March 26, 2012

• Beautiful Outlaw by John Eldredge

  I enjoyed reading this book. You can always tell because then I post three pages of quotes.

   “Haven’t you seen something in nature that made you laugh? Perhaps you did not make the connection—that you were meant to laugh. That it was God who made you laugh. That he laughed with  you.

  “G.K. Chesterton conducted something of a personal experiment to see what the overall impression would be if a person simply read the Gospels without any previous information regarding Jesus. What he found really surprised him:

  “It is full of sudden gestures evidently significant except that we hardly know what they signify; of enigmatic silences; of ironical replies. The outbreaks for wrath, like storms above our atmosphere, do not seem to break out exactly where we should expect them, but to follow some higher weather-chart of their own.” “

  “The Life of Jesus went as swift and straight as a thunderbolt.” Wrote Chesterton, “almost in the manner of a military march; certainly in the manner of the quest of a hero moving to his achievement or his doom.”

  “Consider the natural human longing to be loved and admired, how deep it runs in you. It is practically an aching abyss. Remember how rare it is for love and admiration to come to any soul in this jealous world. Now, add to this poverty the insight that very gifted people actually have a greater need for affirmation that most (it’s true). You begin to feel how intoxicating it is to have thousands of people holding their breath for the next word you have to speak.”

  “We typically think of integrity as the ability to resist temptation by resolve. And that’s a good thing; self-discipline is a good thing. but there is another level of integrity, the kind where you don’t even want the seduction that is being presented to you. Goodness runs so deep, so pervasive through your character and your being that you don’t even want it. We respect the man who is able to reject sexual temptation. But how much more the man whose soul is such that he does not want any woman but the woman he loves and is married to.”

  “His ability to live with all these qualities we’ve seen, in such a way that no one quality dominates—as is so often the case in our personalities—eclipsing the richness of the others. To live in such a way that there is always something of an element of surprise, and yet, however he acts turns out to be exactly what was needed in the moment. Oh, his brilliance shines through, but never blinding, never overbearing. He is not glistening white marble. He is the playfulness of creation, scandal and utter goodness, the generosity of the ocean and the ferocity of a thunderstorm he is cunning as a snake and gentle as a whisper; the gladness of sunshine and the humility of a thirty mile walk by foot on a dirt road. Reclining at a meal, laughing with friends, and then going to the cross. That is what we mean when we say Jesus is beautiful.”

  “How many children have said, “my dad worked hard to provide for us—but all I ever really wanted was his love”? This is one more cunning ploy of the religious to keep us from the kind of intimacy with Jesus that will heal our lives. And change the world. We are not meant to merely love his teaching, or his morals, or his kindness or social reforms. We are meant to love the man himself, know him intimately; keep this as the first and foremost practice of our lives. It is a fact that people most devoted to the word of the Lord spend the least amount of time with him. First things first. Love Jesus.”

  “Step one to a deeper experience of Jesus is knowing what to look for. If you can hang on to this, an entire new world will open up for you: This is a Jesus you can actually love because this is who he is. Step two involves removing some of the debris that has been piled in the way, so that we can begin to experience him, share our lives with him. For example, if you believe, for whatever reason, that “Jesus doesn’t speak to me,” it’s going to be hard to hear him speaking to you. Or believe that it was him when he does. For the same reasons, if you hold it in your heart that “Jesus doesn’t really love me,” then it will be awfully hard to experience the love of Jesus. It is a stunning realization: you will find Jesus pretty much as you expect to. Not because he is exactly as you expect him to be, but because he would be known by you, and you have insisted that he act only within the boundaries you’ve set. Jesus will accept those terms of engagement for a while—like a loving parent will do with their teenager—because he wants relationship with you. This explains why one denomination experiences Christ in one way, and another denomination experiences him differently. And why both are missing massive portions of his personality. They created rules, outside of which they forbid him to act.”

  “At the outset of the book I asked, “What do you think of Jesus?” Here is a very revealing way to get at the issue from another angle: What do you think Jesus thinks of you?”

  “The way a person gets angry and what they get angry about is a real clue to who they really are.”

