Children of Promise

Another final blog entry from the other account I had...
For the past couple of days I've been really struck by the word "promise". I'm reading through Galations and had one of those "I've read this loads of times before but have never ever noticed this verse before" moments. And it all happened in chapter 4 when Paul starts talking about how we're children of promise while he's writing about Hagar & Ishmael vs Sarah & Isaac/slavery vs freedom/law vs promise. I was just blown away by this whole thing of being children of promise. There's such an incredible freedom in the midst of it all. Children of promise don't need to strive or earn because they're children not because of what they do, but because of what God has promised (and we know that He's faithful to fulfil every promise He makes). We're part of the promise He made to Abraham back in the day (somewhere around Genesis 12, I think...). We're children of faith, not of law or works. As children of promise there's a rest that we have. We rest in our identity because the God of covenant has made a covenant with us. God is a promise-keeping God. We rest in His love. We rest in His grace. This whole thing of being children of promise blows the whole concept of legalism right out of the window and ushers in the beautiful, life-giving truth that is grace, and the spacious place of freedom that comes with it. It's so incredible. WE are children of promise. We ARE children of promise. We are CHILDREN of promise. We are children of PROMISE. (get the picture??). As children of promise all we have to do is wait, enjoy God, rest in Him, let our hearts respond to Him. There's such a sweetness to it all. And from that place of being children of promise God fills the earth with the fragrance of His love. It's just incredible.

Freedom in Christ is so much more abundant than what we've made it to be....anybody care to venture with me & explore the spacious place??

Short & Sweet

Another post from my other blog account.

Stuff I've learned recently

Let yourself be loved in your brokenness.

Patience breathes freedom from expectation.

Friends are more important than I ever realised.

Love sees people as people not objects.

Introspection is a dark thing. Remain fascinated with Jesus and allow Him to hold what dwells inside in the confusion of the soul. Remaining introspective causes us to be less effective in our fight against the kingdom of darkness. Staying enthralled by Jesus breathes fresh air into a suffocating soul.

Surrender and individualism

This is another imported blog entry from my other account...

I'm reading "The relentless tenderness of Jesus" by Brennan Manning at the moment (INCREDIBLE book, by the way). I'm in the final section which is talking about Christmas.

"The contemplative at Christmas grows quiet before "the light [that] shines in the darkness" (John 1:5). He stills his soul and becomes tranquil like a child in its mother's arms. He interiorizes and appropriates to himself the mercy, forgiveness, reconciliation and love that are embodied in the Child of Bethlehem. He surrenders to the grace of the Word made flesh. He accepts acceptance."

I've never really thought of surrender in that way before. In my mind it's always been about surrendering to the Holy One, the sovereign Lord, the King of kings, the One on the throne, the one true God, the almighty God. In that place, surrender can be hard & motivated by fear. But surrender to grace...that's another thing altogether. Surrendering to grace is a willing response because of the extravagant goodness and love inherent in grace. Surrendering to the grace of the Word made flesh is LIFE. It's not sacrifice in a negative way. It's a step of faith, but is dependent on the goodness of God and on the beauty of the unity of grace and holiness, goodness and glory.

The other thing I've been thinking about recently has been individualism - partly because I'm an incredibly individualistic person & I'm realising more and more how individualism & faith in Jesus just don't go together.

One of my friends really challenged me about my individualism this week & got me thinking about some stuff. He asked me what I hear when I hear the expression "personal relationship with God". Do I hear "individual relationship with God" or do I hear "relationship with the person of God"? There's a massive difference. In relating to God in an individual way, it's all about me, I, my experience, etc. It ignores the corporate aspect of faith. I'm not saying that we shouldn't have alone time with God, but I think in the west we're in danger of having so much "alone time" with God that we get unsettled by the corporate dimension of it all. What do we value more? I haven't got too much further in my thoughts to be honest, because I don't want to simply intellectualise it all. I want to live it out. That's going to take more time. I can have all the theory in the world, but if i'm not living it, it's meaningless. As good old James wrote "don't merely listen to the word and so deceive yourselves. Do what it says" (james 1:22).

Love, love, love (it's another Beatles moment)

In an effort to try & have one blog as opposed to 2, I'm combining my blog entries, so sticking my favourite ones onto here so I can shut my other account down. If you haven't read these ones before, enjoy! :)

This one's from 28th June 2007:

As a few/lot (not really sure to be honest) of you know, the past 18 months or so has been a journey into the heart of God for me, really grasping His love, His Father heart, His grace (oh, His sweet, sweet grace. Such a powerful thing)...

