What do you expect?

First a disclaimer - this post is about the expectations we have of one another within church of real, deep and meaningful relationships, not our expectations (which are idolatrous) of a specific person being available to meet a specific need at a specific time, or having a knowledge and understanding of us they can't possibly have.

Expectations is a dirty word. A word we use to beat each other up when we feel inadequate before another’s needs. A word we use to express our frustration and disappointment at the people that let us down. You need to expect less of people, you can’t have expectations, it’s not fair to expect…

Relationships in a fallen world are painful, difficult things. We’ve all been hurt. We’ve all felt rejection and loss and betrayal. But I have never found anyone who has been helped by being rebuked for their unrealistic expectations, or who having said they have lowered or changed their expectations has ceased to really long after real, deep committed relationship.

Because that is what we are made for. Real, deep, committed relationship. Garden of Eden relationship where we can be naked, known and accepted and feel no shame. But however much we long for these relationships, we feel how inadequate we are at giving them. We think with shame of the friendships, at one time so close, that distance, circumstances and sin have allowed to fall into neglect. And we hide ourselves and our selfishness behind the rhetoric of expectations. You can’t expect that of me, surely?

Furthermore we do it to ourselves. We start to feel that friendships like that are for other people, there’s something about me that means people just can’t love me that way, and if I don’t expect it, I can’t get hurt. It doesn’t work though, our soul cries out, even through the bitterness and pain that pushes others to arm’s length, for intimacy and security.

What is it exactly that we shouldn’t expect of each other? Should we not expect each other to keep promises? Should we not expect each other to care? Should we not expect our family to give us relationship in real and meaningful ways? That is what Christ tells us we are in church, family.

At this point I want to point to my limitations, I do my best, I’m just so busy, there are too many people, too much going on. To that I say to myself, yes, I am limited and I am busy but mostly that is my choice. Like the time I waste, not resting, not refreshing myself, just waste. And the times I let my guilt at failing you get in the way of loving you. And the times I run after my own needs instead of thinking about yours. And the times I am angry with you but don’t want to admit it. And all the times I make choices based on what looks good or makes me feel good instead of actually being faithful. Not to mention the times and times I waste my physical and mental energy not trusting God with things in my life so I have few resources left over to love. I feel guilty, and rightly so, because however limited I am, I hurt you infinitely more because I am sinful. Which is uncomfortable as it’s much easier to blame your expectations of me.

The answer is, as always, not more guilt but more grace. Guilt puts up more barriers, makes it harder to step over and begin to love you again. Grace says what I really should be saying is “I am sorry”. I am sinful, frail and selfish. I know what you need from relationship because it is exactly what I need: consistency, patience, grace, perseverance and love, but I just can’t give you that. Because I am inadequate, because I am weak, because I am, deep down, wicked and I don’t want to. The problem is not yours, it is mine, and I cover it over by blaming your expectations of me.

Real relationships start with grace. They start with the fact that I will let you down, I won’t love you the way that I ought. And when that happens I need to ask God’s forgiveness and yours, not blame you for expecting me to love you. Real relationships start when I know you won’t always be there for me, that you will choose your happiness over mine, that I have to let you make promises of commitment and love, and trust you to keep them, and forgive you when you don’t because that is where real relationship happens and if I cut myself off from that, I cut myself off from part of my humanity. A really good part too.

And of course this is all missing the obvious. These real relationships can only happen in Christ. Only when I am freed from my guilt in Christ can I be free to see my sin, say sorry and start over. Only when I am clinging to Christ for ultimate security and intimacy can I dare to expose myself to your frailty and sin in intimate relationship.

So think of that person in your life of whom you are tempted to say, “they expect too much from me!” Recognise you have probably sinned against them. Recognise that what they need from you is real relationship, which can say sorry and start over, which isn’t enslaved to guilt and fear. Recognise that Christ has set you free to love them and continues to do so every day as you continue to sin. And through the mess and the pain and the struggle just keep loving.

