Unpacking the Feeding of the 5,000

...and I managed to do it in 27 minutes! Don't just sit there, check it out yourself!

Hard Times

This week I'm preaching one more time at Chapel Hill Bible Church. Last time they invited me to preach it was Labor Day weekend--which just happens to be one of the biggest travel weekends of the year. Which is what you do with a guy you've never heard speak before.

So here I am, a non-holiday weekend. I'm moving up in the world!

At any rate, I've been given free reign to speak on whatever I want. So I'm speaking out of the passage that I've probably taught out of more than any other passage over the past 15 years--Mark 6:30-44, commonly referred to as "The Feeding of the 5,000."

If you're not that familiar with the story, check it out real quick and then come back

Like I said, I've taught on this Scripture more than any other--at least a two dozen times. But this time around, God's kicking me in the butt with this summary of the point of the story:

Jesus:

Leads his disciples into a situation that they would rather not be in

Rejects their perfectly reasonable plan to manage the situation

Issues a command that they cannot possibly fulfill

In order that they might have to depend on him

And in so doing they experience the super-abundance of his grace, power, and blessing.

And so the question is: could God be doing the same thing in your hard times right now?

The Place Where Angry Atheists and Christians (Wrongly) Agree

So I want to note a strange place of intersection and agreement in our American culture between angry atheists and many Christians.

Angry atheists and many Christians have one thing in common: they both mistakenly believe that if there’s a God, we shouldn’t have to deal with opposition or calamity.

And Christians will go even further than the angry atheists and add: especially if I’m doing what I know or think God wants me to be doing. “I’m obeying God, doing what is right or good—why is this happening to me?” or "Why isn't God doing his part?" are frequent ruminations amongst those of us who call ourselves Christians.

This is an odd thing if we step back and look at. Christians follow Jesus who’s whole life was marked by 2 things: obeying God and by opposition from start to finish.

Christians sometimes mistakenly think that if we’re doing something God wants us to be doing that God OWES US “smooth” that we DESERVE smooth.

But the good news is that God doesn’t operate with a ledger. This isn't a math equation and nothing in the Christian life is about getting what we deserve. If we were keeping score or count, all of us would lose miserably.

Following God is about a life of mysterious grace, not a life of keeping count of what we imagine or think we’re owed.

And we see that most remarkably in the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ himself. And in him, we see the true promise: not that we bypass opposition, but that opposition emphatically does not have the last word on us.

In Christ, God has the last word on us, not our opposition--not even death which is biblical shorthand for everything that's set against us.

Prior to Christ, death was the one great last opponent that no one escaped from. But now in Christ, there's victory over all our opposition--including our own conflicted selves, the world, the flesh, the devil...and most especially, from the power of death.

Now if only angry atheists and those of us who call ourselves Christians could come to the place of living into that reality--that would be something worth talking about.

Overcoming Opposition Pt. 1: The Pre-Game Coin-Toss and Why Opposition Matters

Over the weekend I was given the opportunity to preach out of Nehemiah chapter four with the topic "overcoming opposition." First, we needed to carve out what we meant by "opposition" since next week they were going to tackle "overcoming conflict."

So here's my arm-chair definition for you: opposition is conflict calcified. It is to be in a situation where someone or something is implacably set against you that will not be negotiated with without a winner and a loser.

When there's conflict, you can often work it out. There's room for dialogue in a conflict, maybe even end up with a win-win. But not so in an oppositional situation.

I have a deep love, as I professed last week, for football in all its various forms. And when two teams go out for the coin toss, they aren't meeting to negotiate a peace treaty. There's no settlement being offered. They are opponents. One will win and one will lose.

Opposition is conflict, calcified.

This makes the opposition conversation a bit more difficult because not everyone has faced true opposition. All of us have had conflict, but not all of us have experienced genuine opposition.

But here's why this matters for us and why it's important for us to engage with this topic: opposition is a crucible, it is a deeply visceral experience. What opposition does to us emotionally, psychologically, spiritually and physically is extreme.

For many of us an experience of opposition will be one of the most defining moments or seasons of our lives. It will be a fork in the road, where the trajectory will be radically altered for good or for ill.

For some of you, that's already happened. You look back and you can identify an incident or a season of opposition that was a turning point in your life--again, either for good or for ill.

So here's the deal: if the God of the Bible and the work and the message of Jesus Christ do not matter here, then they do not matter at all. Opposition matters. And how we deal with it matters. And so if God matters at all, he must matter here or else we should just pack this whole thing up and go home.

The good news is that God has much to say and much to do with how we deal with and address opposition, as we'll see as we look at Nehemiah chapter four.

A Wedding Homily Part 4: The Good News of Demonstrating, Not Generating

[This is the fourth part (hence the title) of a series of posts from a wedding homily I did this past weekend. If you missed the first three, you might just need to catch up a bit before diving in here.]

And the good news is that this isn’t up to you to do: Jesus Christ in you and he has already done it.

When we were God’s enemies, when we had turned away from him and as we continually turn away from him, again and again and again, God who is rich in mercy, graciously and compassionately and continuously turns towards us, runs toward us

He does not turn away from us in anger or harden his heart toward us. He turned and still turns towards us, he offers us not just a chance to make it up to him but he gives himself up for us. He dies! Even though WE are the ones in the wrong!

Here’s what God does: he turns towards us perfectly in Jesus Christ. And then he invites us to abide in him and to allow him to abide in us. And then he says let me lead you into a life of turning towards the needs and people around you—including your spouse!—because that is what I have already done.

So when you are in the midst of conflicts, hardships, difficulties—when one of you hurts the other, when you sin against one another

Remember that Jesus Christ has already absorbed that sin. He has already forgiven it—yours and theirs. He has already taken on all of the ways that you’re both going to sin against one another—it is already covered and paid for and done in Christ.

Here’s the good news, Eric and Cristina: I’m calling you to turn toward each other and not away from one another, but the bottom line is that Jesus has already done this AND he has taken up residence inside of you

And so your job is not to GENERATE this turning toward but simply to DEMONSTRATE this turning toward

You don’t have to drum up turning towards one another, but you do have to abide in Christ, look to him, allow HIS story and his energy, his Spirit to shape and re-shape how you’re thinking about your story

And allow the fact that he is already turned toward both of you to drive and allow you to turn towards the other.

You don’t have to generate turning toward the other, you simply have to demonstrate—because Christ in you has already done it. It is already reality, the most real thing imaginable.

A Wedding Homily Part 3: S/he Just Shouldn't Be That Into You and Making the Right Turn

[Note: this is the third in a scintillating series from a wedding homily I delivered this past weekend. If you've missed the previous posts, you might not be ready to be married.]

Let me invite you and charge you if I might be so bold to do two things, in this order. I believe that if build on these two things in your marriage in this order, it will set you on the right trajectory as you share in your married life together.

The first is Jesus’ word to us in this passage: that you abide in Christ. I want to challenge and remind you that for both of you, you come into this marriage with a prior commitment and a greater lover: Jesus Christ himself.

And sometimes you’re going to have to remind each other of that as various things attempt pull you away from your first love

The siren call of career and work, kids, even one another and even service to others will attempt to call you away from abiding in Christ and towards trusting and attempting to find life in other things.

It can be a tricky thing, especially initially, to tell the love of your life that they’re just not supposed to be that into you. But that’s your first job towards one another—to point one another to Christ.

So the Scripture you’ve chosen and had read over you this afternoon is your first call: abide in Christ, turn toward him, rest in him,

The second thing I want to charge you to do after you’ve made abiding in Christ your priority is this—there’s going to be times when you have conflict, get frustrated with each other, drive each other more than just a little crazy.

And while here and now we smile and laugh and everyone here who’s married can identify with a rueful smile

The honest truth is that conflict is where the true battles are fought for the quality, character, intimacy and direction of your marriage. How we handle conflict is what makes or breaks our marriage relationship

And I want to call you, and charge you with this: in the midst of difficulty and hardship, as long as you both shall live, turn toward each other, not away from each other. Turn towards each other, not away from each other

In those hard moments, those conflicts where you can’t see how you can work around it or manage it, when the other person appears to you at that moment to be the most obstinate, wrong-headed person you have ever met in your entire life and you just honestly can’t stand them

You have a choice to make: will I harden my heart toward this man, this woman, will I shut down, check out, give up on him or her, roll my eyes and just quit?

Or will I turn toward him, turn towards her? Will I fight to keep my heart soft? Will I turn toward and not away?

A Wedding Homily Part 2: The Cure for Fruit-Constipation

[This is part two in a series of posts from a wedding homily I gave over the weekend. If you missed part 1, you missed the set-up! Scroll down a bit and check that out first.]

We’re here to worship Jesus, we’re celebrating the two of you. It’s a subtle but important distinction.

