It's Important To Remember How To Live Life And Not Only Write About It.

Ahhhh... That was nice. Anybody still there? Well, if you are, we might have more fun now.

As I'm sure many weblog writers know, I arrived at a point where I wasn't living life so much as I compiled content interesting enough to write. Imagine the state of my faith when I only read the Bible to find my next weblog post, and when I only prayed to hear God give me some new insight I could share with my tiny group of readers. 

Then after hearing a message from Francis Chan at Verge 2012, I decided to take some time to remember what it felt like to read and pray just so I could experience God's presence. It was good to get away from finding ways to make myself interesting by talking about God and instead become interested in God Himself again. 

But I'm currently preparing a post I think someone may need to read. Stay tuned. 

Treating God Like A Famous Person

I can't remember a time when I said to myself, "Hey! A lot of very famous people live in Nashville," and then felt excited at the thought of running into them. Once, Carrie Underwood walked by me in a store where I worked and I didn't notice her, despite her picture on the cover of the magazine directly in front of me. I would not be here telling you this story if my friend Bruce hadn't brought it to my attention. That's how much I don't think about it.

However, I am human, and have experienced a "star-struck" feeling at least twice in my adult life. Once, I stood next to Patrick Stewart in Vancouver. Even then, I enjoyed the moment a little too late. I didn't realize it was him (because he stands about as high as my shoulder) until someone called his name and he replied "Over here" in that spectacular accent.

Then there was the time I found myself standing next to John Davis of Superdrag in a crowded bar. He looked up (also a shorter man. I guess I'm most impressed by people shorter than me) and said, "How's it going?" Instead of saying something normal and friendly, I panicked and asked him if he'd let me through to the bathroom. 

We've all wondered what we would say or do should we meet someone famous. I'm sure we have. At least once. Some people think about it more than others. I know because I met them on the Rachel Leigh Cook Fan club message board.

But why? Why do we want to meet famous people so much? Considering the quote referenced in this post, would it have been ironic to feel giddy if I met pre-death Joe Strummer? It's hard to tell. The definition of irony has blurred a little in our culture. 

Fame is so weird. You can't measure it. You could argue over a person's ability to produce or commodify fame, but I probably wouldn't agree with you. I think it's most like a currency. Its worth is determined by the faith or value given to it by people. 

This could be why I've never really liked the song "You are the Lord, the famous one." I know it's accurate in the sense that a lot of people know about God. Still, I can't shake the feeling it describes God as if He were on the cover of Self Magazine (although, maybe that would be fitting?). If meeting Patrick Stewart and John Davis says anything, I don't want to treat God the way I treat famous people. Would I not realize He was there? Would I panic and go to the men's room? 

Is it possible that some Christians treat God like a famous person? Do they think about what it would be like to meet God someday, but not really feel comfortable meeting Him in real life? Is it more of a fantasy than a relationship for them?

Just wondering. What do you think?

Secondary Questions - Or, lessons from a homeless man's reading list.

In 2004, a man named Dan walked into the coffee shop where I worked in Grand Rapids. My co-worker took his order and I made the drink. While they waited for me to finish, she decided to make some small talk with this guy. “I’ve never seen you before. Do you work around here?”

“I don’t work around here or anywhere else,” he said.

“Oh. Well, do you live around here then?”

It was an innocent question, but she clearly didn’t understand that Dan was probably homeless. I hip-checked her out of the way and handed him his drink. He paid with a dirty dollar bill and some change, if I remember right, and began talking with me about education and religion. Unlike some of the other people I talked with in that neighborhood, his points were articulate, well reasoned, and truthful. He mentioned some books and asked if I had read them. Then he wrote the titles in beautiful cursive on the back of a concert flyer. “You’ll find these at the Grand Rapids Main Branch Library,” he said.

