Can God Really Meet Your Emotional Needs?

 

 

If anything has become clear to me of late it is that all problems are emotional problems.   Whatever your moral, spiritual, relational or even sexual problem is, it’s an emotional problem.    What you feel or don’t’ feel makes decisions for you.

This is a new angle for me to look at things through, and I think this angle is so appealing to me because I’m so emotional myself.  I’m sometimes refer to myself as “emo”  because of it.   I’m sensitive, dramatic, and emotionally aware, and it is reflected in all aspects of my life.    In areas where emotional capacity is a strength – like relationships and pastoral ministry, I do well, but in areas where emotional capacity is a weakness, like stability or consistency, I do poorly.

My emotional needs seem to get ahead of me even when I don’t want them to. And this has led me to ask – how do I get a grip?  I’ve become convinced that having emotional sensitivity and awareness is superior to lacking it, so I don’t want to just stuff it, but then if I don’t stuff it, how do I manage my life?

I think I’m part of a generation of boys brought up under the feminist regime, where women were told to be tougher and men were told to be more sensitive.   It’s reflected in my marriage,  my wife is emotionally tough, and I’m “in touch with my feelings.”  It’s a bit of a strange inverted recipe, which leaves most women wondering “where did all of the real men go?”  (right ladies?)  Over the years I’ve done a lot to develop my manly capacities, but fundamentally, I’ve still got these deeply emotional thing, which I’m not sure how to handle.

This drives me to God.  I remember when I was in college under the radical campus ministry all answers came back to “you have an idol, God is the answer.”   When you thought a girl was cute, it was because you had this idolatry problem.  If you couldn’t wake up and do your quiet time it was your idolatry, etc.  The notion was that God was the answer to all of your needs.   It sounds like it must be true because it’s really spiritual, right?

The only problem is that before the fall God only saw one thing that was not good and that was that the man was alone.  God Himself recognized that a  finite created being was going to need like-fellowship so He created the woman.  And it should come as no surprise that this new creature was wired really well well for relationships and connection.  She was something that would keep man from “being alone”

Well, unfortunately, since the fall, some things have been broken.  Men and women, separated from God try to get from each other what only God is able to give.  This does not make the converse true, however – that anything you seek from a human being is somehow unspiritual.  The fact is that you need healthy human relationships in your life from the day you are born.  You cannot be an island.   Trust me,  I have a friend who has lived that way, and he desperately wants out.   You can’t be spiritual enough not to need other people.  Even Jesus, craved human beings to be with him in his times of deepest need.

So all of your answers in that sense are not supposed to come from above.  They are supposed to come from above and around.  Sure you may have to rely on only God alone in the hardest moments of your life , or if you get locked away by the Chinese government, but that’s not any different than the solid meals you are also being denied while in the brig.  You aren’t wired to live without it.

You, were, however wired to live without all of the other relationship substitutes which you may be using, including TV, internet, novels and the like.  Strip those things away, and watch your circle of friends dramatically expand.  You will crave and seek out relationships because of the emptiness you feel without these false relationship placebos.

There is something very fundamental that you can only get from God, however, and you have to learn how to get it from Him, and it’s not that easy or natural.   You must first learn to experience Him as a loving Father, then you must resist the flesh to actually abide in that love continually allow it to mine into deeper and deeper places n your identity.

The problem I encounter is that as I go deep in this journey, I just keep jumping out of the boat.  I progress in my relationship with God, and then some deep “emotional” craving of the flesh begins to feel starved and I jump out in order to feed it.   WHAT IS THAT AND HOW DO I STOP?   I get afraid sometimes that I won’t progress any higher in God because this my pattern.  My  emotional capacity takes me naturally and quickly to a certain place in God, but It also prevents me from getting any higher.  I want off the merry-go-round.

I have only recently come to see that part of the exit is having close human relationships, not just a close relationship with God.  And I don’t just mean ideologically close.  I mean emotionally close.  People that give you that emotional feeling that you are loved and life is worth living.   Having these kinds of relationships meets a deep emotional need that is very hard for a non-corporeal being to meet.

There is something else, however. The love of God, when I experience it, normally feels kind of like a nice hug.  It’s happy, it’s warm and it’s comforting.  The craving of the human heart is something much deeper than this encounter, however.  It’s a longing for an impossibly deep oneness and intimacy.

This is why, God showed me recently, he equates idolatry and adultery.  It is not simply a metaphor.  God is not likening adultery to idolatry.  He is not comparing false worship to harlotry.  He is saying that they are of the same essence.   Adultery happens because you have a deep emotional craving that you want met by someone else.  It’s a love for the illicit rather than the good.  It is of the very same essence as worshipping false gods.  Which may be how all of those women pulled Solomon away.  It wasn’t just their religion, it was the satisfying of his lusts which in his heart formed a different religion.   Sex outside of marriage is false religion, not just one of the side effects.  Sex and the associated love in marriage is an act of true worship.  It is actually redemptive.  And it involves loving what is good.  Onan sinned because he hated the good so much that he could not have proper sex with his wife and so God killed him for it.   He was a worshipper of evil.

In the deepest moments of physical intimacy with your spouse, you experience oneness, freedom from concern, and peace.  This is the same kind of depth of intimacy that is available in God.   However, like a powerful lovemaking experience with your spouse, it doesn’t just fall out of the sky.  You have to actively pursue this kind of depth that touches and rewires these deep places.   And if you allow yourself to be touched this deeply, trust me, you will bawl your eyes out.  And once you are there, you can’t live without it that long before you are back to how you were.   How long can your marriage be healthy without sex?  Honestly, in normal circumstances, not more than a week.    How long can you stay soft and fulfilled without a deep consciousness altering encounter with God?  I doubt much longer.

