"The Church is the people of God. The Latin word for "church," ecclesia, comes from the Greek ek, which means "out," and kaleo, which means "to call." The Church is the people of God called out of slavery to freedom, sin to salvation, despair to hope, darkness to light, an existence centered on death to an existence focused on life.

When we think of Church we have to think of a body of people, travelling together. We have to envision women, men, and children of all ages, races, and societies supporting one another on their long and often tiresome journeys to their final home."   

                                                                    - Henri Nouwen

I am not reading 1 John Chapter 3 this week like my Tall Monastic friend Ryan Taylor but I agree with the message this song/video brings and thought it was worth posting. It is catching little tune that may offend some peoples sense of who they've created their image of God to be.

This seems to ring true in my life and in the lives of those I know who are actively praying to live and move and have our being in Him, to be directed by the Holy Spirit. When this is your bent in life it will come at a personal cost.

You will be tired....do you have the discipline to make time to rest and rejuvenate?

Spiritual warfare will come at an intense pace....do you have the eyes to see it and the companions to battle it?

Weariness and tears and battles will ensue daily....do you have the perseverance and support of community to endure?

Schaeffer is right, this seems very counter intuitive for our simulated fabrications of how the Holy Spirit moves. We often see the Holy Spirit like the ice-cream man who only brings good things for us to experience and eat and ride the sugar high.

And most people will limit the moving of the holy spirit to an event, an hour of produced emotional manipulation that the programmers have conjured up, so we can willingly offer ourselves to the experience. And if we feel the tinge of emotional up-rise internally, like a good story will naturally cause, we say wow, the holy spirit was really moving this hour, I could feel him.

But maybe, just maybe the scriptures are right and we are wrong about how the Holy Spirit moves. Schaeffer's insight to the scriptures and the history of the church are sobering. When the Holy Spirit works, there is always tremendous cost to the people of God....weariness....and tears....and battles. So let's not mistake the emotional high of a weekend experience that was crafted to give us the high we seek, with the true working of the Holy Spirit.

If you are crying out for the Holy Spirit to move in your life and in the lives of those around you and it seems that things are not going smooth, you are getting weary and life is difficult, don't be surprised. When you pray for the Holy Spirit to move, life is not lived beyond the fray but rather it is lived right in the middle. Offer your praise to God and get real with your faith community and go to battle, because whenever the Holy Spirit moves the enemy will be there.

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Have you ever stopped to think about what (or who) shaped your belief in who you are or who you want to be?

For some, you were raised in an environment where parents, teachers, coaches, grandparents, friends, peers, boyfriends/girlfriends, pastors, cub scout leaders, and even the lunchroom lady constantly protected your heart from the attacks of the enemy's voice so you could only hear the sweet sound of your heavenly father speaking his truth into your heart unconditionally, "I love you", "I created you", "You are good", "You are lovely", "You have what it takes", "You are mine", "You are fearfully and wonderfully made", "You are worth it"!

For the rest of us we didn't have such privilege. We grew up where the enemy used all the above mentioned people and created personal situations to attack our hearts with false agreements about who we are and who we will become, all cultivated from his bag of lies.

I'm not suggesting that everything we grew up believing about ourselves is a lie. Far from it. We are who we are because our individual experiences along our journey have shaped us into who we are. God will use all people and all experiences in our life for good - if we allow him to own it. What I am suggesting is that there are those subtle agreements that we have made with ourselves (and the enemy), while on the surface seem like good, well intentioned moments, are actually quite damaging to who we are and who we want to become.

Let's take for example a parent telling their child; "You are a hard worker", or "You are a good cook", or "You are a good student", or "I am proud of you for how well you did in your game". And as these well intentioned words of affirmation are given repeatedly over time and are rewarded with the parent's love and approval, they go right to the heart of their child's self-worth. It sends a very strong message when we equate our love and approval to someones self-worth based on their performance and our own expectations. And the message, I believe, is damaging. Essentially we are saying, "I want relationship with you as long as you are performing well".

Don't think so. Then ask yourself. What if the child was not a hard worker, not a good cook, not a good student, or wasn't a good athlete? How would that same parent respond? Would he/she still be proud? Approving? Loving?

I had a parent of our baseball team tell me this weekend that they were so glad their son finally got a hit last game. He said that he didn't care if his son was a great ball player, but he was glad he got a hit because he wanted him to have good self-esteem. On the surface this sound great, but do you see the subtle tie of self-worth to performance. Basically this dad, unknowingly, is making an agreement that if his son does not perform well in baseball that somehow he will not have a good sense of self-worth. It's not the dad, it's the enemy at work here to get the dad and his son to make subtle agreements with him all under the guise of well intentioned motives.

We read about this same type of subtle attack by the enemy on Jesus in Matthew and Mark's writings. The enemy uses Peter to attack Jesus' heart, to try and get Him to make agreements about who He is, what His purpose is, who He will become. Similar to Peter there are times when these attacks come from those closest to us with the best of intentions, albeit misguided intentions. Jesus recognized it for what it was and does not even address Peter, but instead confronts the enemy directly and makes no agreements with him.

On a personal note, when I was younger, my grandpa hired my two brothers and I to rake the leaves in his backyard. I really didn't want to, but I remember thinking if I was going to to do it, I just wanted to get it done. So I jumped in and worked hard and non-stop until the job was completed. My brothers took a different approach and played in the leaves while they worked and goofed off a bit. Hey we were kids! When we were finished, my loving well intentioned grandpa sent a very strong message to me that day. This is what he did.

