From “Jesus: A Meditation on His Stories and His Relationships with Women,” by Andrew Greeley:

“We must begin a search for understanding some of the stories of Jesus with the realization that he is deliberately elusive, mysterious, enigmatic, paradoxical. Hence we will never finish our search. We will never understand him. He is a man of surprises, appropriate for one who claims to witness a God of surprises. This, when we think we at last have figured him out, truly understand him, and can sign him up for our cause, we find that he has slipped away. … The Jesus we have shaped to fit our ideas, our needs, our fears, may be a very interesting and special person, but he is no longer Jesus. …

“Those who followed him in Palestine a couple of millennia ago were fascinated by his stories. They had heard most of them before, but he insisted on ending the stories with a disturbing twist, a disconcerting finale. … His good news indeed sounded good, perhaps too good to be true, but it didn’t fit the expectations of his followers, even the closest followers. It disturbed them.

“If he doesn’t disturb us, then he’s not Jesus.“

From “The Sacredness of Questioning Everything,” by David Dark:

“C.S. Lewis once observed that while many people use art, only a very few receive it. … We only receive art when we let it call our own lives into question.

“If the words of Jesus of Nazareth, for instance, strike us as comfortable and perfectly in tune with our own confident common sense, our likes and dislikes, our budgets, and our actions toward strangers and foreigners, the receiving the words of Jesus is probably not what we’re doing. We may quote a verse, put it in a PowerPoint presentation, or even intone it loudly with an emotional, choked-up quiver, but if it doesn’t scandalize or bother us, challenging our already-made-up minds, we aren’t really receiving it. …

“If we aren’t reaching toward a fresh understanding of the world through the questions we ask, we remain pretty well zombified in the cold comfort of a dead religiousity. Fresh questions and new acts of imagination are our primary means to encounter love and liveliness, to discover integrity and authenticity. Without them, we’re pretty much done for.”

What’s more, I re-discovered that reading books leads me into a better and deeper place with God. It’s not that I don’t spend time online reading Christian meditations and insights, but I fear that I read under the pressure of getting to next thing. I perhaps skim a bit more, and, too often don’t give myself the time to absorb and reflect. In the midst of a book, I find it easy to stop and to pray, to consider my life, and to give my full attention (or as much of it as I have with a two-year-old in the house).

I have also been going through a move, which is causing me to consider all of the things I own and what I really need. I am looking at this new space and considering how to arrange my life within it. And it is within the context of these two big changes that I have made a new spirit-change goal for the fall that is among the most challenging (but most spot-on and deep-seated) that I’ve tried in years. I think I’ve been given a clarity of vision about myself that I sometimes lose when I’m running more on auto-pilot.

Oddly enough, one of the books I’ve been reading, “A Perfect Mess” by Eric Abrahamson and David H. Freedman, makes a similar point about how making changes in one area requires a bit of a shakeup in life overall, to un-stick you. I thought it worth sharing with Christlikeness-seekers:

“The most common cause of stress at organizations, [Ben] Fletcher explains, is mistreatment at the hands of managers, who often tend to be overly assertive, rigid, and intolerant. In working with managers to help them improve their behavior, he found that while managers could usually understand and accept the fact that they had been acting inappropriately, they were rarely able to make and maintain long-term changes in their behavior with subordinates. People are simply too conditioned to acting the same way every day, he says, which often makes being locked into harmful habits.  Focus and consistency, in other words, became barriers to solving problems. So Fletcher asked the managers to alter other, easier-to-change behaviors in their lives, like the route they took to work or what they ate for lunch or where they sat at meetings — anything at all, as long as it introduced some variation in behavior. The results were surprising: over the course of as little as a few weeks, managers who threw monkey wrenches into their routines in this way found that they were also able to change the way they treated subordinates. The reason, says Fletcher, is that peple tend to get trapped in what he calls “habit webs.” When they try to effect an important, useful change, they find they’re stuck tight. But if they snip away at individual, thin, supporting strands of the web, the web can eventually be loosened enough to permit more important change. ‘New behaviors lead to new experiences, and eventually that helps people change the way they think,’ he says.”

We only have on record about three years of what Jesus’ life was like, but it’s pretty clear from the gospels that Jesus didn’t have a schedule. He didn’t have office hours. He didn’t have touring dates. He was led by the spirit from one place to the next, often arriving late (according to when people wanted him there), and always being open to whoever crossed his path and making time for them. Jesus didn’t give himself the opportunity to get hooked into a routine that he would later have to fight against to make his spirit free.

Of course, the world is a different place today, and punctuality and scheduling of events have become more a part of society now that we all have clocks. Going fully anarchist in scheduling might not be possible. But if Jesus didn’t need things neat, ordered, and settled, and he was open to new experiences and new challenges and disruptions, then perhaps it is a good idea to view such “difficulties” in life as important elements in trying to live more in God’s spirit.

