“But because my servant Caleb as a different spirit and follows me wholeheartedly, I will bring him into the land he went to, and his descendants will inherit it” (Numbers 14:24)

Cultivating this “different spirit” of wholehearted devotion to the Lord is so difficult in today’s culture.  I watched a John Stossel video with my 6th period class yesterday about being famous.  They cited a study–most young people today would rather be a personal assistant to a celebrity than be a Senator or a CEO of a corporation.  They did “man on the street” interviews where they asked people two questions:  1) Who cured polio?; and 2) Who was Nicole Richie’s best friend?  Among older people, some knew Jonas Salk, and many didn’t know Paris Hilton. (I didn’t even know who Nicole Richie was; I had to find out from the video.)  But among the young, nobody knew who cured polio, but almost everyone knew who Nicole Richie’s best friend was.

Our media-obsessed culture, in which we vicariously live our lives through celebrities we have never met, is destroying meaning and significance in our lives.  How does a Christian live in this culture with a “different spirit?”

What Caleb did is that he saw his circumstances through God’s eyes.  He saw the same fortified cities and giants in the land they were supposed to conquer.  But He and Joshua argued with those who were afraid:

“Do not be afraid of the people of the land, because we will swallow them up.  Their protection is gone, but the Lord is with us.  Do not be afraid of them” (Num 14:9).

He trusted the Lord to intervene in his circumstances, and acted on it.  He put himself in situations where he would be in trouble if the Lord didn’t act.  Not recklessly so, but out of obedience to God.  He remembered what God had done in the past, and trusted him to do it again.

Lord, help me to walk wholeheartedly before you.  Lord, I want to listen to your voice, and see my circumstances through your eyes.  Increase my faith.  Put a different spirit within me.  As I read the stories of your intervention and deliverance, give me the faith to believe that you will do it again.  Thank you for repeatedly doing it again in my own life.  In Jesus’ name.

But it pains me to have to leave them there.  Just have character?  Do the right thing?  Can I even do that?  There is an emptiness in this conclusion.  None of us can do it.  I constantly need the strength of Jesus and his Holy Spirit.  It is the realization that I can’t do it on my own that leads me to humble myself at the cross and ask for help. And He is so merciful.

So even though I feel like what I have to say about relationships and families touches a lot of my students, it’s not complete.  It’s only the beginning.  What really makes relationships work is when all of those involved go to Jesus and get his strength and wisdom.  Without that, I am just giving my students a list of rules.  The law, if you will.  And that grieves me.

My prayer is that what they see in me will draw them to Christ, even if, as a public school teacher, I often can’t say what I wish I could say.

Father, please rescue my students from this child-molesting culture we live in!  Draw them in by your kindness, and show them your great love.  Bring others that know you alongside of them to show them who you are.  Any part of me that accurately reflects your character, may they see you through that.  In Jesus’ name. 

Isn’t there something in us that always feels that way? We put our eyes on what others “get” to do, and feel like we are being treated unfairly. Yet we fail to notice the additional responsibilities and burdens that come with that “better” position, and we ignore the blessings of our current assignment compared with other alternatives.

There are times that I ask myself, “What is God going to do in my life after teaching?” I dream about pastoring a church, or being a university professor, or running a cutting-edge ministry. And maybe God actually has some of those things in mind for me in the future. But when I start to get envious of people in those roles, God has been faithful to remind me of the blessings of being a high school teacher, and of my original calling into it.

This Thanksgiving, I resolve to be thankful for where God has me right now. Lord, help me keep my eyes on You and Your blessings in my current assignment. I want to have a heart of gratitude that pours out to others. Fill me to overflowing with your Spirit. In Jesus’ name.

On my bike home today, I was listening to Jack Frost from Shiloh Place ministries (yes, that’s his real name, though he died a few years ago).  I’ve been listening to his series called “Confronting the Taskmasters,” which is about how the Lord brings us out of slavery to fear, shame, etc. to move into God’s calling on our lives.  The quote above struck me.

Real change in our lives requires help from God and usually help from others.  It’s the old cliche that the first step is admitting we have a problem.  If we are too ashamed to admit to God and to others that it’s not working, we will probably never change.  But God won’t leave us there.  He allows the pain from our choices to increase and increase, until we no longer care what other people think.  We cry out for help.  Then the partnership toward healing begins.

In prayer, I was having a conversation with the Lord.  In my journal, I often ask God a question, then prayerfully listen for an answer.  Hearing God in this way is a learned skill, and I don’t do it perfectly, but I’ve written a little more about it here.

