At best, the prodigal son hoped to become a servant. He prepared a speech, intending to beg for just a small measure of forgiveness.

The father was watching, hopeful for his son’s return. Unconcerned with convention, unfettered by bitterness, the father ran joyously to embrace his son. Immediately a celebratory party was ordered. When the prodigal son tried to speak, his father cut him off, declaring to all that his lost son had returned. No sermons. No hesitation. Only relationship.

But I think there were actually two prodigal sons in this story. I love Henri Nowen’s quote because it speaks to the hard heart of many Christians. Thankfully, many folks bypass the rebelliousness of the younger son. They follow the rules, attend church, tithe, work hard in ministry, etc. But what is the motivation of their heart? It’s revealed when God shows mercy to a sinful, disobedient child.

When the older brother heard his father was throwing a party for the brother who shamed the family, he was filled with anger.

Look! All these years I’ve been slaving for you and never disobeyed your orders. Yet you never gave me even a young goat so I could celebrate with my friends. But when this son of yours who has squandered your property with prostitutes comes home, you kill the fattened calf for him! Luke 15:28-30

The older son did not understand the father’s heart any more than his brother. All he needed to do was ask for what he needed and it would have been given. “‘My son, the father said’, ‘you are always with me and everything I have is yours.’” (Luke 15:31) Rather than rest in a loving relationship, the older son based acceptance on good works. He believed obedience would bring him special status, feeling betrayed when the father showed mercy.

No matter which son you resemble, the key is to move toward the father’s heart. Do you look for unconditional love in all the wrong places? Do you run towards trouble or stand in defensiveness? The younger son eventually came to his senses (Luke 15:17) and turned around. We don’t know what choice the older son made. Did he, too, see the error of his ways and embrace his father? What about you? The father is always watching and waiting for your return.

Don't Shoot Your Eye Out (Do I Really Have To Go To Church?)

There's a popular meme going around lately.

I get it. I understand the idea. Yes, totally true that the relationship with God, not the religion of church attendance and rule abiding, is the only thing worth pursuing, spiritually speaking. Plus, I love boats.

But not quite.

Because the dangerous part of this meme's philosophy is the popular statement made these days by so many--I don't have to go to church. I can worship God anywhere.

Anywhere. In the woods. In my fishing boat. With my family. Staring at the sunrise in the Smokies. In bed. (And let's be honest. That's where people are most often on Sunday morning. They are not out in Yosemite lifting their hands to the mountains in praise. They are snoring. True story.)

The idea sounds good. Simple. Truthful. Uber-spiritual, right? Definitely appealing, some days. But is it true? And do we? Do we worship God in those places? Or do we just believe that we do? Is it necessary to be in church to worship God? Or to be there at all?

This is the second question in a series on the church. I hope you'll join the discussion.

Do I need to go to church? And the common follow up statement—The church has hurt me. I don't need it anymore. True?

The first part of this response is—yes. True. The church probably has hurt you. And I'm sorry.

The church does need to repent. And change.  [tweet this].

Yes, sometimes we have acted like you're less than worthy if you were not in a pew (or a chair) every week. We have looked at you like one of those HGTV projects that needs a lot of work. We have been friendly but not loving, inviting but not welcoming, a group but not a community.

We have fought over minutia and neglected to fight for what mattered. We have condescended to younger generations and accused them of compromise when all they've really done is made us uncomfortable.

We have gossiped, and backstabbed, and questioned your parenting, theology, and loyalty. Yes, the church is guilty of all this, at one time or another. And we should repent.

Seriously. I love Hermey. But theologically speaking . . . 

But that doesn't make it OK to go all Hermey and Rudolph on us. You're not romantic misfits if you strike out on your own because the church was mean. I think, in other arenas, that's called pouting. If there's a place on earth that's not full of sinners who need to repent, I have not found it, and God never mentions it past the Garden of Eden. If I did find it, I'd be there, and, well, there goes the neighborhood.

I know about hurt. I left my last pastoral position when I finally felt too emotionally abused to keep trying. As I work now in a church plant, it seems that eighty percent of the people who come through our doors have felt that hurt in some way. The stories are frighteningly similar. I do not trivialize it; there is some serious pain out there caused by people who earnestly believe they are following Jesus.

Pain teaches us something

But maybe, just maybe, God wants to use that pain. Maybe he wants to use it specifically to make his church a better place. Could it be that he truly wishes to use you, and your hurt, to make sure that the next person who comes through the doors does not end up with that ache? Could he be training you to teach his people about empathy and wholeness? Could he want you to bless His church, not vice versa?