— by Steve Lansingh

Photo courtesy of zizzy0104 on stock.xchng

One year ago today, we held our first official meeting as a no-profit spiritual mentorship group here in Seattle.

Thanks, Courtney and Mayna, for growing with us, and thanks to the moppers at Northgate Mall who have cleaned up after Corin’s spills.

We invite any interested parties to join us for fun, smoothies, and good conversation this summer!

WHEN CHRISTLIKENESS GROUPS first started, I had developed a somewhat convoluted curriculum for us to follow. As reality weathered away intention, we were left with a much more simple — maybe deceptively simple — approach to helping one another grow in deeper Christlikeness.

Essentially, we ask of each other three questions:
1) What’s going on in your relationship with God?
2) Where are you striving to grow spiritually right now?
3) How can we help you make progress in getting there?

These do not seem like exceptional questions, but in the lives of nearly every Christian I talk to, they are questions that very often go unasked. When they are asked, the answers usually go unheard.

The typical church service is a one-sided communication. A sermon may push a person to consider his or her relationship with God, or to seek a place to grow in faith, but there is no one available to listen to the response. There is no follow-through. A weekly Bible study would seem like a great place for deeper, responsive conversation, but most often the Christian life is discussed obliquely, through the third person. Much emphasis is placed on what “a Christian” should know or believe or understand — an examination of doctrines, perhaps seasoned by a personal example or two — rather than on challenges to personally become transformed in tangible ways by a closeness with the Scriptures. It’s considered intrusive, perhaps, to ask someone to make a plan of action, to follow up on their progress — to ask more of them than to sit back and ruminate on an issue. But most of us as human beings are desperate for the people around us to say: I want to hear your story; I want to be with you in your struggle; I care about where you go from here; you are not alone. We long for that depth of involvement, even as we fear it — but fear need not win out.

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OF COURSE, you can’t just lay these three questions on the table and expect instant camaraderie and community. There are some key intangibles in how we conduct our meetings that allow these questions to be more than an intellectual or emotional exercise.

To begin with, it is not our intention to make any judgments about the answers given. Whether things are going great with God at the moment, or you feel distant from and confused by him, all that we ask for is honesty. There is no great crisis, no sense of shame or failing if one’s spiritual life has been dry. This is a huge difference from how such questions are usually asked, on the rare occasions they are: they come from a parent, or mentor, or pastor, or even a friend, but in every case they come from someone whose opinions and relationship we value. We want to remain in their good graces. Even if they inspire us to do more in our spiritual walk, the process is tainted when we are going after it for the wrong reasons: an approval and affirmation awarded by others. We can so easily go through the motions to look good on the outside without really drawing life from God himself.

Our method is different: for starters, we ask these questions of each other every other week. It seems unlikely that a person is going to be wholly successful in connecting to God and growing deeper in that relationship week after week after week. There will be setbacks. When you have shared what is good, and gotten that out there, you are free to say: this week was a step back; this week was harder; this week I was lost. This requires a huge time commitment. It means that what we do as a group is dominated by our reflections on our lives; in short, our lives are the text that we study. We don’t try to tack these conversations on to end of a prepared lesson. Instead, the alternate weeks that we meet — when we’re not sharing — are filled with prayers, scripture passages, songs, book excerpts, and conversations that support and deepen the questions that we raise about life and God during our sharing times. Our study and learning is tailored to support the development of stronger relationships and to prompt new insights in our times of reflective sharing. That’s what you will find is different from virtually any other church small group out there.

Second, and key, is that we have no “leader” per se. There is no one person with more answers and knowledge and wisdom than anyone else, who everyone is tempted to defer to. We have facilitators who keep the meetings moving along, who coordinate the schedule and so forth, but who share just as openly and just as solicitous of help as everyone else. This honors the “priesthood of all believers” in which every person has permission to minister to one another through their own experiences of God working in their lives. There is no one in particular whose good opinion you might be tempted to solicit, even if there might be one whose advice resonates best with you. In our model, the group as a whole fulfills the role of counselor — we call it “peer mentoring.” We do not anyone to become passive in their relationship with God and just accept someone’s advice because they are in charge. Each person is encouraged to set their own goals and take the responsibility themselves for moving forward, to be answerable to God and God alone, and use the group as one would use a band of fellow travelers: for other tales of the journey, to hear the perspective of another vantage point, to shine light on the path ahead.

Traditional mentoring pushes people into polarized roles: the experienced and the weak, the elder and the struggler — when in fact we are both of these things at one point or another. Traditional mentoring works itself toward an inevitable breaking point, where one must, in some way, throw off the reigns of control of the other. Peer mentoring, on the other hand, in which each person has permission speak into the lives of the other, moves us toward deeper, lifelong, bonded relationships. It is not that we ignore authority or leadership, but rather achieve such an abundance of leadership roles in our lives that we are being led collectively, by Christ through his servants.