He told me that one of the books, The Art of Clear Thinking, didn’t have much to say. He really only recommended the chapter, “How To Not Be Bamboozled”. I found all the books on his reading list and read them over the next four months, but I remember this chapter best. “How To Not Be Bamboozled” warned against accepting false information in an age where information is so easily accessible. And mind you, this book was written in the 1950’s, way before the lightning speed at which we could all WikiTubeBookSpace. The author said that all information should be tested by three questions: “Why do I need to know this? Who is telling me? And what are their sources?” I won’t give you my book report summary of the chapter, but I want to point out the importance of further inquiry. It’s easy to hear something and assume that we have a complete understanding of both its context and credibility.

I’m awesome when it comes to acting like I understand everything. Reader’s Digest once had an article that explained how you could impress people at parties. I was ten and woefully insecure, so I ate this stuff up. The author’s strategy was to say truthful statements, but to say them in such a way that deceived people. Imagine someone asks you, “Have you ever read Dante’s Divine Comedy?” Instead of saying “No,” you can answer, “Not in English.” The second reply insinuates that you’ve not only read the Divine Comedy, but that you read it in Italian. But this is a party. You can move on to another circle of cocktails and leave that person to bask in the residual glow of your coolness.

I’ve spent the better part of the past five years re-training myself to not play that game anymore. It all started when I couldn’t get away fast enough and the person started asking questions that proved I was a phony. My Reader’s Digest-inspired cool (if such a thing were possible) couldn’t stand the test of secondary questions.

But secondary questions aren’t just a BS detector. What if every conversation you ever had sounded like a job interview? You have your set of questions for people to get the basic information of who they are and what they’ve done. But without context, do you really know the person? I recently filled out an application that asked me to tell them a little about myself. “What makes you tick?” it asked. I looked at the space given after the question and basically wrote in, “It’s a long story, but at least it’s not boring.” I couldn’t give a short, easy answer. If I had given an answer like, “I’m a writer,” and left it at that, their assumptions could lead them to a conclusion miles away from my meaning. In Nashville, when you say you’re a writer, most people immediately say, “Songwriter?” I have to tell them, “No, typewriter.” It takes another question for them to understand what I meant.

I’m learning to ask secondary questions when I pray. First, it’s important to ask questions that test the truth of what I may hear in prayer. 1 John 4:1-3 says, “Beloved, do not believe every spirit, but test the spirits to see whether they are from God, because many false prophets have gone out into the world. By this you know the Spirit of God: every spirit that confesses that Jesus Christ has come in the flesh is from God; and every spirit that does not confess Jesus is not from God; this is the spirit of the antichrist, of which you have heard that it is coming, and now it is already in the world.” Just because I hear something while I’m praying to God, and just because it sounds like something God might say, it doesn’t automatically mean the word is from God. John encouraged people to ask questions that would test the spirit speaking to make sure the word came from God.

Then there are the questions I ask God to build an understanding of what He may require of me. I think He wants us to make an effort to understand, to learn and grow instead of passively accepting everything that comes our way. There’s a reason, I think, why James 1:5 encourages us to ask for wisdom from God. And the writer makes it clear that God wants to give you wisdom. But you have to ask.

If God were to tell you to get a new job, for example, does that mean you should get any job other than the one you have now? Or should you take a moment to ask, “Where do you want me to work?” That could save you a lot of frustration applying and interviewing at dead ends, which might cause you to blame God for making your life hard. And I’ve found that asking God the secondary questions doesn’t only give me clearer information on what He wants me to do, it also helps me to understand His heart, how He desires to give me good things, how He loves me enough to guide me.

Secondary questions help keep us from being bamboozled. We can see if the guy at the party is making himself look a lot cooler than he is in real life. We can see if God is speaking, or if a lying spirit is trying to deceive us. Information without credibility will eventually break down if you press it with questions. That sure beats having your thinking enslaved by lies.

Secondary questions also make space for a relationship. It’s the difference between a boss who only wants you to know your duty and a Father who wants His adopted son to become more like Him. Information without context is just trivia, and I don’t want my life to be trivial. Instead of asking the wandering homeless guy where he lives, you could ask him why he’s out of work. Who knows? He might give you a cool reading list.

A Bend In the Path – Promises and Patience.