And is it possible that, when you give up and run from the hurt, you're running from the chance to make it better for everyone? Is this, maybe, the grown up version of taking your toys and going home from the playground? Yes, even when the playground ended up being more of a battleground that left you nearly fatally wounded. Are we really supposed to get up and go back there?

Maybe not exactly the same “there” in terms of street address. (Although that's also very possible.) But the church? Yes. Because it's about more than us.

Just as a body, though one, has many parts, but all its many parts form one body, so it is with Christ. For we were all baptized by one Spirit so as to form one body—whether Jews or Gentiles, slave or free—and we were all given the one Spirit to drink. 

Even so the body is not made up of one part but of many. Now if the foot should say, “Because I am not a hand, I do not belong to the body,” it would not for that reason stop being part of the body. And if the ear should say, “Because I am not an eye, I do not belong to the body,” it would not for that reason stop being part of the body. 

If the whole body were an eye, where would the sense of hearing be? If the whole body were an ear, where would the sense of smell be? But in fact God has placed the parts in the body, every one of them, just as he wanted them to be. If they were all one part, where would the body be? As it is, there are many parts, but one body.

The eye cannot say to the hand, “I don’t need you!” And the head cannot say to the feet, “I don’t need you!” . . . If one part suffers, every part suffers with it; if one part is honored, every part rejoices with it. Now you are the body of Christ, and each one of you is a part of it. (1 Corinthians 12.12-27).

A body cannot exist without all of its parts. It can't function properly. It will always be doomed to go around without a heart, or courage, or a brain (yes, we've all seen that, haven't we?) so long as those whom God joined to it are MIA. It will continue to blunder into walls and fail to hear the cries of those outside those walls. Because the eyes and ears, often the most sensitive parts of the body, are gone.

Paul explains that, if we have the Holy Spirit as our mark of identity, we are part of the body. Like it or not. That church we complain about? It is us. We are it. We cannot disassociate ourselves from it any more than we can take out our own eye and declare we have no need for it, we can see just fine without it, thank you very much. Our eternal identity is spoken by God as part of that body.  [tweet this].

We are poking ourselves in our own eye. And that's just plain dumb.

If you've been hurt, I'm sorry. Really, really sorry. I know you'd rather do just about anything than open yourself up to that again. But it's what God designed when he called us a body. He had in mind a people who walked together, toward the same place, with the same goal. He did not have a picture of a bunch of individual eyes, noses, and kneecaps lying around telling one another, “Hey, I'm OK. I'm worshiping God over here. Going my own way. But it's all good.”

He thought of a community of people who were willing to risk hurt. Again and again. Not because anyone deserves it or because we will benefit from it. Because Jesus did it. Does it. For us. And he asks us to be his image here until he comes. 

This Is Not Your Mother's Church . . . (Part 1)

   

A little over thirty years ago I reached a crisis point.

My life was unraveling in just about every area, and I was about to make an irrevocable decision. I was driving my car at over one hundred miles an hour on an overpass on the Boulder/Denver Turnpike on a sunny, but cold, March morning. There were a slew of demonic voices whispering in my head, relentlessly telling me how worthless a human being I was and how easy it would be to drive off the road and end my pain and suffering. The ground yawned one hundred feet below, waiting to receive me with open arms, an un-dug grave.

Then, something extraordinary happened.

In an instant, The One True Living God invaded my torment, banished the voices in the blink of an eye, and told me how much He loved me. He then proceeded to distract me from my temporary insanity by showing me all the good in my life instead of condemning me for all the bad.

Three was plenty of bad and, in my mind, not much good at all.

But He showed me how wrong I was to believe the lies the enemy of my soul had been so adept at spinning for a very long time. I’ve had multiple first-hand experiences since that incredible, life-changing moment battling the Father of Lies, both for myself and others. Fortunately, I’ve also had even more encounters with The Prince of Peace, The Ancient of Days, The Holy One of Israel.

When people ask me about those dark days, I often tell them that I was looking for God in all the wrong places (yes, I borrowed that from the Country Western song and replaced one word, although love and God are easily interchangeable). I also tell them that I was dragged into the Kingdom kicking and screaming, and that God definitely got the worst end of the deal. I, like Paul, was chief among sinners. I sinned with gusto. I was not much of a prize when the Lord pulled me back from the precipice, both feet hanging dangerously over the brink of the Abyss. 

I’m so very glad He did.

Shortly after He found me and plucked me from an eternity of torment separated from Him, I had a series of encounters with Holy Spirit that set the course of my life in Him. Before I share a bit about that, and the point of today’s blog, some background is important.