And yes, I am equating deep worship with sex.   Sex is nothing more than a physical act of emotional union with another person.   It’s represents and expresses the deepest cravings of humanity   It’s where you are “naked”, vulnerable to another person, your true identity and emotions cannot be hidden.  The place you have to tap in God must address this same level of depth.   If the place you are touching in God is not as deep as the place you can touch in the bedroom, then it is simply not deep enough to satisfy your human longings.  You are living on a starvation diet.  I think I need to quit mine

Receiving a Prophecy

In a prior post, I wrote about how to approach prophecy, but in this post, I want to take it to a different level:  the psychological processes that receiving a prophecy releases in those who take prophecy seriously.    I received a word recently, and have finally come to a place in my walk where I can reflect on it a bit more objectively.

I remember when I was younger, when I would receive words,  I could get really messed up.   I remember one time the prophet told Jaime (when we were engaged) that she would need to “keep her passport up to date.”   I was so depressed,   I thought it must mean that we were not getting married, because I knew I wouldn’t be traveling any time soon.   A bizarre response, right?

What led to that response?

First, I was giving the prophecy too much authority.  A good prophecy usually speaks into processes that are already in motion in your life, not into things that are completely counter to what is going on in your life.   If it sounds like it is completely out of left field, then the general rule is to discard it, or at least shelf it.

Secondly,  I moved into a place of fear.   Rather than trust that if this prophecy were to come to pass, God would cause it to work together with the plans we already had put before Him, I assumed God was coming down from heaven and  blowing it all up – that I must be hearing God wrong.

My recent word had a similar tone.  A close friend told me that God wanted me to quit relying on my mind and return to my first love.   Now, for those of you that know me, I do tend to build the intellectual side.   But without going too deep into that, I want to break apart my reaction to the word as a way of exploring this psychological dimension of receiving a word.

Now I’m studying to teach a major church history class in the Spring, and so instantly I started thinking things like “God doesn’t want me to teach the class” or “How can I teach this class?”  etc.   I started thinking “I need to go on a total fast from knowledge for the next year”  and “Close all your books”  and stuff like that.  In other words, I was dramatizing the word.

Instead of some dramatic shift, a closer look at my life reveals that the word spoke to exactly what he was already doing in my life before receiving the word.   I had just repented of a major distraction on Sunday, and just before that was asked by a close ministry partner to teach a class for him on a very spiritual topic – one which, to do correctly, was going to force me to build my spirit, not my brain.   It helped me realize how far off the path I was, and I was embracing the process of getting stirred back up again.   I was willing and excited to do it.

What God really wanted to say to do was reinforce and highlight the process He had already started.   To go with it, essentially, not just teach the class, but follow that process through and put more priority on relationship than I had been.     I still need to teach the other church history class, and that still requires study, but I can’t let it take over or become a substitute for being spiritual.  I need to put God first.

When you  “dramatize” a word, it generally puts you into works.  You make these extreme resolutions, which you will inevitably fail to live up to.   What you need to do, is cooperate with God, and the grace He is giving you.  In general, the God-kind of change is progress, and radical steps (except for cutting out serious sin)  are often counter-productive.    I don’t need to do something crazy like cancel my other class, what I need to do is allow God to continue to expand His outreach to me, and respond appropriately.    As I’m doing that, His mission will be accomplished.  This weekend, for example, without additional effort, I’m going to some crazy charismatic conference with Joel, which is most certain to stir up that non-intellectual part of me.

Another major pitfall is in the opposite direction.  My tendency is to take words overly negatively or overly seriously.   Some people, however, tend to inflate them, or latch on to aspects which speak to an idol of their heart.   God wants to say something to you about financial increase, but because you have an idol, you get all excited, and move over into greed instead of whatever transformational work He really wanted to do in your heart.   Or even worse, the prophet themselves prophesies to the idol of your heart…  Don’t even get me started on the bizarre things that this kind of thinking can do in marriage related prophecies.    If your prophecy made you giddy, you probably have an idol, not a word from God.

There are lessons here for the giver too.   A “corrective” word does not always have to be or feel corrective.  My word could have gone  “Will,  God is really awakening the Love relationship with you right now.  He knows you love intellectual things, but He is stirring the love relationship because He misses you and wants you closer.   He is inviting you to a deeper place.  Respond to Him as He draws you in. “   Now, something corrective, has become invitational.   Something which could provoke a crisis of conscience has become about embracing a process.

This is a difficult skill.   I consider it the finest art of prophecy – giving a word which will provoke the correct psychological response and processes in the receiver.

Staring a Church from Scratch

Staring a Church from Scratch

We are in discussion about helping some friends start their church, and so I am writing this post as a way of getting my thoughts together as a set of basic instructions.  In my other posts, I covered a lot of perspectives and pitfalls which1 would be of interest to those who are in the middle of it, but in this post, I am going to cover things you would want to know from the “ground up.”   This is different from a church plant that you start with a group from another church.  This is a church that you and a few friends start together.

You must have a leader.   There must be a single person who is in charge of the church plant and calls the shots for it.  Everyone else who is thinking about getting involved needs to agree to respect, support and listen to this person regarding the plant.  Anyone not willing to do this, can’t be a part of the plant.   The leader must be considered a spiritual leader by everyone else on the team. The best way to set this in place is by having someone from the outside explain it.

The Leader must work hard.  The leader must be willing to take ownership of the plant.  It’s like being a small business owner.  Church planting is hard work.    You can’t do it unless you are really willing to put effort into it to make it go.   Just like in a small business the “entrepreneur” has to be a motivated person willing to work.    You can’t “oursource” it to someone else.   Your main job as a leader has nothing to do with what you tell others to do, it has everything to do with what you are doing yourself.