This reality is a great gift to each of you individually and to your marriage. We worship Jesus because your life together and your marriage is too great a thing to be built on the fickleness and arbitrary-ness of human love.

Your marriage is too profound, too wonderful a thing to be left to your own devices to figure out.

And so you’ve chosen a great passage for today’s ceremony—John 15 where Jesus invites us: “abide in me and let me abide in you!” And as we do so, there’s a tremendous promise: if you abide in me, you’ll bear much fruit—fruit that will last.

In the Scriptures, love is not primarily about our emotions and it’s not even primarily about our decisions, even though both emotions and decisions are required as a part of it

In the Scriptures, love is a fruit of the Spirit, it is the work of God. And it happens not as we try harder but as we abide in Christ

Branches do not have to TRY to bear fruit because fruit-bearing is very simple: a branch that stays attached the vine bears fruit. If it doesn’t stay attached to the vine, it withers and dies. If you find in your life that you are fruit-constipated, perhaps it is because you are abiding-deficient.

The good news about marriage is that it is a gift!

And part of that gift is that marriage becomes one of the primary ways that God will shape both of your characters for the rest of your lives—marriage is one venue that the Lord uses to teach us to abide in him and trust in him to shape our souls

Sometimes that will be a welcome shaping, sometimes it will be a little less welcome! And sometimes, honestly, it will feel literally like death—because it is death.

There are things about each of you that needs to die, that need to be pruned as it talks about in John 15—the Father is a good gardener, he prunes us so that we’ll bear more fruit. He often uses people to do that--our spouses most of all.

And putting things to death, while it's a good thing, can be extremely, extremely painful.

A Wedding Homily Part 1: Evil Professors, The Impossible Promises, and The Reason We're Here

[This past weekend I had the privilege of preaching my first wedding homily at two former students' wedding, Eric and Cristina (now!) Stam. Below is the first in a series.]

It was really just a handful of weeks ago that the two of you had a different kind of celebration—you graduated from Carolina! Go Heels!

And if you’re like me when I was at Carolina, there was probably at least one class where you experienced first day, syllabus shock—it’s like sticker shock, only slightly more personal and invasive.

Some professors enjoy making sport of undergrads by trying to scare them out of their classes with a syllabus that you look at and instantaneously break out into a cold sweat.

You look at it and your gut reaction is this visceral cry:

“This is impossible! The only way to get this amount of work done would be to drop all friends, drop all my other classes, quit all other activities, give up on eating and sleeping and going to the bathroom, hook up a permanent caffeine drip on my arm and work this class 24/7 for the entire semester!!”

And if you’re at all like me, there was probably at least one class where the professors evil intentions worked and you dropped the class at the earliest possible moment because he had scared you away with his impossible, impossible syllabus.

Well, here’s the deal, in about five minutes you guys are about to subscribe to a syllabus that’s way more impossible and intimidating than any syllabus you were handed in college.

See, we’ve all gathered here to watch and celebrate you two making promises to each other that are outrageous.

And if we’re going to be perfectly honest, they are promises that are beyond your ability to keep.

If it’s just up to the two of you, no matter how warm and fuzzy your love looks now and no matter how beautiful this day is, the promises that you’re about to make are utterly absurd.

That's why it's critical for us to understand what we're doing here. This is a worship service.

And it can get confusing because there’s so much about you two in the midst of all of this, it can start to feel like we’re worshiping you or worshiping the potential of human love or something equally as sentimental and vacuous and empty as that.

But the reality is far different and it’s far better news. We’re not worshiping you two, nor are we worshiping the potential of human love.

We’re here to worship Jesus, we’re celebrating the two of you. It’s a subtle but important distinction.

Saving the Whales, Leading a Freaking Bible Study, Finding Time for What Matters

So for the past six or seven weeks on campus, each large group meeting we've been casting vision for what we think a Christ-Centered Community looks like.

We've talked about a community of grace and forgiveness, a community of faith, a community of hope, and a community of love. And last week, after four weeks of positive vision, we talked about what we don't want to be.

And last week I got a chance to speak into a sickness at UNC: the sickness of busy-ness. Student life at UNC presses students to do so much. As an InterVarsity community, we long to go against that grain. We are not going to be too busy for significant relationships.

The problem is that my students got to UNC by being over-achieving, stressed-out high schoolers. Then they come to UNC. And of course, it doesn't get any better because now they're surrounded by 17,000 other over-achieving, stressed-out people.

One startling realization for many freshmen: if you skim the top 12% off of every high school and put them in the same context, not everyone's going to be in the top 12% any more.