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IT IS WORTH noting, too, what happens outside of the group meetings. We do not go home from the meetings and simply compartmentalize that conversation until the next week — we take what we learned and what we discussed and try to bring these new ideas into our everyday life. It is unfashionable, I realize, to assign homework in a church group, and to add one more things to a person’s busy schedule. Leaders tend not to ask too much of people, lest we scare them away. But the Christian life, as we all know, must be a 24/7 venture. God doesn’t want just two hours a week from us, or even four or six. He wants all of us. Everything we do must fit into him.

In many ways, it’s actually freeing to think about Christianity as an all-consuming venture. If we think about it as a side thing, a portion or percentage of our lives, then we are burdened with never doing enough. We already have our plate so full with non-negotitables: work and family, sleeping and eating, resting and playing. Then we struggle how to fit in the religious activities that re-center us, that give us perspective. But if 100% of our time belongs to God, then it becomes clear that necessities like work, and rest, and time in the kitchen are all tools that God has given to us to draw us closer to him. Our self-assigned “homework,” then, is to make progress in 1) examining our own character, 2) seeing how the fabric of our daily lives informs and shapes our character, and 3) making changes in our habits and routines that will push our character more toward that of a Christlike spirit. We don’t ask people to carve out time each week to work on a side project; we ask them to keep at the forefront of their minds the kind of person who God wants them to become, and let that goal infuse all that they do in an ordinary day.

As an example: Let us say that someone in the group is feeling convicted or inspired to work on their anger or a quick rush to judgment. We might begin a conversation around the question of: What situations trigger you to become angry, or what people get under your skin? Clearly, an answer to this question isn’t going to involve a small, once-weekly effort but a substantial digging into the elements of daily living. For the sake of argument, let’s say this person decides that one of their biggest triggers is driving: the rush-hour traffic burns his or her fuse down to the point that it’s liable to go off on anyone. At this point we discuss how to uncouple those sinful emotions from the daily experience and replace them with Christlike ones. It might be something as practical and simple as leaving for work ten minutes earlier, or taking an alternate route that is longer around but less stop-and-go. Perhaps this person might try singing or praying in the car to focus away from the feelings of frustration. Another idea could be to look past the anonymous metal vehicles and see the people inside, the long lines of human beings trying to make their way through the day, each of whom God knows and loves whole-heartedly, and to treat them as God would — or at the very least, to marvel at how much bigger God is, and the world is, than your own sphere of friends and family extends.

The key is to arrive at goals like this that are concrete, specific, practical, and achievable. Even though we are talking about character, the spirit, and the heart — spiritual matters — our approaches are through the tangible, physical reality of this world. God gave us our bodies, and our world, and called it good. He intends to resurrect us to new bodies in the new heaven and the new earth. Our spiritual strivings must not simply come from the brain, from the will, but also from the interactions with the created order that affect how we think and act. We all are aware that if we are lacking sleep or haven’t eaten in a while, that affects our mood and our thoughts, making us more quick to negative reactions. It is not unspiritual to attack this problem of the spirit through the restoration of balance in our physical bodies. Getting enough sleep and caring for our health can be profoundly spiritual acts, to name just two. Our group discussions are aimed at teasing out more and more of these atypical approaches through practical means.

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EVERYTHING I HAVE laid out so far are structural imperatives we use in fostering spiritual growth: ask pertinent questions, take the time to listen well, don’t judge but offer help and suggestions, come up with a concrete plan, and give yourself homework. Just as important, though, are the conceptual imperatives, the way which we think about our relationship with God and envision our path toward growth. What is absolutely essential in our conversations about making spiritual goals and living out our faith in relationships is this: God looks at the heart, not our outward displays.

It can be extremely difficult for us to shake the idea that what it means to be a good Christian is to attend church, read the Bible and pray, and donate money and service in the name of Jesus. Although they are all important things, a person could easily sleepwalk through years of ticking off these checkboxes on the to-do list without ever really engaging them. Even worse, they are quantifiable measures, meaning a person could easily be tempted to increase the number of services attended, chapters read, hours prayed, ministries committed to, and money given, in order to try to feel closer to or more loved by God.

But if we remember that God is interested in the heart, and what he wants for us is to be more hopeful, more joyful, more creative and spontaneous with our love, more perseverant, more bold and courageous, more patient and kind and long-suffering — then we have a whole new criterion to hold ourselves to. If God would rather have us truly engaging scripture once a week for a few verses than to read three chapters a day ritualistically, then our relationship with time is changed. If we understand that God would rather have you give one dollar cheerfully than a hundred dollars begrudgingly, then we discover a whole new economy. If God is more glorified when you make the effort repair a broken relationship by asking for forgiveness rather than singing a hundred songs about God’s forgiveness, then the direction of our energies is shifted.

So as we ask our group the question “where are you striving to grow spiritually?”, we expect that the answer will be couched in terms of one’s character, in terms of our intentions and motivations that we are asking God to transform. The term we usually use is that we are pursuing a “spirit change.”

