July 25 -- Using or Loving ? -- Szczecin

I hope you are having a great day.  If instead you have encountered an evil day [as we have all been promised from time to time], I hope that you have each and every part of your spiritual armor firmly in place and tightly fastened for your protection.

I am a bit later than usual writing to you this morning.  Yesterday Mariusz and I were each having interactions with several different men who have definite and serious problems in their lives.  In each case, although the men are quite different, we can see how the problems largely have resulted from the interactions each man had with his biological father while growing up.  I found myself meditating and pondering about these issues for quite a long time.  I suspect most children of God have had this experience.  I know with great certainty that Holy Spirit wants to reveal some important spiritual principle to me through these situations.  But, I am simply too blind to see what it is right now.  I simply must wait for Jesus to heal my blindness.  Often I struggle with being willing to wait upon the Lord.  But, I know waiting upon Him is what will result in my being strengthened and refreshed.  So, even though I thought I would be writing something about that,  I will not yet.

Yesterday was a fantastic day.  The weather was pleasant.  We spent about 7 hours just riding in the car from Szczecin to Koszalin and back again.  It should have been only about 4 hours but part of the road was closed and traffic moved slowly.  But, the ride provided a long period of time when the 5 of us could converse about anything we wanted to talk about.  I remember when I would drive the man who was watching over my soul from place to place on ministry trips.  My questions for him were virtually non-stop.  I received many many valuable teachings as I sat driving in the car with a wise older brother beside me.  There is something so precious that happens when we allow ourselves to truly hunger and thirst after full total intimacy with Jesus.  When that is our condition, we will not let any opportunity to learn more about him to be wasted with frivolous empty talk.  When we are truly hungry we live on a mission to let the Lord fill us.

In Koszalin we met and had supper with 3 parents and 3 children.  The husband wife team have 2 young sons.  The single mother has a beautiful young daughter.  As we talked about the true nature of the living Bride of Christ, Holy Spirit moved to help each of the 6 have a greater sense of personal vision for his/her own role of ministry among the saints of God.  It was such a delight to see the relief wash over faces as they were reassured that they had not lost their minds.  I find this happens many times as I share with people.  They suddenly realize that the ideas Holy Spirit had been planting in their minds are not crazy.  These ideas from the Spirit are actually being confirmed and affirmed by the words God is speaking to others with even more experience than they have.  Toward the end of the evening the husband admitted that because of his back ground with an extremely legalistic father he was actually unsure of his salvation.  In a few minutes he had reaffirmed his decision to follow Jesus and let Jesus be the final authority for all his decisions.  Thus we could completely reassure him that he is saved and is a living son of the Creator God.

As we spent time together with these folks, I was reminded again:  It is crucial to learn to build friendships.  As I thought about this today I went back and found something I wrote 6 years ago that I think will be helpful to you.

The Holy Spirit is currently moving among the Body of Christ, teaching us the importance of being connected together in joints.  You notice in Ephesians 4 that the Body builds itself up in love when the joints are working properly.  Ironically, in our society, people who gather in the local pub are better at building the early stages of relationships than the people who attend the congregational meeting under the steeple.  For most of the folks in churchianity, God's love is theoretical not personal.  That is to say we accept a doctrine that God loves the world; but we do not experience that God loves us.  In the same way, we know that we are called to love one another; but we do not know how to personally love the individual sitting next to us.  Institutional churchianity seems quite content to leave us in this condition.  It is extraordinarily rare to hear a teaching about the practice of love.  Tragically, it is also extraordinarily rare to simply experience being loved on a practical level, as the people we are today.

I remember when I was a child playing in the attic that I discovered a book of poetry given by my grandfather, when he was young, to the young lady who was to later become my grandmother.  He had penned an inscription inside the front cover of the book:

           Into every life some rain must fall.  

           I hope that I might be the young man who carries your umbrella.

