He has sent me to bind up the broken hearted

Something amazing happened to me at church today. I hope I can put it into words. It requires a bit of a longish back story, so bear with me. I will start with the beginning of my day this morning.

Usually at church I am at the front playing an instrument of some kind. But today we had some people from All Nations College over to run the whole service, so I was one of the congregation. My heart was heavy knowing this because my experience is that when I am not having to concentrate on playing an instrument well, I think more about the words of songs and that often means I become upset and tearful. I dislike this partly because it makes me feel painfully conspicuous but also because they are invariably not tears of joy about the beauty of the Lord, but tears of sadness and heartache. As you read on, you will understand why I was so bloody miserable.

So, anticipating that this was fairly likely, I struggled to get out of bed and arrived about 10 minutes late. The only available seat I could see when I arrived was one next to someone who I think is thoroughly wonderful, so I was quite pleased. I sat down just in time for the kids’ slot.

The service this morning was about the first half of Isaiah 61, which contains the verse “They will be called oaks of righteousness, a planting of the LORD for the display of his splendour”. The girl had given each of us a leaf on which to write the name of someone we wanted to ask for God to make into an oak of righteousness. She said that an oak of righteousness is someone who is full of joy and love for God. Someone who is used by him. I tried to think of someone’s name but I could only think of my own. I was not full of those things. I wanted to be, but I’ve always felt I was doing something wrong or missing something. I felt decidedly un-oak-like, and a familiar sinking heart.

Then someone turned to me and said “I would like to put you on my leaf”. I couldn’t tell if he was just saying that as a way of avoiding small talk, or if he was joking or if he really meant it, so I took it cooly and said thank you. But inside I wondered “Did God just hear that heavy-hearted prayer and answer it straight away?” No, that sort of thing doesn’t happen to me. Swallow it down, look straight ahead. Don’t get emotional and embarrass everyone. He probably didn’t mean it anyway.

Then the sermon began. It was on the following passage:

The Spirit of the Sovereign Lord is on me,
because the Lord has anointed me
to proclaim good news to the poor.
He has sent me to bind up the brokenhearted,
to proclaim freedom for the captives
and release from darkness for the prisoners,^[a]
2 to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favour
and the day of vengeance of our God,
to comfort all who mourn,
³     and provide for those who grieve in Zion—
to bestow on them a crown of beauty
instead of ashes,
the oil of joy
instead of mourning,
and a garment of praise
instead of a spirit of despair.
They will be called oaks of righteousness,
a planting of the Lord
for the display of his splendour.

The speaker reminded us that this was the passage that Jesus read out in the synagogue in Luke 4 where he follows it by saying “Today this scripture is fulfilled in your hearing.” A heart stopping moment in scripture and history. It tells us that Jesus fulfills this prophecy. But Jesus also says in John 14:12 “I tell you the truth, anyone who has faith in me will do what I have been doing. He will do even greater things than these, because I am going to the Father.” So Jesus passes on the baton to his people too. We are to carry on his kingdom work, and even do “greater things.” So Isaiah 61 is our ministry. It’s even my ministry.

A couple of weeks ago another preacher was talking about us being called to make disciples. He seemed to be saying that making disciples meant doing evangelism and teaching people about the Bible. This had been one of those weeks where I hadn’t been playing an instrument and instead got tearful and unhappy. Because you see, I USED to do those things. I used to work in ‘Christian ministry’. I felt really sure and secure that I was doing ‘God’s work’. Now, I’m not sure. I’m doing what I want to do. I’m doing something that makes me feel alive and something I feel good at but it’s not ‘making disciples’. I’m not telling my clients about Jesus. I’m not teaching them the Bible. Am I only doing God’s work and God’s will when I’m doing those things, or when I’m doing other ‘spiritual’ things like praying for clients, but not the actual nut and bolt work of counselling? I didn’t feel like this could be right. But I’ve had this horrible feeling since finishing Christian work that I’ve just been following my own path in spite of God. Not with him or for him. He must be so disappointed.

Then in that same church service we sung a song about making sacrifices for Jesus and I got even more unhappy. You see I USED to do that. When I first became a Christian I made big sacrifices that made me so unhappy I wished I was dead. And everywhere I went Christians applauded me and told me how wonderful it was that I loved Jesus so much that I would do that. And so I used to sing those songs about sacrifice feeling sure and secure that I was doing God’s will. But I also had begun to believe something really wrong because of the situation that I was ‘born’ into as a Christian. I thought that because people seemed so pleased that I was making sacrifices, then it must be a really good thing that I was so unhappy. It must please God for me to be so unhappy. Being so unhappy that you wish you were dead must be authentic Christianity. So I didn’t just make the original sacrifice (which I still believe was right) but I also sacrificed anything that had the whiff of happiness in it. I threw the baby of joy out with the bath water of appropriate sacrifice. I have been doing that my whole Christian life.