This can either bless them with the realization of their limits, or it can drive them to an even greater degree of frenetic activity. Alas, many choose the latter path: pre-med/pharmacy/nursing/business/law, must-have a 3.9 GPA, must save some whales, tutor some kids, keep some sort of social life....and for the Christian kids, add on leading a freaking Bible study to top it all off.

This, of course, is simply a mirror-reflection of our frenetic culture. My students just have more free-time to cram more stuff into their lives because they're not working in one place from 8-6.

But here's the deal: nobody had more significant work to do than Jesus. Nobody. And he made the time and space for significant relationships.

So if the volunteering/Bible study leading/major path/work habits of your life mean that you do not have time for significant relationships, then it is almost guaranteed that you are not doing what God would have you to do. You are over-committed and out of step with the Spirit. If Jesus had time given his responsibilities and the nature of his calling, so must we.

That's not just a word for my students, is it? It's been ringing my own ears for most of the past week...

The Blankie, The Invitation, and Dropping Cumbersome Nets

One of the things about having little kids: when you're leaving to go somewhere, they always want to take their most-recently-used stuff with them. The blankie, the matchbox car, the Thomas trains, the recently strung together bead necklace...whatever.

This weekend, I traveled with 115 students to New Student Retreat. It was awesome. And as I spoke out of an old favorite passage, I was reminded of the difficulty of leaving stuff behind.

"Come follow me," Jesus said, "and I will teach you to fish for people."

This is how Jesus starts his relationship with four guys who will end up being his go-to church-starter, Bible-writing guys. An odd invitation, if you think about it--not why most of us Jesus-followers decided to follow him.

"And immediately they dropped their nets and followed him." A crazy, over-the-top response.

The disciples leave everything that they've known, their security blanket, their family business, all of it. If it would have been me, I would have tried to bring the nets with me. It's what I've always known, it's what's expected of me by my family, and it could be something to fall back on should this whole Jesus thing not work out.

But they have to leave the nets. Jesus is going to lead them through deserts and forests and cities and those nets would have only tripped them up. They have to leave the nets, there is nothing left in that for them.

Most of us who are Christians follow Jesus with one foot in another door of some sort. Most of us are walking around, trying to follow Jesus, with our hands full of another option, a personal back door, something that we're not willing to let go of, forget about, put aside in order to follow fully.

And it shows.

You know what happens if those guys don't drop their nets and follow Jesus? Absolutely nothing. Jesus still starts his church. They live their lives in relative ease and die anonymous fishermen. Instead, I'm blogging about them 2,000 years later.

There's no limit to what God can do with someone who is willing to drop their nets and follow him. I'm freshly convicted and emboldened coming off the weekend to do just that.

Now if only we can get the kids to buy-in, it'll make going places a whole lot simpler...

F.A. Part 2: Freedom from Comparison and Competition

When I was on staff with IV at VCU, there was a guy on staff at another school in Eastern Virginia who was ridiculously gifted: Kevin. Kevin went to a school where there was no IV chapter. Within four years, it had grown to like 300.

We'd meet as a staff team every couple of months. And sometimes it was hard for me to get overly-excited about what God was doing through Kevin. I felt jealous, threatened, insecure.

And eventually, God had to hold up the mirror and press me: either I could celebrate what God was doing through Kevin or I could kick against the goads and live in jealousy and insecurity. The choice was mine, but the invitation was to repent. One choice would bless me, the other would lead to bitterness and smallness of heart.

Eventually, I repented, but it still wasn't always easy to celebrate what God was doing through him...even when I clearly saw God doing good stuff through me as well.

Ladies and gentlemen, we have a couple problems.

Problem number one is that most of us are functional atheists. That is, we live most of our lives as if there were no God, as if we had no good Father who watches over us and provides for us and who loves us.

Problem number two is that our identity then becomes driven by what we can do or produce. Our culture is a performance-based culture. So our identity becomes driven by how well we perform.

And the invitation in Christ is to be free of comparison and competition. Because comparison and competition is always a lose-lose deal. Either we compare and come out looking better, which leads to pride. Or we compare and come out looking worse, which leads to envy and jealousy and self-contempt.

Neither of these gives us life. In the operating system of comparison and competition, every new person we meet is a potential threat to our very sense of self. That doesn't exactly set us up for a lifestyle of serving one another, humility, and genuine love and trust towards one another.

In Christ, we are invited to a life that lives larger than the lose-lose operating system of comparison and competition. In Christ, I am deeply loved by my Father, apart from my performance.