I asked the Lord about whether there was any sin in my life that I needed to confess.  This can be a dangerous question, because we are often so tuned into what the enemy is saying, that all we can hear at that point is accusation.  But the Lord gave me one word:  passivity.  When I received that word, it did not come with shame attached.  I did not feel judged or condemned.  But I was still open to the possibility that this was the enemy speaking to me, so I waited and kept listening.

The Lord then helped me define passivity.  His next word to me confirmed in my heart that it was the Lord.  He pointed out an action I took this weekend that was intentional and active, rather than passive.  He affirmed me in that, and encouraged me to do more of that.

This is the heart of our loving Father.  When he brings correction, he brings it to draw us in and encourage us, not to shame or condemn us.  If you are constantly feeling under the weight of your sin, especially if you identify yourself with your sin (e.g. “I am a liar,” rather than “I told a lie.”), then it’s very possible that you are listening to the enemy more than the Lord.  In Christ we have His righteousness.  The old has gone, the new has come.  Yes we still sin, but it is no longer our identity. When the Spirit convicts, rather than feeling like a heavy judgment, for me it usually feels like an invitation to something better.  What are your experiences with this?  I would love to hear.

Father, I pray for your church, that we would throw off the sin that so easily entangles us, and run with perseverance the race that has been marked out for us.  Free us from the accusations of the enemy that are often based in truth, but ultimately are false because they lie about our identity and about how You see us.  Jesus, you yourself said that you came to save us, not to judge us.  We can approach the Father with confidence because of the cross and the empty tomb.  Your word says that you delight in us.  So may we run to you in our brokenness, not away from you in shame.  You will not turn us away, those of us who are in Christ.  Your desires for us are better than anything we can imagine ourselves.  Give us the strength to embrace our calling in You.  Holy Spirit, fill us with Your courage and boldness to face our issues and and to risk to reach out to others with Your love, confident of our position in Christ and the love and acceptance of our loving Father.  In Jesus’ name. 

Becoming the Beloved means letting the truth of our Belovedness become enfleshed in everthing we think, say, or do.  It entails a long and painful process of appropriation or, better, incarnation.  As long as “being the Beloved” is little more than a beautiful thought or a lofty idea that hangs above my life to keep me from becoming depressed, nothing really changes.  What is required is to become the Beloved in the commonplaces of my daily existence and, bit by bit, to close the gap that exists between what I know myself to be and the countless specific realities of everyday life.  Becoming the Beloved is pulling the truth revealed to me from above down into the ordinariness of what I am, in fact, thinking of, talking about, and doing from hour to hour.

Lord, let the words I hear and listen to be yours.  Help me to obey even when I don’t want to, knowing that your path is the path of life.  I already am your beloved, but I know I can choose to walk in that or not.  Strengthen my resolve and will to keep my eyes fixed on you.  In Jesus’ name.

We spend much of our energy in ministry trying to build churches, whereas Jesus invested almost all of his energy making 11 disciples.  Now having been on a church staff before, that’s not a fair indictment of the “church” (as if there were a singular entity in this context) because building ministry programs is usually an act of making disciples.  But Jesus lived and walked with those 11 guys; he didn’t just see them for a couple hours on Wednesday night.

Of course in many ways Jesus’ ministry was unique and cannot be exactly replicated, but what if we focused on making a few true disciples?  The question that comes up immediately for me is: am I living the kind of live that I would want to see reproduced?  And this is what I think keeps many of us from doing this.  Showing up a couple hours a week to something is easy and safe.  Letting someone in on an intimate level is dangerous.  We might have to face some stuff.

But the Lord doesn’t expect us to be perfect before he can use us.  So Lord, help me to step out and invest more in a few disciple-making relationships, starting with my children, and extending to others as you lead.  With 11 guys, you turned the whole world upside down.  May you continue your mission to extend your Father’s love to the nations through me and others who will intentionally make disciples.  In Jesus’ name.

After experiencing the desperation of believers in the underground church in China, and going back to pastor his megachurch, he writes:

What if we took away the cool music and the cushioned chairs? What if the screens are gone and the stage is no longer decorated? What if the air conditioning is off and the comforts are removed? Would his Word still be enough for his people to come together?

At Brook Hills we decided to try to answer this question. We actually stripped away the entertainment value and invited people to come together simply to study God’s Word for hours at a time. We call it Secret Church.

We set a date—one Friday night—when we would gather from six o’clock in the evening until midnight, and for six hours we would do nothing but study the Word and pray. We would interrupt this six-hour bible study periodically to pray for our brothers and sisters around the world who are forced to gather secretly. We would also pray for ourselves, that we would learn to love the Word as they do.