So I got upset in that recent church service because I’m not unhappy any more. I don’t wish I was dead. So, my skewed logic tells me, I must not be a real Christian any more. God must be so disappointed with me. I can’t sing those songs with any authenticity any more because I’ve discovered a way of living (still according to sound doctrine you understand) that doesn’t make me feel like my heart has been ripped out.

I was sad because I wasn’t unhappy enough.

Cut back to today’s sermon. The ministry being described in Isaiah 61 is a little broader than “tell people about Jesus and then do one to ones with them”. It includes things that I actually do. I help broken hearted people. I comfort those who mourn and grieve. Maybe… No. Could it be? Could it possibly be true that God called me to do that? That he made and equipped me for it? That it pleases him for me to do that? That this could be called God’s work for me? She mentioned that God prepares us for the ministry that he has for us. Our life stories tell the tales that he wants us to tell. I remembered earlier in the week a friend texting me to encourage me that I was doing good and fruitful work with clients and that I was being a good friend to her. She said that she believed it was because I knew what it was to be broken hearted that meant I was able to help others effectively (or words to that effect). It seemed to fit with what the speaker was saying. Could it be that God is and has been using me for his purposes by doing what I love and is not angry with me because I haven’t converted anyone…?

Then the next song was announced. It was one of those sacrificey songs that I used to like. It was about giving everything to Jesus.

And suddenly, I saw that idea in a totally new way for the very first time. 

I had always thought that giving everything to Jesus meant giving him anything good you had or felt until you were so unhappy that you wanted to die. Because that is what I thought made Christians applaud you, so that is what I thought made God pleased. And so I have felt that I must be displeasing him by daring to stay in a job that makes me happy, or in friendships that make me glad to be alive. I keep expecting him to rip them from my hands because I will no longer give them to him willingly. But maybe there’s another way you can give everything to Jesus.

Maybe you can use every good thing he gives you, for him to use for his will. 

Maybe that doesn’t mean you have to give good things up. Instead you can recognise them as good things and thank him for them. Rejoice in them. Use them for him. Give it all, for him. But still keep them.

It sounds so obvious now.

At the end of the sermon the speaker prayed that we would see the scriptures. Not that we’d see the words on the page. Not that we’d understand what she’d explained, but that we’d see what’s really true. And God answered her prayers. I feel like my eyes have finally been opened to who God is and who I am in him. He is not an angry bully who wants me to be miserable and who hates it when I’m happy because I’m not sacrificing enough. He is a Father who designed me with giftings that he wants me to use for his kingdom, for his glory AND for my delight. He gives me good things because he is kind and generous and not because he wants to test whether I’m loyal enough to deny myself. No wonder I’ve been such a bitter, angry and unhappy Christian – I’ve been trying to love and worship such a horrible god! He must really love me to keep hold of me all this time…

And he’s shown me that I’m loved in my church. The thoroughly wonderful woman who I was sitting with came to find me outside when I left to cry privately. She just stood with me until I was able to say why, and then said that she understood, and that it was in fact true that God is not horrible. And then she stood with me while I had to wait in the coffee room after church because she knows how difficult I find that. And then two more friends did the same, for ages. And no-one made fun of me for finding it difficult to stand in a room on my own where people are having coffees, they just understood it and helped me with it.

And the man said he wanted to put my name on his leaf.

And when I have told friends that this is what God showed me today, they told me they have wanted me to understand this for a really long time, but I never seemed to get it.

Well, now I do. And it’s changed everything.

OddBabble: She’s a slow learner. But she gets there in the end.

Delight Yourself in the Lord…Part 2

In those years where loving the law was incomprehensible to me, I made some big sacrifices. Some really costly, painful sacrifices. I was proud of having made them and people regularly congratulated me for making them. However I was making them because I was afraid of what other Christians would say if I didn’t. When I was working for Christian organisations, I made them so I wouldn’t lose my job. I made them because I would no longer have been accepted by the people I wanted to be accepted by if I hadn’t. Looking back, I wonder now how God saw those sacrifices. I wonder if he might have said something like this to me: “The multitude of your sacrifices – what are they to me?” says the LORD. “I have more than enough of burned offerings, of rams and the fat of fattened animals; I have no pleasure in the blood of bulls and rams and goats.” (Isaiah 1:11).

Maybe it’s a bit like if I was married and I worked to bring some money home for the family. I bought home the cash and spat on it, throwing it on the floor. I had promised on my wedding day that I would make sacrifices and so there it was. Well done me.

