Standing In The Gap

So, the lot of you gave me quite a bit to consider this weekend. Each of you so different, each bringing out a different part of what I can give.

N , my friend, I know that things are going poorly. I suppose that’s a wretched understatement for what you’re going through. Wrenching, wretched, … I’m out of alliteration. It’s awful. And yet. Everything that I knew about you is still true. It always has been. It’s not true because I say it is — God knows I’m just this guy; it’s true because it’s true. But perhaps it isn’t true in the way that you’ve thought it was. That’s sometimes the way with these things. God doesn’t give us ease when he puts us into leadership.

I don’t have some magical phrase to cure these ills, friend. They are here and real and horrible. I can tell you what I see, but I don’t have any special insight into it. Just my own opinion. I don’t know why God has let this happen. But I do know that it doesn’t mean that he doesn’t love you. Just like I know that there is nothing that you can do to snatch yourself from out of Jesus’ hand. His covenant with you is not about making things easy or good appearance. His hand is greater than you.

And perhaps now is the time to remind you that I’ve spent years dreaming of driving into cement pylons. Things have not been nor are they now easy. Or even pleasant. But I get to see people like you. I get to see God at work. I get to participate his glory by his own allowance — I have nothing and add nothing to what he gives me to give him back. I’m not sitting in a big house in the ‘burbs, with a fancy car or even a job.

Still I say these things, because we did not choose him. He chose us.

Everything is still true. I wonder if you acted like you thought so what would happen.

M, whom I rarely see these days, has come into a moment, a place where something can happen. That hasn’t always been true. Bitterness and hatred, still there but at a lower tone. I think the time has come to provide a push. We all choose our own lives, whether to live in sin or in righteousness. But perhaps I think of “live in sin” much differently than she would hear it. She denies the glory that is hers in Christ out of fear. They deny it together. And yet….

I say that a lot, don’t I? “And yet….” Jesus is dead. The Romans have killed him at the behest of the council and dead men don’t get back up, do they? At least, not without a Jesus to raise them from the dead, shouting “Come forth!” Jesus is dead, bled, buried. They broke him.

And yet….

This thing I cannot truly believe nags at me. They say they saw him. They say he is still here. They say….

Hmmm. R & M have let bitterness not only take root but grew a massive tree. I can’t really see how this shall be healed. I think that they most of the time hate each other. I mean contempt, probably. Maybe hate’s not the right word. The love of their marriage, if it ever burned, has been stamped out by the trampling of their mutual armies of anger turned sideways. Yes, there can be no real hope here.

And yet….

I’m not a hopeful man, you know. Or perhaps you don’t. You may only know what you have seen. No wait. I’ve stayed at your house before. I think you can see the level of ineptness I bring to much of my life. I don’t look at things and see the hopeful situation most of the time. I see a stark reality that normally says that odds run high against.

And yet….

There is something about Him, isn’t there? I wish I could keep him at bay, but I can’t. He brings me these most wonderful people, and then stocks me full of gifts for them. I even get to pledge things on his behalf, act as his “co-signer” of sorts, saying that I will make good on his promises even if he renegs. Who has ever heard of such a thing, that a man would back up the promises of the creator? But I do, mostly in matters of money. It seems stupid for me to say “God will meet that need” when the airwaves are full of people who say such things. Which is easier, to say “God promises to meet your need” or to say “Hear’s a blank check and if God doesn’t come through I’ll bankrupt myself to meet it”?

You know that I’m right. All of this is a distraction. And maybe y’all need the distraction. But I don’t know. I konw that I so often find the experience of God to be overwhelming, so ecstatic that I have to find some way to stop feeling it. I feel like I’ll burst. It’s hard to explain unless you have the same bizarre personality, where you don’t really have desires except for these overwhelming ones. It’s like riding a hurricane.

Except of course that people like Da get it because they feel the same thing. “What do you want?” I don’t know, except that I do but it’s not what I want it’s this horrible longing or compelling force that is sweeping me away like the torrent when San Antonio got those 35″ of rain in a week. 60 feet above flood stage, the Bandera sweeping even the massive river oaks aways. Yeah, that’s what it’s like. Knowledge, experience. But the experience is not God, merely an experience that he wishes us to have so that we can bring something to the body. Lost to ourselves because we have no self, we bring something that breaks apart strongholds, like the grass breaks apart concrete.

We talked with her this weekend, too. A long talk with great Belgian beers. (They even had the Cantillon Gueze Grand Cru on tap, for goodness sake!) She’s afraid, afraid of the wonderful thing that God gives her, afraid of the power of the ecstasy, of the envelopment, of the explosion that cannot be challenged. She’s dangerous, you know. She doesn’t, of course, or I should say she knows that she is dangerous and won’t believe it. So much in her life is not consistent with what I see. And yet, she knows that what I say is true, not because I am some great prophet but because I speak what the Spirit is testifying to her in her heart, speak what she must confirm in the congregation, within the Body, against the scriptures. Just words, but they are a gift from God. I’m just a letter carrier, like an out-of-shape postman. He could’ve used the dog in front of the bar, of course, and probably gotten a better message.

