peace, be still

As I have discovered the value of the written and well-loved prayer, one of my favorites has become a prayer “for quiet hearts,” found in the Book of Common Prayer:

O God of peace, who has taught us that in returning and rest we shall be saved, in quietness and in confidence shall be our strength: By the might of your Spirit lift us, we pray, to your presence, where we may be still and know that you are God; through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.

Often when I sit down to write here, my heart is not remotely quiet. There’s a lot of tension, disquiet, a sense of striving—for the right idea, the right words, the right way to explain myself. There have been times I’ve asked God if it’s time to be done, if after 15 years of writing on the Internet I have said as much as I need to say and the world has heard enough from me.

This morning in prayer, I asked again what the Spirit had to say to me. “Speak, Lord, for your servant is listening.”

I hoped for something obvious, like “Stop writing,” or “Keep going.” Instead, He said, “Be still.”

As translated by the NASB in Psalm 46:10—cease striving. I’ve spent a lot of time mulling that phrase and the Hebrew words it comes from. I picture a child’s sleeping body, utterly limp, or the perfectly still surface of a pond—no tension, no motion, no bracing.

As spoken by Jesus to the turmoil of the storm—peace, be still. Or perhaps a booming command of “Silence!” would capture the nature of His words more accurately. “And the wind died down and it became perfectly calm” (Mark 4:39b)—no tension, no motion, no bracing.

Or, as put by Moses in the face of a battle against the Egyptians—you need only to be still. To stop talking, to say nothing, to let God fight instead.

And so I release my own bracing for the impact of writing the wrong thing. I release my tension around disappointing the people I value. I am quiet, restful, limp in the hands of God, waiting to receive the word He might give me and refusing to willfully dig it out on my own strength or my own clock. Waiting for Him to do battle on my behalf.

Words keep failing me, and maybe it’s because words must fail eventually. Maybe it’s because it’s not possible to capture God and His heart and His work in the space of a few paragraphs of cold letters on a page. This has to be lived, embodied, touched, felt, known, seen, shared—for the first time I’m realizing I cannot have this walk with Jesus alone. I cannot have it online. I cannot have it only in my head, as if my truest self were just my mind, divorced from my body and heart and gut.

The convenient thing about an intellectual faith, a faith built on righteousness by good doctrine and knowledge of the Bible, is that it’s fairly self-sufficient and immensely scalable.

The inconvenient thing is it bears almost no resemblance to Jesus’s vision of the kingdom of heaven.

One is a formula I can watch on YouTube from the comfort of my home. The other is a fully embodied experience of the life, death, resurrection, and ascension of Jesus that can’t be mass-produced, faked, bought, or sold.

And so of course words fail—words, which I love so much! Words which I have spent my life honing, crafting, and using to express my deepest thoughts and feelings as I learn and grow. But words can’t help but fall woefully short of the truest reality unless they, like Christ, become flesh.

Israel had many words. The Ten Commandments are called, literally, the “Ten Words”—and they had hundreds and hundreds more commands than that. They had a whole history of kings and prophets recorded in writing. And still, the Word had to become flesh.

The knowledge had to become life.

The truth had to become human.

What good have I done, if I write a dozen profound books about Jesus but fail to live and walk with Him in my real, offline life? He says “whatever you did for one of the least of these brothers and sisters of mine, you did for me”—and His examples are feeding the hungry and clothing the naked, not writing brilliant essays of what it’s like to feed the hungry or clothe the naked.

God didn’t tell me “Stop writing” but neither did He say “Keep going.” He said, “Be still.”

So in returning and rest, I follow Jesus, and I learn to bring my whole self—not just my head—into communion with Him. It is not scalable, nor even really shareable. But it’s all that matters.

belonging to Jesus

The reformer in me is ever-tempted by the idea of a Ninety-Five Theses moment—a complete break from the ball of religion attached to my limbs by a chain of bureaucracy (in other words, your average Western church). What would it feel like to run—to set off at a sprint toward the finish line, cheered on by that Cloud of Witnesses, unencumbered by sin, guilt, law, fear, or any other unnecessary hindrance?

I have spent my life immersed in evangelicalism, in a variety of different local church bodies. The weight of religion seems to grow heavier over time, and I wonder if it’s because it didn’t feel like much of a burden when it gave me belonging. But what if conformity, not Christ, has been at the root of that belonging? Ever since I started seeking first the kingdom of heaven—sometimes at the expense of the “kingdom” of the church—the shackles of religion have become much more obvious.

When you belong, it’s so easy to believe that you’ve got it right. You are where you’re supposed to be, doing what you’re supposed to do. Your church must be approved by God, because you feel so at home there. But wait a second. Doesn’t that just mean your church is approved by . . . you?

I heard this quote recently for the first time, and it made me think:

Classically, there are three ways in which humans try to find transcendence—religious meaning—apart from God as revealed through the cross of Jesus: through the ecstasy of alcohol and drugs, through the ecstasy of recreational sex, through the ecstasy of crowds. Church leaders frequently warn against the drugs and the sex, but, at least in America, almost never against the crowds.