Or I made a meal for my family and while I stirred and baked, I listed out loud all the things I’d rather be doing if I wasn’t chained to the kitchen. I told all my friends about the wonderful meals I cooked and the money I worked hard to bring home and they all congratulated me because they’d heard me promise I would do those things. Only my spouse knew how much I resented it and how much I wished I could be free to do what pleased me. The sacrifices I had made were real enough, but their value was almost nothing because I had given them with a raging, resentful heart while at the same time basking in my own misplaced pride.

A couple of years ago while going through a difficult patch, I had the opportunity to make some choices in a more real way. I didn’t really know if I believed in God and so the desire to fit into the Christian community diminished to almost nothing. I could really do what I wanted without any consequences that I cared about. To cut a long story short, after some wrestling and wrangling I came to a point where I realised that I wanted to make the same choices and sacrifices that I had before. I wanted to. I wouldn’t lose a job, I wouldn’t be rejected, but still, it was the right thing to do. This time though it was my choice.

Going back to the wedding analogy, it’s so much more pleasant for the spouse to eat a meal that has been put on the table having been made lovingly and willingly. It’s so much easier to get up in the morning for work when you’re doing it for someone you love.

This is actually grace and freedom in practice.

It’s so easy to fall into the trap of thinking that the way to make Christians obedient is to make lots of rules that they have to follow, and make lots of punishments for when they don’t. The punishments don’t even have to be that big, just things like tacit disapproval, negative labels and guilt. Such a simple plan – what could possibly go wrong? There are some large, ‘successful’ churches that operate on this philosophy and there are people who think that this is the essence of Christianity. The problem is that this produces Christians like the ones I just described. People like I was. It produces Christians who are obedient out of fear and social pressure, or who are disobedient, but become experts at hiding it because of fear and social pressure. It produces a culture of mask-wearing and superficiality for fear of being ‘found out’. It makes no allowances for failure, which further perpetuates guilt and the fear of exposure, and it does this universally because every single Christian will fall short of its ideals. In short, it does nothing to reach the human heart.

OK, so it’s not a perfect plan. It’s clearly a rubbish one. So why is it so pervasive in parts of the Christian subculture? I think it’s attractive because it feels so safe. Rules make us feel safe because we know where we stand with them. We know what we can and cannot do, and we know that everyone else will operate within the same confines. We are all contained and uniform. Safe.

Grace, on the other hand, is dangerous.

I had this teacher at school called Ms Ashcroft when I was 10 or 11. She was new and the first thing she said to us was that in reality she had no actual control over us. She said that if we wanted to, we could all get up and walk out of the classroom right then and there. At the end of the day, it was us that chose how we were going to behave. Honestly, it was like something out of Dead Poets Society. What she said caused us all to snigger as we realised that we could, in fact walk out of the classroom –there was nothing stopping us. It felt very exciting in that moment. But we quickly realised we didn’t want to. This teacher gave us the respect of showing us that we had the power and ability to make choices and that we were responsible for the consequences. No-one had ever spoken to us like that before and we loved her for it. Plus she was the first teacher to let us have a class hamster.

Obviously it’s not a perfect analogy, but it provides a hint towards why grace works when on paper it looks like it shouldn’t. When I apply it to my original thought about sacrifice, grace means that I realised for the first time that when the pressures of people and their opinions of me were removed, it was like it was just me and God in the room. And God, to my surprise, didn’t sound like all those people in my life (or at least how I chose to hear them). He said that grace means I’m free to make whatever choice I want and his love for me will be totally unchanged. That there is no trick or small print, his love for me would be as big and wonderful and limitless and unfathomable if I was the sacrificial hero I thought that everyone expected me to be, or if I was a sell out and a failure and I let everyone down. He was able to say that because it wasn’t the sacrifice that interested him anyway.

He was interested in me.

Now that is a profoundly dangerous way for God to operate, because it means that I am truly free. I am free to disobey him. I am free to give up sacrifices and free to walk away from him. Free to get out of my primary school chair, and just walk out of the classroom.

It was only when that freedom to disobey was a lived reality that I was also truly free to obey.

God’s mad gamble pays off because he knows how captivating Love is. Anyone in a loving marriage would find the analogies earlier on ludicrous, because why would you behave that way with someone you love? You wouldn’t. Not because you promised not to in your wedding vows and you are obliged to stick to those promises and follow those rules, but because you love them, they love you, and that love compels you towards striving for  goodness and rightness in that relationship.