And think of that person in your life of whom you are tempted to say, “I can’t trust them again, they have let me down too many times,” or even for some people “I can’t trust anyone, they will always let me down, I will just never have that kind of deep friendship.” Recognise that in Christ you are utterly loved and safe and secure. Recognise that people are sinful and weak. Be brave. And through the mess and the pain and the struggle just keep loving.

We all long for relationships that are deep and real. We all live in a world where relationships are broken and messy. But the miracle of the church is that by grace broken and messy relationships can become deep and real whilst never stopping being broken and messy. God is just that good. So don’t give up.

If I give you a baseball bat you could beat yourself up better...

I got a phone call from a friend today. From one of my best Christian friends in fact, the one who astonishes me with her willingness to go the extra mile, who's generosity verges on the extraordinary, who's prayer-life I most envy of all my friends. But every now and then she calls me up in a pickle. When she is tired and low she has a remarkable tendency to succumb to the same lies over and over again. We talk them through, I point her towards the truth, we pray and often she ends the conversation in a much more positive frame of mind. I thought I might write this post for a couple of reasons, partly so she has somewhere to go back to and read the truth when I can't be there one day to give a her shove in the right direction and partly because it's a joy to share how Christ set me free from the same trap she finds herself caught in from time to time.

Because you see whenever she calls in her pickle, I feel like I am listening to myself on the other end of the line. 20 years of myself. 20 years of a very miserable self. And the way it changed for me took dozens of people, words in season, great Bible teaching and a lot of mess in my life.

I'm talking about grace. The most offensive or most beautiful word in history depending on your point of view. The easiest thing to understand and the most difficult thing to live.

You see I was an expert at explaining the offense of grace to people who weren't Christians and absolutely hopeless at living it out in my life when the rubber hit the road. I spent hours and days and months and years of my life in angst and doubt over my salvation, in despairing of my weakness against sin, of hating my sin and by extension myself for my failure to conquer it, given everything I knew. I knew Christ had died for me, I knew that I had been given a new heart to worship God, I knew I had received the Spirit within with resurrection power, the old was gone, the new was come and yet, and yet... There it was. Again. Ugly, inconvenient, ever-present. I couldn't escape it. I would repent and pray in tears, "I'm so sorry Lord, I won't do it again, Lord please help me, please don't cast me off," but time and again the same bad habits, the same bad choices the same self-centred and selfish motives corrupting even my best attempts at loving others and loving God with all my heart. Every sermon felt like a blow of condemnation, every book on holiness I desperately read for help, a tattoo beating out the words hopeless, dirty sinner.

I masked it, often well, I tried harder, or I just got so busy I didn't have time to think about it, but it always came back at those low, tired moments, just like my friend. Why does Jesus love me? How could Jesus use me? Was I even really a Christian if I could turn my back on Jesus over and over again to choose what made me feel good, when my sin was so deeply ingrained that it corrupted everything in my life, when I knew that I was barely scratching the surface with the sin I was aware of. Wasn't the gospel supposed to set me free from sin?

I was trapped in a lie of the devil. A lie, like all good lies that closely resembled the truth. But there was an important omission. Grace.

I knew all about grace in theory but my practical application, you will gather, was highly sketchy. Grace was for other people. People who had it sorted. People who didn't know as much as I did, so weren't as guilty as I was. Ultimately people who deserved it, not awful people like me. Of course, being theologically correct I never would have put it into those words, but that was my practical application for all intents and purposes of the doctrine of grace. I was a Romans 7 Christian, trapped in an endless cycle of law, despair and more law and more despair. I knew Jesus had died for my sin, but I also knew that did not excuse ongoing sin, in fact it made it worse. I longed at times for death to set me free from the body of death I lived in.

Escaping the trap was a journey of years for me which I am going to attempt to summarise in briefly below.

1) "You know God doesn't love you any less, right?"