Warmth is essential.   You need to give off warmth as a group.   You need to make people feel genuinely loved and connected in order to come back.   The second most important person in your group is the “connector.”  This is the person who everyone loves and who loves everyone.   This role is often played by a woman who hosts the meeting, but it can be anyone, and to some extent you hope it is everyone.   But you genuinely must all agree to be warm to those who come, to reach out and follow up.   You need a gathering that you bring everyone to that they want to keep coming back to.   It almost doesn’t matter what you do, just that they want to keep coming back to it.

Worship is important.   Some people come mostly for the worship.   The better your worship is, the quicker you can grow.  Live worship is much better.  You need someone who can make it happen.   People say the first person who gets paid should be the pastor, but I think these days, the first payment should be for the worship team if needed.    People really expect high quality music.

Evangelism and Discipleship.   This is your bread and butter.  You need unbelievers and nominal believers to come to your group.   That means you must have some strategy for connecting with them.  There are lots of good ones, but you need one.  You have to all have an outward focus and a plan on bringing together the people you are reaching out to in a safe home environment. .

Feed only the hungry.   Everyone is going to move at their own pace.   Some people will warm the couch in your group for a long time and not “get it” while others will absolutely suck down anything you say.   Don’t’ get too “in your face” with the people who want to go slow, just spend your time on those who are hungry.  Make sure they are well fed.  Help them connect with other people.  Building your church is about building these people.  Sometimes someone who is going slow will catch fire, and when they do, spend time on them, but the key for slow moving people is to give them space.

Run off the recycles.   If you have someone who comes to your group upset about another church or with all kinds of ideas about how you should be doing church, confront them politely and they will leave.

Ministry of the Incarnation – Part II

Today I was driving in the car, and started thinking more about what it means to live as the incarnation.   About two months ago I had this thought:  “What if you were who God sent to save the world?”   What if you thought of the entirety of God’s mission as depending on you?   How would it change your mindset?   What if you thought of yourself like Jesus thought of himself:  as a man on a mission.   A man sent by God, to bring God’s presence to the earth.   Not just as a contributor to something larger, but as the one on whom the mission depends?    We don’t think this way as Christians, but we definitely should.   The Gospels are full of parables telling us that we should think this way, and yet it apparently is very hard for us to internalize.

If you have ever had something very significant depending either solely, or largely on you, you know the kinds of feelings I am talking about.   There is a singular focus that takes over.  Everything fades out of view as the mission takes over.  A sense of urgency that says “I cannot let everyone down.  I must come through and I will come through”   Today though, I was realizing an even greater dimension of what this means:  the sense of relationship that comes from it.

I realized that ever since having that initial thought about being God’s sent one, my orientation has started to change.  I am having very different feelings about my life.   They go something like this “God how can we make this happen”  and “God how can I get something done here for you.”   I feel that God is depending on me.   Our hidden Calvinist categories of the world normally prevent us from having this thought, but I believe it is completely true.   God already sent His son, and he does not have another one.   His only instrument for accomplishing things on the earth is regular human beings.   He does nothing apart from them.    History is shaped by what those believing in God stand up and do.   God may not “need” you in any emotional sense, but he does “need” you in a very practical sense.   God needs partners on the earth to fulfill his purposes.   Now I do not believe God is in any “danger” of not having partners, but that does not take away from the fact, that he does require them, and you have a very real choice whether or not you will be on of them.

This whole line of thinking has been shifting me into a much more relational posture.   Knowing that I am God’s outpost on earth somehow eliminates the thinking that I am going to do something “for” God.   Instead I keep thinking about what I am going to do “with” God.   I am his hands and feet.   He is looking for someone, and I want to be that one.   He wants to do amazing things through my corporeal body, but the question is will I flow with Him to bring lost people to know Him.

I was recently given occasion to understand this as I have a friend who is a strong believer and his father is very rich.  The father has blessed my friend in many amazing ways, to the point where there is really nothing the son can do for the father except say “thank you,” and after a while that just sound trite.  By contrast, my friend’s brother is completely lost, and the relationship between his brother and his dad is very strained.  And therefore the friend has come to realize that there is one thing he can give to his father or at least try — a relationship with the lost brother.   The father would do anything to have his lost son back, and if my friend could some how make that happen, it would be worth more than any gift he could ever give.  His dad has many things, but his heart is empty without the love of the lost son.

Seeing this situation in real life helped me to see how God really feels.   He has “lost sons” all over this earth.   And he cannot get a relationship back with them on his own.   He needs the “good sons”  to go out and try to help bring reconciliation.    You can’t give God anything, really, but you can give him this one thing.    It’s the one thing He lacks, and it’s also the one thing he cares about more than anything else.  What good does it do Him to possess the whole universe if his son is lost to him?  You see what I mean?   If you had a wayward son, what price wouldn’t you give to have them back?

Now I hope you are seeing the picture.   God is so into this.   I’m feeling emotionally connected with him on it in a whole new way as I go down this path — my heart says “God I want to bring back your lost sons”  and His heart says back  “Son, all the vast resources of my wealth are available to you.  Anything you need to do it, I will give you.”  It’s like if you were in charge of Seal Team 6, with the assignment to rescue the President’s daughter in a hostage situation.  Money?  Helicopters?  Weapons?  Men?   No problem.  Not even a question.  Whatever is needed, you’ve got it.  Just deliver.

