The truth is, after a brutal couple of years, I have decided I do not simply believe in Jesus. I am done with that life. Mainly because it turned out to be guttingly empty and hollow — and, frankly, not enough.
After years of navigating all kinds of personal heartbreak, and family trauma, and the whole lot of us living through global upheaval and political and cultural divisiveness and polarization, this is where I find myself landing:
I do not merely believe in Jesus, I live in Jesus.
“I do not believe in Jesus, I live in Jesus.”
In this polarized war over what is truth, what is reality, what is identity, what is Christianity, what is evangelicalism, what is wrong, what is right, what is left, all I’ve got left is this:
Jesus is not a belief to me, He is breath to me, not some theory, but all my gravity, not a lens for my life, but He is my life. The Triune God is not one sphere of some multi-dimensional life — He is atmosphere, terra, lung and the only way to not suffocate in self.
People may almost universally believe that Jesus is a good person, but the only way to have a good life is to choose Jesus as your whole universe.
Live in a universe where the sun revolves around you, and eventually you find your life just withering up and dying in a thousand painful ways.
Create your own alternate god — of self, of some identity, of political power — and you end up living in an alternate reality.
The only way to not live in some parallel universe, but in the one and only real world that is our Father’s world — is to come to the Cross of Christ.
Only when your life revolves around the Son is there any hope of real life.
“People may almost universally believe that Jesus is a good person, but the only way to have a good life is to choose Jesus as your whole universe.“
These past few years has led me to realize:
We aren’t good news, evangelical Christians, if we believe the fake news that Christianity is only the mental assent of faith in Jesus, without requiring the lived allegiance of faithfulness to Jesus.
The Gospel truth is that believing in Jesus is about having a faith that is committed to a life of faithfulness.
It’s the covenantal faithfulness of Christ alone that saves us, and we respond to His saving faithfulness, by covenanting our own faithfulness to Him. (And just because we will be faithless, doesn’t mean that it’s less important that we commit to reorienting ourselves back toward faithfulness.)
For too long we have lived a cheap faith, instead of a costly faithfulness.
Cheap faith says one only has to believe.
When the truth is:
“For too long we have lived a cheap faith, instead of a costly faithfulness. Following Jesus means a cost will follow.”
Believers, by the Scriptures own account, aren’t the ones who are really Christians. Even the demons believe.
Real Christians aren’t merely the believers; Real Christians are actually the faithful followers.
We can say we pay allegiance to Jesus, but that is cheap talk; we aren’t paying allegiance to Jesus unless it costs us something.
Following Jesus means a cost will follow.
Following Jesus will mean a cost of comfort, cost of reputation, cost of relationship, cost of status, cost of self, cost of things near and dear, and though it may feel like a rendering in two, any cost for Jesus is only gain for now and all eternity. I’m betting the farm and staking my whole life on the cost of following Jesus is worth it because Jesus is worthy.
I’m daring to believe it and desperately trying to live it:
Following Jesus will cost you laying down the kingdom of self to give you the upside down kingdom that has only upsides for all eternity.
“We aren’t good news, evangelical Christians, if we believe the fake news that Christianity is only the mental assent of faith in Jesus, without requiring the lived allegiance of faithfulness to Jesus..”
True, one can try to make up their own reality, in their own universe, but Jesus-followers daily follow Jesus in only real world, that is our Father’s world. Any other reality or universe of our own making is vaporous mirage.
Why believe that this is our Father’s world, instead of believing in any another universe of our own imagining? Why believe there is one real God in this universe?
And if the universe has a beginning that has a cause, it must have its beginning in that which is uncaused, beyond time and space, which means: “In the beginning, God…. “
This world, caused by God, absolutely cannot be a product of chance.
Perhaps the most impressive example of how incomprehensibly precise the existence of our planet is that “the initial distribution of mass energy to give the low entropy throughout the universe necessary for life is fine-tuned within1 part in 10 to a factor of 10(123). That means? If you took a sheet of paper and filled it with zeros, then reproduced zeros on sheets of paper lined up across the entire universe, 15 billion light years across, that number would still be smaller than 10 to a factor of 10(123).” And THAT’S the preciseness we need for any life on this planet.
