students of jesus

My first workplace nickname was Doughboy. Not because I was chubby: it was because of my two-year relationship with dough balls. I worked at a hole-in-the-wall pizza joint near the racetrack in Arlington Heights, Illinois. (Think of Robin Wright using the name Farmboy for Cary Elwes, but then take away the farm and Robin Wright and replace it all with cold florescent lights above an ugly kitchen: “Doughboy, fetch me that pail.”)

Each day I arrived an hour before the others and mixed a fresh batch of dough. Two huge sacks of flour. Quarts and quarts of water. Sugar. Salt. And a tiny package of yeast. The commercial mixer groaned and whirred until the collection of powders and water gave off a sticky sweet smell. It turned and turned until the ingredients became dough—lots of it. I reached into the mixer and pulled out handfuls of pizza dough and measured them into six-ounce dough balls, four wide and six long on a stainless steel tray. The dough balls, made by the Doughboy, became the foundation for the perfect food—pizza. Nor was my work finished. I had to re-shape the dough balls twice each night because the yeast caused them to grow more than twice the size of the original six-ounce lump. 

Later, as I began to read the New Testament, I discovered Jesus already knew my occupation and nickname:

He told them still another parable: “The kingdom of heaven is like yeast that a woman took and mixed into about sixty pounds of flour until it worked all through the dough.” (Matthew 13: 33 ~ Except the woman didn’t have the advantage of a commercial mixer.)

I had seen it firsthand: the yeast was the last ingredient, the tiniest amount, but it made the dough come alive. This is the way of the kingdom. The smallest things have great effects. Leaven, a microscopic lifeless dust, comes to life in the right moment and the right environment. Resurrection performed nightly at the pizza joint.

In a rare moment of clarity I grasped his point the first time I heard it. The hidden work of God is inexorable. Whether it’s a new birth or a new idea, he finds a way in us and through us. The secret ingredient is life from another realm. It finds a way.

Jesus the storyteller reveals the workings of the kingdom. Yeast, mustard seed, wheat and weeds, even beams of light: each starts with God’s action in us, planting and placing, shining upon us until each ingredient shines forth from us. I learned something of his method. It is hidden, and it is hidden in us. We are the environment of God’s activity. He breaks off a piece of himself and hides it deep within us. We discover it, nurture it, and eventually we share it with our world. He submerses himself in us so deeply we can easily miss his presence, even though it’s the animating force behind our rising.

Night after night in a no-account pizza joint the work of God was played out before me. I learned to trust the yeast even if I couldn’t see it working. In truth, I couldn’t stop it if I wanted to.

And it’s not only true about me. It’s true for each of his children. The superstars are not the only ones who will rise. Through each of us God is at work in a thousand ways, and we are delivered all over town. I’ve learned to trust the leaven in others as well—in the right time each kingdom child will shine like the sun. We are the aroma of Christ to a perishing world. Resurrection nightly, not just at the end of days.

And while we wait, we are in on the secret. The leaven is here. In us, breaking forth.

It turns out the God of Genesis was right after all. Watch out for those humans, he said. They can do anything, and they probably will. God looked down from heaven to the flatlands called Babel and watched us come together to build a tower. We refused to accept the world as we found it. We made bricks instead of gathering stones. We began to build a stairway to heaven of our own design.

When Heaven took notice and scattered us over the face of the earth, we in turn made every corner of the world our workshop. We employed the simplicity of hammers and levers and wheels to construct stone pyramids in the desert, forty stories high. Four thousand years later our craft still stands against the barren wind and the sand.

Then we turned our attention to the sand itself and fashioned it to silicon. From the tiny chips of our own making we declared ourselves the creators of artificial intelligence. We created machines that count with dizzying speed. Our machines add one and zero so fast and so many times we mistake the result for thought itself.

God saw it first. He said nothing we planned to do would be impossible. We were made from the dust of the earth and we have mastered the dust itself. The sum of human knowledge doubles itself like some embryo hurtling toward birth, yet the manchild we have conceived hasn’t developed ears to hear.

Alongside the sound and fury of human effort the creative Spirit has whispered again and again,

“Trust in YHWH with all your heart,

and lean not on your own understanding.”

God’s answer to Babel was to ask one man to trust Him. Heaven’s alternative to our great industry and understanding was a simple relationship.

From macro to micro it’s the same story. Whether we look to the grand stage of human history or examine the hidden platform of our hearts, our choice remains: will we lean on our understanding, or lean into a relationship with him? Human knowledge doubles every 18 months, but trust and relationship are cultivated in the soil of daily life.

