For the longest time I would say with a high level of certainty that this is a phrase that I would use to define my relationship with God. Unfortunately, for myself, and many others these two words have become synonymous. While this was never my intention, like many aspects of my own life, I became complacent in my growth.
Making a decision to change an aspect of your life, whether it is your personal faith beliefs, an aspect of your health, your career, or a relationship you have with another is never easy. Unless we continue to reinforce that decision our growth will eventually stop. It comes in the form of only going to church on Sundays, cheating on your diet or skipping a workout, and even giving ourselves permission to enter into a relationship with someone who has many of the characteristics of the person we just cast out of our lives. Whatever it is, our old tendencies come back, and often with a vengeance.
Many people would call this the “enemy” sneaking back into our lives, working his plans, and being patient enough to wait out our own humanity; knowing it’s easier for us to go backwards than it is forwards. I don’t think anyone would argue that routines, especially ones that we find comfortable, are very hard things to break away from. In fact, the more ingrained that pattern is, the more difficult it is for us to make lasting change.
Fortunately for Christians we do not have this option! When we enter into a relationship with God we enter it knowing that there are boundaries and expectations on our relationship. How many of us have heard that being a Christian is the hardest thing? It truly is, because we have a God that cares about us more than anyone in our lives. Not only that, our God desires to have a relationship with us no matter what our faults are and He meets us where we are and expects us to grow.
In my small group on Friday night, we talked about forgiveness; specifically focusing on our forgiveness of God. The conversation soon evolved into the servant nature of our relationship with God. In fact, as it was eloquently argued, we are in fact enslaved to God, as he purchased our lives through Jesus’ sacrifice on the cross.
While that in it self was an amazing teaching, it got me thinking about the general responsibilities we all share as Christians. We are called to grow in our understanding of God, and to really take hold of what His will is for our lives. When we are in congruency with the plans that God has for us, and allow Him to direct our lives, we cannot begin to fathom the amazing things that may happen through us, by Him. While our lives won’t always be filled with “sunshine and rainbows” God’s will, His teachings, and the way our lives play out, always, without fail, are designed to be good for us, and afford us the opportunity to grow deeper in our relationship with Him.
In Luke chapter twelve, we see that our understanding of God’s will for our lives is proportional to His expectations for us. Additionally, when we are incongruent with His will, the “punishment” we receive is proportionate to our understanding of the Word:
"The servant who knows his master’s will and does not get ready or does not do what his master wants will be beaten with many blows. But the one who does not know and does things deserving punishment will be beaten with few blows. From everyone who has been given much, much will be demanded; and from the one who has been entrusted with much, much more will be asked. (Luke 12:47-48)
The good news in all of this is that He entrusts us with many things and we freely choose to take on these responsibilities; however difficult they may be! We all know that God can speak to us in our quiet time, through another individual, or through an event. Sometimes this conversation is designed to remind us that we are straying from His path. When God speaks to us through another person, we can either choose to accept their criticisms as words of encouragement coming from a sincere place, or an attack against us (something the enemy would want us to believe!). It is these individuals in our lives who hold us accountable for our actions that TRULY love us, and aren’t afraid to approach us. It is when we aren’t receiving this feedback from others that we should be truly concerned, because when others stop paying attention to your behavior and the congruency of your actions with your stated ideals, that they have really given up on you.
As one final note, I realize it is hard to have these conversations with others. You don’t want to “come off wrong” or be “misinterpreted.” Even at the age of 30, I am still (in my mind) terrible at starting this type of conversation, but I can tell you that if you truly do it out of love for the other person, they will know it. In fact, it is often in these moments where we are helping to lead our brothers and sisters back to Christ, that God will reveal in our own lives some of the ways we ourselves may have strayed.
3.18.2012
3.13.2012
Finding Flow
There is the old idiom “go with the flow” that many of us have heard countless times in our lives. Often, we are reminded of this under situations that are stressful to us. Whether we are in the midst of a situation that may feel foreign, alienating, or we just feely poorly equipped to adequately respond to the given task, this statement often applies. I know in my own life, particularly my studies in chiropractic school, I often encountered experiences such as this as I was exposed to new, and vastly different, techniques. As my knowledge base shifted, and my understanding of anatomy, physiology, biomechanical and neurological function of the human body, and most importantly, the philosophy of chiropractic grew, these challenges became less frequent. In fact, they became opportunities to flourish and grow.
When we are actively engaging this “flow,” we can rephrase the action as “going with the flow.” As Mihayl Csikszentmihalyi describes in his numerous works on a topic called “flow,” when we are actively working in an environment that has certain conditions for success, we may often enter this state of flow. These conditions include: (1) structured goals and specific tasks, (2) an understanding of the skill-set, and the personal fortitude to see the task through, and (3) immediate feedback which allows for shifts in how the individual engages in the task to keep it continuous and uninterrupted.
This concept of “flow” manifests itself in many ways. Have you ever had a day at work where it just seemed to fly by and unbelievably productive? You probably even felt energized at the end of the day, as if it almost required none of your physical energies. I know that for myself, this experience often manifests itself when I am serving through the vehicle of chiropractic. I’ll be adjusting for a few hours, and when I sit down to finish my paperwork at the end of the evening, and actually tally up the number of patients I have seen, I surprise myself. The day seemed effortless, enjoyable, and fulfilling.