“It takes far greater faith to believe that this universe is a product of chance than it takes to have faith in God as the Maker of this Real Universe.”
It takes far greater faith to believe that this universe is a product of chance than it takes to have faith in the one real God as the Maker of this universe.
Dr. Anders Sandberg of the Future of Humanity Institute recently reported of his team of researchers analyzing the likelihood of life such as ours anywhere else in the universe, “to get estimates of just how unlikely the steps could be,” and confirmed: “We feed in data about when things happened on Earth and a guess of how many steps there were, and in return we get the most likely levels of difficulty.”
He concluded?
“[The data] turns out to indicate that, yes, we are an unlikely planet.”
In all the universe, ours is an unlikely planet — because this is a world made by Love Himself… by a Love that is beyond this universe.
But can there be a God — when we wrestle with the the Problem of Evil in this universe?
The truth is: If there is no God — there cannot be any objective moral values. If atheism is ultimately true, then there is ultimately no basis to argue anything is objectively evil. But the human heart knows that murder, rape, violence against children is objective evil, and objectively exists in this universe. And if one believes in the reality of evil, one is faced with the reality of God.
The problem of evil is answered by the fact that there is no believing in evil unless there is believing in God.
“The problem of evil is answered by the fact that there is no believing in evil unless there is believing in God.”
And yet, one always has the gift of options — one can exit this one real world that is our Father’s World, and try to live in an alternate universe of one’s own imagining, because we all get to decide if want to do it our own way, have our own Kingdom where we make up our own laws of nature and morality, and yet I can testify from the scars of my own wayward life:
Defying the ways of God is like trying to defy the law of gravity.
During this past wildly hard season for us all, a popular, lead Christian musician went to his Instagram community to humbly and honestly offer that he no longer believed in God and, genuinely heartbroken, I was deeply struck when I read the last few lines of his walking away from God:
“My wife and I — we didn’t enjoy going to church. We didn’t enjoy reading the Bible. We didn’t enjoy praying. We didn’t enjoy worship. It all felt like obligation and our lack of enthusiasm about those things always made us feel as though something was wrong with us. Now I don’t believe anything was wrong with us. We simply didn’t believe — and we were too afraid to admit that to ourselves.”
“Enjoyment in God is evidence of attachment to God. Enthusiasm for the Word of God is powerful proof of being in the God of the Word.”
I ached with their tender vulnerability and the courage of their confession: again and again, they didn’t — enjoy, enjoy, enjoy, enjoy. They lacked enthusiasm for God.
And I found myself struck with the deepest conviction:
Lack of joy in God, reveals lack of belief in God. Enthusiasm itself means “in God” — entheos; Lack of enthusiasm for God means one likely isn’t in God.
Enjoyment in God — is evidence of heart-attachment to God.
Enthusiasm for the Word of God is actually powerful proof of being found in the God of the Word.
When the sun rises again in a ball of glory over this planet and floods morning light across all our old floors, there it is:
“In these strange days: There is more than believing in God. There is enjoying living in God.”
Hope only exists in this world because death has been killed at the Cross, and life has meaning beyond the walls of this earth, because Hope has a name and rose from the grave and engraved your name like a love note on the palms of His hands. Alternate man-made universes, with their alternative facts, can’t offer any meaningful alternative to genuine Hope.
In these strange days: There is more than believing in God.
There is fully enjoying living in God.
There is enthusiastically taking a one long, deep breath — and feeling your lungs expand with the joy of being fully alive in this moment, in the reality of Jesus here, right here, with you.
With the joy of more than merely believing in Jesus, but the joy of actually getting to live in His oceanic love and all this horizonless amazing grace.
How do you practically, actually live in Jesus — instead of just merely believe in Him?
What does it personally look like to form your mind, your days, your life, into the deeply meaningful, cruciform love of Jesus and entrust everything into His hands?
What does it powerfully look like to have a new way of life, a new way of being?
The practical tool to begin true life-transformation for a different way of life start here:
