My scarcity paradigm and my “old mind,” outlined in prior reflections, began to give way to a more hopeful worldview when God interjected into my collapse some rescuing words. These words had always been tenets of Christianity but they were pieces I had not found myself able to trust before or did not understand. Perhaps the cornerstone of my restoration was the most relational of these assertions: God told me that he loved me persistently.
I was open and desperate for that word in a new way, perhaps, having lost my strength again and collapsed on every level. In the total letting go of influence and performance and collapse into the long-coming burnout, God told me he is pleased with me, that he loves me. The lapse of my “effectiveness” did not worry him, he could take care of things without me. He could afford to, and was pleased to love me and remain invested in me even in my pathetic condition and even having “failed” a number of things. I didn’t have to work to re-qualify for God’s affection and investment. It had always been given, always been grace. Upon this insisted truth, God built a brighter world for me, uprooting the briars of my scarcity paradigm. As I began to trust that God did, that he could afford to love me despite my particular exhibition of weakness and “ineffectiveness,”(as I understood it)– as I began to trust that God loved me, I began to receive a hopeful world, a paradigm of certainty, confidence, and abundance.
When I asked, “What about the dying world?” wondering whether he was concerned about my inability to help him with the “mission”, he replied, “I’ve got this. All the world is mine and I consume it.” When I asked, “Do you still love me?” – when I collapsed and was unable to follow through on all the things I had thought had made me effective – when I asked if he still loved me he replied, “Of course” and admonished me for ever thinking that I had been securing his affection by my performance. No, his love had always been grace, always been given.
I had my old mind, the way I used to see the world, I had been trying to grasp affection, a scarce resource, from an anxious God. In this paradigm, God had been like a benevolent but exhausted parent stretched to his limit, too strained to show affection in any significant measure, needing his children’s help to accomplish his mission of reaching the nations. God was kind but was obliged to treat his children like machines in order to get the critical mission done. He couldn’t afford to let his children be children because he needed them to be as effective as possible. There was no abundance of time or energy for playfulness and no margin for rest. The children’s failures would break God’s heart. Too much had been lost already. God was trying to salvage as much as possible and until his children died (upon which event things would be better) they were supposed help him in that desperate salvage agenda. There was no other justifiable purpose for a Christian’s life than to help God out as much as possible in the effort. Superfluous enjoyment of life was shameful, it had no utility for the mission. The world of my old mind was supervised by a maxed-out, task-bound God.
I’m entering an alternative worldview as I’m slowly convinced that God is emotionally involved but not afraid. God compassionate, God saviour, is not unaware or apathetic toward his creation’s crisis. He has entered the fray, even allowing himself to grieve, as he did Lazarus’ death, and die in pain. He presses into our pain instead of choosing dispassionate surveillance. He’s involved and invested and vulnerable in the sense that he chooses to feel – or perhaps it is more inherent to his character to be emotionally open than we sometimes perceive. God is imminent to the world’s pain. What does that mean about his outlook?
When God feels what I feel, does he despair? When he sees how expansively sin spans across the world and how deeply woundedness and reactiveness defines humanity, does he despair? Does God get the nervous energy that I do when I see how much needs to be repaired? Is he resorting to contingency plans and emergency measures? Is he paralyzed by gravitous sadness? Is God reacting, to a bad situation? If he is, then I am necessarily an extension of God’s good-hearted anxiety, required to participate in the emergency salvage mission.
Is God afraid, or is the New Testament true? Is God in fact confidence and undaunted? Has Christ already been made ruler over all things? What does that actually mean? Is he making all things new? What does that mean? Is the total victory of God as inevitable and complete as Scripture reports as the truer reality? If God is confident, and not an anxious parent, then this is a sweeter world and a safer universe. If God’s “got this,” then maybe I can relax.
Reporting rapidly a few more of the sweet assertions of the Spirit to my soul: God told me that he doesn’t need me, but that he remains pleased with me. He can afford to love unconditionally. In other words, he can afford to love me regardless of my performance for him. Asserted also, he overcomes all history and all the world. It’s under his authority somehow. What that means I’m still figuring out, but it comforts me. God is not helpless or anxious. God is at peace, and God is faithful. He saves and he heals, and nothing is beyond his reach. God is free. He is not bound to any anxious necessity. What he does he does from freedom and with full confidence and autonomy. Furthermore, his grace is big enough to contain all the foibles of the Church. He is resourceful enough to use even our failure for his purposes. He’s astoundingly larger than all our strategies and maps of meaning. I’m back to mystery, and I think that’s how it’s meant to be.
