Mentoring by God

Therefore Jesus answered and was saying to them, "Truly, truly, I say to you, the Son can do nothing of Himself, unless it is something He sees the Father doing; for whatever the Father does, these things the Son also does in like manner. (John 5:19)

I have been learning some background information about how our brains work over the past few years that have helped me understand a little bit more about this verse. Our right brain is actually the control center of our being, especially whenever we find ourselves in very stressful or emotional situations. Our right brain cannot be trained directly through the use of words (unless set in music), but most of the education that we focus on in our culture is primarily directed at the left brain. Unfortunately as a result, whenever we actually need all that information the most it is very often unavailable because the right brain resorts to imitating what it has absorbed from observing significant people in our life and what they did under similar circumstances instead of utilizing all our new information that was only conveyed to us intellectually.

In this verse Jesus is actually referring to this very principle that is in place within our makeup. That should be no surprise at all since Jesus Himself created our brains and knows exactly how they were designed to function. All of God's instructions and laws for us are designed to restore us to healthy functioning in the ways we were originally designed to operate. Sin has interfered with the natural process of how our original design would have us live and as a result we see all the dysfunction (sin) that results from trying to live in ways we were never meant to live.

The primary method of training our right brain is by association with people who are more mature than us and consequently absorbing into our own internal circuitry the spirit and reactions and methods that those mature minds demonstrate under various circumstances, especially times when they are under intense stress themselves. All of the wonderful intellectual education that we primarily use to train people for how to live is often wasted because it is not intimately connected with personal demonstrations of what it can look like under real-life circumstances. We are often deceived into thinking that the most educated people actually have greater maturity when that is very often just an illusion reinforced by our artificial labels and social priorities.

The kind of training that is most effective for actually increasing maturity and true growth in a person's life is the mentoring process of living in close proximity with more mature people who are going to shape us somewhat into their image by their examples in everyday life. That is the reason that Jesus drew His disciples into close association with Himself for 3½ years. It is true that during that time they received a great deal of instruction from Him and later were able to better comprehend what much of that actually meant. But the far more important training for them during that time was their opportunity to personally observe up close how Jesus treated people and His reactions during times involving very tense emotions or dangerous situations.

The disciples were given the unique opportunity to watch up close how God wants to relate to people and how He feels about people in contrast to the commonly accepted religious teachings of the religion of their culture. As they saw Jesus respond in situation after situation differently from how they would have reacted, they began to see a pattern emerging of how God feels towards sinners that was completely new and foreign to them and to most everyone else who claimed to serve God. The picture of God that Jesus portrayed to humanity was such a radical departure from the pictures painted by religious leaders that Jesus found Himself in constant conflict with their insistence that God was a stern, exacting, demanding authoritarian more interested in strict compliance with His laws than in having an intimate relationship with His children.

This point was what aroused the anger of the religious leaders in this very story. When Jesus began to talk about God as a loving Father who had a close relationship with Himself, the Jews were horrified and even scandalized to the point of considering this kind of thinking to be blasphemy. Surely no one should ever feel so relaxed and intimate about their relationship to God as to ignore the fundamental beliefs prevalent in all religions that God operates through the use of fear and intimidation. Most people believe that God uses a mixture of threats and force and anger along with offers of love and mercy to those who have enough fear from His threats to comply with His demands. But these ideas are fabrications of God's archenemy the devil, not an accurate portrayal of the real God of heaven.

But I still struggle as I have for many years to grasp with my own mind and heart the much deeper experience of what it actually means to see what God is doing. Clearly Jesus here is revealing a model of living and relating to God that is largely foreign not only to me but to most people I know. I can see how in my own life my reactions under stress have most often been shaped by similar reactions I learned observing how my parents acted under similar circumstances. That has actually been a serious problem all of my life as it is for many people. The important people in our lives, particularly when we are very young, have the most influence on our outlook, our concept of God and our ideas of what is right and wrong and on how we raise our children. That part is starting to make more sense to me as I learn about the true function of the right brain.

But what still baffles me is how Jesus intends for me to follow His example by getting retrained, re-wired and to have new circuits put into place deep in my own brain to displace all the malfunctions that were originally set into place from my past. I can see how I got the faulty wiring from close association with people who typically malfunctioned under stressful situations, but how can I see what my good Father is doing when I cannot see Him literally like I could my own parents?

Even the disciples of Jesus seem to have had a huge advantage over the rest of us because they got to observe God in the flesh up close and personal as He demonstrated His true character and interacted in every situation with the grace and unconditional love that the Father has for us. But in this passage Jesus implies quite clearly that He could not even do that Himself unless He stayed in such close connection with His Father that somehow He 'saw' how His Father acted in similar situations and responded likewise.

At the same time, Jesus did not literally see His Father anymore than I can literally see Jesus or the Father myself. So whatever it is that Jesus is talking about in this verse it must be something that I can actually do just as much as He did it. If Jesus could somehow see what His Father was doing all the time and download that kind of attitude and responding into His own circuitry and then use that as His context for relating to any and all circumstances, then there is surely a way that I can do the very same thing or He wouldn't be my example.

What Is Work? (2)

But He answered them, "My Father is working until now, and I Myself am working." (John 5:17)

Remember the sabbath day, to keep it holy. Six days you shall labor and do all your work, but the seventh day is a sabbath of the LORD your God; in it you shall not do any work, you or your son or your daughter, your male or your female servant or your cattle or your sojourner who stays with you. (Exodus 20:8-10)

I have been brought up from my earliest years to respect the words of God as set out in the Ten Commandments including the fourth commandment. I have understood that this day of rest is sacred, set apart by God to be special, holy and that because it was God who made it holy no one else has the power or authority to change that in the slightest. That is still my belief to this day and I am glad that I have that biblical background as my heritage.