And that frees me up to celebrate and be glad in others as well as to be appropriately glad in the works of my own hands done in cooperation with God's Spirit. There will always be people better than me at everything. My identity isn't wrapped up in having to be better than everyone else. I can just be me. That'd be a novel way to live.

Can you imagine how much more freedom we'd experience if we didn't live a life fraught with comparison and competition and all the ill-fruits that bears?

Freedom from Functional Atheism

Just got home tonight from our Thursday night large group. I was the speaker understudy for a sick co-worker (get better soon, Jfarm!) and the topic was "Pitfalls of Christian Community." The basic idea: what are we NOT going to be about as an InterVarsity chapter?

I proposed that there was one core pitfall that all Christians wrestle from whence springs all the other pitfalls of Christian community: functional atheism.

A working definition of functional atheism: to proclaim on a Sunday morning (or Thursday night) that Jesus is Lord and that he is good and that he is intimately involved in the world and in all the details of our lives...and then to live the other days of the week as if none of that were true.

Us Christians do this all the time. We sing true and powerful songs about God's goodness and power. We nod our heads in agreement as we hear truth proclaimed that he loves us.

And then we walk out the door and live as if it were all up to us, as if there were no God and we have to do what we have to do to get by, to survive and advance, to scratch and claw our way through life.

We live our lives as functional atheists: professing one thing in a "religious" context and then living completely differently the other six days and 23 hours of our lives.

And tonight as we worked through the "nots" from 1 Corinthians 13 (love does not envy, does not boast, is not proud, is not rude, is not self-seeking, is not easily angered, keeps no record of wrongs) I was in essence trying to call us to put functional atheism behind us.

The Christian life is to be lived with Jesus as Lord. One of my hopes for my students when they graduate is that they'll understand something of what it means for the gospel to shape life in real-time, with real-life situations: angry at a co-worker, tempted to hit porn, an argument with your spouse, raising kids, coaching soccer, angling for a promotion.

Jesus is Lord over all those situations. Part of our work and the work of the Holy Spirit, is to help us to live into that reality in all aspects of our lives.

And if we did that--if we actually repented of our functional atheism and lived into the power of Jesus' Lordship in all aspects of our lives--it would radically and relentlessly and gloriously set us free.

Hoping for the Atari v. Hoping in the Someone

So it seems that we're stuck in a dilemma. On the one hand, we're hard-wired to hope. Every one of us had childhood hopes--to be a wide receiver for the Dallas Cowboys, to get the Atari for Christmas, to live in an r.v. when you grow up, to get a ferret one day, to have your parents stay together, whatever.

And yet we're also hard-wired to avoid pain. And all of us have disappointments, things that don't work out. Enough things don't work out, we start to try to shut down the hope mechanism inside of us. We wall off, become cynical.

Cynicism is a secondary response to the primary one of pain and disappointment and sadness.

And so we're trapped in a tension. We want to hope innately, but we also don't want to hope too much. It hurts to be so vulnerable.

It seems in the Scriptures that God says a couple things about hope. First, it's good to hope. And second, that our hopes are too precious a thing to be build on fragile circumstances.

God comes to us in Christ, and he invites us find our hope in him. Not in everything turning up roses. If the content of our hopes is in our circumstances, that structure will inevitably fail. It is not strong enough to carry the weight that we're putting on it.

So God says to us: "put your hope in me." This is not a means to the ends of everything turning up the way we want. This isn't bartering to get God to give us the stuff we really want. It's the end, in and of itself.

Our hope is not meant to be loaded up in a particular alignment of events. It's given to us to build on someone: God.

My dad is the kind of guy who just gets things done. As a kid, if the toilet was broken, my math homework was too hard or there was problems in the neighborhood--if dad was around, I knew everything would be okay.

Not that he knew how to deal with everything. And not that it was always a quick and easy fix. But if he didn't know, he'd find someone else to take care of it. When he was present, I knew that eventually all would get worked out.

That's what it means to hope in someone rather than something. That's the invitation God extends to us when it comes to something as precious as our hope.

I never did get that Atari.

Not Sure We Want Grace

One week from Thursday I'm giving our first large group talk: A Community of Forgiveness and Grace. I'm excited about the talk topic except for one thing: I'm not sure that we actually want grace.

Forgiveness is something that's easy for us to culturally get our minds around. We screw up, we need forgiveness.