What is so special about the truth? I know that in part you simply haven’t had enough people tell you who you are. Any of you. And then there is K. My dear young friend who will probably cost us thousands before it’s all over and done. Totally worth it, of course, to permit God the opportunity to build someone who can change the world. We stand in the gap for her, betwixt her and her parents who can no longer see her fully — she’s grown beyond them already — betwixt her and the church leadership, who must care more for her than they think she needs; betwixt her and God, standing in as fleshy backers of the Increate’s promises. It’s a pretty easy thing to do, committing to meeitng these needs that I believe God is promising to her. I mean, I’ve been stepping up to the plate to put my money where God’s mouth is for years. I can’t remember when it ever cost me money. I always worry about it because I know that I’m just this guy and it’s ridiculous for me to think that I can say that God wants them to stop worrying about this particular financial issue. I’m not even mildly good with money. I don’t even care about money: it’s just not on my radar. I don’t even care about it when I’m well below the poverty level. And yet I can’t just say “God will meet your need” because any charlatan can say that. Since I’m just a fool and not a charlatan (don’t follow me!) I have to say that I’ll make sure that this is going to be met, because I think that God wants to meet it. If he gives me the money to give to K, what do I care? It’s not my money anyway, but God’s.

The other K, the other young person who may revolutionize the world for Christ, had a need that I knew God wanted me to say “don’t worry about” and had to commit to covering. Those thousands of dollars came from someplace else, totally unexpected. Because it’s not my promise.

I know: why can’t God promise you money? I don’t know. I can only work with what I’m given, since I have nothing to offer on my own.

Life looks hard. It is impossible for me to meet K’s needs, just as it was impossible for me to meet the other K’s needs. I committed to giving over more money than we had anywhere. We just don’t have money any more. I started looking into getting rid of the bassoon, selling a car. Work wasn’t happening. I was seriously concerned because I have to meet my word.

So God just goes out and meets it. Doubly.

Poor compensation for him, though. He’d give it all away to solve some other problems. Your mother doesn’t come back from the dead. Your life doesn’t come back together.

So here I have all of you: R & M in bitterness, Da in fear and hiding, K hoping that it won’t go away, N forgetting the real truth. Me getting more than I ever give. Bozo of the year becomes ambassador to God’s annointed ones, chosen from before the foundations of the earth.

If I had to experience everything that L and I have gone through for the last five years — losing my career, losing my mind, going nigh bankrupt, having our lives destruct, enduring the pity and embarassment of our families, despairing of ever seeing the hope of the Lord in the land of the living — if all of this were only to give me street cred for K, so that she would believe in Him who loves her, then it’s all nothing. None of this mattered. Nothing at all. It’s not that it was worth it: it’s that the agony of our pain simply is irrelevant by comparison to the glory of God as expressed in her life.

If you could walk through glass and know, really know, that you would see God — and I mean see God, the Increate, the Endless, the Perfect, the Almighty — would you pass it up? Don’t you know that he care more about your kids than he does the sparrows? More for you than for the lillies of the field? More about E than the cattle on a thousand hills? This is he who did not think of the loss of his station, seated with the Father, to come, being born among us as this bastard, living a lackluster life, being thought mad by his own mother and brothers, being misunderstood and rejected by those he came to save, who wouldn’t stay dead. What does he have to do for us to understand his love? His fierce, unending, unimaginable love for us. (But I ask these for myself.)

This will pass. It may not pass the way that you want it to. The outcomes may be very different from your desires. I do not know. I only know that nothing that God allows ever changes who you are. The gifts have been fired and folded, hardened for the day that they are revealed. The leaders of the people of God are shown to be imperfect, flawed, helpless without God. Only the inconsequential leaders have lives of no struggle. Those that God has chosen to bless his people through have very different lives.

But don’t give up. Don’t let go. You don’t really have much of a choice. He has dogged us this far. He will dog us awhile more.

I no longer call you servants, because a servant does not know his master’s business. Instead, I have called you friends, for everything that I learned from my Father I have made known to you. You did not choose me, but I chose you and appointed you to go and bear fruit — fruit that will last. Then the Father will give you whatever you ask in my name. This is my command: Love each other.

Here is what follows the “and yet….” Only Christ. In the end, he’s all we will ever have.

We stand in the gap, betwixt the darkness of our Godless night and the faintest hoping of the dawn of the resurrection. We stand there not because we wish it but because it is here that we also stand betwixt those we long for and their only salvation.

And I stand in the gap for you, betwixt you and the Creator. I cry out to him, and he bursts the bonds about you. What is done is not always made plain living inside it. I sit at his gate and cry out for him to give me flour and oil, for a friend has come unexpectedly from out of town and I have nothing to give him.

Standing in the gap hurts. We suffer here. We cannot be known or idolized. It is the job of idiots and fools, of the castoffs of our world. But I live now in another place, at the throne of God himself with Christ, first-born of all of us.

Because you stand in the gap for others, do you believe that none stand in the gap for you? I stand here, knowing full well the darkness that surrounds you. I live there, too, you know. But I live the resurrection of Christ, the rebirth and spiritual quickening. Hope, friends. We stand there for each other, ministers of the grace of Christ himself because he chooses to let us be a part of each other’s salvation.

The darkness of Saturday surrounds you. Those who said they would be with you have betrayed you. You cry out to God that he has left you the only prophet in a wicked land. The darkness is Godless: he is dead, cold, buried. There is no comfort, no hope. No anything.

And yet….

I stand ahead of you in the darkness. Look. Day breaks. Dawn may yet come. The resurrection may yet happen again in you. Between the darkest night and the hint of dawn. Crawl over my body and on to Christ.