I'm not really inclined to get off this journey anytime soon, actually. It's so easy to leap from one thing to the next and to miss the depth and fulness of God. That's my experience anyway.
But this journey of love...well, that's the rest of my life. And that gets me pretty excited. Actually, that is the one thing that will have me pinging off the walls.
I'm beginning to grasp some of His love, now. Paul talks about the height and depth and width and length of that love and I'm blown away by how boundless it is. But how do we go from receiving to giving? What stands in the way of it all?
It's so easy to complicate this whole life thing. Jesus came for us to have life and life to the FULL and yet we crowd out that fulness, His fulness, with a whole bunch of other stuff.
But life is just about loving - we love because He first loved us. And so we receive His love and pass it on. Simple as that. Simple and yet so hard.
I notice so much fear in me when it comes to loving others - fear of rejection, plain old fear of man. It's one of those situations where i can recite all the Bible verses that talk about things like perfect love driving out fear, about us not having a spirit of fear, but of sonship, of power, love and a sound mind, about the fear of man being a snare, but those who trust in the Lord being kept safe....but what does it look like to LIVE those things?
In many ways these questions are hypothetical and are just part of the journey for me, you know? They show me how desperately I need a deeper revelation. a deeper understanding of the love of God. They show me that there are areas of my heart that haven't received that love, no matter how much I want to argue the matter.
I was having a chat with someone recently, though, who pointed out something that brought so much encouragement to me and yet so much challenge too.
I was talking about the challenges of loving, of stepping out and the risk involved in loving. My friend came out with this: God risks His heart everyday and has His heart broken everyday. Everyday He faces rejection. In creation, in His crucifixion, as He waits for His Bride to be made spotless...He constantly, daily risks His heart and loves and loves and loves, willing to risk the heartache if only to love, to extend His love and see if His love will be returned. He knows the heartache of unrequited love, or betrayal, of lukewarmness, or unkept promises. But He knows the joy of being loved too because He dared to extend His love.
How incredible is that?! Am I missing out on something of the joy of being loved because I'm holding back love because of fear of rejection, heartache, etc, etc?
I'm so challenged & yet so excited at the whole prospect of it....it's one step at a time for me, but I'm so looking forward to taking another step along the journey of love, another step towards having life to the full...another step towards obedience :)

My Dundee

For the past couple of weeks I've been regularly struck by a question: is the Dundee that I live in the same as the Dundee that other people live in? I'm guessing probably not, but it's hard to tell. It's been blowing my mind that thousands of people can live in the same city, village, wherever, and yet all of them will have their own perspective of that place, their own way of seeing colours, their own things that they focus in on and take note of, their own memories connected with places.
And I don't really know any of those perspectives, any of those idiosyncrasies, so I thought that I'd start sharing some of mine and introduce my Dundee to you.

My Dundee is full of colours that come alive in the sunshine, change with the seasons, and can captivate me in ways that not much else can. There are the trees on Balgay hill that at times seem so concentrated, and yet let light stream through and illuminate individual leaves, which in springtime is insanely vibrant and around now is opulent in its beauty. There are the gardens around where I live, some perfectly tended, others wilder, all beautiful in their own way. The garden on the corner is my favourite at this time of year because it is laden with cotoneaster berries parading the autumnal reds and golds, heralding the changing of the seasons. In the summer this garden always commands my attention too, although I'm not entirely sure how to explain why. It's never as cultivated and immaculate as its surrounding gardens, but has a wild elegance to it, and hues that seem as if they're simply the way that God created them with no man-made embellishments. There's the garden on the other side of my block of flats that, in the springtime, becomes awash with glowing yellow daffodils. As far as daffodils go, however, Dudhope park wins the prize:

My Dundee involves watching the sun rise over the Tay bridge and set over the chimney-topped skyline, taking in the way that the last rays of sun illuminate the clouds, drinking in the message of the love, faithfulness, nearness, personal nature and hope of God that are proclaimed so clearly to me through the sky's display.
My Dundee consists of many people that I know, and many people who remain unknown in name, but whose interactions with the world fascinate me. There's the German family across the road, whose car looks like it's been painted as camouflage for an exotic tropical island with aquamarine water, through whom God speaks to me a lot about His Father heart, simply because of the relationship of the dad with his sons. He spends, what looks like at least, so much quality time with them, playing with them, running around the house and garden with them, laughing with them. It's a picture of joy, of love, of delight to me. Then there's their next-door neighbour - the lady whose house is always the last one to have snow melting from its roof when it does snow, and who often hangs around her doorway on sunny days smoking.
My Dundee is a weird and wonderful place and that's just a first taste. More I'm sure will come another time.

