Truth is an experience, don't miss it!

A while back I was watching a YouTube video that popped up in my recommended feed. The video was about two orthodox evangelical theologians from America who discussed the longing for revival in the charismatic movement. Though I said to myself that I should stop watching because it would just irritate me or make me angry I somehow could not bring myself to click the little cross icon to close the tab, so the video kept playing and I got annoyed as I knew I would. The video was shot during what is known as the Asbury Revival and was a response to it of sorts. Both of the men talking hadn’t been to Asbury, nor did they display a great desire to go there, but they did feel the need to talk about what happened there and what revival would truly be in their opinion. Though they never condemned the event outright, they kept talking about what a revival should, and shouldn’t be, casting al kinds of doubt and shade on what for a lot of people was a live changing event. Both men said they both hadn’t seen a revival with their own eyes but would want to see one.

For some reason this video sticked with me. Not because of the annoyance I felt in their ignorance, in the years I have developed a filter for ignorant intellectuals and their desire to talk about what they don’t understand. The reason this video sticked with me is because both men lived a (long) car drive away from Asbury, they expressed a desire for revival, had all sorts of opinions on the matter based on historical and theological arguments, but they didn’t think to just go and see for themselves. For some reason this felt profoundly wrong to me. Both of them are full of passion about truth and have a job devoted to the Word of God, yet something happens and you stick to the knowledge from your books instead of experiencing it for yourself. It seemed like it didn’t even cross their minds that they could just go and experience this revival for themselves.

I often hear the saying, ‘truth is not understood before it is experienced’, and I couldn’t agree more. Sure, one can believe a statement to be true by just hearing it, but to truly understand it must be experienced. This doesn’t just work for the Kingdom of God, but it works for everything. Even the scientific method is based on observation, hypothesis, and experimenting before you analyze and form a conclusion. In theology, experience has been downplayed a lot in the recent centuries and this has had a profound impact on the way people experience faith. For example, one of the main criticisms from traditional theologians on modern worship music is the repetitiveness of words and melodies, which plays on people’s feelings instead of focusing them on Gods truth. For centuries experience was an essential part of theological truth, what we now would consider to be third wave Pentecostal weirdness would be quite normal and called mysticism, or mystical theology.  There is an irony in the fact that charismatics are often accused of pursuing the latest, newest experience over ancient truth. Experimental truth has, from the very early church until a few hundred years ago, always had its place in Christianity. The overemphasis on solemn ratio as basis for theological truth is what I would call a modern invention. And about repetitiveness in worship music, lets just say that contemporary worship artists weren’t the first who discovered the power of repetition in liturgy.

Solemnly following the ways and truth of the mind brings us all kinds of problems. Just take a brief look at Dutch church history and you can see how lack of experienced truth has led people astray. In 1926, the Dutch reformed churches had a church schism because one of their pastors in his lecture on Genesis 3 said that the snake in paradise didn’t actually use words to speak. There was a schism over the question whether the speech of the snake would be perceivable by human senses. You could ask, what does this have to do with anything? And my answer would be that this little anecdote is precisely the point I am trying to make. Truth, in this little story is not very hard to perceive. The truth is that the point of Genesis 3 is not about what factually happened in regards to the snake and the fact that he talked, but about good and evil. If you truly experienced evil, and have truly experienced good, this whole story sounds rather stupid because the whole discussion is meaningless. Instead of leading people into a revelation about sin, truth and lie, they were squabbling  over a trivial fact. So much so that it drove those people apart. This stupid discussion was so important to them that they went separate ways. The sad thing is, since the early 1800’s there have been countless of these little schisms in the Dutch church. A church focused on ratio is a church in permanent disagreement. And more, it’s a church that slowly loses its ability to distinguish truth from lie. Experienced truth is the best evidence of it’s truth claim, if truth can’t be experienced the question of its relevance should be asked.

I think, for me one of the great questions I often ask myself is, ‘when do I trust someone to teach me truth’. I have heard enough smart lies, and have seen goodhearted people lose their faith because they fell in ratio’s trap and couldn’t believe in the supernatural anymore. True knowledge comes from experience, thus I will trust those people that experience, to lead me into a place where I, also, experience. Do I trust two theologians to teach me about revival when they don’t even feel the need to experience said revival? No, thank you! I will trust those people that testify about God experienced, whether they are intellectuals or illiterate, not to feed my mind but to show me the way so I can experience God in the same way. I mean, if God is truth, truth experienced is God experienced.