I grew up in a “typical” middle-class home. My dad worked two jobs. My mother stayed at home until I was twelve and old enough to take care of my brother while she went back to school to earn both her college degree in Teaching and a Master’s in Library Science. Dad’s parents were Methodist, but he had no place for any kind of religion in his life. He viewed Preachers right up there with used car salesmen. Mom grew up a staunchly faithful Baptist and won awards for perfect attendance in Sunday school--until she turned fourteen. She’d been having dramatic encounters with Holy Spirit and shared them with her pastor. He told her to stop having those encounters, because “they were of the devil.” You see, mom’s experiences with Holy Spirit did not fit the pastor’s religious theology; therefore they could not possibly be of God. As a result, mom left the organized church and wandered in the wilderness for the next five decades. She was on a quest to find out the truth about God, and her sincere desire to grow closer to Him led her into the welcoming arms of the New Age Movement. Mom never did anything half-way. She became one of its staunchest disciples. I’m the oldest, and we have always been close, so she passed along everything she learned to me. She was a wonderful teacher, and I was her best student. I drank it all up like a man who hasn’t had water in days, because I was on a quest myself.

A quest that had been ordained before the foundations of the world.

 

 

      
I grew up hearing all about God, very little about Jesus, and nothing about Holy Spirit. My mother gave God credit for everything good that happened in our lives and taught me to trust Him even when things fell apart. She taught me the importance of tithing, how to turn the other check, how important it is to forgive those who hurt me, the blessings that come when I lay down my own soulish desires and put the needs of others first, and the biblical mandate of generosity toward the poor. She taught by example, living what she’d learned.

But there was something missing.

A pearl of great price that took me eighteen years to find.

Jesus and Holy Spirit.

You might think that knowing all about God is enough. I can tell you from first-hand experience, it isn’t. You might think that knowing all about God and Jesus is enough. It isn’t. Father, Son, and Holy Spirit are a package deal. We need an intimate relationship with all three if we’re going to be victorious and overcome the world as Jesus did, both for ourselves and for others. Think of the package this way: Father is the magnificent engine of a beautiful and highly-sought-after vintage car. Son is the one-of-a-kind key to the ignition. It cannot, and has never been, replicated. Holy Spirit is the high-octane fuel that can only be used in this unique automobile. Working in unison, they are a functioning and all-powerful automobile. An extraordinary vehicle that turns heads whenever and wherever it shows up. However, if even one of the Trinity is missing, the car is going nowhere and will be good for little more than looking at and admiring.

Back to my story about the dramatic encounters with Holy Spirit shortly after I made a decision to surrender everything to Him.

Over a three week period I had a series of “visitations.” In Christian lingo this simply means Holy Spirit revealed Himself to me in a dramatic and undeniable fashion. The very first thing God spoke to me through Holy Spirit was that I would live to see His Son coming in Glory and that I would be living in Jerusalem. I really didn’t know what this meant, but I knew it was important and that I had to study and find out exactly what this shocking heavenly pronouncement meant for me.

I was thirty years old, and I’d never read or studied the Bible. We had them at home, but they were just books we carried with us to church and kept on our laps while the preacher told us what God really meant to say in His Word. We were sheep and the preachers were the keepers of knowledge. It was understood by all that they had the answers. If our questions didn’t fit with their answers, there was something wrong with us.

Consequently, I didn’t last very long in any church.

 

I was searching for truth, however, and I was diligent in spite of my misgivings. I went to the Methodist church of my grandparents, gave my mom’s Baptist church a whirl, went to Mass with a Catholic girl I dated briefly, and visited a Synagogue with another girl I dated. I found a great deal of religious hypocrisy in all of them mixed with bits and pieces of truth. In my youthful arrogance, I decided none of them knew what the heck they were talking about. So, for over fifteen years I wandered in the wilderness as well, following in mom’s erstwhile footsteps. 

Please don’t think I’m bashing any particular denomination. 

I’m not. 

 

There’s plenty of hypocrisy and religious bondage in all of the denominations, so they are all in good company. Let me also be clear, I am not bashing individuals, denominations, or even the Church as a whole. In fact, I’m not being critical at all, in spite of what you might think. I’m merely making a point about the distinction between religious views and behavior, and relationship. God has as much distaste for religion as I do. In fact, I leaned from Him that He hates religion. He could care less what denomination we idolize and bind ourselves to. His only interest is in having an intimate relationship with His creation. If you don’t believe that, you might want to spend some quality time in your Bible, starting with the stories about the Sadducees and Pharisees.

Next week, I’ll pick up my story, and we’ll delve a bit deeper into the meaning of “This is not your mother’s church . . .”