Servants or Slaves

"Am I now trying to win the approval of human beings, or of God? Or am I trying to please people? If I were still trying to please people, I would not be a servant of Christ." Galatians 1:10

Paul is writing to people who had abandoned a gospel of grace and gone back to a gospel of performance, and in the middle of that argument he stops and asks a question that has nothing to do with theology and everything to do with the heart. Whose approval am I working for.

And he does not leave it hanging. He gives you the two choices and he makes them plain, and I have come to believe they are the only two there are.

You will either be a servant of God, or you will be a slave to the opinions of other people.

Notice that both of those words involve someone else holding your life. Neither of them is autonomy. There is no third door where you finally become free and self-sufficient and beholden to nobody, because that person does not exist and never has. You were made to be held. The only question is by whom.

And I want to be honest that this is a hard choice, and I am tired of hearing it presented as an easy one. Because for most of us, long before Christ ever broke into the hardness of our hearts and began to warm them with his grace, we had already spent decades living for the approval of others. It is the water we learned to swim in. It is the first language we ever spoke. It is entirely possible to live today, and tomorrow, and every day after that, constantly calculating what other people think of us, constantly managing how we are perceived, constantly working to keep a good standing with a room.

And to call it faithfulness.

Paul says that if he were still doing that, he would not be a servant of Christ. Not that he would be a worse one. That he would not be one.

That sentence should cost us something.

The Second Oxygen

“Hear, O Israel: The LORD our God, the LORD is one.” Deuteronomy 6:4

Two parts hydrogen and one part oxygen, and you have water. You can drink it and live. Add one more oxygen and you have hydrogen peroxide. Drink that and it will take you apart from the inside. The elements did not change. The arrangement did.

That is what unsettles me about our faith. We are rarely wrong about the ingredients. We say Father, Son, Spirit. We say sin, we say grace. Ask almost anyone in the room and they will hand the words back to you correctly. But the words are not the thing. What matters is how they are combined, and whether we have quietly added a second oxygen.

Grace, held together with the Father who loves you, makes a life. Grace held next to a small view of sin makes permission. The same word. A different arrangement. Holiness, held together with grace, makes a saint. Holiness held next to fear makes a Pharisee, and Pharisees are built entirely out of true things.

You do not usually go wrong by believing something false. You go wrong by holding true things in a combination that will not carry life.

Which is why Moses does not begin with a list. He begins with an arrangement. Hear, O Israel, the Lord our God, the Lord is one. Before anything else, God is not an assortment of parts. He is one. Not a Father you go to for comfort, and a Judge you avoid, and a Spirit you call on when you are desperate. One. And the love he asks for is not divided either. All your heart, all your soul, all your strength. Not a portion set aside for him and the rest arranged around other loves.

That is the confession. It is also the only combination that yields water.

So look at what you actually believe today. Not the words, you have those. The arrangement. What have you set beside grace? What is sitting next to the Father’s love in your chest, so that it cannot be all his?

You may not be far off at all. You may only be one oxygen away.

I Will Freely Love Them

"I will heal their apostasy; I will love them freely, for my anger has turned from them." Hosea 14:4

I will love them freely.

Freely means without cost or payment. It means given as a gift. When Jesus sends the disciples out and tells them to heal the sick and cleanse the lepers, he tells them they received freely, so give freely, and he means do not put a price on it. When Paul says we are justified freely by his grace, he means there is no invoice.

And it also means willingly. Spontaneously. Without being compelled. David says he will freely sacrifice, and what he means is that nobody made him do it. There is no obligation in the room.

To love freely, there has to be freedom.

Which brings me to the phrase I wish we would bury, and I mean bury it in the church first. You scratch my back and I will scratch yours.

It sounds like brotherly love. It sounds like unity. It is faithlessness with good manners. Because the moment that motto gets into the heart of a church, it requires obedience without love, and it turns a relationship into a transaction, and a transaction always has terms. Which means it can always be breached. And when it is breached, either side now has the right to leave, or to withhold, or to be cruel.

That is not love. That is bondage with a friendly face.

And most of us are running this arrangement with God and do not know it. Jesus, I come to church, I give, I serve, I have done my part. And I am not being blessed right now. So you are not doing yours.

Listen to me. The transaction already happened. It happened between Christ and the Father, and the debt was paid, and you were not a party to it.

There is nothing left to negotiate.

He is not going to love you more if you produce, and he is not going to love you less if you fail.

He said he would love you freely.

Let him.

I Will Allure Her

"Therefore, behold, I will allure her, and bring her into the wilderness, and speak tenderly to her." Hosea 2:14

Allure is not a word we use much, and when we do we usually mean something a little dishonest. A lure is what you put on a hook.

That is not this.

The allurement here is not to trick. It is a persuasion that radically suggests a different option than the one we are living. It says, would you be willing to consider something else. Would you be willing to see my goodness as greater than whatever it is you love more than me.

And notice the mechanism, because it is the strangest part of the verse. He does not corner her. He does not expose her. He brings her into the wilderness and speaks tenderly.

Faithful love never forces itself on anybody.

Think of the two on the Emmaus road. They are walking away from Jerusalem, away from their group, away from everything, and they are doing it after two separate testimonies came back and told them the tomb was empty. They heard the women. They sent the men. And they walked away anyway.

And Jesus comes alongside them and hides their eyes and just walks.

He had every reason to boast. He had just defeated death. He could have said, what is wrong with you, you had two witnesses. Instead he listens. He asks questions. He opens the Scriptures and shows them how the whole thing has been pointing at him the entire time, and he lets them not know it is him.

He never once pushes them to see him.

He walks in the direction they are already going.

I have wondered whether he does that all the way. Whether he walks the ones who are turning away as far as they will go, still speaking tenderly, still offering the other option, right up to the gate.

Their hearts burned first. The recognition came second.

He is not going to force you.

He is going to walk with you until something burns.

Ready or Not

"You will seek me and find me, when you seek me with all your heart. I will be found by you, declares the LORD." Jeremiah 29:13-14

Three things came clear while I was praying through Jeremiah, and they came in this order. Not for disaster. Look for me. I will be found by you.

And what filled my heart when I read them was not a doctrine. It was hide and seek with my kids. Little feet scampering across hardwood. The perfect hiding spot, which is never as perfect as they think. And then that moment when you call out, here I come, ready or not.

They always give themselves away. That is the part I keep turning over. The giggle from behind the curtain, the foot sticking out from under the blanket. They are not trying to win. They want to be found. Everything in them is straining toward the moment you pull the door open and say, there you are.

Young children love being found. It is not until we get older that we make it harder to be found.

Somewhere along the way the game changes. We learn to hide better. We learn to hold still and hold our breath and let the footsteps pass by. We learn that being found might cost us something, and so we get very, very good at not being found, and we call it privacy, and we call it strength, and we call it managing.

And then we wonder why God feels far away.

Maybe hide and seek was never meant to be won. Maybe it was always about bringing us together.

He says, I will be found by you. He does not say, I will find you and drag you out. He says he will be found. He is not hunting. He is seeking a person who wants to be discovered.

So here is the year. Here is the whole thing, and everything else that follows is a footnote to it. God is not looking for you the way a man looks for lost keys. He is looking for you the way a father looks for a child who is dying to be found.

The question is not whether he is seeking.

The question is whether you still want to be found.