We weren’t sure how many would show up that first evening, but by night’s end about a thousand people had gathered. Our topic of study was the Old Testament. After our first try we decided to do it again, and again, and now we have to take reservations because we cannot contain all the people who want to come.

One of my favorite sights is to look across a room packed with people with their bibles in their laps, studying who God is and what God has said—after midnight (we have never ended on time). Granted, we still have the cushioned chairs—though we did discuss the possibility of removing them! And we still have the comforts of a nice building with indoor bathrooms. Be we are taking steps, I hope, toward discovering what it means to be a people who are hungry for the revelation of God.

This speaks to me deeply. Lord, raise up in our community and in our churches groups of believers who would hunger and thirst after you!

Mohler is essentially correct—the most commonly practiced forms of Yoga emerge from a largely unbiblical worldview and involve spiritual ideas and practices that cannot, as a whole, be reconciled with biblical Christianity.  While he has no objection to specific Yoga poses per se, he rejects the idea that the physical components of Yoga can be separated from the spiritual.  In a subsequent post, he writes:

I have heard from a myriad of Christians who insist that their practice of yoga involves absolutely no meditation, no spiritual direction, no inward concentration, and no thought element. Well, if so, you are simply not practicing yoga. You may be twisting yourselves into pretzels or grasshoppers, but if there is no meditation or direction of consciousness, you are not practicing yoga, you are simply performing a physical exercise. Don’t call it yoga.

Mohler traces a bit of the history and philosophy of yoga, pointing out that much of yoga practice has involved the channeling of sexual energy to unite with spiritual entities.  And Mohler’s fears that this practice could bring harm to Christians are justified.  The word yoga means “yoked,” and the theme of yoga throughout its various forms is the idea of being yoked to the spiritual.  A Christian walking into a traditional yoga class may be at risk of being yoked not to Jesus, but rather to a demonic spirit.

This sounds scary, but is yoga all bad?  Is there a baby in the bathwater?  We learn in bible school and seminary that there are two sources of knowledge or revelation.  We call them “general” and “special” revelation.  General revelation consists of what we know to be true by observing the world around us.  Most true knowledge in fields like science, math, architecture, astronomy, etc. fall into this category.  Special revelation is what we learn when God directly communicates to us, e.g. the Bible.  But regardless of how it comes to us, if anything is true in this world, God established it.  God not only rescued the Israelites out of Egypt and fed the five-thousand from a few loaves and fish, but also invented the laws of nature that we discover through scientific inquiry.  The architect who designed my house did not learn the truths of architecture from the Bible, but through general revelation.  Yet God is their author.

In a response to Albert Mohler, John Mark Reynolds from Biola University argues that Mohler lacks imagination in this regard. He raises questions like: Are there any benefits at all from yoga practice?  Could there be benefits if yoga was practiced differently?  If yoga contains any spiritual and physical truths, then didn’t those truths come from God and therefore are intended for our benefit?

Reynolds writes that we need to

find faithful men and women who can appropriate what is good, true, and beautiful in yoga and turn it to Christ. It was Christ who gave men of old the insight to do good through yoga and devils that corrupted that insight into a false religion.

A brick may be used in a pagan temple, but then reverently placed in a Christian church. A cave may be used as a stable, but then turned into the birthplace of God. No metaphysical system is safe from plundering by Christianity, because Christianity is afraid of no good idea, object, or word. The system in which a great work of art is trapped may be corrupt, but we can reinterpret that work and so redeem it for Christ. Is this process dangerous? Of course, because there is always the danger of being corrupted by the object of redemption before it can be reimagined. What is more dangerous is the cowardice that would leave any good, true, and beautiful thing to the Evil One. We must reclaim everything for King Jesus.

The Evil One has used yoga for thousands of years to enslave its adherents.  But our enemy cannot create, he merely corrupts and distorts what God has made.  If there is anything good, true, and beautiful in yoga, then our Lord created it for our benefit.  Let’s not be afraid to redeem and rescue what we can from yoga while remaining faithful to biblical truth.

What might this look like in practice?  Common yoga practices include emptying the mind, or meditating on the breath or body with the possible aid of mantras.  A Christian practicing yoga would instead fill the mind with God’s truth, meditating on scripture, and might dwell on how a particular pose reveals God.  For example, some common yoga poses include mountain, tree, or child’s pose.  All three of these ideas are used in scripture as object lessons to teach us spiritual truth. Reimagined in Christ, the poses then can become natural ways to connect to God. Dropping down into child’s pose, which looks a lot like bowing before a king, we can meditate on our status and position before God, that of an adopted son or daughter, and we renew our commitments to walk in that identity. This is much like lifting up your hands in church when the worship song lyrics say “we lift up our hands.” Our physical position helps to encourage and express the posture of our heart.