Let that impact you.    I have served God a long time and I have loved God a long time, but never really been able to put the two together very well.   Now it’s impacting me at a whole new level.   I am God’s man for the hour (each of us should be) and I have His unlimited resources to do a mission that is very very dear to his heart.  He is counting on me.  Not only that, He is in it with me.  I am his hands on the earth.  Together, we will fulfill the mission.    I don’t plan to let Him down.

Ministry of the Incarnation

God has been speaking to our team more and more about the incarnation.

Jesus was God, in created form.  He was incarnated.  He was God on earth, and his mission was to bring God on earth.  “Your Kingdom come, as it is in heaven”   Jesus was bringing the kingdom by being here, first by being the Kingdom, and second by creating it in others.

Now there is really a lot to this if you think about it.  The direction of movement is from heaven to earth.  God is bringing something to be real here on the earth.  Jesus was heaven arriving here and setting itself up in the earth.  “The Kingdom of God is here” he says throughout his ministry.  Heaven has come here to earth through the arrival of Jesus.

People are healed:  heaven is here on earth.  People are set free from bondage:  heaven is here on earth.   The presence of God breaks into dead human flesh – heaven is here on earth!  The presence of God inside of you is nothing less than the Garden of Eden being restored.  Perfect fellowship and communion with God, the glory of things being according to the created order.

Now, when you take it a step farther, you see that not only was Jesus the incarnation, but the Bible teaches us that Jesus comes to live in you.  He becomes the incarnation inside of you.   You are the presence of God on the earth, pushing outward everywhere you go.  According to John 20:21 “As the father sent me, so I send you”   You are your mission is to bring the Kingdom down by being the incarnation. You are to fill the whole earth.

This is an incredibly powerful idea that I would like to put a fresh spin on.  For most of the 20^th century a large part of the church was trying to get off of the earth.  We were focused on getting saved and going to heaven.  Then, near the end of the century, a movement sometimes called the “Dominion” or “Kingdom Now” movement came along and corrected that.  The only problem was that this movement led to very earthly ideas about what the coming of the Kingdom would look like.  In some ways you could say it was an over-correction.  I have wrestled with these two extremes for a while, trying to forge a path where my Spirit could really resonate, and as we have sought the Lord, this idea of the incarnation has become larger and larger for me.

The incarnation is nothing less that bringing the presence of God to the earth, everywhere – so that the glory of God covers the earth, as the waters cover the sea.  It is not primarily about the governments of men – those governments exist because of the absence of God’s presence.  It is primarily about God having intense intimacy with his people, here in the temporal created realm. The Kingdom is coming, and it is shaking everything of this world, but the Kingdom is not of or like this world.  Look all around the world, anywhere you go, and you will find this Kingdom coming. As time moves forward, the peoples of the earth are getting a hold of God in deeper and deeper ways, more and more of them.  His Kingdom is coming!

The fullness of what this means, however, has not fully permeated our understanding and expression of Pentecostal Christianity, however.  As Charismatics and Pentecostals, we know how rich and amazing heaven can be, and so we seek to go there.  We seek to have tangible unity with God through the Holy Spirit.  We have developed a diverse vocabulary to discuss the things of the Spirit.  We have learned to think and talk in the terms of the Spirit.  And as good as this is, there is a fundamental problem with it:  we have not learned how to bring the Spirit here to the earth.  Talking about how the Spirit operates is fascinating, but what matters is if we can bring God here to the earth.  This is where He wants to be, dwelling among men.  He is hungry for it.  As Charismatics and Pentecostals we need to rethink everything we do and think in light of this single question: how does it help us bring God here to the earth?

That recenters things a bit doesn’t it?  Let’s take a look at the prophetic ministry as an example. Prophecy is essentially looking into the realm of the Spirit and speaking something to someone from that realm.  Charismatics love to do this.  The only problem is that when we do it, we rarely actually translate the Spiritual into the natural.  We simply speak the spiritual.  What do I mean by this?   Well I might see evangelism over your life, and so I say something to you like “God has called you to be an evangelist to the nations”  Now that’s interesting, and good that I brought this Spiritual idea to earth by at least saying it, but it’s really not practical.  It is not close enough to the daily realities you are actually in.  To do that, you would really need to address a whole series of much more practical questions like:

• What would it take for you to actually become this kind of evangelist?
• What would you have to change?
• What would you need to learn?
• Why aren’t you an evangelist already?

These are ‘incarnational” questions.  If you can address questions like this, then you can bring the spiritual idea of “evangelist” to actually exist here on the earth in a very real person.   Do you see what I am saying?  The purpose of prophecy is not to excite or simply speak – it is to bring something that only existed in the Spirit realm into being here in the earthly realm.  And the closer your prophetic word comes to doing that, the more you are really advancing the Kingdom.

In fact, the hypey way that we tend to give prophecies tends to actually prevent them from coming to pass.  By telling me that I am an evangelist to the nations, you are getting me all puffed up about my calling when what was really on God’s heart was me developing my evangelistic capabilities: something very real and very practical.  Hyping me up may prevent me from doing the hard work it is going to take to become that evangelist.  I have met more than one backslidden Christian running around telling me that they were prophesied to see massive numbers of people come to Christ.   As if some magic were going to make that happen.  This kind of magic is attractive to us because it requires no investment or work.  Simply speaking it is enough.  I have news for you, speaking it is never enough.

Our entire worldview of Spirit-filled Christianity needs to have a massive shift in this direction.  We want to stand in deep deep places in God, but not just because they are amazing, but we want to learn how to bring those deep places back here to the natural realm.  We will literally bring the glory of heaven here to the earth.  This is the awesome thing that God has commanded.