I started writing a graphic novel two months ago. It’s about Jewish people in the old west. The idea for the story came to me when I played a concert in Grand Rapids last summer. This girl was hanging around as I waited for my turn on stage. I had a Star of David that I’d picked up in Jerusalem and I was fidgeting with it in my right hand. She caught a glimpse of it and asked, “Are you a sheriff?” I tried not to make fun of her, but it got me thinking, “I wonder if there was a Jewish sheriff in some dusty gold-rush town…”

The story has gone through some changes from that initial thought and I’ve already had a lot of fun the past few weeks. At one point in the story, as the Jews sail on a ship headed to California, a Russian listens to a Jewish boy talk about his faith. The boy narrates the story, “As I told him of King David hiding in caves while King Saul sought to kill him, he stopped me. ‘I have heard these stories. The priest at the Orthodox Church told them to me. What I don’t understand is God’s power to give things He promises to people. He told your people that they would have the Promised Land, and yet they did not have it for centuries. He told David that he was king while Saul still sat on the throne. Then David had to run for his life, hiding in caves until Saul died. Could not God promise something and then simply give it?’”

After I wrote this question, I realized that I didn’t have an answer for the boy to give the Russian. Then I realized that I didn’t know the answer for that question in my own life. Why couldn’t God simply give the things He promised?

God has made a lot of promises for my life. He’s made a lot of promises to a lot of people. He makes so many promises to the world in scripture that I don’t feel like scanning BibleGateway.com to find them all. When I read the promises in the Bible or hear Him make promises to me in prayer, I very often feel a longing to see them fulfilled. Sometimes, I let those feelings of longing and hope (I’m looking forward to these gifts, Lord) turn into despair (Are you ever going to come through on those promises?).

For the sake of brevity, I’ll only talk about one of these promises. God has promised me a wife someday and I felt like He told me one night, “Pay attention to (her). I want you to pursue (her).” Now, I’m aware that He didn’t say, “You’re going to date her and marry her.” I’m only trying to make the point that I have a promise and feel like God has showed me a possible fulfillment of that promise. As I prayed about this, seeking confirmation and asking for wisdom, an elaborate picture came to mind.

God and I walked along a path together. An arch formed in the path and a field lay between us and the other side of the bend. God pointed at a figure on the path across the field and said, “See that person? I’m bringing you two together. That’s what I want to give you.”

In my excitement, I figure the shortest distance between two points is a straight line, so I dart into the field. Unfortunately, I don’t see that the field is full of quicksand and bear traps and debt collectors and all sorts of other stuff I’d want to avoid. By the time I get to the other side, I’ve lost a shoe in the quicksand, a foot in a bear trap, and changed my phone number. That’s trouble enough. Even if I make it to the other side, I can’t be sure that I’ll know what or whom God pointed out because I perceived something different at a distance. It might not look at all like what I thought close up. Because I’d made assumptions based on vain imaginations, I might be confused or frustrated with what I find. I’m not sure how I’d deal with the disappointment. And what if I did find the right person that God pointed out? Would they be ready? What if I grabbed that person’s hand saying, “Alright, let’s get back to God,” and I drag them through the field I barely survived?

The best thing for me to do is stay by God’s side and follow Him around the bend. Staying on the path may take longer, but I’ll keep out of unnecessary trouble. That’s not to say I won’t suffer hardships. I will, but the things He and I encounter together will prepare me for what’s ahead and I’ll mature in the process. When we finally come to the point that God showed me earlier, I’d see the promise for what it really is in the time and context that He intended. If things worked out the way I expected, I would have spent so much time in preparation with God that He would remain my primary focus. The gift wouldn’t become more important than the Giver. If things didn’t work out the way I expected, I wouldn’t feel disappointed. God and His promises would still be good. I’d be grateful for what He has given me.

So why would God show me what was ahead? If it's all going to happen anyway, isn't it kind of a tease to make me wait for it? Or is it more like incentive to keep me going?

When I was in summer camp, I ran a race around Piatt Lake in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan. I don’t exactly think I’m an excellent athlete, so I knew I was in for an agonizing afternoon. Every now and again, I’d catch a glimpse of a landmark ahead and think, “Just make it there. You’ll be okay, just make it to the bridge.”