The world morphs exponentially before the march of knowledge and effort, but our greatest need is to chant the ancient words until they take root and begin to grow:

“Trust in YHWH with all your heart,

and lean not on your own understanding.”

The way of submission is counter-intuitive, yet what if our intuition is merely another way saying “sin?”

Father, your love is so much greater than my understanding. Please help me to live in your love.

It’s an established fact: parents do not live in reality. 

When I was a 4-foot, 11-inch freshman in high school (you heard me), my Dad regularly told me I was a tough guy—tough enough to beat up “anyone in the school.” I knew what he was up to. He wanted me to believe in myself. He wanted me to approach life from a posture of confidence, yet he obviously didn’t live in my world. He had good intentions, but no wisdom to help me through high school.

This is true of all parents. When my oldest daughter went through high school she had a highly calibrated sense of social judgment and hierarchy. She knew from day to day who was “in” and who was "out." Check that—she knew it from hour to hour. This time I was the father: “Honey, who cares what other people think? You are smart, funny, warm, and beautiful.” Right, Dad.

I was disconnected from her world. I didn’t know the score, and what’s more, I was powerless to change the score. All the areas that matter to a teenage girl were beyond what little influence or power I possessed. What’s more, I suspect she would have been embarrassed if I really did know and understand her world. It belonged to her, not me.

The two lessons we learn growing up? Our loved ones may not have the wisdom or the power to help us. We are utterly on our own. Sometimes the best advice from our loved ones cannot provide the wisdom and strength we need to face our challenges. Experience teaches us that even if we trust our parent’s heart and motives toward us, they do not have the wisdom to guide us, or the power to act on our behalf. We love them and they love us, but it is not enough.

This is precisely the heart of the problem: first-hand we see our parent’s limitations, which means our experience also teaches us not to trust the Heavenly Father. One of the deepest transitions following our born-again experience is the need to grow up again—this time with the perfect parent. Paul wasn’t kidding when he said:

So from now on we regard no one from a worldly point of view. Though we once regarded Christ in this way, we do so no longer. Therefore, if anyone is in Christ, the new creation has come: The old has gone, the new is here! (2 Corin 5:16-17)

When he urged us not to regard anyone from a worldly point of view, it’s important to include the Heavenly Father in that mix. We enter a new world, with a new Father, and the defenses we built up to protect us from our earthly parents can actually hold us back from the love and yes, power, that flows from the New Father. In God’s kingdom, the Father displays perfect love (motivation), perfect wisdom (insight), and perfect power (strength to help us) toward his children.

After we come to terms with the idea that the One who knows us best loves us most we have a second transformation: total surrender to the Perfect Father. We have so many years of disappointment; too many memories of our loved ones letting us down. Life experience has caused us to turn inward. We take care not to let our hearts fall too deeply in love. We live by the whispered caution, “Take care: no one understands!”

The good news is better than you could have ever hoped for. We have Father poised toward us with perfect love, wisdom, and power. In the Kingdom of God there is a new, established fact: our New Father see things the way they really are. We can trust him.

Let me share with you the deepest and most beautiful problem I have ever faced. Approaching this challenge has filled me with vulnerability and risk. Working through this wonderful problem has yielded life and peace.

I like to hide. You won’t hear what I’m thinking right away. Some thoughts you will never hear. I craft the image I want you to see, and live in fear you will see through the hologram I offer. Hidden in my deepest space is the driving fear, if you really knew me, you wouldn’t like what you see. You may tell me you admire transparency, but I know the truth: you will be repulsed if I let you in all the way. And yet, this is not the problem.

The problem is: the one who knows me best loves me the most. God. God is the problem; all my defenses are useless before him. And it fills me with terror.

Enough about me. Other people have had this problem. David, the forgotten-shepherd-boy-turned-king, had the same fears:

You have searched me, Lord,
    and you know me.
You know when I sit and when I rise;
    you perceive my thoughts from afar.
You discern my going out and my lying down;
    you are familiar with all my ways.
Before a word is on my tongue
    you, Lord, know it completely.
You hem me in behind and before,
    and you lay your hand upon me.
Such knowledge is too wonderful for me,
    too lofty for me to attain. (Psalm 139:1-6)

It is no surprise to me that David wants to run: in verse seven he asks the same question I would ask:

Where can I go from your Spirit?
    Where can I flee from your presence?

By the end of the Psalm David presents the fruit of his struggle. He surrenders. God wins, and David opens the secret places to the One who has already been there all along:

Search me, God, and know my heart;
    test me and know my anxious thoughts.
See if there is any offensive way in me,
    and lead me in the way everlasting. (Psalm 139:23-24)

David invites the Creator into the violent places hidden deep within his heart. In these places God will discover David’s longings, lusts, and insecurities as well. Am I willing to make the same invitation?

