David with his Birthday Cake (Made from scratch by my wife).

I have a friend named David. He lives in an orange grove. He lives in a tent. Most people would say he is homeless. And I would have to agree except David’s real home is 1041 Corporate Drive. That’s the address of the church I pastor.

I have a friend named David. He rarely changes his clothes. His hygiene is almost non-existent . David smells bad too. When I talk to him, I am greeted by the odor of cigarettes and Bud light beer. People don’t like to sit near him in church. I’ve even heard people don’t want to worship God when David is near.

I have a friend named David. He comes to church every week. He comes on Friday night to hear the worship team rehearse for the next day. He comes back again the following day, for both services. He sits through CrossWalk U. where we talk theology and philosophy. David tells us about the night Jesus Christ walked into his tent and talked to him—and he wasn’t even doing drugs. He tells us this story, again, and again, and again. David loves our church. David prays for our church—every night.

I have a friend named David. He’s a former drug addict. He’s an alcoholic. His mind is gone. At times he doesn’t remember my name, my wife’s name, or my kid’s names. What does David remember? He remembers how his mother died when he was young. How his wife left him in Colorado and broke his heart. He remembers that he used to do the “hard stuff, but not anymore”, as he says. He remembers to tell me these stories every time I see him, as if it’s the first time. And David remembers, that every week when he gets to church there’s warm coffee waiting for him, sometimes a bagel and donuts too.

I have a friend named David. I watched him in church today. He was sitting three rows in front of me. He was wearing his new blue coat. A coat from donations I helped him find in storage today.  I watched David listening to the music, trying to sing. I watched him leave three times to have a cigarette. But David always comes back. I watched him sing “It is Well with My Soul” and it is well with my soul, for I belong to a church that has a homeless man who worships God better than I do.

I have a friend named David. I’ve been told I need to talk to him about his drinking and his smoking. I’ve been told I need to talk to him about his hygiene. We are glad he’s here but we want him to change. We want him to be like us. Smell like us. Look like us. Act like us.

I have a friend named David. I wish he would change. I wish there would be a miracle. But I doubt it can happen. I do not even worry if it will happen. I am at peace. God hasn’t given me the power to heal my friend, fix my friend. He’s only given me the power to love my friend.

I have a friend named David. I watched him in church today. I smelled him in church today. I heard him in church today. And I thanked God for my friend today. Jesus was in church today, not in the beautiful people I saw, not in the lovely children that sat near me, not in the songs or the prayers or the sermon today. Jesus was in church today through a homeless man named David.

I have a friend named David. He’s been sent from God. When I see David, when I hear David, when I smell David, I am reminded that church isn’t about me. This worship experience isn’t about me. It’s not about my comfort, it’s not about my happiness, it’s not about my well being. It’s about Jesus, and Jesus is sitting three rows in front of me in a homeless man named David.

I have a friend named David. Do you?

Note: I am re-reading Dallas Willard’s book, The Divine Conspiracy. Over the next several weeks I’ll be posting my reflections as I make my way through a book  that changed my life nearly a decade ago.

Last week I said, What Jesus Knew: Our God-Bathed World, is one of the most important chapters in Willard’s book. Namely because he gives us a vision for putting our confidence in Jesus Christ—crucial for anyone who really wants to follow him. Here are further reasons why we can trust Jesus with our lives.

1. God Wants to be Seen
God isn’t hiding from us. He wants to be seen, but in the spiritual realm we don’t see things the same way we do with the naked eye. Part of seeing God is desiring to see him.

Persons rarely become present where they are not heartily wanted. Certainly that is true for you and me. We prefer to be wanted, warmly wanted, before we reveal our souls—or even come to a party. The ability to see and the practice of seeing God and God’s world comes through a process of seeking in intimacy with him. (p. 77)

2. God is Not in “Space”
If you go looking for God in “outer space” you won’t find him (e.g. the Orion Nebula). However that doesn’t mean God isn’t there. God operates in a realm that we can’t see with our finite vision.

… the air our body requires envelops us in every hand. To receive it we need only breathe. Likewise, “The air’ which our souls need also envelops all of us at all times and on all sides. God is round about us in Christ on every hand, with his many-sided and all-sufficient grace. All we need to do is to open our hearts. (p. 78)

3. We See with God
One of the reasons people reject Jesus’ teachings, is because they can’t see his world. In Jesus’ world things don’t work the same way the do in our world, e.g. the widow who gave all she had. Foolish to our world, not to God’s world.