The writer of Hebrews spoke of a race and the promise of a prize. Hebrews 12:1-3 says, “Therefore, since we have so great a cloud of witnesses surrounding us, let us also lay aside every encumbrance and the sin which so easily entangles us, and let us run with endurance the race that is set before us, fixing our eyes on Jesus, the author and perfecter of faith, who for the joy set before Him endured the cross, despising the shame, and has sat down at the right hand of the throne of God. For consider Him who has endured such hostility by sinners against Himself, so that you will not grow weary and lose heart.”

When Jesus ran His race here on earth, his prize was bringing salvation to mankind. To get there, He had to endure abandonment and crucifixion among other things. He’s our example, the hero of our own marathon. Our goal is eternity with Him, but we have work to do, a race to run, a relationship to build with Him. Despair creeps in when I focus on the “landmarks” so much that my journey seems more like a waiting game. It’s easier for those feelings of longing to produce hope when I’m focused on how the race itself builds my relationship with God. Looking at it that way, I don’t mind taking the long way around.

Is It Possible To Have Relationship With An Immaterial God?

In my first post, I presented the idea that many churches treat a "personal relationship" with God more like a membership to a fan club than anything else. Reading a Bible, going to a church, and praying heavenly voice mail messages doesn't make a personal relationship. The only way you can have a relationship with anyone is to talk with them and establish trust between the two of you. I've included the first chapter of Stark Raving Obedience to introduce how God spoke to individuals, why it's Biblical, and how it still happens today. Even to "uneducated and ordinary" men like me.

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Signs of life

“One of the greatest blessings a true believer has is to hear and know the voice of God. It is possible to hear God’s voice today as certainly and clearly as did Abraham and Moses – as clearly as did Samuel and David – as clearly as did Paul, Peter, the apostles, and John on the isle of Patmos!” - David Wilkerson

It all began with a prayer, at a time when I wasn’t sure if I took prayer seriously. This particular prayer was in response to Psalm 42:1 “As the deer pants for the water brooks, so pants my soul for You, O God.” As I read about David’s thirst for God I realized that even though I belonged to “the Jesus Christ Club” of Christianity, and believed myself a sold-out disciple because I did all the correct “church” things, and had once read the Bible the whole way through, I did not feel a desperate longing for God.

People often tell testimonies like this, “My life hit rock bottom, and I didn’t know what to do. Then I found Jesus. Now I have all of this joy and peace and success.” Well, it was only sort of like that for the Kallmans.

We had come to a bad place as a family when I was eleven years old. My brothers Ben and James got burned by people in the church and it seemed like they decided to break every rule the church tried to place on them. The family business had struggled and we lived on the edge of financial failure. All of that strained mom and dad to heartbreaking points. I was intensely unhappy and hated myself. Once or twice I snuck into my brothers’ world and see if drugs would make me happy, and, you know, they didn’t. For me, faith was two parts habit and one part safety precaution. I knew I didn’t want to go to hell, so I became a Christian, but devotion to a religion didn’t seem to fix anything. I felt like I was living in hell already.
At the time, I didn’t know that my father, Ted, and I were in the same place spiritually. We knew that we had accepted Christ and tried to live our lives according to His teachings, but God was this distant being to whom we paid tribute with routine. Prayer, reading the Bible, attending church, helping with church activities, Bible camp, charity, mission trips that suspiciously looked like vacations. Witnessing never seemed to do any good back then because people could probably tell that I wasn’t so sure about God myself.

A part of our family’s routine was to spend time together on Sunday nights. Usually it meant pizza and a movie. One Sunday night, we didn’t have pizza or a movie. My brothers became angry and asked why we were just sitting around the living room with nothing to do.
“We’re going to pray,” my mother answered.

