Believing

Now may the God of hope fill you with all joy and peace in believing, so that you will abound in hope by the power of the Holy Spirit. (Romans 15:13)

There is just so much to learn and assimilate in this one verse that I can't do it in just one or two days. What I want to ponder and listen about now is this idea of believing and the implications that it has on the surrounding elements in this passage.

What I have been learning and reinforcing in my mind and heart over this last week is the surprising truths about God's forgiveness and salvation that were never so clear to me before. When I realize from various texts in the Bible the unconditional nature of these things that God has revealed to us through Jesus and His sacrifice for us, I begin to experience the kind of amazement that draws me into that salvation. At the same time I become more disillusioned with the false teachings that I grew up with that makes us the centerpiece of salvation and the focal point of the universe. While we are certainly an important part of the issue, the great war does not really revolve around us like we have so long supposed. The real center of all the commotion is the accusations against the real truths about God Himself.

God is the center of all attention in this trial for everyone who knows anything about what is really going on in this war. God's character reputation has been maligned, distorted, blasphemed, and displaced with lies and insinuations by His archenemy who used to be His closest created comrade and friend. The part that us humans have in this battle of the titans is only as witnesses to testify in His trial. And our testimony that is required and that every person will give whether they claim to know God or not is this, Can God accomplish in the hearts and lives of fallen sinners what He claims He can do or is it all a ruse?

The ninth commandment given on Mount Sinai is the requirement that we are not to witness falsely against our neighbor. But I believe that even more importantly we must experience God's transformation in our hearts so thoroughly that we will not falsely witness in God's trial about His desire to work in our lives.

We can present a false testimony in God's trial in different modes. We may claim outwardly and intellectually that God is good and kind and powerful but not allow those truths to transform our hearts. Then it will be our spirit and influence and symptomatic behavior that will be testifying against the claims of God contrary to our professed claims.

But even more common is the embracing and teaching of some or many of the lies about God that have so long been assumed to be true. This clearly becomes an endorsement of the false charges against God that Satan insists are true. But no matter how many centuries these lies have been accepted and promoted by millions they are still lies and will never stand the test of full exposure to the light of real truth.

The problem for us is that we were born in this sea of lies as well as taught many of these lies about God and therefore have little frame of reference to even know that they are false. The very nature of deception is that one does not usually even know they are deceived. The things they believe are in their mind completely true and they are simply embracing what they have assumed all their lives to be the path of integrity while not realizing they are promoting insinuations about God that inhibit them and others from coming to Him for life. And the fact of the matter is that every single one of us finds ourself in this condition to start with.

For many years I was mystified by Jesus' repeated statements about our urgent need to believe. John seemed to pick up this theme particularly and amplified it in his other epistles. But what I could not figure out for a very long time was just what it was that we are supposed to believe. Sometimes He would say that we were to believe on the Son of Man. Other times it was to believe that Jesus came from the Father. Sometimes He simply said that we were to believe with seemingly little hint as to what that meant, at least from what I could tell from the context and my perspective.

This used to greatly frustrate me and even fed into my secret suspicion that maybe it was another scheme by God to keep me from being saved. (Yes, that kind of picture of God was a very real part of my life growing up, sadly to say.) I wondered for years why God did not make it more explicit just what it was that I was supposed to believe so that I could fulfill this additional requirement so as to get “saved”, whatever that meant.

But a few years ago when God began introducing Himself to me personally and began to seriously challenge my many fears and false assumptions about Him with the truth of His goodness, kindness, compassion and all the other unconditional truths about His character, it began to dawn on me that what Jesus was really saying to people was this: I want you to believe that what you see Me doing and how I relate to you and treat you is the same as the way the Father feels about you. My kindness, gentleness, unconditional forgiveness and my passion to lift you up, heal you and love you is exactly the truth about both Me and the Father that has been hidden from you by all the lies you have believed.

