Idealism

This has been the hardest week of my life, by far. I won't take the time to get into the details, but I'll just sum it up by saying I feel misunderstood, resistance, and loneliness. But in my loneliness I have done some thinking, so here I go.

Recently I have been accused of being too idealistic. I've been told that I have unrealistic expectations of people, the world, myself. At first, I was really disappointed and hurt that someone could try to tell me something like that, but now, I am taking it as a compliment. I think it is just an indication that I get it. Let me explain...

This past week in Juarez, I talked about returning to Glory. What is Glory? I don't really know. I think I've experienced small doses of glory in situations. When we handed the keys to the house over to our family, that was glory. When I saw the youth putting other people before them and truly serving, that was glory. When a group of people gathers to praise God in whatever way, that is glory. Dictionary.com defines glory in 12 different ways, but my favorite is #7: the splendor and bliss of heaven; heaven. AMEN! My gosh, is that not dead on? Glory is when we get a glimpse of what heaven is like; glory is when we get a glimpse of what God created the world to be like.

In Genesis 1, God creates the world. He creates light, the sky, land, vegetation, stars, the sun, living creatures, animals, etc., all along saying, after each completion, that "it is good." Then something really cool happens. "God created man in his own image, in the image of God he created him; male and female he created them" (Genesis 1:27). And when He finishes creation, he sits back, looks around, "saw all that he had made, and it was VERY good" (Genesis 1:31). Did you catch that? When God made man, things all of a sudden became very good. God thinks we are VERY good. Not just good. But an integral and absolutely essential part of creation that is even better than good. God thinks that I am an integral part of creation. He thinks that I am absolutely essential, and that I'm better than good. That's intense, and it's also very exciting.

So then shortly after things start to venture off the path that God intended. We get excited about the idea of being able to play God, so we try to control things (hence the story of the Garden of Eden). Things are so out of whack that, at one point, the Bible uses an illustration of God clearing the Earth with a flood, with the exception of a righteous man named Noah and a couple of smelly animals. Hmm...seems like we may need to re-evaluate things a bit.

Ok, so clearly we need to think about our purpose. Rob Bell says in his book Velvet Elvis, quoting his counselor, that "Your job is the relentless pursuit of who God has made you to be. And anything else you do is sin and you need to repent of it" (114). Repent. What a word. Ironically, repenting is the first step to forgiveness. We tend to throw this part out most of the time. In order to truly be forgiven you must repent, or turn away, from the sin. And, fortunately for us, if you are repenting of a sin, you are turning toward God. Think about it...if your only job is to relentless pursue God, then if you aren't, you are sinning. But if you repent of your sins, then you are turning toward God. Returning to God, if you will.

Sounds easy, right? Yeah I know. It's not. It's really hard. In fact, I think the closer you get to relentlessly pursuing God, the harder it gets. But the point is not "not sinning." The point is not trying to avoid things, stop doing things, getting rid of things in your life, etc. The point is filling yourself with God. In the New Testament, Jesus often told people "Shalom," or He would say, "Now go in peace." But, as Rob Bell describes in movement 4, Shalom isn't accurately translated as "peace." I love peace. I get made fun of for wearing peace signs so much, and being slightly hippy at times, but that is totally not what this means here. When we talk about peace, we are talking about the absence of something - war, violence, resistance, agony, etc. But the word "Shalom" means something way more than that. Shalom is not about the absence of something, but the presence of something: GOD. So when Jesus said "Go in Shalom," he meant to go forth in the presence of God. Not to go forth without resistance, without sin, etc. Just to go WITH God.

So when we think about sin, we have to think about it in the peace v. shalom sense. There are all kinds of peace advocates that miss the whole point of God completely. But we want God. So let's stop trying to avoid sin, and start trying to relentlessly pursue God. If we are doing that, we aren't sinning.

This seems intangible, impossible. It seems hard to fathom that we could be sinless. But God says that we are very good. Jesus tells us, "I tell you the truth, anyone who has faith in me will do what I have been doing. He will do even greater things than these, because I am going to the Father." (John 14:12) We will do GREATER THINGS THAN JESUS, if we just have faith in Him, relentlessly pursue Him. Whew.

The 12th definition of Glory on dictionary.com reads as follows: "go to glory, to die." If we go to glory, we must die to something. We must die to sin. Jesus did! For us. A lot of times we get into the habit of thinking of grace as just this thing that we use in exchange for forgiveness, but that is totally missing the point of the crucifixion. Rob Bell says "There is Jesus' death on our behalf once and for all, but there is the ongoing work of the cross in our hearts and minds and souls and lives. There is the ongoing need to return to the cross to be reminded of our brokenness and dependence on God. There is the healing we need from the cross every single day" (108). After everything started to get out of control on Earth, God sent his son to show us how to live. He sent someone to give us a tangible and very obvious example of how sin and death must be conquered to be alive fully in God and to sit in God's heaven. So every day, we have to return to the cross, dying to sin, returning to relentlessly pursuing God. It's possible to do it. God promised us it was. He sent his son to prove it.

18Yet what we suffer now is nothing compared to the glory he will reveal to us later. 19 For all creation is waiting eagerly for that future day when God will reveal who his children really are. 20Against its will, all creation was subjected to God’s curse. But with eager hope, 21the creation looks forward to the day when it will join God’s children in glorious freedom from death and decay. 22For we know that all creation has been groaning as in the pains of childbirth right up to the present time. 23And we believers also groan, even though we have the Holy Spirit within us as a foretaste of future glory, for we long for our bodies to be released from sin and suffering. We, too, wait with eager hope for the day when God will give us our full rights as his adopted children, including the new bodies he has promised us. 24We were given this hope when we were saved. (If we already have something, we don’t need to hope for it. 25But if we look forward to something we don’t yet have, we must wait patiently and confidently.)
Romans 8:18-25

We do all of these things in hope. We do them because God promised us that if we are released from the groaning and suffering of sin, we will reveal his Glory. When I was in Juarez last week, I spoke on Friday night, our last night of the trip. I told the group that the one thing I was returning with is hope. After watching the kids serve like Jesus served, putting others before them, I know that things can be different. I know that they don't have to be this way. In my van, we counted up the number of people that we were going to show and tell about what had happened on the trip. Not the showering part, or the building and dusty part, but the Jesus part. It was 126 people. From 1 van. Just think if we all did that? That's a revolution. That could be 5%, the 5% that it takes to change a society (that's a statistic from a human rights activist organization).

So am I idealistic? HECK yes. Because Jesus was idealistic. God made this world to be "on Earth as it is in Heaven." So I have the right to be idealistic. Jesus promised me that. But that doesn't mean it is going to be the easy road. Just in the last few days, I've experienced some of the most resistance I've ever seen. But that's ok, it's supposed to a hard path, and I want to be one of the few that find it.