The process works something like this: Someone in the group will share about a difficult relationship they have, with a roommate or boss, perhaps. Or someone will share about being drained and depleted from too much going on in life. These are the things that God has burden their hearts to confront. But rather than deal with those issues head-on, and trying to conquer them through force or determination, we take a step back and say: What element of your character is not letting you deal with this situation easily? What part of you needs to change so that you can bring to bear a new perspective and new energy to the situation, seeking a transformative outcome rather than simply putting a bandage on the situation? Let’s work on that first, separated from the immediate crisis.

I cannot overemphasize the importance of naming a spirit change when working on spiritual growth. Simply keeping at the forefront of our minds that we are trying to work on patience (or on gratitude, compassion, listening, boldness, forgiveness, or perseverance, to name a few examples) gives us a new outlook on every facet of our lives. Every moment is a new opportunity to practice developing this new character trait, instead of only trying to deal with one small troubling incident. Naming a spirit change is making a diagnosis instead of putting a bandage over a symptom. No longer will we judge success of failure by the outcome of a particular relationship, or on our strength in getting through a harrowing schedule, but by the vibrancy and vitality of our heart’s reception to God’s spirit. The onus for progress is no longer on your own striving and effort, but on your submission to and embracing of the spirit of Christ. The very reason we use the name “Christlikeness Groups” is because we need the constant reminder that whatever we are dealing with in life, what’s important is that we use our circumstances to try to take on the character of God, through his grace.

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AT THE SAME TIME, it is important to remember that real change requires real work, and real openness. Naming a spirit change is important in making sure that we don’t get bogged down in the specifics of a situation, but it equally important that we don’t simply float above it all, clinging to a vague ideal of a love, joy or peace at the expense of working toward real, tangible, practical incarnations of love in this world. It is important to have the proper motivations and a true heart for God when striving after his character, but that does not get us off the hook for taking the risky and daring steps toward an open and dynamic living out of one’s faith.

Toward that end, we have developed a certain structure, a set of loose guidelines, that the group collectively has found helpful in trying to honor and live up to these spirit changes. I must stress that this is absolutely not a fast track to success, or a secret formula that no one has ever discovered. In fact, for the most part, I try to keep the structure deep in the background, offering people space and freedom to try their own intuitive approaches or bring their own personal touch to a situation. But there are certain lessons that people in the group have learned, through their own trial and error, that can be of help to all of us, and I like to make these suggestions available to people who don’t know where to begin. These guidelines are not to be taken as mandates, rigid and constricting, placing complex human emotions and relationships into artificial boxes. That said, we are equally aware that discovering what has worked for people in the past, and what hasn’t, can be an invaluable resource. In short, we have found that:

Working to adopt a particular characteristic of Christ requires that our efforts are:
          — rooted in relationship with Jesus
          — reinforced through daily decisions
          — supported by a group of believers
          — expressed in relationship with others

Let us examine each of these elements individually before discussing how they fit together as a whole.

The first we often refer to as developing an “intimacy with God” or cultivating a “love of Jesus”; different terms tend to work for different people, so we try not to codify it too much. The essential point is that it is not by our own efforts that we are transformed, but only through a closeness and communion with the living God, whose mindset, and approaches and solutions to problems, rubs off on us the more we walk and talk alongside him. For some, this area might involve developing a deeper prayer life or reading the Bible more. For others, it might mean setting aside a dull devotional routine and listening to the voice of God through other means, like a walk in the woods, through music, or painting, or journaling. The classic Christian disciplines like fasting, solitude, study, and simplicity would fit here as well. The point is that we don’t want to take our relationship with God as a given, or to coast on our past closeness, or to imagine that we know the full extent of the mystery of God. We want to keep exploring, seeking ways to renew and maintain the vibrancy of our relationship.

Now, few if any of us are always at a peak in our relationship with God, and I absolutely do not want to suggest that you have to master this step before you can move on to becoming like Jesus. It is not a linear process, A first, then B, then C. Becoming more like Jesus is not an extra task added onto a deep sense of connection with God; they are intertwined. If you try to seek the presence, comfort, healing, and restoration of God in your life but want to keep him at a distance from the inner workings of your heart, you’ll find it hard to feel that presence. To truly be touched by God without making oneself vulnerable and open to being changed and transformed by the encounter is a near impossibility. Reflecting the likeness and image of Christ is at the very center of a proper relationship with God: We were made with the express intent to be image-bearers of God, and we were saved from sin so that Christ might live through us. To pursue the nature and character of Jesus when you are at your very lowest might in fact one of the best ways to reignite a flagging enthusiasm, because it connects us to God’s own heart and desire, his true passion for us. Communing with God and adopting his heart go hand-in-hand together.