I am sad to admit that this process of changing my opinions about what God is like has been extremely slow and full of resistance due to the lies about Him that are so deeply rooted in my psyche. These lies appeal for justification to the continued belief of them by most people in the church and by misreadings of the Scriptures and other inspired writings. These lying spirits are irreconcilable with the Spirit of God and the only way I can relate to them effectively is to expel them forcefully from my heart and mind as they come to my attention in the light. There can be no compromise with them. There can be no shared mind space between the real truth of God and the poisonous counterfeits that are dedicated to drawing my heart away from Him.

But a very interesting aspect of this thing called believing is the element of free choice. While it is amazingly true that God's forgiveness is permanent and has been in place since eternity (it is a description of what God's heart is like), and His salvation is also a permanent fixture and has been gifted to every human being whether they know it or not, it is completely up to each one of us as to whether we will experience all the benefits of engaging or synchronizing with these unchangeable facts of reality. It is very much like two gears that are near each other, one with power in it and the other in need of power. It is only as the powerless gear chooses to move close enough to the powered gear to engage its teeth with the stronger gear that any power can be transferred into itself and it can begin to turn.

What I see in this verse right now is something along the line of this analogy. The teeth of the gears could be likened to these two important descriptions in this verse: joy and peace. It just so happens that those who have been studying the brain recently have discovered that these two things are the most important experiences that the brain needs in order to grow and thrive and mature and bond with other minds. These two experiences form a cycle that is crucial for the mental health of every individual. We need to experience joy together with others followed by times of peaceful togetherness and quietness, which is then followed by more experiences of the more active experience of joyful togetherness which is followed....

So I find it quite compelling that in the heart of this verse describing in essence the process we experience in salvation that the two most important ingredients for mental health are the same things that our God of hope wants to fill us with when we choose to believe in Him. So what is it that constitutes our choice to believe? What is it that we can choose to believe that will allow God to fill us with this energizing, life-giving joy-peace cycle?

I believe that what we need to choose to believe is in the surrounding context of this verse. We are to recognize and believe the truth about Jesus and His servant spirit (v. 8). We can glorify God for His mercy and praise Him in our joy and singing (v. 9). We can rejoice together with His people (part of the actual definition of the word joy – v.10). We can believe that God is the kind of God that will inspire hope in our hearts and instead of motivating us through fear (v. 12, 13).

Any amount of resistance to believing in any of these things betrays hidden lies and false spirits still lurking within my heart. And it is that resistance that is trying to prevent me from making the choice to believe. But choosing to believe is the permission that God must have in order for Him to enter into my heart and accomplish all that the power of His Holy Spirit is waiting to do in me.

If I choose to believe and keep choosing to believe, then God is given the permission that He needs to expel these lying spirits from my heart, to expose the secret fears and apprehensions I have harbored all of my life in the light of His love so that I can release them and become even more free from my slavery to fear. It is this point of belief that is the most crucial and pivotal point for each one of us in our role as witnesses in God's trial. For if we choose to believe the truths about Him as He reveals them to us instead of resisting them, our lives can bear a truthful testimony that God's word is true and that He indeed can do what He says He can do in us. And according to Romans 4:1-5 when we believe that God can do what He says He can do it is credited to us as righteousness.

I choose to believe the real truths about God and what He is like that He has been progressively revealing to me over the past few years. I know that there is much more that I need to know about Him and even more that my heart needs to embrace. But I am so glad that He is the one in charge of this process of transformation and lie exposure. I am coming to actually appreciate the fact that I come under conviction on a regular basis because that indicates that God is at work in my heart. I want to have the lies about him exposed that have hidden inside of me all of my life, because they have been the roots that have produced so much bitterness, dysfunction and sin in my life and my relationships. I want the God of hope to fill me with joy and peace in believing. So I choose to believe and keep on choosing that option, because I know that my choice to believe in the goodness of God is the door that allows Him to continue His work in my transformation. And the real purpose for my transformation is so that in His trial I will be able to give a truthful testimony about His character.

I know that I will be called upon to give a character reference for God in His great trial in the day of His judgment. But I also realize that I am daily called upon to testify about what He is really like. So I choose to believe the truth about Him as He continues to reveal it to me so that He can reproduce that same truth about His character in His image that He created me to be. (Gen. 1:26, 27)

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