Better at Experiencing God
“This is the covenant I will make with them after that time, says the Lord.
I will put my laws in their hearts, and I will write them on their minds.”
Hebrews 10:16 (NIV)
In Christ, you are invited to experience God living in the human heart. That’s the key. That’s the aim. It’s the spiritual path to ensure faith and maturation. It’s how you and I can live our best lives. This is God’s ultimate will for us.
A better relationship with God is to experience God, which is when God writes His law on your heart and in your mind to face challenges and address deeply layered cultural and personal issues. This will only be possible when people who have experienced God can offer a faith that is based not just on what they know but on what they have themselves experienced.
The Bible was written to a community, Israel, for how Israel needed to understand their God and how they needed to relate to each other. This is why the Scripture does not say, “All men and women will know that you are my disciples if you have a certain amount of money,” or “a certain political persuasion,” or “if you are a certain gender,” or “if you are of a certain ethnicity.” No, it says, “All men will know that you’re my disciples if you have love one for another” because your spirituality is not based on your singular solitary sanctification, consecration, isolation, or theological reflection. No, we are not impressed with how deep you are if you are deep but do not obey God’s commandments to love your neighbor and love your enemy.
If the Lord is living inside of you, you ought to be one of the most mercy-giving, grace-filled, compassion-extending people, and when people are around you, they ought to hear the truth of Jesus and not your opinion.
The future is going to be shaped by people who have matured beyond an adversarial conversation about the Bible and spirituality. There are people who are debating with you for the sake of debating, and you can tell them God’s honest truth and it won’t matter. And then there are other people who are debating because they have a strong opinion, but they are open to being taught something different.
A person who has experienced God never needs to debate with a person who nurtures their religion only as an intellectual construct, and that’s why the writer of Hebrews says God wants to relate to you not just cognitively, He wants to relate to you experientially—this is the Lord writing His law on your heart. The Lord wants a deep personal, internal connection with you where your heart is aligned with His will.
Better at Sharing My Faith
I pray that your partnership with us in the faith may be effective in deepening your understanding of every good thing we share for the sake of Christ.
Philemon 1:6 (NIV)
Part of the toxicity and vitriol of our culture is because Christians are too anonymous. A strong discipline the Lord wants you to steward is the sharing of your faith. He wants your worship, your service, your devotion, and your surrender of will to Him—but He also wants you to share your faith in Christ with others effectively and powerfully.
There are people around you that you need to interact with, whom your spirituality can influence so that they can become anchored in faith. As you’re conversing with people around issues of finance and social graces and what it means to be interconnected, do you interact with them with salvation on your mind?
Our faith is something we are destined and called to share. Paul is saying to Philemon: Don’t see Onesimus as a slave, see him as a brother because Onesimus and you, Philemon, are now part of the same family. Both of you are now tied together by blood. Both of you are living graced with redemption. Both of you are blessed by the atoning sacrifice of Jesus Christ. There’s a common connection that changes how you see yourself and how you see others—not only the sin connection, but the faith connection.
We don’t start our conversations of faith with what we believe about various doctrines or ideologies. We start with Jesus because when we start with Jesus, His sacrifice, His grace, His surrender for our redemption, His power to change human conditions, we realize we are closer in relationship because of Jesus than we are different without Him.
Paul desires that Philemon’s sharing of his faith have a powerful impact not just on others but also on himself. Paul believes that when Christians share their faith, they not only help others establish an understanding of God but also deepen their own understanding of Him.
So when you communicate with people around you, what’s more important to you?
Is it more important to you for people to see your point or to see your Christ and your engagement? What’s more important: your victory or the kingdom’s expansion?
Better at Private Prayer
But when you pray, go into your room, close the door and pray to your Father, who is unseen. Then your Father, who sees what is done in secret, will reward you. And when you pray, do not keep on babbling like pagans, for they think they will be heard because of their many words. Do not be like them, for your Father knows what you need before you ask him.
Matthew 6:6-7 (NIV)
Prayer is not only understood as asking, but in ancient Greek, it is also understood to be like pleading or beseeching God. What does it mean to beseech? It’s like asking, but with a lot more emotion, as a passionate appeal. You’re not tossing prayers around in hopes of a response. No, you are praying toward God as a way of approaching or seeking Him. This isn’t like gambling, hoping things go your way. Your ask is urgent; your need to communicate with God ought to make you turn your face toward your Heavenly Father with fervency.