The Inner Court

Recently I was reflecting on the impact of our ministry compared to the impact of other ministries.   Like everyone else in a ministry context, I want to have a bigger impact than I am having.   However, I don’t want to have it by compromising, and yet as I pursue truth, I keep getting farther away from the mainstream positions that allow you to have a large following.   And as I was sort of putting this thought before God and reflecting on those who were on the margins in terms of their beliefs and yet amazingly effective in long term impact for God, I felt like He said “They were in the inner court.”    (a metaphor from the OT Tabernacle).  And I saw suddenly that being in the inner court was no small thing.  It wasn’t something that you just give a Charismatic teaching on, get filled with the Spirit and arrive.    That being in the inner court had to do with true intimacy with God.   Nothing that a doctrine can replace.   All the teaching in the world won’t put you in the inner court.  This revelation I’m about to give you won’t put you in the inner court.  The only thing that will get you there, is being totally remade by God.   And all of this made sense to me because I have seen how the more our ministry gets aligned with God, the more He just does things kind of on His own.   He creates a kind of gravity to what we are doing, that without him we just don’t have.

Later that night as I was talking with Joel, I felt like God added to it something like “and I’m inviting you to the inner court.”  Which in context was a staggering thought.    And I saw that in the outer court there were a huge multitude of people.  Like 99% of all of Christianity was there.   And they were wandering around talking to each other, maybe like a huge crowd before a major event.   But there was a lot of confusion.  Everyone had their theory on how to get to the Inner Court.   Some theories were pretty good, and others were completely wrong.  People would talk to each other a bit, and then wander around a bit more looking for the inner court, but most would never find it.    The crowd was so vast, that the crowd itself was like a maze.  You couldn’t just walk out.   And if you only followed the directions of others, you couldn’t get out either, because you never really knew who was right.   So the only way out of this maze was to hear God himself and start moving in the direction He was showing.

And then God showed me that this was why recently our team has started to have a kind of shared experience when we meet with other Christians.   I feel like I deeply relate to and understand where the person is, but it seems very far away at the same time.   Someone tells me “I don’t know if God loves me”  and I know exactly what that is and how it feels because I’ve been exactly there, but at the same time it’s very strange to me.   Like meeting someone from a different culture.   I don’t have an experience like I’m looking down at them, but more like I’m just completely not there.   I understand these things, but they are foreign.  And God was showing me that this experience was coming because as a team, we were starting to break away from the crowd, and get within sight of the inner court.   And that we can help guide others in that direction, but that even with guidance, for the eager and willing, it can and will take many years of wrestling and changing to come close to that point.    We’re really just able to offer breadcrumbs.   Nobody can get you there except you responding to God.

Joel then began to share the deep cry of his heart for relationship with God, and it was truly profound.   If you know Joel, you know that he is the guy who you would say more than anyone has the relationship with God that you wish you had.   Yet, he’s still seeing something that he doesn’t quite have.   And I saw how the place of the inner court was a place of pure relationship, one that could only be had by keeping your heart pure and open enough to really see God move in and through you.   A level of purity you will not see or experience over night, but that has to be cultivated over years of dealing with layers of sin.    And that one of the true marks of the inner court kind of relationship is when you come to the place where all you care about is the relationship.  All you care about is the intimacy.

And that’s not in a self-centered or withdrawn from the world kind of a way, but it’s alive because you can’t be in real relationship with God and not feel His burning heart to touch this world and bring people to know Him.   So it’s an intimacy that is developed from walking with Him.  When we think walk, we think of this self-centered stuff, but  remember the disciples who actually did “walk” with Him developed their intimacy through ministering together with Him, not meditation.   And so if Jesus is the perfect model of that you see that He did everything together with the Father.   He had deep private moments, but there was also a profound intimacy of doing everything together with His dad.

But anyway, in this kind of intimacy, ministry is and relationship fuse together.   You don’t go do ministry.  You go do things with God, your friend, who you know and relate to all the time.   It’s normal for the super-normal to happen because God is God.  He’s naturally supernatural.   And then God showed me that this was this is what it was like to minister from “behind the veil.”    When the people saw Moses he was glowing and they were amazed and wanted Him to put on a veil.   Yet, that’s not what Moses saw.   He didn’t see any glow or anything strange.  The only thing he saw was the veil of separation between where he was and where the people were.   When you are behind the veil, the supernatural is just as normal breathing.   It’s not particularly amazing or remarkable.  You’re hanging out with the creator so of course there are angels, lightning, amber lights, spontaneous healings and most of all impact to the world around you.    Until you have that kind of intimacy with God, you’re not in the inner court.   Remember only the priests could enter the inner court.  And what a priest was was God’s representative on earth.  Until you have a oneness with God operating in your life, you can’t really minister in the inner court.

And God showed me something very interesting:  the inner court has different “tools” in it.   In the outer court, all you had to work with was the bowl for washing and altar for sacrificing.   That’s your only ministry tools.    Basically stuff for dealing with sin.   You can stay forgiven from sin and you can minister it to others.   However,  in the inner court, there are some really fascinating items.   There is a lampstand,  a rod that budded, some showbread, and some incense.   These are much different tools with very different purposes.  And I saw how the power of coming from the inner court was because you have access to the much more impactful tools.   The lampstand is a light which shines before men and draws them in.   The rod that buds is fruit that grows out of that which is dead, etc.   (I’d have to do a study to really understand all of this stuff).    But craving the impact of these tools will never get you inside the inner court.  Only becoming so united with God that you feel at one with Him will take you there.

Romance with God

The idea of a divine romance has been mainstream for probably 15 years now and I have heard the term many times, however it never really made any sense to me.   This is not because I didn’t believe in the idea of a romance with God, but it just wasn’t a very real concept to me.   Of course, this could be because some concepts in the Christian life really don’t make much sense at all until you are mature enough in your walk and life experience to understand their full significance.   Think of explaining “romance” to a child.   They will understand something, but it will be quite far from the full significance of the term.  So, anyway, for whatever reason, the divine romance was not clicking for me.

