frustration

I am dealing with a lot of frustration right now and I am trying to work out how to live with frustration, and whether we should live with frustration!? 

My personality is one that leans towards operating under a lot of frustration and wanting more of God and desiring breakthrough, but today I am kind of sick of it! Often frustration is affirmed as a normal quality of a pioneering person but does frustration do anything? I suppose it pushes people on towards the goal in someway.  Is it closely linked with motivation? It does often lead to more prayer and desperation for the Lord. But is frustration a good thing..I'm not sure.

I doubt that there is frustration in heaven and therefore surely this means it is not something we should live under. In heaven there is life, peace, joy and contentment. What is the opposite of frustration? Contentment and satisfaction? Is frustration closely related to impatience? If so, since patience is a fruit of the spirit, frustration surely is not a good thing? The Bible is committed to the view that contentment in all circumstances is how we should live...

But I am sure that Jesus was sometimes frustrated... at Peter when he 'got it' and declared that Jesus was the Christ, but then shortly later Jesus rebuked him as Satan! Or at the disciples when they were unable to cast the demon out of the boy. Or when they missed so many things that Jesus tried to teach them. Or when Jesus went into the temple and market stalls were set up and in anger he trashed the place! This leads to the question is frustration akin to anger in someway? Perhaps in the same way that the Bible teaches that anger in itself is not sin ["in your anger do not sin"] perhaps frustration is in the same vein. Its not sin, but perhaps can lead to the sin of impatience or unthankfulness or just plain being annoyed!

So how do we get breakthrough from a place of frustration...prayer and perseverance [Lk 18], thankfulness and testimony, fasting and just getting more passion and oomph. I am in a season of real perseverance and its not that fun to be honest. But I am believing for the breakthrough. Perhaps is it that God allows us to live under frustration because he is waiting for us to sort some stuff in another direction. Perhaps he is encouraging certain things to be on the back burner while he works in another area. Maybe frustration, because it pushed you into more prayer and desperation before the Lord, it is a tool the Lord can use to get our attention. All I know is I am thirsty for something...for the king and the kingdom. I want more. I am not satisfied with the same level of experience in the miraculous, provision, intimacy in relationship, evangelism...there is so much more.

I am working my way through Mike Bickle's teaching on the Song of Songs at the moment, I think God is getting my attention on some alternative areas that are his priority although not always my priority., Perhaps frustration is when our priorities aren't totally in line with God's. He is more bothered about our hearts, rather than results. Help, I need to get in tune!

we are all like drug addicts!!!

Paul Mac was speaking today on some very interesting perspectives on sin and the way we function and live so below how we were meant to. We are slaves to our fallen nature, we have access to freedom but we don't embrace this fully because we all have addictions and attachments to things in our lives that take the place of God...idolatry in other words. We live life less fully than we were intended for too...we are sinners and we fall short of the glory God intended for us. The stuff on attachments and how we are all essentially addicts came from a book about a psychiatrist's journey from atheism to faith due to studying drug addicts and his finding that the only ones who got freedom, had had a spiritual experience.

Paul took it further and said that the way God has to deal with us is like how a rehabilitator has to deal with an addict...we are generally deceptive, we try and do disciplines and we can't, we say we love God then we do something that reflects the opposite, we are broken and a mess! 

I have been thinking is this perhaps why we don't see more breakthrough in the supernatural and in our ministries? God can't give us the fullness because in the same way you can't trust an addict, God can't really trust us with the full measure of the anointing until we get rid of the addictions to work, stress, money, TV, food, relationships, dysfuntional ways of thinking....we need to be holy and set apart from these things. The naff thing is also that these things like an addiction also become not as fun to us the more we do them...actually fullness of joy will come in His presence alone and not through these things. That's not to say we can't enjoy these things but if we are looking to them for relief or happiness a lot of the time then we need to reasess...

Ephesians 3 says we will be filled with the fullness of God [that would lead to breakthrough in the supernatural] when we know his love and that we are adopted sons, not slaves. God loves us even though we are needy, messed up addicts and we need to know his love a whole lot more. I think there are a lot of us that need to humbly see ourselves as needy before God, we really cannot attain anything unless he changes us. We need to taste Life and position ourselves to receive a double dose of his love and presence than we have been getting as a step towards more freedom and the fullness of God in us.

grieving and questioning

Bit of a serious/personal one but a couple of people [strange how things come at the same time!] have asked me recently about how i processed faith and the death of my father...i answered some jumbled thoughts I thought I may as well include in my blog...this is obviously not everything I could say on the matter but here goes...