When speaking with my mentor two weeks ago, he asked me how I end up in that space while I am adjusting. My answer really came down to “my trust in God.” I notice that the more I trust God in guiding my adjustments (and even my studies in school) the more profound the healings are that occur, the more patients I can serve, and the more filled up I feel at the end of the day. It’s as if we enter into a state of trance, and serve with God’s guidance.
Scripture even supports this idea of “finding flow” (incidentally, also the name of one of Csikszentmihalyi’s books). In John 7:38 Jesus tells us, “Whoever believes in me, as the Scripture has said, streams of living water will flow from within him.” When we are connected to God and the Holy Spirit it is truly a time for God to work through us. As A.W. Tozer points out, our relationship with God is proportional to how often we see God working through us in our lives, and the credit we give to a power not of our own at work. Our belief, understanding and the relationship that we build with God represents our own preparedness to face whatever challenges or situations that may arise.
I would argue that there is a direct relationship between our individual relationships with God and the frequency that we find ourselves in flow. For as the Word of God often states, when we are out of relationship with our Father, the waters dry up. One clear example of this is Psalm 107:
He turned rivers into a desert, flowing springs into thirsty ground, and fruitful land into a salt waste, because of the wickedness of those who lived there. He turned the desert into pools of water and the parched ground into flowing springs; there he brought the hungry to live, and they founded a city where they could settle. They sowed fields and planted vineyards that yielded fruitful harvest; he blessed them, and their numbers greatly increased, and he did not let their herds diminish. (verses 33-38)
On Sunday at Marietta Vineyard Church I believe that we collectively entered a state of flow and it was testament to the growth that our church is undergoing. While it would be impossible to adequately capture the profoundness of Sunday morning’s worship service, the best way I could describe it would be that we collectively "wrote a song for God.” As Psalm 107 states the vineyards will yield a fruitful harvest and their numbers will greatly increase. While there is the literal translation of increased food, I really feel this verse directly speaks to what is going on in our church.
As Pastor Ron pointed out in his sermon, the more “junk” we remove from our own personal rivers, the deeper our relationship with God will grow (and flow!). I like to think of our church as individual members who are working to clean up their own rivers. And, each of these rivers flows into one larger one, which we collectively define as our church body. As our personal rivers become clearer, stronger and more fertile, our church will exponentially grow in it’s own strength and fertility.
When we are actively engaging this “flow,” we can rephrase the action as “going with the flow.” As Mihayl Csikszentmihalyi describes in his numerous works on a topic called “flow,” when we are actively working in an environment that has certain conditions for success, we may often enter this state of flow. These conditions include: (1) structured goals and specific tasks, (2) an understanding of the skill-set, and the personal fortitude to see the task through, and (3) immediate feedback which allows for shifts in how the individual engages in the task to keep it continuous and uninterrupted.
This concept of “flow” manifests itself in many ways. Have you ever had a day at work where it just seemed to fly by and unbelievably productive? You probably even felt energized at the end of the day, as if it almost required none of your physical energies. I know that for myself, this experience often manifests itself when I am serving through the vehicle of chiropractic. I’ll be adjusting for a few hours, and when I sit down to finish my paperwork at the end of the evening, and actually tally up the number of patients I have seen, I surprise myself. The day seemed effortless, enjoyable, and fulfilling.
When speaking with my mentor two weeks ago, he asked me how I end up in that space while I am adjusting. My answer really came down to “my trust in God.” I notice that the more I trust God in guiding my adjustments (and even my studies in school) the more profound the healings are that occur, the more patients I can serve, and the more filled up I feel at the end of the day. It’s as if we enter into a state of trance, and serve with God’s guidance.
Scripture even supports this idea of “finding flow” (incidentally, also the name of one of Csikszentmihalyi’s books). In John 7:38 Jesus tells us, “Whoever believes in me, as the Scripture has said, streams of living water will flow from within him.” When we are connected to God and the Holy Spirit it is truly a time for God to work through us. As A.W. Tozer points out, our relationship with God is proportional to how often we see God working through us in our lives, and the credit we give to a power not of our own at work. Our belief, understanding and the relationship that we build with God represents our own preparedness to face whatever challenges or situations that may arise.
I would argue that there is a direct relationship between our individual relationships with God and the frequency that we find ourselves in flow. For as the Word of God often states, when we are out of relationship with our Father, the waters dry up. One clear example of this is Psalm 107:
He turned rivers into a desert, flowing springs into thirsty ground, and fruitful land into a salt waste, because of the wickedness of those who lived there. He turned the desert into pools of water and the parched ground into flowing springs; there he brought the hungry to live, and they founded a city where they could settle. They sowed fields and planted vineyards that yielded fruitful harvest; he blessed them, and their numbers greatly increased, and he did not let their herds diminish. (verses 33-38)
On Sunday at Marietta Vineyard Church I believe that we collectively entered a state of flow and it was testament to the growth that our church is undergoing. While it would be impossible to adequately capture the profoundness of Sunday morning’s worship service, the best way I could describe it would be that we collectively "wrote a song for God.” As Psalm 107 states the vineyards will yield a fruitful harvest and their numbers will greatly increase. While there is the literal translation of increased food, I really feel this verse directly speaks to what is going on in our church.
As Pastor Ron pointed out in his sermon, the more “junk” we remove from our own personal rivers, the deeper our relationship with God will grow (and flow!). I like to think of our church as individual members who are working to clean up their own rivers. And, each of these rivers flows into one larger one, which we collectively define as our church body. As our personal rivers become clearer, stronger and more fertile, our church will exponentially grow in it’s own strength and fertility.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)