One way in which this might work is, keeping your particular spirit change in mind, to use a concordance to create a Bible-reading track filled with God’s thoughts and words on the particular characteristic you’re seeking. Use a hymnal, or go through your own music collection, to find and sing songs about the nature of God that supports your goal. Read books by Christian authors you respect on the subject. Make your prayer life about a better understanding of your temperament and motivations, and of his temperament and motivations, so that you can learn from him. Ask him into the situation. However, this is only one approach. If you feel like things are going well with God at the moment, don’t try to shoehorn something artificial into the equation. If God laid on your heart the need to deal with a particular spirit change, simply follow that prompting through your normal channels of hearing from and responding to God. Maintaining an intimacy with God is one area where there might be thousands and thousands of viable approaches — if you have key methods or places or times that you know work well for you, revisit those first; alternately, you can open yourself to suggestions from the group and try a new approach in renewing your love of Jesus.

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THE SECOND ELEMENT is reinforcing your spirit change through daily and mundane decisions, also known as a “pattern change” or “spiritual conditioning.” I touched on this component earlier, in my example of the frustrated driver who is using the day-to-day pattern of driving to confront deeper issues of anger and control.

I consider this element to be the closest thing we have to a secret weapon, because it probably goes most unmentioned in the church today. The physical body and the daily life are often thought of as ordinary and unremarkable compared to the mind and spirit, and the compartmentalized spiritual experiences of a person. This false dichotomy between spirit and flesh, sacred and secular, runs counter to the way in which God created us, as a whole unit, a union of body and soul, as beings that needs sleep and food, whose lives are filled with ordinary tasks. When God gives the law to the Israelites, he makes it clear than no part of life, no matter how simple and ordinary, should escape its right place in our communion with Him: “Repeat [these commands] again and again to your children. Talk about them when you are at home and when you are on the road, when you are going to bed and when you are getting up. Tie them to your hands and wear them on your forehead as reminders. Write them on the doorposts of your house and on your gates” (Duet. 6: 7-9).

One’s character is formed not through a single, important decision about a dilemma, nor through a mental adherence to a stated ideal, but through thousands and thousands of small decisions made day in and day out, which accumulate into shaping who you are. A person does not becoming loving toward one’s neighbors just by volunteering in a soup kitchen once, but by confronting the root causes of one’s indifference toward neighbors. What structures in your life are taking you out of community and keeping you at arm’s length from people? Why are you striving toward self-sufficiency, and then reaching out to others only out of your abundance, instead of from your need? What would you need to do to cultivate better habits of listening and interest in others rather than staying focused only on your own? The answers may touch on some of the most basic elements of our lives: where we live, what our checkbook looks like, how much time we spend indoors, the kinds of books and articles we read, how clean our house is for potentially inviting over guests, how often we put ourselves in situations where we are the new person, and on and on and on. We shape our reactions and thoughts through these physical constructs that we have created for ourselves. Just as when an athlete repeats an action hundreds or thousands of times so that it becomes part of his or her muscle memory, or when Pavlov’s dogs were trained to make the mental leap from the sound of a bell to the anticipation of food, the repeated patterns in our lives actually makes the physical pathways in our bodies and minds stronger and more easily traveled. We get trapped into repeating what we’ve always done if we don’t break out of the routines we’ve made for ourselves. We absolutely must examine the ways in which we are conditioning ourselves to think and act, and alter our patterns to allow for new thoughts and ideas and approaches to come to the surface. Every mundane task and activity is an opportunity to practice teasing out a new and transformed spirit.

Let us say, for instance, that the spirit change you’re working on is patience. You find that you’re quick to anger in a particular relationship, and you want to work on taking the time to listen and not assuming you know how an argument will unfold. What you need to do is to step back from the particular relationship and broaden the scope to examine your whole life, and ask yourself: “What in my life, on a regular basis, triggers a rush to judgment, or triggers turning a deaf ear to someone? How can I practice cultivating a different reaction to these triggers, in situations that are maybe not as highly charged emotionally for me? Or, perhaps, do I have such a great number of triggers in my life that the problem is in my regular habits, and it’s only in one relationship that I feel permission to lash out?” There is a bit of self-diagnosis going on here, but fortunately, these questions are explored in the context of the group, where we can all brainstorm together and learn from other people’s stories and experiences making changes in their lives. Maybe in the above scenario, you discover that you spend a lot of time reading the political opinions in the newspaper, or the home-team sports columnist, or the witty movie critic: personalities who get away with being opinionated and derisive rather than nuanced and understanding. You might try taking a break from that reading habit for a while, and read books of memoirs or poetry for a while, of a different tone and see if it effects you in any way. Dig into the patterns of your life that you don’t even think about, that are just there, taking up space, and ask yourself how you can turn them toward the purpose of being present, joyful, aware, reflective, invitational, or prayerful. Change your routines and see what you miss, and what you can do without. Keep the things that make you feel more expansive and life-giving, in a better place to respond to people in your life with the love of Christ.

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(If you have read this far, congratulations! You’re a trooper. I am still working on writing about the last two components, and the summary, so be sure to check back in the next week for the rest of the article to be published.)