For those who don't know, my father was hit by a car and died in 2002, he wasn't a christian and I had been praying and fasting for him for as long as I could remember.

Reading and thinking and talking were very important...grief cannot be ignored it must be faced and grappled with and God SO wonderfully shares in it and leads you if you let him in [though this for me has come in hindsight]. A few books in particular helped me...

• 'on grief and grieving' [its a secular book - takes you through the steps of what generally happens to people when they grieve - although not christian it was VERY helpful]
  
• 'A grief observed' by CS Lewis - he was single for years, then got married in his forties and his wife died very short after their marrieage of cancer. his account is very real, very raw and honest.
  
• 'When heaven is silent' by someone Dunn. He was a very charismatic believing christian who saw miracles yet his son suffered with mental illness and committed suicide. this book is EXCELLENT on all thiss stuff.

• "God on mute" by Pete Greig...also about his journey of seeing loads stuff happen yet his wife being very very ill.

• the books of Job, Ecclesiastes and Psalms [bread and butter]!!!
  

generally grief is something that is raw for at least five years, its a journey, there are no instant results, there are no formulae or definite ways of dealing with it.  when my dad died my whole world turned upside down...there were some unusual circumstances in that the last time i saw him i was VERY upset for no reason - as if i knew it was the last time i'd see him. Grief is often accompanioed with weird things like that that may be made up or God preparing you.

I suffered with a DEEP mental pain that psychologists call cognitive dissonance pretty much up to last New Years!!! last new years God really healed me/gave me a boost out of a deeper sense of grief and confusion that had been continuous since 2002. The last year has been such a different year than the years previous. God just shifted something in me - I do remembering deciding to receive this as a gift from God. Cognitive dissomnance is where your mind very much believes two things very strongly and yet they completely contradict. It is a very painful thing to live with but life and the christian journey does include living with mystery.. I had to live with and process the fact that my dad had died, not a christian, very young and I had had a hard relationship with him that I wanted to work out but that opportunity was taken away. but yet I totally had believed he would meet Jesus one day and I strongly believe that God answers prayer. I still do for the record.

We never reach full resolution of things like this but the call as Christians is when we face difficulty we MUST press into God closer, push through the confusion barrier rather than follow the tepmtation the enemy offers us which is to blame God and pull away from him [I wasted a lot of time doing this, but God brought me back and he was incredibly faithful and fathered me through the dark times].For me I knew nothing else would work, I knew God enough that he was the only answer even if I didn't get it, i had to trust him, i kept praying and talking to God about it, i kept going to church, i kept reading the psalms and journalling. I held on. Ephesians 6 says to stand on the day of evil and to stand. just stand! 2Corinthians is my fave new testament book and theres loads in it about being "hard pressed on every side but not destroyed, struck down but not abandoned...we carry around in our bodies the death of jesus..." these words along with the Psalsm kept me. Being a Christian is hard -mark 4 -the sower; stuff gets in the way...the enemy sowed a whole load of garbage but i had to pull through anyway. We are following someone who was murdered anda people group who are attacked...we live in a fallen world where the enemy seeks to kill steal and destroy and he does do these things.

A new book called "strengthen yourself in the lord" by bill johnson is amazing and the most practically life transforming book I've read in the last two years...i do wish i had had that during my grief...the base default truth is that God is good and that we must see the things that happen to us through this truth. It talks about how we must choose to worship, give thanks and thus be strengthened in every life situation. It talks about this as a discipline in hard times and we must do it even if we don't feel like it...this is a very releasing truth because I felt it was wrong to say words in worship that I didn't totally mean...actually choosing to turn our mouths to truth and to God will cause faith to be released in us and change in our hearts and minds will result. 

The story of the wise and foolish builders in matthew 7 is one of the most important of Jesus teaching...the rains will come, being a christian is not all hunky dory, but God is good and he will give us the grace if we turn our face toward him just that little bit. We must build our lives now on the rock because grief and crappy stuff happening is inevitable. We are in an exciting time of seeing God move more, healings and hearing his voice; we are seeing more breakthrough...its fantastic. But we will still see and be impacted by shoddy stuff and we must be prepared or we will be offended at God and that is a very sorry place to be...don't go there!!!

buildings suck!?