And this is only half the problem. Because the Great Invader of my most secret places—the very God who is holy, holy, holy—loves me despite the tempest raging in my secret place. Not only has God not been fooled by the hologram I have perfected, he loves the confused mess that is the reality of my heart. And I hate this. His love, too, causes me to want to run.

In my pride I resent that there is someone so great, so kind, so condescending as to look beyond my faults. In my shame I writhe under the pain caused by the fact his love for me is greater than my self-love—not only greater, but deeper, more pure, and altogether clean. My insecurities tempt me to reduce the Heavenly Father’s eternal love to just another human love that will disappoint in the end.

You’re asking, “What could be so wrong with being loved?” Yet this is precisely where the challenge lives. Do I dare believe such love exists, and that I am the focus of such love? To make peace with this invasive love means the end of my pride, my self-love, my shame and my insecurities. It means (as I said at the beginning) risk and vulnerability because it means absolute surrender to the Other.

If you’ve never tried to work through the implications of being loved perfectly, you have a journey yet to take. Anyone can accept a gift—even eternal life—without receiving perfect love. The discovery of the Father’s boundless love is an invitation to strip away every other crutch we use to prop up our self worth. Submitting to perfect love means we lose ourselves in him. Are you ready for that kind of loss? Our pride, the shame to which we cling, and our insecurities all whisper, “Take Care! You can never return if you start down this road.”

And they are right.

Back in the days when DJ’s were still on the radio and spun vinyl 45’s, I turned up the volume in my car—loud.

When one teenager tells another to turn the radio down, you know it’s loud. My best friend tried to get the point across: “Ray, if you can hear the static from the needle in the groove, it’s too loud.” These days, ear buds do the trick: I still get the volume I crave. When it comes to music I still believe the 60’s mantra, if it’s too loud you’re too old.

This was my attitude about following Jesus, too. Crank it up, Lord. Gimme all you got. Christianity was for in-your-face linebackers. Thumpin’ bass or heavy metal, there was no question about the mission. I loved power verses and no-questions-asked Holy Ghost direction. In short, I may have been born again, but I was a child of my times as well.

Every advertiser in America screams for our attention. TV commercials boost the volume; our cars have become half transportation, half nightclub—and we like it that way. We wake up to music and go to sleep with Jimmy Fallon and The Roots. If something’s important, we roll it out with flash and dazzle. Every announcement is accompanied by shouting. It’s the way of our world.

There is, however, another world, where the greatest news is whispered. The Kingdom of God speaks the language of the still small voice. Deep joy is in the quiet. The heavens may declare the glory of God, but they never make a sound. As his Kingdom is worked into me, I discover the true music is in the rests, not the downbeat.

There was a time when the silence meant God wasn’t speaking. Now, in the quiet, he’s all I hear. Elijah was the prophet of shock and awe, but perhaps it was a way to ignore his own depression. Eventually his fears drove him into seclusion. There he discovered the presence of God not in fire, nor earthquake, nor the whirling of the wind. He heard the whisper of God. It strengthened him and nudged him forward.

Stillness and peace are signs of the Spirit’s presence. For every Pentecost there are fifty days in the prayer closet. The prayer closet is not meant to be a place to hide from the world, but a place where we hide the world from ourselves. An anchorman once asked Mother Teresa what she said during prayer. She answered, “I listen.” The interviewer followed-up, “Well then, what does God say?” Mother Teresa smiled. “He listens.”

It turns out the Father is a pretty good listener. “You know me when I sit and when I rise,” said David. “You perceive my thoughts from afar.” Imagine the mutual quiet. Imagine the joy unspeakable.

My friend Heather Kraus observed, “Jesus’ promise of ‘I will give you rest’ is not the same as ‘I will give you answers.” I suspect some of his best answers do not come with words. My friend Adam Russell says, "Any fool can hear it when God shouts, only the lover can hear him whisper."

Waiting on God is not passive, it’s the mark of an active soul alive to the ways of God. Isaiah tried to slow people down in his day:

In repentance and rest you will be saved,
In quietness and trust is your strength.

But his gentleness was lost on a noisy people:

But you were not willing,
And you said, “No, for we will flee on horses,”
Therefore you shall flee!
“And we will ride on swift horses,” (Isaiah 30:15-16)

In Isaiah’s day the movers and shakers took the bull by the horns until the bull ran them over. Even vigorous young men stumble and fall. Strength is overrated. Stillness is missed altogether. But those who power down, log out, and disconnect will renew their strength.