It was of greater value. More value was done with the widow’s pennies than with the “large” gifts of others. The context of the Kingdom Among Us transforms the respective actions. Little is much,’ we say, “when God is in it.” And do it is. Really. (p. 88)

4. The Great Inversion
At the very heart of the Gospel is the “Great Inversion” where Jesus turns everything right side up, e.g. the Widow’s offering, Jesus’ parable of the workers in the vineyard or the mustard seed.

To become a disciple of Jesus is to accept now that inversion of human distinction that will sooner or later be forced upon everyone by the irresistible reality of his kingdom. How must we think of him to see the inversion from our present viewpoint? We must, simply accept that he is the best and smartest man who ever lived in this world, that he is “even now” the prince of the kings of the earth” (Rev. 1:5). Then we heartily join his cosmic conspiracy to overcome evil with good. (p. 90)

5. The Smartest Man
That last passage is one of my favorites. The truth is, we don’t think of Jesus as smart. According to Willard, failing to do so, limits our ability to put our confidence in Jesus.

He is not just nice, his is brilliant. He is the smartest man who ever lived. He is now supervising the entire course of world history (Rev. 1:5) while simultaneously preparing the rest of the universe for our future role in it (John 14:2). He always has the best information on everything and certainly also on the things that matter most in human life. (p. 95)

Note: I am re-reading Dallas Willard’s book, The Divine Conspiracy. Over the next several weeks I’ll be posting my reflections as I make my way through a book  that changed my life nearly a decade ago.

In the second chapter, Gospels of Sin Management, Dallas sees as a crisis in Christianity. Christians aren’t that different than non-Christians. This has resulted in our anemic witness for the Gospel of Jesus Christ. The main reason? We are not disciples of Jesus. Rather we have turned Christianity into a “bar-code” religion where anyone can go to heaven if they have the right beliefs, bypassing the need to follow Jesus. As Willard writes:

Some ritual, some belief, or some association with a group affects God the way the bar code affects the scanner. Perhaps there has occurred a moment of mental assent to a creed, or an association entered into with a church. God “scans” it, and forgiveness floods forth. An appropriate amount of righteousness is shifted from Christ’s account to our account in the bank of heaven, and all our debts are paid. We are accordingly, “saved.” Our guilt is erased. (p. 37)

In contrast to this “gospel”, Jesus comes to each of us as the master teacher, seeking people who will become his “apprentices” and learn his ways and do what he did. In the process they will become like him, transformed from the inside out.  This means we must move from a faith marked by the right beliefs to a faith that takes Jesus seriously, i.e. one that is marked by faith and confidence in him. Willard explains it like this:

What must be emphasized in all of this is the difference between trusting Christ, the real person of Jesus, with all that that naturally involves, versus trusting some arrangement for sin-remission set up through him—trusting only his role as guilt remover. To trust the real person Jesus is to have confidence in him in every dimension of our real life, to believe that his right about and adequate to everything. (p. 48-49)

This is the challenge of following Jesus Christ in this world. Do we trust him and have confidence in him? Do we rely on him for everything? Or is it just an idea? An ideal we hope for someday? How we answer those questions influences how we live out our faith in the world. When we seek to follow Jesus, to become his students, or as Willard says, his apprentices, we learn to trust him completely, even in the face of death. And when that happens, we’ve entered into Jesus’ eternal kind of life now.

Note: I am re-reading Dallas Willard’s book, The Divine Conspiracy. Over the next several weeks’ I’ll be posting my reflections as I make my way through a book  that changed my life nearly a decade ago.

Dallas Willard, says he wrote The Divine Conspiracy, “to gain a fresh hearing of Jesus.” Willard believes over familiarity with Jesus’ teachings have led many Christians to “profound ignorance” about following him, meaning “he [Jesus] is not taken to be a person of much ability.”  For example, when Jesus says love your enemies, he can’t be serious, it’s an ideal that doesn’t work in the “real” world. In contrast Willard argues, Jesus’ original followers took him at his word, they saw his teachings as the best way to live in this world. He writes:

The early message was, accordingly, not experienced as something its hearers had to believe or do because otherwise something bad—something with no essential connection with real life—would happen to them. The people generally impacted by that message generally concluded that they would be fools to disregard it. That was the basis of their conversion.