This was probably the first major incursion into my dark cycle of misery. It came like a bolt from the blue from an unexpected source. A casual conversation from someone I knew very slightly after church one day and to whom I had been pouring out the woes of a sinful week. "I feel so bad, I let God down again, I'm so rubbish." Then the unexpected reply, "You know God loves you just the same when you feel sinful as when you feel like you're doing it all right, don't you?" It stopped me in my tracks, because no, I had somehow never realised that. Casual words, spoken in a casual way and probably long forgotten by the speaker, but not by me. God loves you just the same. That can't be right, can it? When I just did that? Just the same? But think about it just for a minute, God's love doesn't change, his promises don't change, so yes, it must be true. God's love for me depends on Christ, not me, that's the gospel, so however I feel about my sin and myself God loves me just the same. Not an excuse for sin, just a fact. Mind. Blown. But that was just the start...

2) Breaking into Romans 8

"Therefore, there is now no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus, ² because through Christ Jesus the law of the Spirit who gives life has set you free from the law of sin and death." (Rom 8:1-2)

I had the privilege of hearing a wonderful couple of seminars on Romans 8 some time later which was the moment that I finally realised that the answer to sin was not more law but life by the Spirit. I realised fully for the first time that in the guise of taking sin seriously I had become trapped in a cycle of law when Jesus had come to give me life to the full. As we went on I saw that the answer to my sin was not trying harder or knowing more it was sonship. The Spirit that cries Abba Father called me not to work harder to please God and defeat sin but to enjoy the life he had given me as a child. That would mean saying no to sin, for sure, but not with the burden of the law heaped up upon my back to crush me in judgement, but through knowing myself to be a beloved child, free to choose God's ways from the heart and knowing in those lovely words of Thomas Brookes, "that which it pleases God not to mortify in the flesh, he will be pleased to forgive". In other words, sanctification is not my job, it is God's, which I do my absolute best to join in with. It was the realisation that the power given by the Spirit to put to death sin is not a magical, impersonal power that was mine to wield like a comic book hero's superpower, it was Christ's power that came through relationship with him by his Spirit. So the place to go when I saw my sin was not more law, more effort, more judgement and condemnation but more Christ.

3) Separating the old from the new - and then replacing it

"Since, then, you have been raised with Christ, set your hearts on things above, where Christ is, seated at the right hand of God. ² Set your minds on things above, not on earthly things. ³ For you died, and your life is now hidden with Christ in God. ⁴ When Christ, who is your life, appears, then you also will appear with him in glory." (Col 3:1-4)

This is one I continue to grapple with and which I still need to think more about. Given to me by a friend to think about, this is putting Colossians 3 into practice. When I look at my life I see nothing but mixed motives. The good, the bad and the ugly all mixed together in one big fuel tank powering my actions. In reality the Bible tells me there are two people inside me battling for ascendancy, the old sinful person and the new righteous one in Christ. Putting to death the former always gives and opportunity for the latter. Battling sin is no longer just an exercise in seeing and condemning the negative but asking what is the positive freedom that I obtain from putting that sin to death. What am I chasing, not simply what am I running from. Idolatries that have had me firmly in their grip are shaken when God gives me a glimpse of what it would be like if I was truly free to love those people, to enjoy those gifts of God. I see sin for what it truly is then, a cage, a dark room, and although it's what I know and it's scary to leave, the view from outside is breath-taking, so maybe it's worth the risk.

4) Free grace is not cheap grace

I had always been afraid that to seek grace for a sin I was struggling with over and again meant that I was holding grace cheap. Grace is not cheap. It cost Jesus his life, on the cross it cost the Father his Son. It's right to feel abhorrence at the idea of using grace as a free pass for sin. In the words of Bonhoeffer, "when Christ calls a man, he bids him come and die." Following Christ means death to self daily, which means death to sin. My mistake was to think that the most effective way to put sin to death was to try harder, mourn deeper. I missed the first part of the quote, "he bids him come", sin dies when it is exposed to the light of the gospel, the truth of sonship, the love of God, the person of Christ.

It's when we embrace the cross that we put sin to death, as it is the cross that restores that relationship which it is the essence of sin to reject. When we fly to the cross with our sin we see that better life of freedom which is on offer which robs the sin of it's savour. When we cry out to God for salvation at the foot of the cross we finally put to death the pride of self-righteousness and the wicked delusion that we can obtain righteousness for ourselves. We submit to God's ways and renounce our own.