The Nature of Wisdom

 Wisdom is a subject I love to meditate on. In scripture, it is often compared to treasure that you can acquire. For me, this always meant that wisdom is like any other commodity in life: you can acquire it, steward it, and, by investing it, get a profit. In the profit, your wisdom will increase. That also means, though, that by making a bad investment, you can lose some of your profits. I see so many people struggling to understand how to invest wisdom or even struggling to see what wisdom is.

The first thing we have to understand when it comes to wisdom is that we cannot acquire it without God. This tells us a lot about the nature of wisdom, mainly that we will not find true wisdom in a place where God is not present. The fear of the Lord is the beginning of all wisdom. So wisdom starts with having a healthy understanding of God's nature and how you relate to it. Scripture also teaches us that God is love and that perfect love casts out all fear. So how do we relate these two things to God without a conflict? Personally, I like to think of the fear of God as a feeling of awe and reverence, combined with a state of being overwhelmed by the size and power of His person and nature. It is important, though, that we also realize that this all-powerful omnipotent being is love, so we are struck by His greatness and undone by the fact that this all-powerful being loves us in a way that we cannot even comprehend.

So we start with the fear of the Lord, and the Lord is love. All wisdom should, therefore, be rooted in love. Love and fear are opposites, so fear can never be wisdom. Some people try to sugarcoat fear with terms like caution, or they call it life experience, but we should not fool ourselves. If wisdom is rooted in love, wisdom should also be risky because love is a power that moves people to take risks. Love makes people do crazy things. In Paul's famous poem on love in his first letter to the Corinthians, he says that faith, love, and hope will always remain. I would say that having love without faith and hope would be impossible. Faith and hope are the engines that make it possible to move in love. Hopelessness and despair are the opposites, and they are both rooted in fear. So if we would like to advance in wisdom, we should press into love, using faith and hope, abandoning all reasoning grounded in pain, despair, hopelessness, and ultimately fear.

Meditating on this, I feel a sense of irony. What we consider wisdom is so often grounded in caution and logic, designed to avoid risks and see all possible outcomes. In the last ten years, I have seen so many people who wouldn't move in love because they thought wisdom said they couldn't. I have seen people abandon other people in the name of wisdom because they couldn't foresee if their love would be enough or that something might go wrong. One might think, "If someone is not sure that they could give what a person needs, would it be love to try?" It almost sounds like love, and it feels like wisdom to consider this, but it is fear in disguise. When we press into love, using faith and hope, we cannot oversee with certainty what the outcome will be; otherwise, we wouldn't need faith and hope. I love that faith implies that there is a reason to expect a good outcome, but hope doesn't even imply a reason. It's just a choice to look at what could be as opposed to what could go wrong.

It's sad to me that so often people who love but don't achieve what they hoped (or what others think they should have achieved) are used as examples of a lack of wisdom. If you do a Google search on a Christian ministry that takes a risk, you will find websites dedicated to pointing out everything that goes wrong, seeing all their flaws. People are calling it discernment, though they are only judgmental. A discerning person would feel the love those people poured into their ministry and feel compassion over their struggles.

I feel like true wisdom would seldom be recognized. We live in a day, age, and culture that needs to understand everything. Our churches are infected with this obsession of the mind, to understand and have control. If the beginning of wisdom is the fear of the Lord, and the Lord is love, we need to understand that this all-powerful, omnipotent God expects you to move in love without having any fear because if you truly fear the Lord, you will not dare to fear anything else.

One last thing to conclude would be that wisdom doesn't necessarily lead you to success or to the goals you set. That is not the point of wisdom. If you truly take risks, you will fail. If you never failed, you have never taken any risks. Wisdom is calling you into a realm of risk and failure. True love manifests in the possibility of failure and loss. Investing wisdom, moving in love, and taking a risk will bring you to a place of surrender. You don't always know what you'll get, but your investment will pay off because your love increased. And know that your God is all-powerful and watches over all your failures, ready to fix them. When you fear failure or fear that love will make you lose something, you have an opportunity to ask God to increase your fear of Him. So a word of wisdom to all: stop thinking, get out of your study, and start moving already!