Prayer was also understood as a wish to speak your desire, almost like a vow. It’s that shaping of prayer that you would offer most when you have a deep wish or need. Prayer was also understood to be an expression to God in response to an emergency that had taken place in life. Many people today are trying to come up with such different forms of spiritual disciplines as if to create different and better methods of prayer. But we don’t need to attempt to create different prayers shaped on performance and language, public display, spiritual depth, or maturity.
Notice in the text, Jesus is not speaking in parables, trying to create interpretive bridges by painting images or telling stories that make it easier to understand and softer for absorption. In this text, He is straight to the point. Why? Because He wants you to have a strong private prayer life. He doesn’t want you to pray like pagans, who pray mindless, senseless, long, empty prayers for public performance. He helps His disciples so that they can get prayer right.
We could all do better at developing greater discipline around our private prayer lives. You can offer better prayers first by simply honoring the discipline.
God attaches the promise of a reward to our disciplining our lives to pray. He rewards your commitment to bring your urgencies to Him. He makes us increasingly aware of His abiding presence. He is extending Himself and letting you have the ability to make your request known, to express what you think He is worth to you, and what value you think the Lord has in your life.
Better at Dealing with Hurt
Soon afterward, Jesus went to a town called Nain, and his disciples and a large crowd went along with him. As he approached the town gate, a dead person was being carried out—the only son of his mother, and she was a widow. And a large crowd from the town was with her. When the Lord saw her, his heart went out to her and he said, “Don’t cry.”
Then he went up and touched the bier they were carrying him on, and the bearers stood still. He said, “Young man, I say to you, get up!” The dead man sat up and began to talk, and Jesus gave him back to his mother.
They were all filled with awe and praised God. “A great prophet has appeared among us,” they said. “God has come to help his people.” This news about Jesus spread throughout Judea and the surrounding country.
Luke 7:11-17 (NIV)
Your hurts don’t have to be introduced every time you walk in a room. Your reactions to people don’t have to always be fueled by your hurts, past or present. You don’t have to keep making progress with hurt being the obvious crutch that defines your resistance and explains your defenses.
We have to believe that life in Christ helps us to live better than our hurts. It starts when we let Jesus stop us from the pace our hurts have set and the direction our hurts have determined.
Luke is trying to encourage you in this text to stop heading in the direction your hurts are leading you in, and to stop walking at the interrupted pace your hurts have set for you.
If Jesus has the capacity to stop death when the procession is headed to the cemetery, then why didn’t He just go into the ministry of standing in front of cemeteries? Every time a coffin was coming through, He could just turn it around. Here’s the answer: because death is a part of life. Jesus wasn’t touching that coffin because He was just trying to demonstrate His power and sovereignty over death, but because He wanted everybody to know that when you are hurting, He has the capacity to pull out His compassion and turn your hurt around.
This is why verse 14 says Jesus saw her; her pain was apparently so deep, so telling, so painful that His heart was touched by it. He wants to affect how she processes her devastation and bless her so that she doesn’t have to live the rest of her life led by hurt.
Let’s not ignore our hurt. Let’s not let hurt linger either. We can do better by letting the Lord stop us from being guided by our pain and our hurt.
Better at Nurturing Joy
Consider it pure joy, my brothers and sisters, whenever you face trials of many kinds.
James 1:2 (NIV)
What is joy? In the context of this text, it is a deep and abiding sense of contentment or satisfaction, even in the midst of difficult circumstances. This means it’s not joy as a reflection. It’s joy as a reflex response.
Every one of us could do a whole lot better at considering the joy of it all:
- To live better at choosing joy as a lens by which we will interpret the unfolding movements and gradations and experiences that make up our lives.
- To consider joy before we consider hurt or rage or regret.
- To consider joy before we choose mourning or hate or retaliation.
- To consider joy before we decide to completely shut down emotionally.
- To consider joy before we choose doubt and cynicism and detachment and negativity.
- To consider joy when interpreting persecution.
Have you considered that God is dispensing grace to your life because He wants to use you to prove to others that no matter how severe the persecution, Jesus can keep you seated and clothed and in your right mind?
James is saying to us: I don’t want your joy to always be a reflection. I want your joy to be a reflex response, which means in the middle of your persecution, in the middle of your trouble, I want you right in the midst of the torrential downpour to say, I don’t know how this is going to work out, but I know God’s got some grace in here somewhere, and instead of giving into anger, instead I’m going to wait on the Lord and be of good courage and know that He will strengthen my heart.
Joy is a choice. It is choosing to be happy because your contentment is not based on your circumstances, but it is based on what you know about the sovereignty of God.
This text is teaching us that we can live better at considering joy when we keep space open in our suffering for grace.