In my uninitiated mind, the idea meant either:

1. How an omnipotent God reaches out toward you.  He is chasing down your worthless  puny self.
2. How you are in this intense end-time over the top bridal romance, longing for his presence with an undying devotion

Not sure about you, but neither one of these really relates to emotions that I experience on any kind of regular basis.    God however, has been opening this box for me lately in a way that connects with both my experience as a husband and as a pastor.

First let’s take a look at how romance works.    Think when you are dating or courting.  First, you meet someone you might like.   You engage them in some basic ways.   If they do not respond, you are likely to become less interested.  If they do respond to your interest though you become more interested.    You escalate more.   Perhaps you ask them on a date.  If it does not go well, you will back off in the relationship, but if it does, you may escalate further.   This cycle continues until the relationship ends or you reach the ultimate state of a life commitment to be together — marriage.

Now, something funny happens to us when we get married.  The romance cycle grinds to a halt.  Because you are not trying to win the other person over, you start treating them like they are taken for granted.   Women quit dressing up so nice, smiling so much,  making eyes, etc.   Men quit all of the overwhelming displays of interest and settle into their own private routine.   Basically you love one another, but there is not a natural cycle of “romance.”  Because you already have each other, the wooing stops.

One of the funny effects of this non-romance is what it does to physical intimacy.   People often say that it is Satan or simply sin  that pushes you toward sex before you are married, and of course there is truth in that, but what pushes you toward sex even more is the wooing that you are doing.  You keep back your negative thoughts.   You smile at her, she smiles at you.  You hold hands.  You kiss.  The whole process just naturally escalates to the bedroom.   Marriage, and even living together, eliminate the need for the wooing, because you now have one another.   The romance dies, the drive toward sex wanes.

But of course if you are good marriage partners, you continue to have a regular sex life anyway.  It may not be romantic, but it serves the function of reinforcing your relationship.    Now, there is nothing innately wrong with that, but it can become  kind of functional rather than intimate.   After a lot of emotional distance one of you shows up in the bedroom and says “I’m ready to go!”   This often means your emotional connection and physical connection are out of sync.   You can’t just throttle your emotions from 0 to 60 in 2.6 seconds.   What romance does is  move you along a spectrum from disconnected to deep connection — so deep that you want to share your bed together.

Now there are all kinds of obstacles that block this in real life, but one of the most important is that we do not cultivate the connection opportunities when they come.   One person reaches out and the other one shuts them down.   The other reaches out and gets shut down in return.  After a few times of this, both people stop the reaching out altogether, and start to be permanently disconnected.   The romance is gone.

Romance With God
Now what does all of this have to do with God?   Well I started realizing that my relationship with God is kind of like that married sex life.   I have this tendency to ignore God all day long with the idea that at some point I’ll be ready to rush into the “bedroom” of deep intimacy.   And just like that functional marriage sex, the intimacy will be there, but it’s a lot shallower.  It draws on the reserves of the past instead of the living relationship of the moment.   We’re in “the bed” because of some history and standing connection as opposed to a real and vibrant connection we are experiencing right at the moment.

And God started showing me that he is “romancing” me all the time and that I can “romance” Him back.   I’m sitting at my office desk, and I have a mild but abrupt feeling of God’s presence.  It’s a romantic opportunity.  But how does it start?  It starts with you having openness.  Just like you are not going to go flirt with some girl that doesn’t want your attention, God isn’t usually going to show up if you are not open to it.   So the first step is being at least somewhat available.

Assume that you’ve done that.  Now what?   When you feel God is there, you have to respond.  Go with it.   Allow Him to move your heart and emotions right then.  Don’t miss it.    I was thinking about it like “what if a friend came to visit?”  There is no way i would tell them to come back at the end of the day.   As an extravert, I would literally drop everything and eagerly engage the relationship.    But with God, He gets the “come back later” treatment.   I shut down the romance.   And when the bedroom time comes, it’s stale.

And it works both ways.  When I think of God or feel drawn to Him, I just turn my heart and attention to Him for a moment and we share a brief moment of connection.   Now we’re in relationship.    We start out distant, and move closer and closer.   I start to “cultivate” the presence of God.   I’ve heard people talk about this cultivation too, but it also came off sounding really functional to me as well.  Like cultivating a garden.   That’s not what you want.  This is a romance.   You are cultivating intimacy.  It’s keeping your lover close.

And keeping your lover close means several things.  As I just explained, it means being available when He comes and it means going to Him when you feel your desire toward Him.    But it also means not arresting the intimacy with something jarring.   If you flirt with another woman, it’s going to set back your relationship with your wife.   It breaks the intimacy.   If you get interrupted during your romance, it’s going to break the intimacy.   If you want passion and connection, it must be cultivated actively and protected.

You can see how this can really be a game changer.   We talk about relationship with God but what we functionally mean is something more like  “ending your estrangement from God while learning about him in the Bible and talking about Him with other people in the same situation, and occasionally letting His Spirit do something great through us”   There isn’t much actual relationship.  In a relationship, you relate.  That means there is give and take, back and forth.   God takes initiative, you take initiative.   Embracing the romance process is an important step toward a real relationship.

Families and Relationships

In the Garden of Eden, God created one man and one woman and told them to have offspring.   In other words, the very first form of human relationship was the family.  Out of the union of the one man and one woman, everything else would come, so that Eve would become the “mother of all life.”