  “Fighting for a cause often becomes the expression of devotion to Jesus. We take our best and brightest saints and ship them off for indentured servitude. Exhausted Christians working for noble causes, but they do not report a daily personal encounter with Jesus. Over time the work itself substitutes for Jesus, and seeking him seems harder than doing more for him. Martha, Martha. Loving Jesus comes first; out of this will flow whatever work in the world he has for us to do. Without this, any work we take on will be impossible to fulfill. Question: who’s the hero; who is praised? Who is held up as models for serious Christian commitment in your world? “Here is Jeff—he really knows Jesus,” or “Here is Jeff—he serves the poor in India.” “

  “This is what most Christians experience as the Christian life: try harder; feel worse. Here is a surprising trap—the trap of integrity. What I mean by this is when our attention turns to maintaining personal righteousness. This seems noble and right. Jesus told us to keep his commands. But this can be a trap because most Christian interpret this as “Try harder do your best.” I find myself sleeping back into this weekly. A handful of symptoms tip me off. Exhaustion, for one. I’ll just find myself wrung out again. Or an internal distress; my insides all twisted up. Discouragement, that old nagging cloud of “I’m totally blowing it” back over me. Irritation with needy people. These symptoms let me know I’ve fallen back to thinking that to love Jesus is to give my  very best in living for him. And this is a sticky business. Because on the one hand, that’s true—to love him is to obey. But out of what resources? From what fountain of inner strength?

  I thought it was my faithfulness. My integrity. A willingness to sacrifice, to fight well. And of course we are involved; of course our choices matter. The good news is this—you were never meant to imitate Christ. Not if by that you mean doing your best to live as he did. Something inside me says, “Well—that’s certainly been my experience.” But without understanding that I was never meant to do my best, I feel awful about it. Jesus didn’t start the Peace Corps. The secret to Christianity is something else altogether—the life of Christ in you. Allowing his life to become your life. His revolution is not self-transformation, but his transformation of us, from the inside out, as we receive his life and allow him to live through us. Vine, branch. Anything else is madness.

  Love Jesus. Let him be himself with you. Allow his life to fill yours. Every day, give him your life to be filled with his. Of course, this assumes that you are willing to surrender your self-determination. You’ll find it hard to receive his life in any great measure if you as the branch keep running off on your own, leaving the Vine behind in order to do life as you please. Honestly, I think this is why we accept such a bland Jesus—he doesn’t intrude on our plans. Some sort of madness has crept in with the idea that you can be a Christian and hold on to your self-determination. And how is that going, by the way?

  If you are not drawing your life from Jesus, it means you are trying to draw it from some other source. I’ll guarantee you that it’s not working.”

  “I messed up. This morning when I woke the temptation was like New Year’s Day—rushing to make all sorts of resolutions to be a better person. I felt myself resolving to do this and that, despising this and that about me—basically, trying to kill the unattractive parts and buttress myself to be good. The Achilles’ heel of this sort of “repentance” is that it is all still based in self effort. Thank God I saw it, and turned to Christ in me—asked Jesus to come and have my life more deeply. First, I was rescued from days and weeks of striving and self-resolve. Second, the presence of Jesus in me does make those flaws recede into the background—some crucified, others to receive his healing grace. But the point being, this time I was able to turn to Christ in me as my only hope of transformation, and the fruit of this turning-to is profound relief. “

  “I have spent most of my adult years trying to find those keys that would enable people to become whole. Like an archaeologist raking for buried treasure, I’ve combed through the provinces of counseling, spiritual discipline, inner healing, deliverance, addiction recovery—anything that would help me help others get better. Like Schliemann when his shovel stuck in the buried ruins of Troy, the epiphany I have come to is this:

  Jesus had no intention of letting you become whole apart from his moment-to-moment presence and life within you.

  Your brokenness and your sin are not something you overcome so that you can walk with God. They are the occasions for you to cry out for the life of God in you to rescue you. Not God outside you, up in the sky somewhere. Christ in you, your only hope of glory.”

  • 9:50 am
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