So I am the worst consistent blogger the world has ever seen! Thanks everyone for encouraging comments about this blog though..I intend to get back into it this Jan!

I will get straight to the point of what prompted me to start blogging again today... [on New Years Eve of all days!? and when I should really get packed and showered as I leave to go away in under two hours!]....one of my Form "huddleees"; the amazing Franklin Mason sent me a book today called Pagan Christianity. I am sure that a lot of it I will agree with but the first chapter has made me kinda frustrated and confused.

The whole book is about how most of our Christian practices are not biblical and in fact are more sinisterly influenced by pagain practices and therefore we should not be doing them. The first chapter is all about church buildings and how we should not have church buildings for a number of reasons. The book so far is very weak in convincing me that we should not have church buildings...its main reasonings seem to be the following:

1. The early church did not have buildings. So what? They couldn't have buildings because it was illegal to be a Christian, let alone build a church. Yes we must learn from the principles of the NT church in terms of community and not having a building as the focus of our community but this is niot a strong enough argument to do away with church buildings.

2. Jesus predicted the destroying of the temple and when he cleared the temple it also pointed to his anger at the temple even being there. This is simply a pants argument [sorry frankie!]. The fact that Jesus overturned the tables in the temple argues almost in favour of buldings having at least some level of importance to God. Nowhere in that passage does it infer that Jesus is angry at the building being there. Ridiculous.

3. Buildings were brought in by Constantine for his own gain and building "temples" was a move by Christianity to copy Paganism. To debate about Constantine is a massive area that I cannot really go into but again...so what? Why must our response be "buildings are bad?" As far as Christianity copying paganism - have the writers [Frank Viola and George Barna] read the Old Testament? Whole books [i.e. Numbers] are about the building of the temple and tabernacles...Paganism has hardly had the monopoly on buildings...the Bible is full of them. Obviously with Christ the new overtakes the old and we now have Christ in us and we do not need to go to a particular place to meet God; we have the Spirit. Similarly in John 4 Jesus said to the Samaritan woman that no longer would people need to worship in a particular place but would worship in spirit and in truth.

The issues surrounding the use of church buildings in the church is not going to be argued away by saying that buildings are pagan and therefore we should get rid of them. That to me sounds so religious! God can use and work through anything and everything - including "pagan buildings." The issue for the church today is whether they are going to care more about the buildings than the community inside them AND the people not meeting inside them. In the circles of Christians I generally find myself in I rarely find someone who genuinely thinks they must go to a sacred building to meet with God.

Buildings are not necessary for church but they are necessary for life and as long as they are viewed properly surely they can be a help rather than a hindrance to the kingdom of God. Buildings are where people can be fed and clothed, where people can be rehabilitated; others can be taught and trained so they can go out and plant oragnic churches. Buildings can be a place of prayer, a place to go to get away from the messiness and jobs and computers and TVs we find at home that distract uis form spending time with God.

If we want to see revival in this nation it will most likely come through Organic Churches - because its a multiplication method [read the book Organic Church] not an addition method [like Alpha etc]. However to sustain such an evangelisic method and see continuity in this we need centres for training, for healing, for rehab, for prayer, and for meeting. Being at St Thomas Church Philadelphia is brilliant because the buildings generally are not that nice and are certainly not a focus or an ideal and yet they are used for amazing things...young people can meet there, assylum seekers can come, single mums, children, students. Its only if we cared about the buildings more than these things that we have a theological and biblical problem. Buildings are not pagan - people can be! and they don't need a building to be.

sowing and reaping

I am a big believer in adopting evangelistic and missionary tools that are culturally appropriate, spirit led and I am so grateful to the emerging church and fresh expressions movements for pointing out that we need to Go and adapt to the people rather than make people adapt to our church structures. However I am increasingly challenged about what this actually looks like in my everyday life. We must not stay in a place of reflecting and discussing and grappling with the question of mission at the expense of losing an intentiality in our evangelistic action. We must act, we must step over a line.

How bizzarre the days we are living in...VAT down to 15%. When did that last happen? We are in an opportune season with Christmas coming, a new year not far off and so much in the media to make people think about life and its meaning. After Christmas the buses we have probably all heard about with the humanistic slogan "God probably doesn't exist so stop worrying.." on will be driving about the place. This really is a time to step up, be diligent, devote ourselves to the kingdom, pursue a deeper relationship and be intentional and active in our evangelism. For me at the moment this is potentially swallowing my pride a little and engaging in some more bog standard evangelistic methods but hopefully bringing the edge of the spirit and the mix and creativity of what the emerging church movement encourages us to do. Please pray for an event I am doing called Carols and Cappucino which is an evangelistic carol service for students in a starbucks in town on December 16th.

