What I've Given Up For Lent

To be totally upfront with you, I have not celebrated Lent since high school. At that point, I also would not have called it a celebration. More like a nightmare. No dessert for 40 days. No treats. Just an exercise in will power.

It is that view of the spiritual life that caused me to abandon church during the college years when my girlfriend and I were out of the watchful eyes of our parents. Only reason I mention my girlfriend in that sentence is that she is the reason I was going to church. Sunday night was an extra opportunity to have a date with her. Now you have a complete picture of my adolescent spiritual life.

Not this year. It has occurred to me that Lent is about the false self. It is about turning away from something or somethings that give the false sense of value and acceptance. Something that, it is possible, you love more than God. It is denial of the things that give comfort and keep me from having to trust. Even as I continue to develop my identity in Christ, conforming to His image, it is possible to let the Lie creep in, to drift, and function as if something other than Jesus is necessary to make me whole.

It is with those thoughts running though my little brain, that I encountered this in one of the blogs I follow, the New Exodus by Chuck DeGroat (check it out):

Lent invites us to intentionally frustrate ourselves, to engage in a season of deprivation, which actually makes us more aware of the depth of our dependence on any number of things – a substance, our reputation, control, achievement, being right, being comfortable, being secure.

That became the catalyst for me. If you've read any of my past postings, you know that I'm a people pleaser. As I go through the daily process of denying myself and taking up this cross, I have been surprised by the number of ways the need for affirmation manifests itself. My pride wants satisfaction.

Which takes me to what I am giving up for Lent. I maintain this blog for me. I'm working out my thoughts on all this false self, identity, and spiritual life stuff as God directs. Anyone is invited to join, that is why the blog is open. My hope is that if people read they will find something helpful or something that resonates within them - I want God to use this journey.

Lately, though, I've gotten to looking at my 'stats'. Often. Too often. Then either being ecstatic or bummed depending on the number of you that are joining me. It's nice to be noticed. This is not your problem or me asking you not to read. I want you here, bring your friends, tweet and email anything you find of value. The problem is mine - it is my crafty false self in yet another new form. It is insecurity and the desire for affirmation to supplement what I get from God.

For the next 40 days I will not click the 'stats' link on my blog's back-end (is that OK to say?). I'm disabling Google analytics. And I'm going to work through the symptoms of withdrawal as they bubble up.

You are invited to check-in with me on this as often as you care to. Ask me about my Lenten commitment. Ask me how I'm dealing. I'd appreciate your friendship.

Image Part 3: Covering Up the Broken Image

The moment they partook in the fruit that was forbidden by God they realized their nakedness. Everything changed. One moment their greatest worry was finding a new place in the garden to experience the beauty of all God made and the very next moment they realized that they stood naked before one another. That perfect image was broken and the first couple experienced shame.

Their vulnerability was on display and it was overwhelming. As they each looked at the other, instead of security, they were filled with questions and doubt. Shame entered the picture - the fear of not being loved nor accepted - and the result was an uncontrollable urge to make themselves more acceptable to the other.

So they sewed together fig leaves. To cover up their nakedness. The openness in which they lived with each other was now hidden behind a protective layer of chlorophyll. It might as well have been a wall.

New questions must have flew through their mind - Does this person love me? If s/he really knew me, deep down, they would run away. They are just using me. - Trust was in doubt. Instead of oneness, there was fear.

But this was not the end. Far from it - there are footsteps in the garden - God is coming! We must hide. Shame caused Adam and Eve to lose touch with the image. It was broken, and so was their relationship with the Creator

Rather than trust, there was now doubt about God's goodness, doubt about whether He really wanted what was best for them. With the Creator, the realization of nakedness was even worse - fig leaves were not enough - they needed to run away and hide among the trees. To cover their broken image, they hid from the one who created it.

We do the same things. In our relationships, instead of sewing together fig leaves we pursue social status, wear new clothes, are seen with the right people, have the right job, recycle, work out, believe what others do, are overtly sexual, etc. These things cover our shame, we think, and make us acceptable. Creating a barrier so that others will not know the real us, because to do that would open us to not being loved nor accepted. There is less risk with the fig leave. If we are rejected, then either I can fix my leaf or blame it on the inadequacy of the other.

Confronted by God, we run. We ignore. We blame and curse. We question God and his motives and ways. Throwing everything we can between Him and us.

The trees are all around us. Religion looks nice, but it is a forest to cover our nakedness. We create our own standards and truth so that we can make ourselves more acceptable, covering our broken image from our Creator.

The false self we create serves a dual purpose - it is a barrier to others knowing us, and a way to hide from God. In our broken state, the false self is our attempt to fix ourselves. Fig leave and forest.