Even if we don't think we're all that bad, the idea of a God who would forgive us if we hypothetically ever did anything wrong sounds very appealing. I read a quote somewhere recently, "Of course God will forgive me. That's his job."

And in our common usage, we tend to conflate forgiveness and grace. Grace, in our common discussion, is the disposition towards forgiveness.

But when Jesus offers us forgiveness and grace, he has a very different thing in mind. And we see that most clearly in the story of the woman caught in adultery in John 8.

For those who might be unfamiliar: a woman is caught in adultery by religious leaders. She's dragged before Jesus: the law says we are to stone such women (and the men, too, by the way--not sure where he is), what do you say? All in an attempt to trip Jesus up.

Jesus' famous response: whoever's without sin, go ahead and cast the first stone. They all walk way (oldest first, a fun detail included in the story). Jesus finally says, "neither do I condemn you, go and sin no more."

"Neither do I condemn you." That's forgiveness. We get that.

"Go and sin no more." That's grace. We don't get that. Because we think that grace means access to further forgiveness. Which it is. But it's more than that.

Grace is the gift of living life as we were made to live it. Grace is the gift of God to walk in right-ness, in right relationship with God, with other people, with the created order. Grace is the calling to "go and sin no more."

Grace is the invitation to live life with God as Lord over your life rather than the tyrants of sin and death. God would not be a generous God if he simply covered up our mistakes while still allowing us to remain enslaved under a cruel master.

So he came, died, overthrew all our former masters that we might actually live "under new management." No longer are we stuck with our own flesh, the fallen world around us, or the evil one. We can actually learn to live free. He gives us His Spirit to do so.

Grace is not inconsistent obedience. My theology prof said that one day and it's always stuck with me. Inconsistent obedience is how we commonly talk about grace, but that's wrong. Grace is the gift of freedom from the old self to live to the new life in the Spirit, in Christ that we were actually made to live.

So I'm thinking about how to speak the good news of that grace next week to a room full of old and new students. You can pray that the Spirit gives us all a deep love for BOTH "neither do I condemn you" as well as the "go and sin no more."

That is, a real love for forgiveness and grace as it is offered to us in the Scriptures

Freedom from Guilt and Shame for my 7-Eleven Employees

Sunday I'm preaching at Raleigh Chinese Christian Church--it's the English service, for those of you who are concerned that my Mandarin and Cantonese might be a bit rusty.

I'm re-working a talk that I've given twice before because the concepts continue to be fresh and needful for me: Freedom from Shame and Guilt.

I've posted on this each time that I've given this talk, but since blog readers turnover faster than the employees at your local 7-Eleven, I want to gather up some thoughts from previous posts and then share some fresh developments tomorrow.

The reason why a talk on shame and guilt matters is because all of us hear the voices. Those voices in our heads speak to us about our past mistakes (that's guilt) or our current deficits of ability or character (that's shame).

Guilt is feeling bad about something you've done. Shame is feeling bad about who you are.

Since we all hear voices, and we generally don't like what they tell us, we all have various strategies to deal with our voices:

1. Religious stuff--maybe if I get God to like me, it'll all be okay
2. Hedonism/Escapism--how many drinks or sexual experiences or highs or movies or hours of sporting events or hours of video games does it take to quiet the voices?
   
3. Moralism--never mind religion, I'll just try to be good enough to prove something to whoever that is that's talking to me about my shortcomings
4. Activism--if I save enough whales, I'll make up for what I did
   
5. Work-a-holism--if I make it through law school or dental school or med school or if I make partner or manager or vice-president or make enough money, then I'll prove myself

The problem, of course, as most of you realize by now if you stop long enough to think about it, is that none of this actually works. That's why most of us don't stop long enough to think about it. We feel stuck.

In fact, if it's up to us to figure out a way to quiet the voices, then we're dead. Nothing we can do will silence them.

The Christian story has a fresh invitation for us: it's not all about you. Jesus is Lord, not you. And that's good news because that means that it's not all on you to try to silence the voices of guilt and shame.

To live under the gracious umbrella of the Lordship of Christ is to be freed from the onerous and impossible task of trying to take make up for your past. If Jesus is Lord, then you no longer have the last word on you; Jesus does. If Jesus is Lord then he is Lord over all of you: present, past, and future.

If Jesus is Lord then your life is not your own and your future is not yours to worry about and your past is not yours, not even yours to regret. Let me say that again: if all of you is given over to Jesus, then your past is not yours any more, not even yours to regret. It is in Jesus to redeem, to heal, to mend, to fix, to make whole, to wash away. It is not up to you to fix it.