God is free to love me if he wants to. Since he does, I am in the final assessment not a failure but I am a victory God won. I’ve been taken into a world of abundance, where everything that matters is secure and all that I truly need is in good supply. God’s goodness and its outworking are certain. I can only begin to conceive what heaven on earth and “all things new” really mean – the details are absolutely beyond me (and the details in Scripture are a mosaic, not a blueprint) – but it’s happening and somehow God has made me part of it (Rev. 21:1-5; Eph. 2:1-10). I begin to enjoy Habakkuk’s image of the knowledge of God covering the earth, “as the waters cover the sea” (2:14). I belong to a total victory and I have totally been defined by God’s enactment of it – particularly in Jesus Christ. God’s restoration of things is certain and my participation in that is certain, the certainty a grace non-contingent on my human capacity. I’m loved by the God who is free to do so.
Several confidences begin to grow from this first one. I become secondly confident that God saves. He just does, confidently, passionately, consistently. Legions told me otherwise, but somehow all of their stories now sit like the dissident notes in a symphony – in the context of the greater composition they are repurposed for beauty. God is strong enough to save. Nothing I could do could compromise his restorative agenda. I can participate or not but I cannot obstruct him. God will create avenues for his certain salvation. If I am unavailable, I do not lessen what God is able to accomplish. My unavailability may disqualify me from the privilege of participation or reward but it will not handicap God. God saves and will save the same with or without me. To believe otherwise is humanistic and anxiety-inducing.
As God loves me so also he loves his Church. He has shown his passionate and devoted commitment to us. The investment remains despite our failure because our failure does not worry him. Even the systemic issues of the Church will fall and do fall within the context of God’s redemption. God has not been tearing his hair out for two millennia, screaming at the Church’s ineptitude. No, he knew what he was getting into when he committed to sinners and is competent to accomplish his purposes through and despite a faulted Church. Some of the most beautiful stories I’ve heard recently are from those afflicted by a kind of spiritual abuse by the Church who later in life have been found by the healing love of God nonetheless. I suppose I’ve received enough anecdotal evidence to be assured that the Church’s wrong treatment of a person does not constitute the end of God’s power to save and love that person. God is strong and God saves. We will weep when embrace those we wronged and find that God was good to us both.
God is winning, or has already won (John 16:33; Eph 1:10, 3:8-13). The good news as received by the Church should not be anxiety inducing but exciting. It is actually good news, capitalizing on triumph rather than crisis and reporting God’s victory and the beautiful consequence of that for the world. He delights in our participation with him but is not exasperated when we fail. Christ’s enthronement above all powers is real. We do not have the power to make what is real unreal. The ramifications of Christ’s total victory will play out accordingly in any one person’s eternal salvation. God will act justly and in perfect freedom.
God is in conversation with every human soul. What revelation of God is offered in creation and in a person’s conscience is real and significant (Rom. 1:18-23, 17:26-28). Furthermore, we do not know all the ways that he has reached peoples throughout the ages. In the present day, Christ appears in dreams to Muslims who are far from the reach of the church. The stories are plentiful of how God providentially reached people. There’s almost a playfulness in some of the stories, suggesting that God is so absolutely in control that he can actually be creative, and playful in the way he romances a person. God is not crisis-compelled, he is compassion compelled and free to be creative. God is always free, it is in line with his character that he addresses the world’s corruption and pain. It is not something he is forced to by obligation. According with his righteous character, he is faithful to every person and deals with them justly.
It can be adequately argued from scripture that God judges people’s response to him according to the revelation they have received (Rom. 1:18-23). Consider for example how Paul reports to the Atheneans that God overlooked times of ignorance (Rom. 17:30). If all that a person knows of God is from what is provided in nature and provided within them, God will take that into account. If the only witness of Christ a person has received has been very poor, as from oppressive Christian colonizers or abusive Christian parents, God will take that too into account. If all that a person has received about Christ is untrue, surely God will not condemn them for their misinformed response to the untruth. God will judge in truth, rightly dividing a person’s understandings, experiences, motivations and decisions. That being said, let God judge a person to be worthy of condemnation if he will. He is free to do so. I only argue that he will judge fairly and that he seems interested in extending salvation and has done so competently and generously. It seems to me then, that in final evaluation a person may be condemned for rejecting God’s grace but not for never having been accessed by it. Perhaps God will condemn someone for they’re having refused to receive what he offers. He is not bound to condemn someone because he couldn’t get to them in time.