Eugene H. Peterson

When my sense of belonging began to erode, I noticed: I may have been substituting the ecstasy of being part of the crowd for the actual transcendence of being part of Christ’s body.

I may have been conflating going to church and doing “churchy” things with obedience. I may have been measuring my faithfulness by how many Sundays my butt was in the pew. I may have started making my faith about going somewhere once a week for two hours to play-act the perfect mix of smiling and submissive and vulnerable and guarded—not about being something, being an apprentice of Christ alone, 24 hours a day, 7 days a week.

When Jesus called His disciples, He didn’t say “Meet me at the synagogue on the Sabbath for an hour.” He said, “Follow Me.”

Starting here, now, wherever we are and wherever we go—and continuing indefinitely. And, importantly, doing it together, even when our backgrounds are beyond disparate, our personalities mix like oil and water, and our political differences would normally have us killing each other. That’s what being a disciple means.

That’s what being the Church means.

The ball and chain of religion would have us believe that “church” is a place we go with a bunch of people who look and sound and think exactly like us. That it’s an event we help make happen, not a body that we are an animating part of. It often pushes a certificate of church membership or confirmation like it’s a certificate of marriage, forgetting that biblically, we don’t marry a church; we are the Bride of Christ. Religion tries to pass off valuing conformity as treasuring the truth, gatekeeping ministry as protecting the body, and upholding legalism as fearing God.

The truth is something to treasure—so maybe we shouldn’t try to shut down truth-seekers for fear that they’ll find where our statement of faith doesn’t fully reflect God’s heart.

The body is something to protect—so maybe we shouldn’t try to silence and dismiss whole demographics within it that could provide a valuable voice and perspective on behalf of its vulnerable.

God is Someone to fear—so maybe we should consider how He will judge those who, like Pharisees, obstruct the entrance to the kingdom of heaven by paving the way instead toward kingdoms of this world. Jesus said of them: “Woe to you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites, because you shut the kingdom of heaven in front of people; for you do not enter it yourselves, nor do you allow those who are entering to go in” (Matthew 23:13, emphasis added).

I’m not calling out any particular church I’ve been part of in the last 30 years. I’m pleading with all of them. All of us.

Unity does not, cannot, mean conformity to a particular denomination or set of secondary and tertiary doctrines. The goal isn’t to belong to a large and growing crowd, it’s to become one healthy body. Genuine unity can only come through recognizing Christ as the body’s Head—meaning, according to Ephesians, its Unifier. Only a central focus on the Messiah Jesus, His death and resurrection, and His kingdom can bind us together into one living and working and fruit-bearing organism.

Any “unity” achieved through legalistic conformity instead of the pursuit of Jesus will lead only to the (continued) mass fracturing of Christianity into a million tiny echo chambers. We can’t accomplish our mission in that state.

The call of the disciple is simple and difficult: She must deny herself, take up her cross, and follow Jesus.

Jesus, not a crowd.

Jesus, not a husband.

Jesus, not a pastor.

Jesus, not a denomination.

Jesus, not a political party, candidate, or policy platform.

Jesus, not a particular side of a culture war.

Belonging, while a vitally important aspect of human flourishing, is not a biblical metric for how well we’re doing this. Belonging—at least the kind that feels comfortable, confirms all our priors, and lets us come together to congratulate ourselves on our rightness week after week—may not be part of the deal.

We belong to Jesus, and no other.

“My sheep listen to my voice; I know them, and they follow me. I give them eternal life, and they shall never perish; no one will snatch them out of my hand.”

John 10:27-28

Jesus + nothing

For the last couple of weeks, I’ve been writing out something of a treatise on why and how my views on complementarian doctrine have shifted over the last 5-10 years. The hope was to answer the questions I’ve been getting more and more often lately—“Why have you changed your mind?” or “Why does this matter to you?”—because I really do appreciate being asked. Too often, instead of approaching one another with curiosity and care, we choose instead to fill in the blanks with our own assumptions, or apply slippery-slope logic: If you’re not a complementarian anymore, where will your obvious disregard for Scripture take you next?

For now, the treatise is resting and waiting for its time.

Today I just want to set my eyes on Jesus.

Jesus—the Master of the chaos. The storm-winds and wild waves obey His voice. When my gaze is fixed on Him, there is nothing I fear.

I don’t fear those who question my integrity.

I don’t fear those who fear the questions I ask.

I don’t fear those who believe that it’s their moral duty to keep the truth controlled and contained.

And I don’t fear that I will end up lost in some blasphemous new belief system, because my eyes are on Jesus and my heart is filled with His Spirit and God the Father surrounds me with His protective embrace. I know that Yahweh has given me a profound delight in His Word, and I have arrived at my conclusions from it and with it, not working against it or around it.

I’m just a person, thinking, and following Jesus wherever He goes—which sometimes means following Him outside the camp.

Sometimes I wonder if we have lost Jesus the same way the Pharisees lost the plot: by shrouding Him in extra guidelines and burdens, binding His hands and feet with our pet rules and statements of faith, and forgetting that our light and our salvation is Christ alone. It’s Jesus + nothing else, not Jesus + complementarianism. Not Jesus + Paul. Not Jesus + my own good behavior.

Jesus.

Plus nothing.