I figured that one of our family members or friends were in trouble, because that seemed like the only time we sat together as a family to pray. Dad said that nobody was hurt or anything. “We want to teach you children something that your mom and I have been learning together.”
Ben and James looked like they wanted to leave, but knew that it would cause more trouble than they were willing to make. My sister Etta, often hiding silently behind our couch, took it all in. I remember feeling confused and intrigued. I knew how to talk to God. Every Sunday school kid knew what prayer was, but mom and dad had just explained that we could listen to God talk back. It sounded like a thought, but the thought was sometimes God talking to us.
So this is usually the part of that testimony where God changes our lives and everything gets better. The family magically alters into this perfect home and all of us get along and sunshine pours out of our fingertips.

That didn’t quite happen. God began to show us the areas in our lives that needed to change, and there were a lot of areas that needed change. Over time, God sometimes asked us to do strange and uncomfortable things. But when we met on Sunday night and asked God to talk to us, all of the problems we faced couldn’t diminish my excitement. I had actually met God, and He met me.

The Preacher in the punk band had it right

My pastor used to have a rock and roll band called Big Fil. Their “big hit” was a song called “I’m Not Your Grandpa”. In the song, God spoke to His people, asking them when they would realize that He was right in the middle of their lives. He wasn’t some crazy old man that lived in the attic with flowing white hair. It’s a great song. I own all of their records.
But I digress.

The point is that God wants a personal relationship with us. You’ve heard that before, right? I mean, He wants to be able to walk with us in the cool of the evening and talk with us, just like He did with Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden. He wants to be able to meet with us on mountains and talk directly to us like He did with Moses. This same God tore the veil in the temple from top to bottom when Jesus died. Man and God can interact freely, no priest required.

I’ve told lots of people that this book is all about prayer, but it’s really about knowing God. When we hear His voice and obey, then see amazing things come from that obedience, we learn to trust Him. We can approach God with confidence, we can seek Him and actually find Him.
I’m going to talk about sheer madness. I’m going to talk about the best thing that ever happened to me.

Henry Ford once said whether you believe you can or cannot, you are correct. Despite it’s self-centered bent, there is some truth to it. Before we begin anything here, you have to understand: If you don’t believe that God can or will speak to you, then you are absolutely right. This isn’t a case of mind over matter, that the more affirmation you give something the truer it becomes. I’m saying that anyone can hear, but you have to make it a point to listen.
If you’re somebody who really believes that the Bible is the true Word of God, that the Word is unchanging, that God is the same “yesterday, today, and forever” (Hebrews 13:8), why wouldn’t you believe He still speaks?

The book The Lives of the Desert Fathers gives a record of miracles, healings, signs, and wonders that were prevalent in the lives of monks along the Nile from about 100 AD to about 450 AD. It includes a direct translation of The Historia Monachorum In Aegypto, which tells the stories of these men and their intense pursuit of God. Listening while in prayer was a significant part of their walk. In his book Surprised by the Voice of God, Jack Deere details instances in where the early Reformers heard direction from the Spirit and acted in obedience, and how God moved miraculously. This book also cites Jonathan Edwards and Charles Hadden Spurgeon with similar instances. A.W. Tozer in his classic book The Pursuit of God describes the ongoing speaking nature of God in the chapter “The Speaking Voice”.

The problem I have in teaching people about hearing God’s voice comes in the matter of incontrovertible proof. I’m not sure I could come up with a list of bibliographical sources that would satisfy critical minds. I can only present the best information that I have and give accounts of experience.

But they aren’t all just my experiences, or my family’s, or of people unknown to the public. I’ve already mentioned Jack Deere’s book, Surprised By the Voice of God. At the beginning of the book, Deere tells a story of God supernaturally speaking to him. A student came to speak with Deere about a paper, and the Holy Spirit told Deere that this student struggled with pornography. Deere describes his reaction. “What is happening to me? I thought. There is no way this student is into pornography. I must be making this up. But why would I make up something I thought to be an impossibility?” When Deere asks if the student is struggling with pornography, the young man begins to confess and repent of many different sins, including his addiction to pornography. Later that night, the student found Deere and exclaimed, “I’m a new person!”