As I read that inscription, I learned much about love.  I learned that love is gentle and not pushy.  I learned to love as a servant not a master.  I learned that love is protective.  I learned that love is realistic.  A simple romantic inscription in a book contained more practical wisdom about the nature of love than I had ever been taught in the churchianity.

How can believers today learn about practical, loving?  If we do not teach them, who will?  Are you leading your disciples to experience practical love?

We cannot impart what we do not have.  So the starting point for imparting love to others is to recognize that we ourselves are loved.  Many of us have never recognized that we are individually personally and attentively loved by God the Father.  Pause for a moment right now, and drink in the Father's love.  Papa loves you just the way you are right now.  You do not have to look any different or think any different or talk any different; you are loved just as you are right now.  Father knows everything that you are and everything that you have done.  Nevertheless, He loves you completely right now.  Moreover, He is very set in his ways.  There is nothing you can do to get Him to stop loving you.  So, make a decision right now to receive the Father's love and to continue to receive it moment by moment, hour by hour, day by day, for the rest of your life.

In the same manner, your disciples cannot deliver what they have never received.  The starting point for teaching them to love is for you to love them.  By loving them, you will model the Father's love for them so that they will begin to be able to receive it more easily.  But what does it look like when you love someone.  If we were to believe America's greatest teaching mechanism, the movies out of Hollywood, love would generally be expected to look like sexual attraction.  In most movie scripts, one could readily substitute, “I want to use you."  for each and every time “ I love you.” is said.

Most of us have read, on numerous occasions, First Corinthians chapter 13.  It is a worthwhile instruction on the nature of love, and I commend it to you again.  I want to look for a moment at the nature of love in the beginning of a relationship.  What is it that happens in the local pub, but does not happen in the local congregational meeting?  Perhaps the most significant thing that happens at the beginning of any relationship in the local pub is the mutual acceptance without judgment.  Throughout churchianity, we have been taught so many religious standards against which to evaluate people that it is virtually impossible for us to look upon another human being without judging whether the person is good enough to be worthy of our friendship.  We form these judgments on the basis of people's skin color, clothing, posture, cleanliness, and a host of other little factors.  But in Second Corinthians chapter 5, we are instructed to not know people on the basis of what we can perceive by our flesh.  Despite this instruction by the Scriptures, we have been trained to continuously evaluate people against our own personal standards.  We have forgotten how to see people from God's perspective.  God looks upon the heart.

A second dynamic of the meeting in the local pub are the social traditions that everyone has a right to tend to his own business, and everyone has a right to be left alone.  A man is privileged to drink his beer in silence.  A young woman is not required to respond to a pickup line.  When two men are having a conversation they are not required to allow a third to break-in.  Sadly, throughout much of churchianity, we have been taught that we have a right to inject ourselves into other people's personal lives.  We are taught that it is somehow "evangelism" to corner people on the street and ask them very personal questions.  We are taught that there is something wrong with people who reject our advances.  We are taught to have expectations of other people's behavior and thoughts.

But the Scriptures teach us that the starting point for Jesus’ entry into the world was he emptied himself.  He, the God of the universe, the one who had the right to impose expectations upon each of us, entered into our society having emptied Himself of His personal expectations concerning us.  Thus, we see that he was able to be the personal confidant and friend of rich young rulers and drunks and prostitutes.  People of all walks in all conditions He accepted and received as who they were not as who He expected them to be.

If we are to be successful, if we are to love one another as he has loved us, we also must learn to accept one another without our own pre-conceived expectations.  Notice, this does not mean that we must be people who have lost our own standards.  Rather that we must be people who adhere to our own standards without imposing them on everyone around us.  Jesus did not receive the woman caught in adultery as one without sin.  Rather acknowledging her sin he accepted and received her as the woman that she was.  We must learn how to accept and love people while they are still sinners.