Since the fall, a number of different “family” structures have come into being.  Some of the major alternatives are:

• Polygamy — One man and several women.   This also includes the Harem — a king and many women
• The Tribe — One man and one woman procreating, but raising their children in a deeply enmeshed extended kinship group
• The Single Mother — A woman raising offspring apart from their biological father.  This is also connected with polyamory, or serial monogamy.  A child living with many different step parents.

All of these present very significant deficits compared what we know as the “nuclear” family.   The Biblical idea of a family involves a single man and single woman separate from their parents, united for life and raising Children together.   This idea is vastly superior from all others for a wide variety of reasons, but what I want to highlight today is how the nuclear family impacts emotional development.

God made the man and woman different.    And contrary to popular belief, these changes are more than physical or sociological.   Men and women view the world differently.   We view relationships differently.   We have different cravings and needs.  We are born this way.   What this means is that in order for a man and woman to come together a great divide must be crossed.    Each must dialog with this strange foreign creature.    Each must take into themselves part of the other.

In order to find, attract, and keep a woman, a man must learn to relate to a human being with  real needs.   He must settle down.  He come out of his object-oriented world.     And when a woman becomes connected to a man, her world becomes uncomfortably direction oriented — it takes on energy and goals that may not be natural to her.     He must learn to meet her relational needs.   She must learn to embrace his sexual needs.  Two different people cross out of themselves.

And in order to do this over the long term it requires self-sacrifice and personal transformation.   You simply cannot stay married to a single person for more than a few years and be self-centered.  In order to make this happen, God gives us desire.   He places deep with in the man a desire for the comfort and beauty of a woman.  He places deep within the woman a desire for the strength and security of a man.  And when they are young, these desires are supercharged with emotional and sexual energy which draws them together.   These desires give them the will to come out of themselves and be something different than the naturally are.

As they stay in this relationship, the produce children, and the children grow up in an environment where love is being passed back and forth between two people.   In other words — they grow up in relationship.    They do not simply grow up with a mother and father.  They grow out of the relationship between them, and they grow up in it.   They see and experience wholeness as sons receive love from their mothers and guidance from their fathers, as daughters receive modeling from their mothers and affirmation from their fathers.   And as they see the mother and father relate with love to one another. Each of these components becomes a central key to the child growing up with emotional health.  When one is missing, God has backup systems to make up for it, but fundamentally something will be broken without it.

One of the problems in contemporary society is that children have alternative families called the Public School.   In this alternative family, there are distant parents called teachers, but much of the real “parenting” happens among the “herd” of children.    Children receive all kinds of negative fathering and mothering from these false parents, and develop a host of problems that would have been avoided inside their own families alone.

Another more obvious problem is that many children are growing up without to committed parents, and instead a host of step-parents, step-siblings, and step-everything else.  Instead of feeling warmth and security, they feel anxiety and emotional shutdown.

My point here is that a family doesn’t just have relationships.  A family is a relationship.  And God’s fundamental design of bringing a man and woman together is what enables all of us to conduct human life.   When the family is broken,  we become fundamentally broken and society itself becomes broken.  It begins to reflect relationship dysfunction instead of true loving relationships.

The Power of Emotions

When we think about emotions what we normally think of it in terms of a single person.   How am I feeling?   How are you feeling?   But actually emotions are highly relational in nature.   First of all, most emotions that you experience in your life come from a relationship.  Secondly, regardless of the source, when you experience an emotion, it has an impact on other people around you.  What I am highlighting here is that emotions are communicative.   They do not exist in a vacuum.  They impact everyone around you continuously.

In fact, you could even say that an emotion is a “power.”   When you experience an emotion it is and has the power to bring other people into the experience you are having.  In some sense, you are “casting” yourself out into the world and onto others.   This is an incredibly significant thing that is rarely discussed.

Think about anger, for example.  When you experience anger, everyone else around you is impacted.   You are casting your anger out into the world, and other people are sucked into it.   Even though you use nothing physical, they will feel your anger “hit” them, and it will demand a response.    And when the anger hits, they will choose one of several responses:

• The first and most common response if you are angry, is for other people to also get angry back.   You have successfully cast your own emotional situation onto them, and they have not become a part of your angry world.   They will now throw anger back on you and a cycle begins.
• The second possible response is to withdraw.  Nobody likes being punched, and so they will avoid you, avoid the conversation, and generally try to escape from your spell.
• A third possible response is confront or engage.  An emotionally mature person may be able to see or sense your emotions and not be pulled in immediately.  They may identify your emotion and  say “Why are you angry?”  or take some other strategy to address the fact you just cast something out that they do not want.
• A final response is to shut down.   This is similar to withdrawal, but it’s more fundamental.  This is essentially to turn off emotional capability and processing it logically instead of experiencing it.

That’s the negative side, but what about the positive side?  The same rules apply.  If I am happy, you will feel it.  And you will have to decide what you want to do with that emotion.   You would think that everyone would want to enter into happiness, but it’s actually not the case.  When you feel my happiness hit you you have to decide whether or not you will enter in and reciprocate.

• Just like anger, your first choice is if you want to enter in.   If you choose to receive the emotion I am casting, you will also feel happy.  My happiness is not just an invitation it is an actual opportunity to also be happy.   If you choose to receive it, you’ll be happy too, and you’ll start casting happiness back at me.
• One response is to “observe.”   This is the same as the shut down strategy.  Instead of entering into and experiencing the emotion I’m casting on you, you simply observe what I am doing and experiencing.  You may have some small pleasure from this, but generally, you stay outside of it.
• Another response is to confront or cancel.   You may be the kind of person who is not comfortable with happiness, emotion in general, or are jealous if someone is happy and you are not.   In this case you will say or do something designed to bring my emotion back down.  You would prefer that we are all unhappy or at least unemotional.