The solution to all our guilt and shame is not more work, but rather a cessation of work. Freedom is found in submission. Submission to the Lordship of Christ. That's the good news of the Christian story. That's the invitation that all of us are called to respond to.

Identity Part 3: Fighting for Your Identity

So here's what I challenged my students to do this week, and I'll invite you in on this as well.

Take a note card or a journal with you for the next 2-3 days, maybe longer if you need it. Begin to really listen to the voices in your head and write them down. What are the doubts or fears or judgments or anxieties or burdens that they speak to you? Jot all of them down over the course of the next several days. Begin to be in tune to the stuff that goes on just beneath the surface that actually drives more of your life than you currently are aware of. Bringing that stuff to the light is the first step towards being able to live truly freely.

After a couple of days of capturing these voices on paper, step back and evaluate them. What do these voices tell you about what it takes for you to be valuable or successful? What are the places of particular anxiety or pride or stress? Are there some repeated patterns? What are the names that you've given to yourself? Where do those names come from?

Looking at my voices, it's not that my identity is in one particular place, it's that it's clearly based in how I perform, mostly in relation to people. That's where I'm tempted to draw my identity from. So your voices might not point you to the specific place where you're currently drawing your identity from, but they will reveal to you perhaps the bigger pattern that needs to be addressed.

After several days of capturing these voices in a journal or on a notecard, and once you've done some initial evaluation of what that might mean, it's time to look at Scripture. The Greek word for "repentance" in the NT means literally "to change your mind." This is what needs to happen. The Lord needs to change your mind about who you are and what voices get to define you.

Read Romans 1-8 and all of Galatians, and make a new list: write down all of the names and titles that God gives to his people. What does the Scripture say about who you are, now that you are in Christ? These are your new names, your real new names, that have been offered to you free of charge in your union with Christ. This is your identity. All you have to do is live into that list, and ask the Lord to help you let go of your current list. To put off the old self and put on this new self, as Paul often puts it.

I'm praying for my students now as several of them have told me that they're doing this exercise this week. Praying that our identity found in Christ might free them (and me) to live life the way that we all intuitively long for but so few of us actually find.

Identity, Part 2: Jesus

Enter Jesus.

At first what I want Jesus to do is to plug into this whole system and make me better by helping me to perform better. But Jesus refuses to be a part of this. Jesus refuses to participate in this little economy that I've set up, comprised as it is of lies, half-truths, and occasional accuracies.

Instead, Jesus comes through my life and kicks over the tables of these voices. None of this is life. All of it is death. For me to find my identity in my performance will only lead to exhaustion, never peace; anxiety, never joy.

So Jesus comes in with a glorious offer: exchange rooting my identity in my performance for a new rooted-ness. I can live with my identity wrapped up in his life, in his mercy and grace and love. No more must I live under the tyranny of my own ability or in-ability to perform.

Jesus offers to exchange my voices of anxiety for his voice of freedom and love. A new name, that's what he offers me. It's the final redemption of my soul that I'd find my new name in him rather than exhaust myself with attempts at self-re-naming.

With my life-roots in Christ, my identity no longer depends on me doing everything right. I am no longer getting queasy on the roller-coaster of my performance. Who I am is no longer dependent on me. It's fully dependent on Christ, who has already lived the perfect life that I could never live. The grade on me doesn't shift from day to day.

I am in Christ. I am in love, freedom, peace, joy, hope. That's who I am. It is finished.

What's Identity?

[Over the next couple of days I'll be posting some from my Sunday morning talk at chapter retreat wrapping up the theme of "Identity in Christ."]

For some of you this weekend you've been trying to get a handle on what exactly we mean by finding our identity in Christ. It can seem a little ethereal. But it's so crucial and what I want to do this morning is equip you to fight for your identity in Christ as we head home.

Perhaps one way to get at this whole issue of finding our identity in Christ is to understand what other things vie for our identity. And the way that I want to invite you to do this is by listening to the voices in your head.

What do the voices in your head tell you about what makes you valuable or worthwhile? What do they say about who you have to be to be successful or acceptable?

Here's a summary snapshot of what the voices in my head say to me:

-Don't screw this up.
-Don't screw this up AGAIN!
-That person thinks that you're annoying/stupid/arrogant/just doesn't like you
-I can't believe that you just said/did that.
-I can't believe you just said/did that AGAIN!
-You're an idiot
-You're not ________ enough (insert various adjectives here: smart, cool, intelligent, gifted, etc)
-You'll never be good at _____________

Now these might not exactly be what the voices in your head tell you, but my guess is that you at least recognize the tone of these voices.