In your relationships, what are the fig leaves that you struggle to overcome?

How do you mimic Adam and Eve's flight into the woods with God?

Repentance and Identity

I have been reading a wonderful book - The Divine Embrace: Recovering the Passionate Spiritual Life - by Robert Webber (highly recommended) and encountered an amazing definition of repentance that I wanted to share with you. Read, reread, and digest this.

God's vision for us is a reversal of our present identity...The old identity, like Adam, turns in on the self, worships and adores the self, preserves the self, lives out of the self. The new identity with Jesus is an identity with the second Adam. Now it is Jesus who shapes our self-understanding and action.

Repentance is to hear God's story and to be struck by its truth, in the heart - in the innermost chamber of our being - every day. Repentance is the desire to leave behind our old identity with the first Adam and continually turn toward a new identity in Jesus.

What do you think?

Image Part 2: Shattering the Image

Hand crafted in the image of the Creator, experiencing no shame, the man and woman were left to tend the garden God had placed them in. For an unknown amount of time, the two of them lived in this idyllic state. Until the Lie.

A serpent appears on the scene with the ability to talk. Myself, I hate snakes. Since I can never remember if it is "yellow on black, better step back" or "red on black, friend of Jack" or "red on yellow, you're a dead fellow", I just play it safe and avoid them all. Much more so a snake that could talk.

But that bit of wisdom was not available to our happy couple and they engage the crafty serpent in conversation. This serpent is intent on spreading a Lie; God held back on them, He really did not have their best interest at heart and could not be trusted. They were really less valuable then they were going around thinking. There was something they were still lacking if they were going to be complete.

The Lie was that there was something in addition to God that would make them whole.

Sound familiar? The enemy convinced God's image bearers that they were incomplete and not fully acceptable. It is the same Lie that all of us at some point believe. It is the source of our false self and it comes in a million forms. "I am not wanted." "I am not lovable." "God is nowhere to be found." "I am unnoticed." "I am defective." This list could go on and on.

Instead of being met with Truth, the Lie was met with acceptance. Rather than comparing what they heard with God's fixed truth, they verified according to another standard. Looks good. It is edible. It will make us more acceptable. Sin was born.

The image that God so meticulously made a part of Adam and Eve was shattered. It could not remain in tact alongside the violation of God's rule.

We still bear the image, but it is horribly broken. Our attempts to make ourselves more acceptable causes us to lose touch with the image. Consequences that the first couple will see immediately, and we'll look at in the part 3 of the image blogs.

What Lie do you try to satisfy in order to make yourself more acceptable?

Book Review: Afraid to Believe in Free Will by Carl Begley

Free will is a topic that evokes a myriad of responses in church world, so when I picked this book up I was fully expecting to be reading a theological treatise on the subject. It did not take long to realize that, while written by an author with a Christian lens, this book is about the effects a negative view of free will in psychology has had in the public square.

The modern trend in psychology is to deny that humans have free will. This deterministic view, asserts Begley, is the result of psychologists desiring to have their field of study viewed as a hard science, such as physics. Like any hard science, the objects being studied (in this case humans) must behave according to unbreakable laws of nature in order to produce consistent and predicted results. Hence, according to the deterministic view our behaviors are completely determined by the system and circumstances in which we find ourselves.

According to Begley, while we cannot prove free will, neither can we disprove it and it is essential that we adopt a belief in the idea of free will for the good of our culture. If our behavior is indeed determined, then that frees us from the responsibilities and consequences of our actions; a trend, which Begley notes with numerous examples, is already upon us.

My initial reaction was surprise to find that there was a free will conflict within the field of psychology, which is a subject with which I am just beginning to become familiar. But the more I read, I was fascinated by the origins and consequences of this one core belief. This book is not overly technical in its use of terminology and lays out a good historical foundation so that the reader can understand the origins and development of thinking in this area.

That, along with the applications, made this book worth the read for me as a member of a church staff. If you are looking for stars, I would give this book four out of five. I learned a lot and it caused me to reflect on my own philosophy in this area.

Disclosure of Material Connection: I received this book free from the publisher through theBookSneeze®.com book review bloggers program. I was not required to write a positive review. The opinions I have expressed are my own.

Image Part 1: Created in God's Image

As I have been pondering identity and formalizing my thoughts on the topic, I've been drawn back to the beginning. Back to the garden in which God saw that everything He made was good, but looking around something was still missing.

Out of a pile of dust on the ground, God formed man. Still, that was not enough, the creation needed something special, something of more value, something that in the end was going to have him up the ante from good to very good. So, God made man just not another creature, but an image bearer of the Creator Himself.