Confine the Lion...and the Lamb steps forth

It's so easy to confine You
To the limits of my thinking
To make You fit into me
And not me fit into You.
But You don't change
And there are places in my life
That need to be changed
To fit into You.
I fit You around my schedule
And call it flexible
Although its rigidity is frightening.
I go my own way
And call it order
But not allowing You
To order my steps with Your
Gentle whisper
Guiding touch.
The reality looms beneath
The surface
A scary sight to confront,
So easy to cover over with
Comforting words of positivity
But the reality is different,
Telling another story to the one
I portray.
I have tried to tame the Lion
Tried to muzzle it
Muffle its roar
Feed it vegetables not meat.
I've tried to hide the Lion
And present the Lamb.
But the Lamb is full of surprises
And opens its mouth with a
Deafening roar.
And the Lion remains silent.
How do I give over to the One
Who is constant, unchanging
And yet so unpredictable?
Take me there, Holy Spirit.
Take me there...

It's for freedom....

I've been thinking a lot about freedom recently, wondering how much I really get it, how much I really live in it.
What is freedom? Like really, what is freedom? For ages I've read and savoured verses from the Bible like "it's for freedom that Christ set us free" (Galatians 5:1), "if the son has set you free you are free indeed" (John 8:36), "where the Spirit of the Lord is there is freedom" (2 Corinthians 3:17). And when I think of freedom, well I suppose I don't really think about freedom at all - I focus on the prisons that the freedom releases us from and the chains that come off, but somehow never get to really thinking about or understanding what FREEDOM involves. It's something that's so easy to talk about, but seems to be so hard to live. There are no easy confines, and it's no longer about right and wrong, making mistakes or not. These confines are an easy place to stay, full of black and white delineations that keep us allegedly secure, and yet keep us from remaining in God. The confines keep us in control, wanting to appear perfect, sinless, self-sufficient...by remaining in the confines we also remain proud, and miss out on the fullness of life that has been promised to us. But that's not freedom. This is going to sound really obvious, but freedom is meant to be free. We're made to be free.
Freedom, from the perspective of the confined environment that many of us choose to live in (myself included, by the way), is terrifying - it's jumping out of an aeroplane without a parachute, diving off a cliff blindfolded....it's an unknown place that feels like it could be the death of us. And I think that maybe freedom is the death of us. But that's not necessarily a bad thing. You see I wonder if, in order to be truly free, we do have to die. I wonder if, in order to be really free, we have to embrace some things that mean we will have to let go of other things.
I occasionally glimpse freedom - I see its beauty, I see its colour, its vibrancy, the excitement & anticipation that reside within, the wildness that pulses through it, the wholeheartedness of freedom. It's incredible. But living in it, abandoning certain things in my life in order to live in that beautiful state is another thing altogether. It's somehow so hard to say goodbye to my self-sufficiency, to the perfectionistic need for right & wrong to be defined, so that I know I'm right and can correct myself when I'm wrong, my pride that has dictated and directed for so long. It's so hard to part with control. You see, to jump out of the aeroplane I don't have control anymore. The control I have is only the decision I make to jump or not to jump. The consequences of that decision are beyond my grasp.
But freedom demands that I let go of these things and simply walk the path of trust. Trust. Trust. Trust. And that requires me knowing God and believing, like REALLY believing that He is who He says He is.
Even as I write this I feel the struggle in my own soul. It's so easy to focus on what I'm "losing" and not on what I'll gain. Freedom is a glorious place of intimacy with God, a place of adventure, a place of wholeheartedness and abandon. The loss is NOTHING compared to what is there. And yet still I hold on. HOW LONG??? How long will it take? I long to be the woman in the photo at the start of this post - to jump and be free, to fly when I don't see my wings.
The words of a song come to mind:
"Wild horses I want to be like you,
Throwing caution to the wind I'll run free too
Wish I could wrecklessly love like I'm longing to
I want to run with the wild horses".
I so want to run with the wild horses, to live in the reality of the freedom that Christ died for me to have, to love freely, unashamedly, unafraid, unconditionally, lavishly, wholeheartedly.