Meditations on speaking the truth in love
One of the clearest and most pure descriptions of God’s nature or character is found in the bible in 1 John 4:8. “God is love.” Every human being is created in God’s image, so it is in our nature to love. Experience in life can bend or distort that nature, but the impulse is always there.
The Apostle Paul urges his readers to speak truth with love as the source of that truth-speaking. He writes “speak the truth in love” (Ephesians 4:15). In my experience, this is one of the most challenging exhortations to live into.
Many times under the guise of speaking the truth, I am actually expressing my own anger and using that to judge others or keep them away from me.
Then I remembered that anger is usually a secondary emotion. Underneath it there is often the experience of fear. Under the guise of speaking the truth, I am fearfully seeking to control others in my life so that I can feel safe. I am fearfully seeking to manipulate others into doing what I want or think that I need. Under the guise of speaking the truth, I am fearfully – self-righteously – seeking to hide my own failure by judging others.
Then one day it occurred to me that the Bible also says, “Perfect love cast out fear” (I John 4:18).
I began to wonder about that. It became clear to me how often my “truth-speaking” was driven by my fear – not by love. What if, before I could speak the truth in love, God’s love had to penetrate my fear? What if, any place that fear showed up in my life, it was an indicator to me of a place that I had not yet allowed God’s love to have access. What if, when fear showed up, that was me simply trying to protect an old wound that had not healed.
I began to see the people I was afraid of in my life and how it was virtually impossible for me to love what – or who – I feared.
I began to see a connection between my fear and my self-righteous judgment – between my fear and my need to control and manipulate – between my fear and my misguided attempts to speak the truth.
I began to see the deeper truth that the psalmist expresses so clearly. Trust in the Lord with all your heart. Lean not to your own understanding. In all your ways acknowledge him, and he will direct your paths (Proverbs 3:5-6).
So, in the presence of fear, I am seeking to turn inward to God. I’m seeking to be rigorously truthful about my fear. I am asking a few trusted others to name fear when they see it in me. Any place that I see fear in me, the truth I’m speaking is to name that fear and invite God to meet me in that place – to heal the wounding that is there . . .
. . . so that I can love, like God loves.
Fear is a powerful force, but perfect love casts out fear.
God Talk
Today my friend Nate Pyle put me onto a brief video that pokes fun at the religious language that Christians use. You can view it here.
As I watched the video I was reminded of a deep place of hurt in me that took a long time to heal. I grew up in a context with people who used what I now call “God talk.” It’s religious language that, in my experience, stood in the way of authenticity and grace.
On Sunday’s I would hear people use the God talk
. . . and on Monday I would hear that they had beaten their spouse.
. . . and on Monday I would hear them use racial slurs.
. . . and on Monday I would see them lie about something they had done.
. . . and on Monday I would see them speak judgment and criticism and be driven by fear.
This created a deep sense of confusion and hurt that it took me a long time to get over. And, it engendered a deep sense of mistrust of religious people who use the God talk.
Why can’t you just say what you mean? Why can’t you be authentic? Before I had words to express those sentiments, these questions had emerged in my young thought life?
Ironic that I ended up serving as a pastor.
I’ve made a lot of progress in that journey – though I can still get triggered by super religious people who use God-talk.
Recently I read Eugene Peterson’s book The Contemplative Pastor. In that book, he writes:
I learned early that the methods of my work must correspond to the realities of the Kingdom. The methods that make the Kingdom of America strong – economic, military, technological, informational – are not suited to making the Kingdom of God strong.
He goes on to say that the language he (and many pastors) learned in seminary was a language of battle and that this is a part of what confuses pastors in their call.
Finally he holds Jesus up as the great subversive. Listen to what he says about Jesus’ God-talk.
Jesus’ favorite speech form, the parable, was subversive. Parables sound absolutely ordinary: casual stories about soil and seeds, meals and coins and sheep, bandits and victims, farmers and merchants. And they are wholly secular: of his forty or so parables recorded in the Gospels, only one has its setting in a church, and only a couple mention the name of God.
And then I find these words in Matthew’s Gospel: “You don’t make your words true by embellishing them with religious lace. In making your speech sound more religious, it becomes less true. Just say ‘yes’ and ‘no.'”