While accepting people will go a long way is to remove the barriers to building relationships, it is also necessary that we learn to be trustworthy to those people around us.  People who have common sense will not open their lives up to someone who has shown himself not to be trustworthy.  First they must be able to trust us to respect their boundaries.  There is perhaps no faster way to turn off the development of a friendship than touching some personal area of another's life before the relationship has been developed.  It is just as offensive to people to have their emotions groped by a stranger as it is to have their bodies groped by a stranger.  There is great wisdom in the common rule of courtesy that we do not talk about religion or politics among a group of people whom we do not know.  One could readily exclude many other topics that are simply too personal.

Have you ever met someone whose only topics of conversation were about himself?  I have met people who are able to talk about their own work, to talk about their own failings, to talk about their own families, to talk about their own experiences, and to talk about their own health.  But among those people I have rarely found anyone who is genuinely interested in me.  Does it not seem ironic that the man who expects you to be very interested in him expresses no genuine interest in you?  Certainly, in order to build an honest open relationship, you must share some things about yourself.  But those things are best shared in the context of responding to other people's inquiries or responding to the things they have said about themselves.  In building relationships, it is always important to be more interested in the other person than you are in yourself.  This is not because you are of no value.  If you were of no value, why would anyone want to have a relationship with you.  But, if you communicate to the other person that you believe yourself to be the only one of value, why would he want to build a relationship with you?

Ask yourself, do you really care about the other person?  If you do not, simply walk away, you will do less damage.  If you do, ask yourself a second question.  Why do you care?  Do you care because of what that person can do for you or provide to you?  Or do you actually care about the person?

Perhaps, because I started first grade when I was only four years old, when I was young I was always very insecure about building relationships with any of the people around me.  When you are 2 to 3 years younger than most of your school classmates, it is very difficult to fit in.  This is especially true for a boy, whose ability to fit in often depends upon his athletic abilities.  During my early to middle 20s I learned to overcome this handicap.  I learned to be compassionate and caring and helpful to the people around me.  These attitudes will go a long ways toward breaking the ice and building social relationships.  Just after I began the practice of law I was working for a medium-sized downtown Washington DC law firm.  Because I had learned to be gentle and respectful to the members of the staff, whenever secretaries were having a problem, I was usually the first person they would ask for help.  One spring morning, there seemed to be an unusual number of minor difficulties in the office.  Just before lunch I was one more time fixing the copier.  When I had finished, I broke my usual routine, and went out for a walk to talk with the Father.

The question I wanted to ask God was this: why had I spent 19 years getting an education in order to be a copier repairman?  As I asked the question, He reminded me that I had made myself available and open to help. I acknowledged that what he said was true.  But, I pointed out, it also made it possible for the secretaries to talk with me and I had been very helpful to several of them in solving personal problems in their lives.  He then asked me: why?  After a bit of thought I had to admit I did not know why.  So I asked Him to show me why.  He said it was my evil crutch.  He said that I induced people to trust me and talk about their problems, so that when relationships broke apart, I would have someone other than myself to blame.  It took me a while to get around to admitting that he was right.  Ironically, I had developed a very good and valuable skill for a very evil and selfish purpose.  I was using people's trust as a way to protect myself.  This was not a pleasant conversation to have with the Lord.  But it was one that set me free.

Over the years I've discovered that many people who are in "ministry" are there for very selfish reasons: Some to get a paycheck, some to get honor and recognition, some to get power, some to justify themselves, and some for self-defense.  All too often we confuse our own personal desires and goals for the call of God.  Often, very good things are being done.  But, they are being done for the wrong reasons.  So, I challenge you again; ask yourself: why?  And when you think you have an answer, ask God, whether it is true.

At the end of this period of self-examination, come back to Father again.  Confess the faults you have discovered and let Father cleanse you from all the unrighteousness.  Then settle back and once again drink in His continuous unconditional love for you just like you are.  He did not wait for you to be perfect.  He loved you while you were still a sinner.  Now that you are a saint, His child, He loves you even more deeply.  Stop, again, and drink deeply of His love.  YOU are LOVED !

Now, as the beloved child in whom Father is pleased, go and love the people He has put in your life.  You have come to the Kingdom to be the expression of His deep love.

His, thus Yours,

  Stuart