The Joy of Battle

 Lord of The Rings is one of my favorite books, and J.R.R. Tolkien is my favorite author. The man has true talent when it comes to creating an epic, both in storytelling and in his prose. What some people might not know about Tolkien is that he was a World War One veteran who fought at the Battle of the Somme, one of the deadliest battles in world history with over one million casualties. I find it a bit odd that a man who witnessed humanity's worst created one of the most compelling fantasy worlds ever imagined. Surely, witnessing and participating in one of the darkest hours of humanity diminishes one's ability to imagine another world. It certainly affects what you create and imagine.

There is one passage in The Return of the King that always makes me feel a little bit weird when reading it. Knowing Tolkien's war history, I never understood what he meant by saying, 'And then all the host of Rohan burst into song, and they sang as they slew, for the joy of battle was on them.' Surely, a man like Tolkien wouldn't think of a battle as something that brings joy?

When I was driving home from work today, this particular sentence popped into my mind. I haven't read the books for quite some time, but I felt the Holy Spirit upon me. He wanted to reveal something to me. Though I never had to fight in a war or have been in a serious physical conflict, I have had my fair share of spiritual battles. Most of the spiritual battles are battles over a promise God gave me. If there's one thing I have learned in the past years, it's that God's promised land for me is never empty. It's always full of giants to slay and cities to besiege. Usually, when I first cross the river Jordan into my new promised land, I'm full of faith and totally unaware that there is a battle to be fought. The sight of enemies could dishearten me enough to send me right back over the river and complain to God about how He is unfaithful. Later on, I learned that with the promise of the land comes the promise of conquest. So I would cross the river Jordan again, enter my promised land, draw my sword, yell that the land is mine, get hit by an enemy, and run away to complain to God that the blow the enemy landed caused an unacceptable amount of pain. So I would go back and forth until God brought me a battle that was so important to me, and the promise so real, that instead of running, I cried out to God, 'I will literally die on this hill if Your promise isn't true. And if I misunderstood, we can discuss my error in heaven. But if You don't come through, my life will fall apart. I will stand on this promise until nothing else is left.' So I took many hits, but after a long and exhausting fight, the enemy fled from me.

This taught me the value of faith, perseverance, and conviction, but I would not call it a joy to fight this battle. As the years passed, and more fights (and victories) came, I grew more comfortable in combat. Fear faded away. I grew stronger, and while I was growing stronger, God gave me a new revelation. I used to say that I hated the fight (or the process) before I received my promise, but eventually, I stopped hating the fight because I already knew I would win. He even gave me moments when He made me look at the enemy challenging me, and I would laugh, knowing that this enemy could never rob me of my promised land. He also made me realize that with every battle I fought, I became stronger and bigger. I didn't just walk on the new land; I took it and made it my own. One day, the Lord said to me, 'Do you realize that by entering the battle, you have already received your prize? It's not like you are going to lose this with Me by your side, and you will grow stronger and bigger again, just like last time. Can you dream about what victory would look like even when the enemy appears strongest?' And then, just like Tolkien wrote it, I burst into song and sang as I slew, for the joy of battle was upon me. I knew exactly what I was fighting for. I had seen enough victories to not be disheartened by resistance. And though this enemy looked like an unkillable giant, the enemies of the past felt the same way, yet they are all dead now. So now, when I fight, I dream about the land that is promised by God and what I will do in it, and in the dreaming, I feel the pleasure of God. God said to me: 'This is the peace and the joy you can have when you're fighting a battle. When a dream is rooted in My desire, we are dreaming the same thing. That makes it a prophecy. Or do you truly believe that if you and I share a dream, anyone can come against us? How many giants do I need to put on your path for you to grasp this?'

I still feel scared, angry, afraid, or hurt from time to time, or I don't see how I can win, but I'm always drawn back to this truth: If God promised me a new land, He has already given me the victory over all the enemies. So I will not focus on the battles and the giants; I will focus on the land and dream the dream I share with God. And when I do, I will laugh because He who sits on the throne is laughing.

True intimacy

  In the years i've had lots of people come and go in my life. I have moved houses a lot, went to all kinds of different churches, had personal hardship witch alienated me from close people and failed (and was failed by) several people. Reading the bible i always had this strong conviction that relationship is somehow key to a fulfilling life, but in the disappointments and chaos of my life's journey I never fully grasped intimacy and friendship. Some people around me did but for years i missed the point. In my early adulthood years i started to believe that i don't truly need people. Sure, it's nice to have people around but i'm fine if they're not around. In the end, God is all i truly need and I have a wonderful wife, i don't need more than this. 