So God created man in his own image, in the image of God he created him; male and female he created them. - Genesis 1:27

Mankind was created to bear the image of God. It is part of our being and is what makes us human. This image given to Adam and his bride, Eve, gave them the capacity to accomplish their purpose to rule over the creatures and subdue the earth.

It is the image that gives us special value within the creation. How is a human different than a dolphin, cat, hamster or spider? People were crafted in the image of God, while the others were not.

The special gift of God's image also gave special standing in the creation - united with God, having a relationship with Him and serving Him, while at the same time stewarding the creation.

Because of the untarnished image of God, there was perfect identity in God. The man and his wife had a perfect sense of self, their purpose and position, and the source of their value. At the end of the creation account, the last thing we are told about them, the last glimpse that we get of the perfect couple is that they were naked and felt no shame.

Naked not just in form but also in their openness, vulnerability, unity with each other and with God. With the result of this nakedness, this abandonment to absolute truth, was that there was no resulting shame.

Shame is the fear of not being love nor accepted. Adam and Eve felt none between themselves or with God. Intimacy without fear. No fear of rejection. No fear of abandonment. No craving separation.

At this point, there was no doubt about God's love for them. That in the end, God had their best interest as His own.

At this point, there were no barriers to giving or receiving love from the other human. No self-protection. No protective walls. No coping strategies. No shame. Only a perfect sense of self.

No wonder God's assessment was that this was very good.

What are some ways you see God's original goodness in the creation?

How would you expect to respond in a relationship in which there was no shame?

New Math

Finally... I knew that at some point my background in mathematics would come in handy in my bloggings! Was chatting with someone last week about the thought process that we tend to follow when we rely on something other than Christ to add value to our sense of self.

In his book The Pressure's Off, Larry Crabb calls this the Law of Linearity, but it goes by many names and is the underlying theme of so many books on relationships, leadership, parenting, and even discipleship. It is really the conditional statement "if I do X, then I will get Y".

The premise or condition X has something to do with my behavior or what I have and value is reflected back to the self through the consequence, Y. It is a statement of the false self to satisfy the lie that we are living by which has the effects of being manipulative, exhausting, and ultimately results in a never ending cycle of dissatisfaction.

It looks something like these...

If I please my boss, then I will get affirmation.

If I am a good parent, then my kids will turn out great.

If I do something to make my wife happy, then she will have sex with me.

If I am pretty enough, then he will stay with me.

If I get new job, then I will be happy.

If I get married, then I won't be lonely.

If people need me, then I will not feel insecure.

If my preaching is good, then my church will grow.

There is nothing wrong with wanting your kids to turn out great, having a church that is growing, or desiring to have sex with your wife. Those and the others are normal, healthy desires. The problems arises when good things become ultimate things. For instance, when rather than having a desire for affirmation, it becomes a need that the sense of self is dependent upon. Here we end up with a sense of self that is based on things that are prone to change, are not constant, and are going to leave us disappointed.

Desires are a normal part of life. When we attach a condition to them, they become expectations. If X, then Y (our conditional statement) is an expectation. Problem is that expectations go unmet, which leads to disappointment, hurt and shame. The New Math will help us to understand why. Unmet expectations turn the statement around. If not Y, then not X.

Flipping a conditional statement around and negating it is called the contrapositive. It is of interest to our discussion because the contrapositive is logically equivalent to the original. Equivalent means they have the same meaning - so when we turn them around, notice the affect on the self.

If I did not get affirmation, then I did not please my boss.

Notice that the weight of the result here is on me. I was not good enough, that is why I did not get what I needed. So, maybe I'll work harder next time to get the taste of what I need. The contrapositive to the Law of Linearity produces shame, because if only there wasn't something wrong with me or what I did, I would have gotten what I needed. We can see the same thing in the other contrapositive statements:

If my kids did not turn out great, then I am not a good parent.

If my wife won't have sex with me, then I did not make my wife happy.

If he will not stay with me, then I am not pretty enough.

If I am not happy, then I did not get the (right) new job.

If I am lonely, then I did not marry (correctly).

If I feel insecure, then people don't need me.

If my church does not grow, then my preaching is not good.

Sorry for the math lesson. I had to release my inner math nerd, and I hope it didn't distract from the point. The conditional statements that we convince ourselves are true are the result of trying to fix out own brokenness. So, I'll feel less broken (i.e. I'll get Y) if I do X. The unfortunate result is that when those attempts to find our identity fail, the result is further damage to our soul (the equivalent contrapositive).

The reality is that an identity tied to Christ will never forsake us. There is no "If I X, then Jesus will love me." It is just, Jesus loves me. There is no contrapositive, no weight, no self effort, and no shame. Just the truth of Jesus to substitute for our lie.