After we came in the house he paid my bothers each two dollars and then handed me a crisp five dollar bill. I stood there holding the fruits of my labor a bit stunned by the shear wealth that I had just received. My brothers were stunned for a different reason. They complained, "That's not fair, why does Mike get more?" To which my grandpa replied, "Yes it is fair. I stood here at the window and watched you three rake the leaves for the last hour and Mike by far worked harder than both of you and as a result deserves more money. He earned it." I agreed because I loved my grandpa's approval of me and our relationship in that moment. I went on to do many more projects for my grandpa and each time I did it for his approval.

Now I am sure if you have read this far you are thinking. What's wrong with this story. It's a great lesson on hard work, earning you keep, you get what you put into it, economics 101. And you would be right if you were thinking in terms of worldly reasoning.

When I made an agreement that day, it set me on a coarse for the rest of my life to work hard, to not stop until the job is finished, to seek the reward for a job well done, to seek approval from others for my performance, to seek acceptance from others through my efforts. As a result, I can flat out execute, I have been rewarded, I have been recognized, I have been approved of. I don't know what message that experience sent my brothers that day, what agreements they made, if any. For me I made a small agreement that I like the feeling of being accepted, loved and rewarded for my performance; so I crave it, I am addicted to it, I seek it, I am a doer of my self-worth.

My human experience has been very powerful and agreements are difficult to break, impossible on my own, but possible through relationship with the Trinity. So I am seeking each day to Sit with God, to walk with Jesus, to listen to his counselor. Through this relationship I am learning to be a be-er of my self worth.

What about you? What agreements have you made?

For many people, economic recovery means getting back to where we were a few months or years ago. That means recovering our consumptive, greedy, unrestrained, undisciplined, irresponsible, and ecologically and socially unsustainable way of life. I’d like to suggest another kind of recovery, drawing from the world of addiction. When an addict gets into recovery, he doesn’t want to go back and recover the “high” he had before, or even to recover the conditions he had before he began using drugs and alcohol. Instead, he wants to move forward to a new way of life—a wiser way of life that takes into account his experience of addiction. He realizes that his addiction to drugs was a symptom of other deeper issues and diseases in his life—unresolved pain or anger, the need to anesthetize painful emotions, lack of creativity in finding ways to feel happy and alive, unaddressed relational and spiritual deficits, lack of self-awareness, and so on.

Similarly, I’d like to suggest whenever we hear the word “recovery,” we as a nation see it not as a call to get back our old addictive high, but rather as a call to face our corporate and personal addictions, including the following:

1. Our addiction to carbon. Fossil fuels are an addictive substance. They give us speed, quick energy, serving as a kind of cultural amphetamine. Meanwhile, they toxify our environment and throw the ecosystem in which we live into dangerous imbalance.

2. Our addiction to weapons. Weapons give us a feeling of well-being and security, removing our feelings of fear and anxiety, much like a barbiturate. But like a drug, they make us lazy and slow in the much more important work of relationship-building, justice, and peace-making—lazy in seeking the common good. And they plunge us into an addictive cycle, because if everyone in the world is getting more and more weapons, we aren’t safer … especially when increasing numbers of those weapons are nuclear, biological, and chemical.

3. Our addiction to fear. Religious leaders, media leaders, and political leaders have all discovered that you can raise quick votes, dollars, and members through the hallucinogenic stimulant of fear. By making straights afraid of gays, conservatives afraid of progressives, Christians and Jews afraid of Muslims, citizens afraid of immigrants, and vice versa, these leaders get a quick organizational high—”crack” for their unity and morale. But the more fear you pump into your system, the more fear you have, and pretty soon, you go from being stimulated to paranoid, seeing things that aren’t there and missing things that are. And soon after that, you move from paranoia to paralysis, leaving you in greater danger than ever.

4. Our addiction to stuff. Jesus said that a person’s life doesn’t consist in the abundance of her possessions. An economy that measures growth by the number of durable goods (resources) extracted from the environment and turned into non-durable goods that are bought, used, and then thrown away into a landfill … that economy “succeeds” by turning goods into trash, and calling it success. That’s not success. We need to imagine moving beyond an extractive, consumptive economy to a sustainable economy, and beyond a sustainable economy to a regenerative economy. I believe that in God’s world, if billions can be made destroying the planet and exploiting people addictively, trillions can be made caring for the planet wisely and caring for people justly.

5. Our addiction to a single bottom line. During the president’s town hall meeting, a man from Indiana told how he started a solar-powered attic fan company, and how he chose not to ship manufacturing overseas, but instead, to provide good employment for his neighbors. That meant, he said, that he had a little less cash in his pocket … but wouldn’t you agree that being a good neighbor has a value that can’t be measured in dollars? The single bottom line of financial profit is addictive, and like an addiction, it destroys families and communities. We need to rediscover a triple bottom line—financial sustainability, social sustainability, and economic sustainability. So we need a recovery of family values, and we also need a recovery of community values, and neighborly values, and ethical business values.

6. Our addiction to easy answers. “Government is the problem.” “Just throw money at the problem.” We can’t afford our addiction to these kinds of easy ideological slogans and facile reactive fantasies in a complex, real world. Ideology is, in many ways, a drug that substitutes the quick high of unthinking reaction for the hard work of acquiring wisdom.

So … maybe we can sabotage our addictive tendencies by letting the word “recovery” have a meaning that wakes us up rather than drugs us into the comfortable, dreamy, half-awareness in which we have lived for too long. That’s my hope and prayer.

Brian McLaren is a speaker and author, most recently of Everything Must Change and Finding Our Way Again. This piece is taken from the God’s Politics blog at Sojourners.

HT: Catalyst