Before i embraced this conviction i used to feel alone a lot. When i convinced myself i don't truly need anything from people the loneliness went away and i felt some kind of peace. I taught myself that i might not be able to receive from people, but that doesn't mean i can't give. So I indulged myself in ministry and prayer, always focussing on other people, like a true christian. I saw all kinds of people receive wonderful things, it was great. Until something in me snapped.

It rose in me like a tide, a deep anger. 'Everyone seems to receive something from me but nobody sees me and what I need'. At first, i tried to suppress this anger but it came to a point that i couldn't anymore, my soul and spirit cried out, 'I can't go on like this'. So I got angry, angry at people, and angry at God, but what I didn't see was that the only person to blame for me not being seen was me.

At this point God took me on a little journey through my heart. He showed me that I didn't show myself to people because I feared their judgment, rejection and because i didn't want them to see me for who I really am. I couldn't expect from people that if I told them my needs they would care enough for me to meet them. I hid from myself and in hiding from myself made myself invisible to the people around me. He showed me I could expect things from the people around me for myself, if only I could believe people wouldn't abandon me and cared for me. This was hard because i have been hurt and disappointed by several people in my life. The true conviction I believed wasn't so much that i don't need people, it was that nobody would eventually stick around, so i would be better off not letting them enter my heart in a meaningful way. In the end I'd have to take care for my self wether I wanted it or not.

When i grasped the error in my thinking and God healed the pain in my heart i could open up. I learned I have a lot more to give now that I'm able to receive. I also learned that being able to receive is vital to any kind of deep and meaningful relationship. It also means that i opened myself to the possibility of being hurt again. You can't do one without the other. For myself, i made the conscious  choice that I wanted people to be able to hurt me, because now I see, i truly do need people and if it doesn't hurt when they don't stick around I would have closed my heart for all the beauty and love they could give me. 

Intimacy has been a core theme in my life, I hope to write more in the future about how God changed me and what it means to truly connect with people.

Unapologetic

 One of the greatest losses in the Garden of Eden was humanity's loss of innocence. When God called Adam and Eve they hid in fear, covering their bodies with leafs to hide themselves. Such a stark contrast with Jesus, who carried all the sins of humanity bare naked on a cross, visible for all to see, unapologetic, yet judged by all who where watching.

The way of sin is judgement and fear, one leads to cover yourself up, the other leads to hide yourself. I strongly desire for the church to get the deep revelation this entails. If we are truly free there is nothing to hide and nothing to cover up. No fear and no judgment. It is heartbreaking to me that the church is a place where we need to hide and cover ourselves. Most of the times people don't even realize they are doing it.  Jesus did not only pay for our sins, he restored the innocence of all who follow him. This is what it truly means to become like little children. We can be so safe in God that we are no longer afraid of darkness, pain and evil. This is Gods gift to us, to live your lives unafraid of your desires, consequence's and failures. To be unapologetic in everything you do because fear and judgement are far behind you. God is your refuge. Sadly we can hardly believe this for ourselves, let alone for our brothers and sisters. And in this unbelief we cling to our sinful nature because we think we have to fight it. We even think God demands it from us to fight it. If only we could grasp the richness of the renewed man that was resurrected with Christ. Not on the day of judgment but the day you became born again. The true outrageousness of the cross is not just the forgiveness of sins, not even the restoration to the state of Adam and Eve. It is the fact that humanity is richer than it has ever been. We still know good and evil through mans first sin, but true goodness has been given to us, while knowing good and evil, our childlike innocence has been restored. So we should be fearless, unapologetic, wild and free, leaving the wisdom and judgment of religion behind us to become something new. Not servants, but a bride. How could we ever be a bride to christ if we can't leave our fear of sin behind? God trusts us so much that we are to mary his Son in the future and are one with the Holy Spirit in the present. Truly, what does this say about you? Trow away the leafs that cover your shame and walk unapologetic without fear that your desires will lead you astray, because if you do, and you stop hiding, God will show up and walk with you just like he did with Adam and Eve. He will protect you from evil desires and darkness. Everything that is uncovered is his. 

For this reason we should never put to shame a brother or sister who wholeheartedly and sincerely tries to walk with God. Because if we do, we will scare them in the bushes and make them cover their intimate parts. it's so easy to judge the free. I would like to encourage you all to be intimate with God and with each other, to throw away the leaves that cover you and come out of hiding. To be spiritually naked and have fellowship with Him and each other. Let us truly be like children.