— by Steve Lansingh

Photo courtesy of scol22 on stock.xchng

WE ARE not too far into Matthew before we get our first hints that Jesus is a dangerous threat to power. The king of the realm, Herod, attempts to murder the young Jesus after hearing that the prophesied King of the Jews had been born in Bethlehem. At this point in the story, it is still political power that people feared (or hoped) the Messiah would wield.

Reading this passage today, it seems like a horrific and entirely preventable tragedy — after all, it was never Jesus’ intention to directly challenge Herod for this throne. There was no need for such violence. But Herod was right to be afraid, just as the Pharisees were right to be afraid as Jesus began to threaten their power structures: the religious, tribal, and familial systems. It was not his intention to directly take over their seats of power — not even abstractly, through a changing of the guard to more spirit-filled leaders. God leaves many corrupted and feckless leaders in power. Instead, it was Jesus’ intention to liberate people from the need to suck up to authority.

Every means of control that authority has — from the ability to grant status and comforts, to the ability to take away support and means and even life from a person — is only granted to the leaders by the people who buy into their system of thinking. A boss has power only if you are afraid of losing your job, or if you desire promotions or accolades. A teacher has power only if you are afraid of failing, or if you desire a particular grade. A dictator has power only if you are afraid of dying, or if you can work the system to your or your family’s advantage. The same goes for pastors, for parents, for reporters, for police officers, for the rich, for bullies, for the fashionista, and on and on. We confer their status on them only insofar as we are under their sway.

What Jesus does is he comes in and says: “Do you need someone to grant you honor and respect? I call you children of God. Do you fear losing your means of support? Trust in me for everything. Do you fear death? I will be with you in paradise. Do you desire joy in life? Walk alongside me. Whatever the authorities are asking you trust in them for, trust instead in me. Whatever they are threatening to take away from you, I will give you.” Life lived in Jesus is a life of freedom, a life secure in the knowledge of who you are, a life not spent chasing after the approval and praise of leaders.

But make no mistake, as we see from the life of Jesus, if you boldly live your life with no dependence on authority’s ability to confer status, praise, comfort, or respect upon you, then you are a threat to its power. You cannot be coerced or controlled, and that scares them. Not everyone around you will be happy with you, because you undermine the illusions that they still cling to. Following Jesus is not just subscribing to a different authoritarian system than your neighbor, but an entrance into a new reality, into a freedom so complete and untethered to normal social conventions that we live as strangers and aliens in this world.

So what is left of authority when you take away its power? Human beings still have to live together, in a variety of structures, in order to function as a society, and certain individuals must take the responsibility to make sure things run smoothly. Jesus wasn’t advocating anarchy; that’s why he tells us to follow the laws of the land insofar as they don’t conflict with God’s law of love. Earthly authorities are still necessary, but robbed of the power to coerce and frighten and control, they are left only with the ability to serve, to nurture and advance the people they have been entrusted to care for. The political leader becomes the public servant; the enforcers of the law try to ‘protect and serve.’ Absent unchecked power, positions of authority become positions of servanthood.

This is the way that Jesus came into the world: he who had all authority gave up authority in order to become a servant. He did not swoop in, as Herod and others expected, on chariots and in purple robes. He came as one who feeds, one who instructs, one who listens, one who knows no favorites, one who shows mercy, one who calls us beyond ourselves. Jesus came as a river of life, active and flowing, that burst through rigid and solidified power structures and let the renewal of dignity and honor wash over everyone.

We willingly subject ourselves to him because he makes no effort to try to control or coerce us. Jesus never hardens, never clamps down, never imposes, because he does not fear. He loves. And through his unrelenting grace toward us, we also do not have to fear authority. We can be confident that serving him and serving people is where the true power lies; the humble servants of Christ have had an overwhelming effect on the course of history as power structure after power structure has fallen and disappeared. We the ordinary have more of an influence than the institutions lead us to believe; the question is: will we find our identity in God rather than in people? And will we, in whatever roles of authority we have — as parents, as church members, with our wealth, with our freedoms, with our wisdom — be strong enough and bold enough to act always as Christlike servants?

— by Steve Lansingh

Photo courtesy of leonardo buitrago on stock.xchng

MATTHEW 1:21 is another instance where the original hearers would have had a far different understanding than we have today.

The angel tells Mary, “you are to name him Jesus ['The Lord saves'], for he will save his people from their sins.” But remember, at the time this was written, the Jewish people were not crying out to be saved from their individual transgressions before God; they were receiving God’s forgiveness through the regular animal sacrifices that the Old Testament required. They would have instead understood it as being saved from their collective sin as a nation, which were so great that God allowed the nation of Israel to be taken over by occupiers. They yearned for their sovereignty, their independence, the restoration of their nation. That is how their readings of the Messianic prophecies slanted: expecting either 1) a military hero who would lead an uprising, or 2) a moral taskmaster who would purge the unworthy from the ranks of society and make the nation once more pleasing enough to God that he would restore them.

