I promised to complete the chain I started building in a recent Dispatch called “To Trust or Not to Trust.” In it I argued we often don’t succeed at abiding in Christ because we don’t really trust him. Trust must come before repentance and obedience, I said, because those things are scary and hard. I left off by suggesting that there is something even more important that must come before trust.
That thing is simple (though by no means simplistic): We don’t obey because we don’t trust God; we don’t trust him because … we don’t know him.
To most Christians this sounds absurd. I know the feeling. If you’ll go with me, I hope to build a foundation under this idea that can bring us closer to the Truth that sets us free.
When I consider the path my life has taken, I see that through all the twists and turns, I’ve been pursuing two fundamental states of being: freedom and power. I realize this could describe what most people are looking for, though I wonder how many would put it in those terms.
But, as God promised, his law is written in my heart, so I’ve instinctively known that these things could only be found in spirit and truth, not in the many counterfeits the world offers. I’ve looked, often in unorthodox places, for authentic spiritual freedom and the kind of power the Bible promises to those who believe. I’ve distrusted other apparent sources like wealth or status. That doesn’t make me special or better than anyone else; just someone under a compulsion to live differently. I suspect that describes many of you as well.
That is a much more difficult path, of course. It is at the heart of what Jesus meant when he said he did not come to bring peace to the earth, but the fire of conflict, or when the Apostle Peter urged us to live as “foreigners” in this world. But the difficulty isn’t just in being at odds with people or cultural norms.
The pursuit of authentic freedom and power can be described even more succinctly as a hunger and quest for Truth — the irreducible knowledge of God and my place in his kingdom. After all, Jesus said it is truth that sets us free.
Perhaps the hardest part of seeking truth is learning to recognize and confront things which are not true. And so, I come again to a conclusion that gives me no pleasure, but which is a kind of checkpoint I feel I must pass if I’m to go on. (Many will stop reading after the next paragraph. I urge you to keep going.)
Much of what the modern institutional church teaches and embodies in the world falls far short of the truth we are looking for. In fact, it often behaves like one of the counterfeits that divert us from the truth. This may even be among the most powerful of those counterfeits, being wrapped in so much aggressively pious theological certainty.
The institutional church (which is distinct from the body of Christ assembled by the Holy Spirit) mostly amasses power for itself, by blocking individual freedom and power. It siphons wealth, throttles uncomfortable inquiry and discovery, rewards conformity and punishes (or at least marginalizes) all who challenge cherished orthodoxy. It’s tools and methods of conducting business are often indistinguishable from the surrounding, non-believing society.
The church confuses inward-facing busy-ness for “God’s work” in the world and substitutes church membership and involvement for the empowerment of truly abiding in Christ. Above all, it has turned the sublime simplicity of God’s gospel of peace into an infinitely complicated theological mess. (I consider these things to be self-evident to anyone who takes an honest look.)
And yet we remain enthralled by it. This reminds me of the people lying beside the pool of Bethesda in the story in John 5. They were there hoping to be touched by an elusive power that could make them well.
But surely, like the man Jesus healed who had been there for many years, they were disappointed. The most common outcome was an undeniable lack of power in the water — and yet they couldn’t take their eyes off of it. They remained crippled but didn’t dare leave the side of the pool in case today might be the day they finally got it right and received what they hoped for.
When Jesus asked, “Do you want to be healed?” the man replied in anguish that he had never been able to meet all the rules and requirements of the pool.
That’s not what the Master asked, but he ignored that answer entirely. He placed the matter squarely where it belonged — in the heart and mind of the crippled man. Healing had always been available, but the choice was his. That was the day when Jesus commanded him to exercise the freedom and power to take it.
“Stand up, pick up your mat, and walk!”
Now, let’s stop right here and be clear: This is not the “name-it-and-claim-it” theology that’s popular on TV. The point is not to see ourselves as the source of freedom and power, but to overcome the counterfeit barriers keeping us from truly knowing the One who is the source of all things.