An emotion is your actual life experiencing being imparted to someone else, or their life experience being imparted onto you.   This is how preaching works too.   The greatest moments in a great sermon are those in which the speaker becomes deeply emotionally affected.  This has the effect of bring an entire crowd into the life experience of a single speaker.   The speaker weeps for the lost, and suddenly you feel a concern for the lost that you never had before.   You receive something from the speaker because their emotions were cast out on you and you chose to receive them.

Many people believe they can shut down their emotions and have others not experience them, but this is not fully true.   A person who has shut down emotions still gives off some emotional information, especially when they are frustrated or angry.   More importantly, though, they will send emotional information to others by virtue of what they do not send.   If I am happy and you do not enter into my happiness, you are now shutting down the cycle of happiness.  Exactly what you are doing in your own life– canceling emotions – is what you will send to other people.   You become the anti-emotion caster.   Kind of like a “black hole.”   You don’t create emotions, you suck them up.

My point in writing this is highlight the relational dimension of the whole process.   Emotions are not simply something you experience.   They are what create and end relationships.   Emotions are literally the vehicle by which you connect or do not connect by other people.   They are the human capability which make you feel as if you are part of something larger, and cause you to want to have social interactions.  Without them, social life simply becomes instrumental.   With them, you can actually be connected to other people in deep and profound ways, but you have to steward the emotional environment together to make that happen.

This is why families are so important.  A family is an environment, a nursery, where you learn how to handle emotions.  Before you are old enough or experienced enough to choose what to do, you are learning to adopt strategies to deal with emotions.  Will you enter into the emotional world or escape it?   Is it a good place or a bad place?   The world around you and most fundamentally the relationship (or non-relationship) between your parents will tell you that.  In a follow-up post, we’ll talk about how families do that.

Emotional Reciprocation

Continuing my series on the emotional life, this is a post on the importance of emotional reciprocation.   This is actually one the most fundamental human skills but most people have trouble doing it in at least one situation or role.

The principle here is that expression is the fundamental building block of relationship.   If you do not express it, it is as if it never happened.     If you are happy and you don’t express it, then people will think you were not.   If you are thankful and you don’t express it, then people will think you are not thankful.   Human beings require this kind of feedback in order to know what is going on.  God created us as a closed system with a body and a mouth to express our ideas rather than just spirit beings where everything is transparent.   This means that in order to have relationship you have to express.

This expression must be done in the “virtuous cycle.”    Let me explain.    You give me a gift.   I say thank you.  You say “I was glad to”     This three step process is what creates connection.   If anyone one of these steps is missing, the connection fails.

1.  Initation:  You gave me the gift

2.  Response:  I say thank you

3.  Affirmation:  I say I was glad to give the gift.

If you do not initiate, then nothing will happen.  We will just sit around together feeling unconnected.   You have to reach out.  This is an important step, but most people understand this at least in theory, though many don’t actually do it in practice.

The more subtle step is next:  Response.   If I fail to respond, then you will feel rejected.   I have to affirm the fact that I liked your initiation.  If I do not do this, you will be less likely to reciprocate.   I rejected you.  I trained you not to initiate.  This is why if you want to receive the person but not what they want to give, you have to find a way to still send acceptance.   This is why in the world of giving you would never dream of rebuffing the gift.  You would be telling the person you reject them.   Or if you have to reject you must counter-balance with something else.  For example,  I invite you out to dinner.   If you can’t come, you have to invite me back.  Or schedule a rain-date.  If you just flat say no, you are shutting down the relationship.   At the very least, you have to make a large emotional display about how much you really really wanted to come.  This tells me that you accept my initiation in spirit.

The cycle is not yet complete however.   You receiving me is not enough to make us feel connected.   I have to then affirm you back.    This affirms the relationship.  Thank you for thanking me.   I had a great time.  Nothing but positive feelings here.  You are sharing in the positivity of the experience.

When this cycle is completed both of you feel connected.  The more often you complete this cycle together, the closer you feel together.  If you complete the cycle enough you move into

Abiding Connection.

Have you have had a relationship where you just knew you were on the same page?  Where you know there is nothing negative between you?   This is abiding connection.   You experience this after the need for communication has been surpasses.   Things like thanking and affirming become a formality and even a distraction.    You are operating out of deep reserves of shared connection.

What’s funny about this zone is that it only works if you are both truly in it.    I know that we are connected.  You know that we are connected.   I know that you know, and you know that I know.   It’s kind of like when you belay onto a rope for a dangerous climb.  You confirm to each other that the rope is secure and then you begin to put weight on it.

This zone is hard to stay in.  You can easily fall out if one of you starts to doubt that you are connected.   This is the zone we should seek in all of our relationships.    With friends,  with God and even in the bedroom.  When you have this level of connection, there is a deep sense of fulfillment and together that we were all created for.

How do I get there?

A lot of time together will not do it.  Though that can help give background, what really matters is that when you are together you are building and building these cycles of virtuous connection.   Where each time you are together, you never break the cycle.   There is always initiation, acceptance and affirmation.  Even when you don’t agree, you have to keep building this.    You have to always be acting from a heart that says  ” I want a closer relationship with you”

Now of course that means you can’t just do it with anyone.  It’s something you build with people you really trust and want to be close to.   People who share your values.   As you build this, you get to really trust what you know about each other and begin to act on it.    I know that John would like it if I X therefore I will and won’t have to ask.    This feeling that you know the permission is there — sometimes called “refrigerator rights”  is a reflection of the kind of abiding connection I’m talking about and that we should strive for.