Jesus ended up turning those expectations on their head: instead of taking up arms, he laid down his life in selfless sacrifice. He did not reject but reached out to the unworthy of society, and included them in his vision for a new kingdom. It was spiritual freedom that he came to bring, not national freedom.

But I think we miss something about this verse if we don’t understand that ancient yearning for restoration, sovereignty, and regaining the place in the world God intended for us.

In modern Christianity, we read the idea of being “saved from your sins” primarily as the key to entering heaven. But is that all that sin keeps us from, a future destination? Doesn’t sin also keep us in bondage in this world as well? Think of a relationship you’ve had that blew up and you haven’t restored it yet. Doesn’t that harm you? Doesn’t that burden you with guilt, regret, and even timidity in forging new relationships? Doesn’t it harm God’s witness in the world that you cannot reconcile with a brother or sister? Being forgiven of our sins is not just a matter of comforting us personally, but of granting us freedom in that situation so that we can go and make it right again. Being freed from sin has to do with healing, with being remade, with living a life of newfound courage. We are slaves no longer.

Let’s say that a rich man had an avid gambler for a son, who amassed huge debts, more than he could ever hope to pay. The rich man then decides to pay off all the creditors. Do you think all he is hoping for is that he and his son can now have a relationship again? Clearly he also wants his son to turn his back on his vice, to forge a new and different life, one that reflects better the stature of the father. In the same way, God saves us not to wipe the slate clean, but to build us toward something better, toward our full selves, toward the mature and Christlike sons and daughters that he intended us to be.

— by Steve Lansingh

Photo courtesy of ramzi hashisho on stock.xchng

THE FIRST 17 VERSES of the New Testament, detailing the ancestral lineage of Jesus of Nazareth, sound much different to our ears today than they did to the original readers of the book.

To us, it seems like appendix material, an interesting footnote, not something you’d start off with when introducing a person. But at the time, one’s place in the world was almost exclusively inherited, and one’s pedigree was the place you had to begin. The statement here is that, as a direct male descendent of Abraham and David, Jesus is the inheritor of both God’s promises and Godly authority. Matthew’s audience was a Jewish one, and he wanted to set the stage of Jesus’ arrival by showcasing his legitimacy in Jewish eyes.

By the end of the gospels, and the New Testament, of course, we will discover that the transformational life of Christ has rendered such claims to legitimacy through lineage to be unsubstantial. Jesus could tout these rights, but sets them down and chooses not to. What God cares about is not status or family or pedigree, but the heart — our character. We are told to abandon our families if they keep us from following Christ, for together in Christ we have a new family. In Jesus, the apostle Paul writes, there is no male or female, no Jew or Greek, no slave or free. We are all equal in the eyes of God, and we must each, on our own, examine our beliefs and actions rather than simply inherit them. This is good news for humanity.

So if the beginning of Matthew 1 comes across as patriarchal, or pretentious, or dull, it is simply setting the stage for its own reversal of importance. Matthew is working to change minds, reaching out to skeptical inquisitors through arguments that they would understand before revealing how Jesus transcended his qualifications.

So while there is no verse here we can point to that says God is specifically interested in our hearts, or our maturity, the passage is important in understanding the mindset of the time in which God will be working. The context in which they lived was one where your interior self was of little concern, compared with your heritage and your upholding of your role. God does not merely dismiss this concept, he fulfills it to the highest degree, gaining the authority from which to say there is something more important.

The simple fact that as modern readers we are kind of bored by this passage, taking it for granted that anyone from anywhere has value and whose viewpoint should be heard out, shows how deeply the message of Jesus has penetrated the world.

— by Steve Lansingh

Photo courtesy of jcrump55 on stock.xchng

WHAT DOES THE Bible say? What is its overarching message?

In the general culture, the Bible is often perceived as a bunch of old stories and rules about how to live righteously. In the church, the Bible is more accurately seen as a revelation of how accepting the death and resurrection of Jesus makes us righteous before God.

Both of these answers focus primarily on what God might want from us (our righteousness, our faith) but don’t touch on the more pertinent question: What does God want for us?

The Bible is actually quite clear on the subject: God wants us to live in love. He wants us to grow in maturity. He wants us to embrace a new spirit. He wants us to enter fully into life, not being afraid to suffer, for he is our strength. He wants us to understand ourselves well, to be neither blind to nor disillusioned by our own humanness, so that we can come alongside others in theirs. He wants us to exercise our creativity, passion, and authenticity as we join in his work in the world. He wants us to enjoy communion with him. He wants us to know joy, courage, and hope. All of which can be summed up in one singular imperative: He desires for us to become imitators of Jesus Christ. He wants us to live in relationship with, and take on the character of, his Son. To put it in a single word: Christlikeness.

The “Searching the Scriptures” series is my chapter-by-chapter journey through the Bible, to highlight and reflect on the hundreds of passages that show that God is less interested in our behaviors and our words and is far more interested in our hearts. He doesn’t care about compliance but about motivation. He doesn’t value achievement but pliability. He wants our hearts to be open, our instinctual reactions to be transformed, and for our very nature to embrace mercy and love, as Christ did.