Of course Albert Mohler would object to this practice by saying, “then you are not practicing yoga! Don’t call it yoga.”  And in a sense, he is right.  In that sense, “Christian yoga” is an oxymoron, if we mean by ‘yoga’ the entirety of practice and teaching that has ever been called by that name.  But this objection misses the point.  We should care less about what we call it, and more about whether Christians can redeem specific practices or principles from yoga and use them to bring us closer to the Triune God of the scriptures.

And there are some, in fact, attempting to do just that—groups like Holy Yoga, Praise Moves or Outstretched in Worship.  Some Christians trying to redeem elements of yoga have erred through lack of robust theological training or spiritual discernment.  They are too quick to welcome spiritually dangerous practices and integrate them into their practice.  Others certainly err on the side of being too afraid to consider the full extent to which yoga practice can be redeemed.  But while shortcomings are inevitable, some are finding God’s presence and grace through a devotional yoga practice.

More thought and research needs to be done.  For example, are there specific, measurable health benefits to the poses or to the sequence of poses?  As the poses are redeemed and rooted in scripture, will new “Christian” pose sequences emerge that have even greater physical and spiritual benefits?  Will God’s power for physical and emotional healing, deliverance, or spiritual growth be manifested through new practices that emerge?

My hope is that through this process the the full measure of grace that God intended through what can be rescued from yoga will be redeemed and released in the body of Christ.  As Reynolds concludes, “It is easy to imagine yoga dying, because Christianity has enfolded all that is good in yoga within the embrace of its true home.”

He came to Yale at a time when many of the educated in American were being carried away by the influence of French Rationalism that had inspired the French Revolution.

Dwight knew how to do things. Check this out:

The first thing President Dwight did was to fire all faculty members espousing the French Rationalist point of view. Then, with the windows of Connecticut Hall thrown open and the sounds of spring mixing with the streams of sunlight coming through them, he started holding frank and open-ended discussions with the undergraduates. He encouraged the young men in his charge to speak their minds, and by his willingness to listen carefully to their side, with no recriminations for anything they would say, he elicited rare candor from them. But then, they were obligated to pay him the same courtesy, and he presented cogent, well-reasoned rebuttals of all the Rationalist arguments, following with strong appeals for life-changing Christianity, which, as President of the college and an ordained minister, it was his place to give…

If the hearts of his young listeners responded to this message, few made open professions of faith in these first years. Nevertheless, as his illustrious grandfather had before him, Dwight toiled on in the vineyard, never compromising, never flagging. And finally, in 1802, his efforts were rewarded. Like a thunderclap, revival fell upon Yale. In March the first new student confessed his faith in Christ as his Savior, and in April there was the second. By the end of that summer there were no less than fifty! And by the time the senior class was ready for graduation, half of them had committed their lives to Christ, and a third went on to careers in the ministry. Indeed, Dwight personally witnessed the formal conversion of half the student body. Dr. Heman Humphrey, later to become president of Amherst College, was a student at Yale, when the storm broke:

“It came with such power as had never been witnessed within those walls before.  It was in the Freshman year of my own class.  It was like a mighty rushing wind.  The whole college was shaken.  It seemed for a time as if the whole mass of students would press into the kingdom…It put a new face on the college.  It sent a thrill of joy and thanksgiving far and wide into the hearts of its friends who had been praying that the waters of salvation might be poured into the fountain from which so many streams were annually sent out…In the four preceding classes, only thirteen names of ministers stand, against sixty-nine in the next four years—nearly, if not quite all, of them brought in by the Great Revival.”

(From Sea to Shining Sea, Peter Marshall and David Manuel, p. 108-112)

Notice how he exercised his authority with grace.  As president, it was his job to shepherd the students.  He first took care of the wolves who were in the sheep pen.  But then he handled the students gently, listening to them and their ideas, and responding in grace with rebuttals and the claims of Christ.

I’m sure he was roundly criticized in the more liberal circles for firing the Rationalist professors.  I can hear it now, “What about academic freedom?!”  ”Why is he forcing the whole college to adopt his narrow view?!”  But Dwight was playing for an audience of one.  He loved his savior and he loved the students that had been put under his care.  Well done, good and faithful servant.