The Divine Conspiracy, p. xiv

Yet this isn’t the case today. Many Christians believe in Jesus, but they don’t believe Jesus. There’s a difference for Willard.  And he claims, one reason for the “weakened effect of Christianity in the world.” Willard hoped The Divine Conspiracy would help people do what Jesus Christ said, once again, as people did in the past.

His view of discipleship has been compelling to me over the years. Before reading The Divine Conspiracy I had never considered the idea of following Jesus simply because it was the best thing to do with my life, or in Willard’s words, “the best strategy I ever heard of.” He writes about this in one of my favorite passages from the introduction:

Individual Christians still hear Jesus say, “Whoever hears these words of mine and does them is like those intelligent people who build their houses upon rock,” standing firm against every pressure of life [Matt. 7.24-25]. How life giving it would be their understanding of the gospel allowed them simply to reply, “I will do them! I will find out how. I will devote my life to it! This is the best life strategy I ever head of!” and then go off to their fellowship and its teachers, and into their daily life, to learn how to live in his kingdom as Jesus indicated was best.

The Divine Conspiracy, p. xvi

One of the reasons for rereading this book is to see if that idea still resonates with me. Luke ends with the disciples hiding in fear. Acts begins with the disciples proclaiming the Gospel without fear. What happened? After spending three years with Jesus, hearing him teach about the Kingdom of God, did they finally get it? Did they wake up one day and say, “Ah, this is the best way to live our lives!” Is that what compelled them?

In recent years I’ve come to believe that Jesus’ followers were compelled to trust him when they witnessed his resurrection.  That’s what validated the life and teachings of Jesus.  That single event gave Jesus’ followers the confidence to trust him even when he commanded them to love your enemies. If God could raise Jesus from the dead, he can be trusted with anything. Even our own lives. So I agree with Willard, Jesus’ teachings offer the best way to live in this world, but without the resurrection, it’s just ethics. I believe that’s the point Paul is making to the Church in Corinth:

If Christ has not been raised, your faith is futile and you are still in your sins. Then those also who have died in Christ have perished. If for this life only we have hoped in Christ, we are of all people most to be pitied.

“Love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your soul, with all your mind, and with all your strength. And … love your neighbor as yourself.”

I pastor a church in the suburbs called CrossWalk. We have a saying around our church that we are learning to love well.  It’s our mission and it comes from this simple yet challenging teaching of Jesus.  Scot McKnight refers to this as the  Jesus Creed. Several years ago be began reciting it throughout the day. It transformed his life and eventually led him to write The Jesus Creed.

Since the Jesus Creed is the basis of  CrossWalk’s mission we decided to encourage our community to go through Scot’s companion book 40 Days Living the Jesus Creed during the season of Lent. Each day provides a simple reflection on learning to love well. So far it’s been a good experience. In fact my family is using it everyday. We’re reciting the Jesus Creed with our kids each morning and evening (we’ve even had some fun with it while driving around town).

So if you’re looking for something to add to your Lenten practices this year, there’s still time to grab a copy and join us on our journey. In fact, come by CrossWalk this week if you are in town and I’ll give you a free copy (We gave away 300 copies at CrossWalk the last few weeks). There’s a few books left, but its first come first serve at this point.

This week is Transfiguration Sabbath at CrossWalk. The lectionary readings come from Exodus 34:29-35; Psalm 99; 2 Corinthians 3:12-4:2; and Luke 9:28-36, (37-43). I am focusing on the Gospel reading for my sermon this week, but I’m weaving all of the readings together to make my point. Dwelling in these passages leaves me in awe of God’s humility. What kind of a God chooses to reveal his glory to the world through suffering (Lk. 9:57-62) and brokenness (2 Cor. 4)? Would anyone choose to make up this kind of god? We want temples and shrines for our gods. But the God of the Gospels gets things done another way. And our “departure” (Lk. 9:31) is the same—the path of Jesus Christ and his radical call to discipleship. So what are the implications? How about the church is meant to give herself away rather than prop herself up with success, impressing people with her buildings, attendance, or cash (a kind of pseudo-glory)?  Seems to me, Jesus’ path is the only way the world is transformed. I think Henry Nouwen would agree:

“Jesus showed us all that the very things we often flee – our vulnerability and mortality – can, at any moment, become the place of holy transfiguration, for us and for our world.”

- Henri Nouwen: Writings Selected With An Introduction By Robert A. Jonas