The overarching purpose of Christlikeness Groups is to cut through the clutter of what the modern Christian life requires of us and to instead pay careful attention to the state of our hearts, our character, our maturity. The posts that follow will explore, from Matthew to Malachi, every passage that encourages us to press on in that difficult and glorious journey.

(Click here to access every post from the “Searching the Scriptures” series.)

.— by Steve Lansingh

Illustration courtesy of GlassGiant.com

MUSIC IS A POWERFUL force in shaping what we think about. A book or a sermon may resonate for the short time we remember it, but a song can be carried with us through the years, able to be recalled in times of need. I have written a few songs which I will post on the blog that convey, perhaps better than my endless ramblings, exactly what we are all yearning for in our pursuit of God.

WHEN WILL I BECOME

lyrics by Steve Lansingh, music by Steve Lansingh and Amanda Caldwell

Click on the play button to hear the song on your computer:

(If this doesn’t work, click here to download the song.)

Lyrics:

I’m living so small
Lord, can this be all
that you meant for me to become

I don’t want to settle
but do I have the mettle
to push through on what I’ve begun

I know I must die
and let you inside
if I hope to love everyone

and be more like my Savior
more like my Jesus
more like the Christ Immanuel
more like my Savior
more like my Jesus
more like the Lamb of Israel
more like my God
so full of love
when will I become

I think I’ve come far
then I look at the bar
that you set when you died on a tree

can I call myself yours
if I choose to ignore
all that you can accomplish through me

give me more of your Spirit
and let those who come near it
feel your touch in my words and my deeds

make me more like my Savior
more like my Jesus
more like the Christ Immanuel
more like my Savior
more like my Jesus
more like the Lamb of Israel
more like my God
so full of love
when will I become

I have not arrived … I am becoming
I’m not satisfied … so I’m still running
I can not stand by … I must do something

to be more like my Savior
more of his nature
more like the Christ Immanuel
more open-hearted
more joyous and love-led
just like the Lamb of Israel
more like my God
so full of love
please let me become

more like my Savior
more like my Jesus
more like the Christ Immanuel
more like my Savior
more like my Jesus
more like the Lamb of Israel
more like my God
so full of love
when will I become

more like my God
so full of love
please let me become

Photo courtesy of altrans on stock.xchng

ONE OF THE KEY concepts in seeking a Christlike spirit is the art of self-evaluation. It is among the most difficult concepts to master, because each of us is hard-wired to take our value from external sources: an award, a diploma, praise from authority. We often look to how others regard us for clues as to how regard ourselves. But God looks to the heart, and we have to learn to see how God sees. Simply fulfilling a checklist of behaviors is not success. Good standing in the community is not success. We must shine a light on our motivations, our attitude, our character.

Let us say that God is convicting you to become a more generous person. You have identified generosity as your spirit change. There are many ways in which you might grow in generosity — through your money, time, attention, resources, or words. But the first inclination most of us have is to tally up the quantity of dollars, hours, and kindnesses over the past month or year and then make a goal to increase that quantity. We immediately jump to the idea that increasing instances of generosity equals being more generous.

Or, on a more sophisticated level, we might remember the account of the widow who donated her last few pennies to the church, which Jesus praised as being a larger donation than the vast contributions of the wealthy folks. She gave sacrificially, of a higher percentage than anyone else. The temptation here is to think that raising your percentage of generous incidents higher than you thought possible will serve as proof that you are really changing into a generous person.

What Luke 21 doesn’t mention specifically, but which we can deduce, is that the widow gave her money willingly, even eagerly. You just don’t give all of your money away reluctantly, you do it enthusiastically, devotedly, passionately. That attitude, that spirit, is what you’re after when you are trying to work on generosity. Forget the specifics, the tally. Sure, you have to live out the change practically and concretely, but your focus should always be on changing your inner motivation — on wearing down your resistance to the impulse of generosity. Doing it for the right reasons.

The apostle Paul says that attitudes matter:

“And don’t give reluctantly or in response to pressure. ‘For God loves a person who gives cheerfully.’” (1 Corinthians 9:7)

and that God is invested in your motivations:

“For God is working in you, giving you the desire and the power to do what pleases him.” (Philippians 2:13)

So when you’re working on a spirit change, and you’re trying to evaluate how things are going, you shouldn’t rely on how hard you worked, how much you did, how impressed people were, or how proud you feel. You need to ask yourself: Have I been doing it for the right reasons? Have I been developing the attitude that God wants to cultivate in me? Have I been motivated by guilt or pride or self-satisfaction — or is it by joy, and a by tangible experience of God’s love nudging me to take a risk?

“…they are also filled with abundant joy, which has overflowed in rich generosity.” (2 Corinthians 8:2)

.— by Steve Lansingh

Photo courtesy of rachelg on stock.xchng