The circle is completed by the fact that this proves the authenticity of the relationship. The husband, the wife, the Christian, does what is right and loving because they love and because they know and believe that they are loved.

Oddbabble: It is the carrot of love, not the whip of judgement that compels her towards Jesus. That’s why she smiles more these days.

Delight yourself in the Lord…Part 1

For the first several years as a Christian I used to indulge in a secret fantasy that I rarely admitted to anyone. I used to dream that somehow, I would receive a telegram from heaven saying “No-one’s Home”. I would dream about how my life would be different if I wasn’t a Christian, and wish I wasn’t so darned wholeheartedly convinced that it’s actually true.

Recently I found my mind slipping once again in the direction of wondering how my life would be if I wasn’t a Christian and I realised something that worried me at first. I realised that my life wouldn’t look all that different if I got that telegram. It worried me because I thought “This is not a good sign. There ought to be a real, measurable difference between the life and values of a Christian and someone who is not” and began the usual panic that regularly befalls the over-sensitive Christian, wondering if I had ever been born again at all.

However, as I thought it through I realised that it was not because my life hadn’t changed since I’d become a Christian (that genuinely would be a reason for alarm bells to ring, as a Christian life without regeneration and transformation is one that needs to be examined). The difference was that I had changed from a position of hating God’s laws to loving them and agreeing with them. Psalm 119:97 says “Oh how I love your law! I meditate on it all day long.” I realised I had come to a point where that had actually begun to make sense to me. Along with the verse below that stares me in the face every morning when I eat my breakfast:

“Delight yourself in the Lord and he will give you the desires of your heart” Psalm 37:4

I used to look at the verse and think “I know what the desires of my heart are, and I’m 100% sure God isn’t about to give me any of those.” What I didn’t realise is that God doesn’t deny us our desires, but he changes what our desires are in the first place. If I got that telegram, my life wouldn’t look much different because I am convinced of the rightness of the way that God says life should be lived, to the extent that it would remain right even if it was earthly, not heavenly wisdom.

What this means in practice is that I am now a far more ‘cheerful giver’. It’s much easier and more pleasant to give a gift that’s deserved, that the recipient has asked for to someone you love than it is to give something you love, to someone you bitterly resent for asking for it. Even and especially if the gift is very, very expensive. Either way the recipient gets the gift, but the latter is far more civilised for all involved.

Of course I am not saying that everything I do is in agreement with God and I am almost indistinguishable from the living Lord Jesus himself. All I am saying is that for far more things than before, when I do, think or say something that is wrong, I agree that it was wrong. I guess you could say it’s like growing out of adolescence. As a teenager it drove me mad that my parents told me what I could and couldn’t do. I was a comparatively obedient teenager but my obedience was not in line with my desires or personal judgement. As an adult, I’m still tempted to do many of the things the teenaged me was fond of, but I am able to see for myself why those things are not what’s best for me. There’s no-one making me make those choices anymore, but now I choose to make them (most of the time). The results are almost the same but there are far fewer tantrums and slammed doors.

This in turn made me realise something else – something that totally crushed my pride. You can read about that in Part 2…

Oddbabble: Thinks that serialising her posts will increase her readers exponentially.

Things God Said #1 and #2

Things God said #1

My precocious niece has taught me something already. It was an amazing thing to hold her. She didn’t have to do ANYTHING to make me completely delight in her. It didn’t matter that her little head was a bit wonky and pointed from having a sucker thing put on her head during the birth, because she was beautiful. God is our father. We don’t have to do ANYTHING to make Him completely delight in us. He rejoices over us with singing. I find it so difficult to believe this kind of stuff, but I caught a little glimpse of it in Elizabeth, and it made me smile all of Thursday morning.

Things God said #2

I had one of those sermons this morning that God prepares especially for you, and comes over and whispers in just your ear as the minister speaks. Last night I had to give up something really, really precious – something which seemed to offer me joy and delight and Good Things, but which took my eyes and heart away from Him. Giving up something costly tends to make you wonder if we’ve got this whole thing right. Is this promise really worth it? Abram was thinking something rather similar (coincidence?) when he refuses the riches that Melchizedek offered him, because of an oath that he had made with God. “After this, the word of the LORD came to Abram in a vision: ‘Do not be afraid, Abram. I am your shield, your very great reward.’” In other words, ‘yes, it is worth it, and no, I will not abandon you until you get Home, I Myself will be your shield.’ And Abram, refreshingly, wobbles and says, ‘um, yeah but have you seen my wife lately? She’s pretty old! Where are these offspring you promised?’ He says ‘look at all those stars! I made them. It wasn’t hard for Me, and niether is anything else.’ God reminded me that His promise is sure, and His promise is worth it.