So what these voices are telling me is that my identity is wrapped up entirely in my performance. I have to perform absolutely perfectly in every situation in order to live up to the demands of my internal bar. The Scriptures talk about "the law" and how it doesn't bring life. My law isn't a religious law, but it's just as destructive. I must perform perfectly at all times in order to be secure in who I am.

So what that means is that all day, every day, all of who I am is on the line. Every social encounter, every meeting with a student, every blog post must be near-perfect or else I'm a failure. And of course, sometimes I actually do meet these standards, and that leads to pride. And of course, often I fall dramatically short, and that leads to despair. But it's never done, it's never over. There's always more tests ahead.

That's life when your identity is stuck in how you perform. What's at stake here is everything about who you are as a person and where your security will come from. If it's coming from you and what you can do, which is the pretty typical sickness here at UNC, then you're stuck on the treadmill until you either burn out or die, whichever comes first.

Work, Rest, Control, Pigs

Friends of ours did this cool thing when they had a baby: they took pictures of their child each month with the same stuffed animal. That way you could see how much they'd grown each month.

Davis loved this pink pig. Sometimes when Davis was fussing, I would pick up his stuffed pink pig (other kids have teddy bears, Davis loved his pig) and I would animate it—voices, hand motions, break-dancing, whatever.

Davis, of course, was enthralled. His response was to reach out and grab the pink pig. Of course, once the pig was in his hands, the "life" that was in it was gone. It went back to being an ordinary stuffed pink pig. Not a bad thing, but not what had enthralled him with the pig to begin with, not what he was looking for. As soon as Davis had control of the pig, the very life that he had enjoyed about it was gone.

The same thing is true for us when it comes to our work and the bigger purposes behind our lives. The only way for our lives to have real meaning, to have real life, is for Someone Else to be in control of them. Our control is an illusion. It is something to be released and repented of again and again, any time it rears its' ugly head.

Rest re-aligns our souls with the fundamental realities of the universe. It cuts against the lie spoken to our first parents that "we might be like God." Rest reminds us that there is only one God. And we are not Him.

What Work Doesn't Do

Last week I started to post a series on work, then got distracted by the State Fair. I want to pick that back up again because the thoughts keep rolling around in my head, and that's what this blog thing is for!

Work: to co-operate with God in using our gifts and abilities to tend to the world he has given us in order to provide for our own needs, bless those around us, and bring forth beauty and life to the glory of God the Creator.

Work can only bless us under the under the umbrella and in its proper place of this co-operative relationship with God in order to point back to the power and goodness of him.

And then of course, sin enters the picture. Sin is broken relationship, first with God, then with one another, and of course with the rest of the created order. So instead of work being a joyful derivative good, a joyful good that we experience under the umbrella of a bigger and better good of a relationship with God, all of the sudden we’ve got thorns and toil and sweat and ultimately death.

Our relationship with work is way more complicated because our relationship with God is broken and as a consequence all of our relationships are messed up, including how we relate to the tasks that we’ve been given to do.

And so we’re confused. We don’t understand that work is good but it’s a derivative good.

And what happens with our broken relationship with work is that for many of us, myself included here, work becomes a place where we find our identity. It becomes our place where we try to find life. I gave you a definition of what work IS supposed to be earlier, here’s what work or your GPA or your major or your future career is NOT intended to do.

Your work/GPA/major/career is NOT intended to:

give you ultimate life

give you meaning

give you purpose

give you your identity

become your name

be the thing that defines you

be the thing that validates your existence or makes you a worthwhile human being.

But our world doesn’t know any better, and many of us get so wrapped up in our work or GPA’s or resumes or achievement . And so we become obsessed with doing as the thing that validates us, makes us important or significant in the world.

And here at UNC, we’ve even invented our own name for all of this: The Carolina way

Basically “the Carolina way” is a way of nicely saying that your significance as a human being is primarily wrapped up in how much you do: “The Carolina Way” runs on and is fueled by anxiety and grasping and ambition and fear, but the Scriptures say that life lived in step with God is fueled by faith, hope, and love.

Because here’s the deal: ultimately you cannot serve both Jesus and the Carolina Way.If you refuse to take up your cross and follow Jesus into both faithful work and faithful rest, the Carolina Way will gladly take your life and give you nothing in exchange and to draw from a warning from Jesus: you just might gain the whole world and forfeit your soul.