I believe this all began with Deere relentlessly seeking God’s voice. “For months, I had been praying for God to speak to me like this, asking him to impart to me supernatural knowledge about people so that I might minister to them more effectively.”

A high school Algebra teacher had an annoying habit of saying the same two phrases whenever I asked him a question, “it’s in the book” or “it’s in your notes.” I used to wonder why, then, I had a teacher at all. I should have just been able to read the book and look at the notes and understand how to find “X”. But I didn’t understand. I needed him to sit down with me and go over whatever impeded my comprehension. I remember muttering to myself, “No, it’s in your head.”

Growing up in my church, Sunday school teachers and youth pastors told me that God said everything He needed to say in the Bible, so He doesn’t have to talk anymore. I don’t buy that. I don’t think they were lying to me. They just didn’t know how to listen to God, so they assumed He had finished talking. I do believe that the Bible is God’s word, and that it is fully true. I don’t believe that it’s exhaustive, though, because that would mean the eternal God limited the whole of his being to a book with a beginning and end. John said it himself in his gospel, “And there are also many other things which Jesus did, which if they were written in detail, I suppose that even the world itself would not contain the books that would be written.” (John 21:25)
In John 16:7-15, Jesus tells His disciples that the Holy Spirit will come to guide them after He has gone. He says that the Holy Spirit “will guide you into all truth”, and that the Spirit “will convict the world concerning sin and righteousness and judgment”. The guidance of the Holy Spirit was not exclusively for the apostles, and there was a need for guidance beyond the words written in the scriptures. Otherwise, Jesus would have left His disciples with Abraham’s words from the parable of The Rich Man and Lazarus in Luke 16:29, "But Abraham said, 'They have Moses and the Prophets; let them hear them.'” In other words, “It’s in the book. It’s in your notes.”

But even if that were the case, the Bible has no life apart from the Spirit’s illumination. In Greek, there are two different words for “Word”. The first is logos, which refers to the written and spoken word. The other is rhema, which refers specifically to the spoken word. Now, I have only studied a little bit of the Greek language (very, very little), and I don’t claim to have scholarly credentials, but I take it to mean this: When I read the Bible, I read words (logos), but when that word takes on personal meaning, and I feel the Holy Spirit speaking directly to me through the words, that’s rhema. Logos is written and rhema is spoken or breathed. I read logos, but hear and understand rhema.

In the Catholic Church, some believers follow a practice of praying the scriptures aloud and meditating on them. There are two ways that this form of prayer is practiced, one good and the other highly suspect, but I’ll talk of that later.

Even with the Word of God we need to hear His voice to gain true wisdom and understanding. If we study the Bible apart from the Spirit, we can have knowledge of the Word, but not wisdom. Wisdom can only come from having a relationship with the living God. No rhema, no wisdom.

In a letter to one of his closest friends, Francis Schaeffer discussed the “moment by moment” reality of God and how it applied to their faith and mission. “I am not thinking of this in some ‘mystical’ area where God becomes an abstraction, but in the strenuously practical areas of history in which we walk. If we would only allow the Agent of the Trinity, the Holy Spirit, to lead each individual instead of living in the areas of rules which are man-made and quite apart from the absolutes laid down in Scripture. If only we would be willing to have Christ be the true Head, and be willing for the exotic leadership of the Holy Spirit in our individual and corporate lives – rather than stagnifying the Holy Spirit’s leadership of yesterday, as seen in the lives of other men who lived in different historic circumstances, when the infinite eye of God would see today’s history as requiring a slightly different or radically different approach; or even stagnifying how the Holy Spirit’s leading of us today be what it was a year ago, when our historic circumstance is always in a flux?”

Here, according to Schaeffer, to claim that God has no need or desire to guide us in our present day is to “stagnify” the Holy Spirit. It renders His power ineffective, and if it were true, would make me wonder if His love for me were secondary.
So what am I saying?
First, God still communicates directly to people. There are examples of this throughout the Bible, Christian history, and our present day.
Second, our belief impacts our ability to hear God.
Third, as the Word says in Jeremiah 29:13, that if we pursue God with our whole heart, He will be found.