Since God is sovereign and unworried, he is not dependent on me in any way to accomplish his purpose. My Christian responsibility, then, is a participation in what God is already doing and not an actualization of what portion of God’s purposes he could not do without me. He is God. He is inviting his people to join him his restoration and herald his victory. Strong and confident, he calls each person into the mission to serve and love according to their capacity. He can afford to measure responsibility according a person’s gifts and limits. He is not bound to charge each child with duty that is beyond them. Since he does not operate in a state of emergency, he does not demand from his people that they burn out for him, expending themselves beyond limits because God needs them too. Rather he calls them to faithfulness.
Faithfulness is a privilege and an easy yolk. Faithfulness is not the boundaryless, exhausted service of the anxious minister but the humble, empowered, and excited service of the friend of God. Faithfulness includes rest and play, permitted because God is big enough to take care of us and the world. God can allow his children to be children and can patiently facilitate their growth and attend to their health. He’s not obliged by crisis to treat his children like machines. Faithfulness celebrates what is true and what is true is that God wins. A faithful servant and child of God commits to their call with vigour and submits the rest to the hand of God. They don’t need to take responsibility for what is beyond their capacity and do not feel guilty for the limitation of their impact. Their faithfulness is built on the faith that God is pleased with them and what they can contribute, and that God is able to take care of what is beyond them. They’re not making up for the limit of God’s reach, they’re gladly participating in his reach. Faithfulness, then, really is a privilege and not an extension of divine anxiety.
I abandon the humanism of “God needs me” for the theism of “God is God.” Creator and Saviour, he reaches out and redeems in freedom. Undaunted and un-fatigued, God is able to creatively repurpose even the failures of the Church for his redemptive purposes. Participation in God’s mission is a grace and not an emergency; God is not crisis-compelled but is compassion compelled. He moves in freedom. Our part in his work is an easy yolk and a privilege, not an unfortunate obligation which he burdens us with because he has to. God has remained faithful to that which he created and has remained in conversation – through revelation in conscience and creation – with every person. In the end, he is able to judge in freedom. He is not bound to condemn anyone because he couldn’t reach them in time or because Christians poorly represented his Christ. God can afford to love me with my weakness and ineffectiveness. Similarly, God can afford to remain passionately invested in those belonging to Christ – despite their pervasive issues. He doesn’t need them to be more than they are – he knew what he was getting into when he committed to them. He is able to refashion us in time into the fullness of Christ and his grace is able to contain the tension of the interim.
I begin, finally, to have peace and not to be anxious on God’s behalf. He can handle things and he is not despairing as I have. He is not overcome by tragedy as I have been. Though he does participate with me in the pain, he is not undone but remains confident. At the depth of his pain, he could cry, “it is finished.” He could scorn the shame of the cross for the joy set before him. God is optimistic, if you will, or perhaps he just knows with certainty that he has won. His victory is the real. That which opposes him is the passing shadow, the illusion of a moment.
I can finally allow myself to relax. My Christianity is empowered by a certainty paradigm. My God is not anxious. My role is a privilege. My God does in fact love me and remains in love with other Christians despite their failures. We are swimming in grace because God is abundantly able to supply it. I feel safe now. I feel like I can truly receive forgiveness. God doesn’t give it reluctantly. He gives in emphatically. He can afford to. I am like a clumsy toddler, learning to draw. All my best is like a toddler’s scribbles on a page. Since God is free and secure, he can afford to delight in me and my scribbles. He takes the scribbles and tapes them to the fridge. He will compel me patiently to develop and grow as does a secure parent. He is not like the insecure parent who demands that the child be more than they are. He is not compelled by crisis to treat his child like an adult. He does not have to place more on the child’s shoulders than they can carry. He can apportion to them that which they can reasonably handle and he will help them along the way. All the rest is absolutely in his hands. The child’s failures do not compromise his purposes or obstruct his plans – he’s bigger than that. Therefore, he can afford to remain invested in his child, forgive them, and train them. From the scarcity of my old mind I begin to emerge into the abundance of a certainty paradigm. My un-anxious God loves and saves. I get to participate.