5) It's all about the glory

When I fight sin and defeat it for a time, I get the glory. When I run to the cross with my sin, throwing myself on the mercy of Christ, obeying his word, trusting in his sacrifice, the glory goes to him. When I study the cross, meditate on its power and beauty and God uses that to change my desires so sin loses its attraction, the glory goes to him. When I cry out to the Spirit to change my heart and help me want to desire Christ so sin can no longer rule over me, the glory goes to him. And unlike my feeble self-discipline and attempted law-keeping in my own strength, it actually works. Often slowly, often painfully, often inconsistently, real change starts to happen. Life starts to happen, freedom starts to happen. And I am no longer afraid. God is my Father, Christ is my brother, they will sanctify me and bring me home and they will have all the glory, as they should.

"'Though the mountains be shaken and the hills be removed, yet my unfailing love for you will not be shaken nor my covenant of peace be removed,' says the Lord, who has compassion on you." (Isa 54:10)

So to my friend who called today, who is truly one of the most special people I have ever known, please don't let it take 20 years. He loves you, you're his child, that will never change, and the sanctification that you so long for, that happens when you cling to the cross. I know you know this, but sometimes you don't know. This is for then.

The 4 Fs of Friendship

In case you haven't already picked up from my blog so far, I am an idolater. I worship things other than the creator God of the universe. If you are a Christian, you knew that already. The most stubborn idolatry in my heart, the thing I find myself looking to again and again to tell me who I am, what I'm worth and to give me what I need is friendship. 

I was reminded of this yesterday when a very good friend gently reminded me for about the millionth time that basing my identity and security on what she thought of me and how she responded was not very wise. This is not a new concept for me. The emotional energy I expend on anger and hurt when someone I care about responds or fails to respond in a way that I can interpret as uncaring could power a small city.

And as it is an idolatry it can never be satisfied. As another good friend points out occasionally, rather hurt, it doesn't seem to count that she loves me and is there for me when I am focused on the one person in my life who I feel isn't. I have actually been blessed with incredible friends, who love me patiently and persistently and support me brilliantly and with whom I have great fun. However, often any one person with whom I am having a difficult time, dominates my emotional agenda and dictates how I feel about myself to the exclusion of the dozen other healthy, happy, close friendships in my life. This is utterly illogical until seen through the eyes of idolatry, if my friendships tell me my identity and worth they all have to be perfect, all the time, or I am a worthless nothing. This puts a pretty awful strain on the relationships themselves as the nagging insecurity can spill over into demanding and affirmation-seeking behaviour. This makes it harder to be my friend, leading often to less positive relating and intensifying insecurity. 

The only way to escape this vicious circle is for the gospel to break in. I have to be able to take a step back and see my relationships in their proper places, below and in the shadow of my primary relationship - with Christ. Failure to invest in this relationship for me inevitably leads to a distortion of my friendships as I begin to put them into the place that belongs to Jesus. This has created a train of thought in my head that have led to the 4 Fs of friendship - which is actually 4 reasons that friends can't meet your deepest needs and are a useless place to put your self worth and identity and why Christ is better. I plan on meditating on these to try and train myself to turn to him when the warning signs start showing that my friendships are getting out of perspective. 

1) Friends are Fickle

People have emotions that change. They change depending on the weather, how tired they are, how busy they are, what stresses they have going on. It's part of being human, we have emotional weather, I ought to know, mine goes from sunshine to hurricane several times a day sometimes. However much friends care about you they cannot be completely consistent in the way they relate to you and feel about your friendship. 

The same cannot be said of God. He is the same yesterday, today and forever. One of my favourite verses in the whole Bible is found in Malachi 4:6, "I the Lord do not change, so you, O children of Jacob are not destroyed." God loves us and cannot ever stop loving us because he does not change. Once God's favour and love is settled on you, however blameworthy your behaviour may be, he will not turn his back on you, or his promises to you. This is unpacked for us even more as we understand the cross. "He who did not spare his own Son but gave him up for us all, how will he not also with him graciously give us all things?" (Romans 8:32). God's unchanging love towards us is sealed by the blood of his Son who he gave up for us in our need. Having paid such a cost, can he then turn away from those he has purchased so dearly? The consistency of the love of God is told to us over and over again in his word. Friendships may change, day to day, moment by moment sometimes, but, "I have loved you with an everlasting love," says the Lord. He is the one on whom you can rely.