The key to that is in finding the courage to admit that most Christians are plagued by a kind of weird failure — always seeking but rarely finding — for one stunning reason: We don’t know the One we seek. Despite untold millions of sermons, songs, homilies, devotionals, Bible studies, books and podcasts, we are no nearer to truly grasping who God is. We know a lot about how to “church,” but that is not the same thing. Not knowing him, we are hopelessly clueless who we are.
Not knowing him and not knowing ourselves, we have no idea what to make of statements like this:
“The kingdom of heaven is within you.”
Be still and think about that for a moment and you’ll know it’s true.
I propose that the pathway out of this ignorance — and something that has been purposely obscured by Satan’s deception — lies in what Jesus called the first and greatest commandment. He pointed to it as the foundation of everything, and yet very few of us even remember it, much less understand it.
“The first of all the commandments is this: ‘Hear, O Israel! The Lord our God, the Lord is one.” (Mark 12:29)(NKJV)
He was quoting Moses in Deuteronomy 6 who followed that with “Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your strength.”
That’s the part we remember. It tells us what we must do: Love God. But we skip over the first part that reveals who he is. That’s the whole basis for the second part — the answer to why we should love him. How can we love him without knowing this fundamental fact: “The Lord our God, the Lord is one.”
It’s why Moses said, “Listen up! Pay attention to this!” and why Jesus called it the first and most important of the commandments.
The Lord our God is everything. He’s all there is. It’s not enough to say he is the only God. He is the only anything. Nothing exists apart from him. Ever. If you were to contemplate one fact for the rest of your life, this should be it. If the Christian life is a cipher we have spent our lives trying to solve, then this is surely the key that reveals the hidden message.
God is all there is. The endless multitude of things in this world that we fear, desire, hate, chase after and fight over — all of it — is an illusion of apparent separation that does not exist in itself apart from our belief that it does. All things arise in him and through him — including us.
“In him we live and move and have our being.” (Acts 17:28) The Apostle Paul wasn’t just quoting poetry when he said this to Greeks philosophers in Athens. He was revealing deep truth. “He is not far from any one of us,” he told them.
All things are really only one thing. The kingdom of heaven is within you because it is you and you are it. To suppose anything else ignores the commandment, “Hear, O Isreal, the Lord our God, the Lord is one.” It repeats the original sin of believing something else to be true, of dividing ourselves from God and assuming we are our own source of freedom and power through the knowledge of good and evil.
When Jesus said, “The Father and I are one” he was not describing a unique relationship that only he shared with the Father. He was speaking as “the firstborn of many brothers and sisters” (Romans 8:29) to remind us that oneness with the Father is inescapable, always and for everyone. He was foreshadowing what we must all realize and learn to say of ourselves, not because we enter some special category of human, but because it can be no other way.
Jesus told Martha, “You are worried and upset about many things, but few things are needed — or indeed only one” (Luke 10:41-42). God himself is that one thing — literally One.
Here’s how knowing this about God completes the chain and enables us to trust and then obey him.
Knowing God restores our hope.
It provides the confidence to realize that you already are what you seek. You already possess freedom and power because, being one with the Father, these are not possessions at all but properties of your very being. Sin — the choice to believe something else — has hidden this from you and caused you to misuse your native freedom and power in ways that are contrary to the truth. Behavior always follows belief. All evil is created when we deny oneness and believe the world to be an impersonal object we must control in order to survive.
Jesus came to convince us to stop believing that and to restore our awareness of oneness with the Father, by his grace and our faith; to reclaim our place as free and empowered children of God, here and now. All of this is ours when we simply believe. That’s it. Jesus couldn’t have made this more plain in what he taught.
This kind of belief is exceedingly rare, however. Preventing it is the highest strategic aim of all of Satan’s deceptions. A single awakened, restored child of God is more threatening to his “kingdom” than millions of sleepwalking church members.
How does all of this help us escape that weird failure I mentioned? The answer will reorder our most basic beliefs about what life is really about. If God is all there is, then where is he to be found? What is his kingdom really like? What is my place in it?