So sowing and reaping...we have so many strategies and compared to a few years ago we are so much ebtter at sowing into peoples lives thoughts and little tid bits about Jesus. It used to be standard to be afraid to do this. However most of us are kinda getting the hang of this [if you are still working on this side too sorry...go for it!]. However do we have faith to actually reap and see people move much closer to Jesus? Are we expecting this to happen this Christmas for someone?

Grace: Effort and Earning

"Grace is not opposed to effort but it is opposed to earning." I heard this recently in a talk on Galatians 4. A very regular featured discussion within my own thoughts has been how to balance striving and being passionate for God. I have come to realise that the answer is not a balance but whether you are free or not from a religious mindset and if you have embraced the message of grace. If you are caught in the middle you are simply not fully free and need to press in for that freedom. As I write this I am so amazed at how much God has freed me from all legalistic tendencies that I cannot even enter into the mindset I used to have to blog about it! I can't recall what it was like to feel I have to do something in order to be acceptable to God. I know that I know that I know that he loves me just the way I am.

So if grace is not opposed to effort then that means that the other extreme of "oh I am not going to spend time with God coz its all about grace" is also a lesser form of living than God wants for us. I believe we cannot have the mindset that God will spoon feed us or drop everything into our plates because he is "graceful." That is not grace in my view. Jesus came and lived like us to show us what grace can achieve in us if we partner with the Holy Spirit and let God channel through us all of heaven. This requires a transformation of the mind and a dedication and passion to seeking God, being intentional about being alligned with heaven and occupying and receiving all that is legally ours because of the cross. There is no SHORTCUT to this except effort, prayer, stepping out in faith, failing, study and all the other glorious spiritual disciplines. This MUST NOT be confused with striving to earn God's affections.

We must also acknowledge that there is such a warfare against us in this journey. The enemy does not want us to pursue all this. In fact I believe the enemy has probably given us this false view of grace that means we don't pursue God, or put any energy in and as a result we see not near enough kingdom activity as we could do.

How about grace with each other? For me at the moment this is the battle ground. God is pruning the socks off me at the moment in relation to accepting the grace others want to give me and also realising I can't earn the affections of others - well I can but it is a tiring and ungodly way to live. I am letting go.

I have the lovely Sarah Bailey staying at the moment. She is hanging out with Form and soaking up the atmosphere at Philly.

...it's been awhile

Well I really did not want to have a boring blog that is rarely updated so I am ashamed at the way I have not written for nearly a week. It has been a busy week although thats a silly excuse - when do I not have a busy week!?

I had the lovely Rachel Kelly staying last weekend - we had fun doing myers briggs [sorry I am a St Thomas' loser now! but proud of it]. http://www.myersbriggs.org/I have the lovely Sarah Bailey coming for two weeks from Sunday.

The word thankful simply does not express my gratitude or sense of awe towards God at the moment. I am truly humbled at his mercies to me in so many ways. God truly wants us to "have life, and have it to the full." John 10:10. We often quote this verse in relation to how and why we may do evangelism, we may use it in a conversation with a non-churched person. However I seldom have used the verse in relation to me. [You may not have had this same blindspot - it could just be me!]

I am receiving some great mentoring at the moment and something I have been working through and pondering are where am I experiencing counterfeit freedoms? Where am I dealing with something or experiencing something and on one level it seems good and godly, but on another level it is not the highest heavenly level of freedom or expression of life to the full that Jesus wants for me. The enemy will give us some levels of victory, some levels of freedom as long as we "leave it there." We must be tenacious in seeking the life to the full that Jesus has for us in order to truly live how we were meant to live.

It's a cliche but its true that the good is the enemy of the best. I am devoted to seeing revival in this nation and it's going to happen through Christians who are living and walking in the fullness of the freedom of God. Creation is groaning in expectation for the sons of God to be revealed [Romans 8]. This nation needs sons not slaves, revivalists not relatively free born again Christians. God is so good, so good. I am determined to receive all heaven has for me because of the cross; the crack through which all of heaven flows. I am sold out to the king of glory coming into my life in his gorgeously deeper wider longer and higher ways. Bring it on Jesus.