2) Friends are Fallible

However well you get to know your closest friends, however well they listen, however much life you share they will never get it right 100% of the time. They cannot see your heart, they are bound by limitations of language and time, however thoughtful and well-intentioned and caring they are they will inevitably get it wrong sometimes. They will misjudge how you are feeling, they will misunderstand you, they will say the wrong thing. What seems obviously the right response to a situation to you, is far from obvious to them because they simply don't have the full picture. 

But what is true about friends is far from true about God. To him we are "fully known," (1 Corinth 13). Psalm 139 is an exploration of the extent to which we are known by God. It is a great piece of scripture on which to meditate when you are feeling misunderstood.

"O Lord, you have searched me and known me!

                 You know when I sit down and when I rise up;

you discern my thoughts from afar.

                You search out my path and my lying down

and are acquainted with all my ways.

                Even before a word is on my tongue,

behold, O Lord, you know it altogether."

The Lord Jesus who "saw what was in their hearts," and still sees what is in your heart will never make a mistake. He will never misunderstand or misjudge you, never crush you when you are a bruised reed or placate you when you are rebelliously proud. He is the one in whom you can have confidence.

3) Friends are Fallen

However lovely your friends are, however kind and generous and fun and patient, they are fallen. They have sin in their lives and sometimes that sin will spill out in ways that hurt you. They will be selfish at times, proud at times, unfairly angry or impatient or ungentle at times. They will choose their own comfort and happiness over yours, they will speak unguarded words, they will break promises. They are sinners just like you. It isn't OK, it isn't right, but it is reality. You can't have perfect relationships because there are no perfect people. Starting with you. You don't have to condone or excuse the sin of others (or yourself) but you can expect it, accept it and forgive it. 

And the reason you can is because it is not so with God. In him was and is found no sin. The Lord says, “You shall be holy, for I am holy.” God is love (1 John 4:6), God is light (1 John 1:5). Jesus' closest friends could say of him that he was a man in whom there was no sin. He will never speak destructive words to you in selfishness or anger, he will never break his promises to you, he will never cease to act in your best interest and out of love for you. He will never exclude you or mock you or reject you when you are difficult. You cannot wear out his patience or forgiveness, you cannot exhaust his kindness and compassion. He is the one in whom you can place complete trust.

4) Friends are Finite

Ultimately friends are finite. They need to eat. They need to sleep. They can only listen to one person at a time. They need to go on holiday, they have responsibilities and commitments. They cannot always be there to respond to you when you want them to or in the way you want them to. Friends get tired and busy. However much they want to, they can't always be there to pick you up when you fall down. Nobody has the capacity to meet all your needs all the time. No group of people even. God doesn't allow it apart from anything else because our faithless hearts would quickly elevate them to his place in our lives. 

For him though this is not a problem. He is the Lord who never slumbers or sleeps (Psalm 121), his eye is always on you ready to bless, he is the Father who tirelessly waits and watches for you to return to him, the Shepherd who goes out searching for each lost sheep. He is the all-powerful one to whom the nations are dust on the scales and the universe is a hands-breadth, who stills storms and walks on water and raises the dead and stops the sun in the sky or blots it out completely. He is the one who says, "Surely I am with you always," (Matt 28). There is no need you have that he cannot meet, no moment that you are not under his tender, loving eyes, no second in which you are not receiving his care and compassion. He is the one on whom you can depend. 

The Lord, Our Lord is perfect in faithfulness, perfect in understanding, perfect in holiness and perfectly able to meet our every need. The absolute truth, the ultimate truth is he is the friend we need. The only one who will never let us down, who's friendship is entirely unconditional and inexhaustible. I love my friends, but if I try to make them tell me who I am and what I am worth our friendship will become a tiresome burden to both of us. There is only one friend who can do that and his name is Jesus.