I wonder if we followed Jesus’ pattern, if things might be different. I wonder if we learned to tell the Good News in secular ways if it might have more impact. I wonder if we talked less about God and people saw more of God in our lives if our impact would be greater.
I’m just wondering.
Spiritual practices can keep your false self entrenched
As a part of my doctoral work at Houston Graduate School of Theology, I am reading an excellent book entitled Spirituality and the Awakening Self: The Journey of Transformation by David G. Benner. It has been a helpful and challenging text and I commend it to you.
This is one of the best quotes in the book: Spiritual practices that contribute to transformation are those that offer opportunities to practice openness, surrender, and willingness. This immediately eliminates much of what we often do when we follow the so-called disciplines of the spiritual life. It is alarming easy for practices to simply strengthen willfulness, and when they do they further reinforce us against transformation. However, most spiritual practices can be offered in a spirit of openness, surrender, and willingness, and when they do, they prepare us for saying “yes!” to the Spirit when next we are presented with a choice of baking away from the chasm or stepping into it. (162)
In the context of that reading a young man who is in the Faithwalking journey came to me and said, “As we are doing the work on shame in Faithwalking 201, I’m realizing that there are verses in the Bible that I have memorized and used to reinforce the sense of shame that I have and that keeps my false self in place.”
How do you foster a movement?
I don’t know the answer to the question posed in the title of this post. More than twenty years ago, I came to believe that the church in western culture had lost its way. I say that with a deep sense of grief because I love God’s church. The passage of time has only reinforced the belief that the church was lost. Rather than focusing on teaching people how to love God, neighbor, self, stranger and enemy – as Jesus taught and modeled – we were driven by many other things. So, for these twenty years, I’ve been a part of a learning community who has been asking, “How do we foster a movement in which the disciple-making efforts of the church would be refocused on teaching people how to love like Jesus loved?”
In the early days it felt like plowing concrete. The forces at work in the church and in the culture mitigated against our efforts. Despite co-authoring Leading Congregational Change and The Leaders Journey . . . despite consulting with hundreds of congregations and having thousands of conversations with pastors and congregational leaders . . . despite the growing evidence that Christians were increasingly being marginalized because of their inability to love like Jesus . . . it seemed that nothing was changing.
In September of 2007, we launched Faithwalking. This experience reflected the sum total of all of our learning over the years. After years of what seemed like no progress, the proverbial “flywheel” began to turn. For three years we trained about 60 people a year in Houston and got extremely positive results. In 2010, our Board decided to offer Faithwalking at no charge and momentum picked up. About that same time we began offering Faithwalking to a group of churches through an initiative at Western Theological Seminary in Holland, Michigan. By 2012, we were doing 16 retreats a year in Houston and there were initiatives in Dallas and San Antonio, TX, Grand Rapids, Holland and Kalamazoo, MI, and Indianapolis and Lafayette, IN.
Then in 2013 things exploded.
Through a set of relationships with missionaries in Guatemala and Nicaragua, Faithwalking was launched in Central America with teams from eight Central American and Caribbean countries. Marcos Leon on the Faithwalking staff is giving leadership to that effort. And then in the past eight weeks, through our partnership with Western Seminary, we have launched Faithwalking initiatives with over eighty (80) pastors and congregations in New York, Michigan, Wisconsin, in several cities in Ontario, Canada. All this while the effort in Houston continues to expand.
I want to be clear without being presumptuous. I believe this is a movement and one to which God is giving life. I don’t believe this is happening because those of us on the Faithwalking team are smarter or more committed or more wise than others. I don’t believe this is the only thing God is doing in Houston or across the country. But, it is one of many across the country that I believe God is using to renew, restore, and reform God’s people.
There are two things I know about movements. First, they are chaotic, messy, and often go in directions that you didn’t plan or anticipate. Second, those who God allows to steward them must confront the illusion that they can manufacture the movement or control it once it gains momentum (I’m reading the book of Acts these days with a new set of eyes).
I share all of this because I’m am grateful and joyful. I also share it to request your ongoing prayers. None of us on this team have ever been a part of a movement. All of us are working diligently to stay deeply connected in an intimate relationship to God and we are asking the Spirit to grow our capacity to do only the things we see the Father doing. These are exciting and challenging days. I’ll be reporting more as the story unfolds.
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