However, what I have been discovering for many years now is that the assumed meaning of most of the words we use in religion have been distorted and obscured in many cases by the religious cultures that we grow up within. Because the truth about God and the good news about how He views us and desires to save us from our sins has been so perverted and confused in most minds, we have taken all of the words and phrases of the Bible and have morphed them into other ideas that conveniently fit our traditions more than the real truth about God's plan of salvation.

The two texts above tend to highlight this problem. The Jews, just like many of us today, had taken the words of God and the commandments that He gave to them to reveal universal principles of reality to humanity and had externalized them so much that they could not see the deeper importance and significance of how they were originally intended to apply to our lives. Included in this mass of distortions was the real meaning of what kind of work God was talking about in the fourth commandment.

Many have concluded that because Jesus openly stated that both He and His Father worked on the Sabbath day that He was somehow implying that the Sabbath was no longer applicable. But that is a very mistaken application of this passage and can lead one into very deep deception. Jesus in no way was trying to somehow introduce a new Sabbath day or do away with the commandment that lies in the very heart of the law that describes the essence of the character of God Himself. Contrarily, Jesus was actually challenging religious people's assumptions about the true meaning of the words God used when He spoke those commandments in the first place.

Part of the way we can properly understand what Jesus was trying to say here is to look at just what the Jews in this story were thinking about when they accused Jesus of working on the Sabbath. What had Jesus just done that they believed was a violation of the Sabbath commandment?

Jesus had healed a man from 38 years of sickness on the Sabbath day.

Jesus had instructed this same man to pick up the pallet that he had been lying on much of that time and carry it away instead of leaving it lay there on the ground in the way of everyone else.

These two things are the only things that I can see in this story that could have been involved in the accusations of the religious leaders. These evidently were the activities that they classified as being work that was unacceptable to God for people to do on the Sabbath day. They had not accused Him of conducting some sort of business to profit Himself or to support Himself financially. He was not doing carpentry work or fishing or working in the fields. He had simply carried out an act of compassion and had invited a dying man to exercise his own faith in the goodness and power of God and the results were obvious to everyone, especially since the man was carrying his pallet away because he no longer needed to lay on it helplessly anymore.

Can anyone of us honestly believe that these kinds of activities were what Jesus Himself had in mind when He spoke the commandments on Mt. Sinai around 2,000 years before? Or had the beliefs of the Jews been transformed into something very different than what God had in mind when He instructed humanity as to what their original blueprint was supposed to look like?

Humans are designed to be very similar to God Himself. God created the first humans in His own image, to reflect God in many ways, to be so similar to God that they could be considered His own children. That was not just in the physical realm but in nearly every respect. Humans had become so confused as to what healthy humanity was supposed to look like by the time of Moses that God stepped in to reintroduce Himself more clearly to humanity and to expose the foundational principles of what both He and His children would look like if they were restored to the relationship they were designed to enjoy together in the first place.

But because the Jews had lost sight of these truths in their vain attempts to reproduce the outward symptoms of godliness without the heart transformation, they had done the very same thing that nearly all religious people tend to do – they had morphed the meaning of nearly all the words of Scripture to take on quite different meanings than what God intended them to convey. As a result they could not comprehend that what Jesus did on the Sabbath day was anything other than work since it violated their artificial restrictions put in place through long years of tradition and human religious interpretations.

Because Jesus chose not to engage in an argument about what the real meaning of work was, He chose instead to simply use their terminology and disrupt their own thinking by stating that both He and God the Father would do things on the Sabbath that they classified as work. That does not mean in any way that the original commandment had changed, it simply meant that the meaning of the word 'work' had been lost and replaced with false assumptions by religious people bent on control over others instead of humble dependence on God.

These Jews were so opposed by this time to the very idea that true religion was supposed to be an intimate relationship with God instead of a system of ethics and morality and outward performance that the very suggestion of viewing God as a Father rankled them to their deepest core. They became so irritated by this reference by Jesus to His Father that they started to lose sight of the original cause of their frustration with Him and resented this reference so strongly that they cherished a spirit of hostility and murder in their hearts. They failed to notice that their inward desires to hurt and destroy Jesus were far clearer violations of the commandments than might be the activities of compassion that Jesus had performed that they found so offensive.

So, was Jesus really working on the Sabbath? Or was He simply borrowing their confused terminology and using it to expose their faulty thinking? I have to believe that the later is the case.

Jesus Himself gave the Ten Commandments centuries before and nothing had changed in the meantime. He knew better than anyone what He meant when He spoke those words to the Children of Israel and He had come to earth again to reveal the true meaning of what those commandments would look like when lived out as a human being in right relationship with Father God. For mere mortals who claimed to know more about the commandments than the original Author of the commandments is absurd to the max when one realizes what was going on there. But unfortunately we too often do the very same thing when we fail to search for the real meaning of religious words that we likewise misuse and misunderstand.

Example of Facing Resistance

For this reason therefore the Jews were seeking all the more to kill Him, because He not only was breaking the Sabbath, but also was calling God His own Father, making Himself equal with God. (John 5:18)

I am starting to see even more in this text each time I come back to look at it. I see three accusations embedded in this verse that sometimes show up in the lives of those who choose to follow Jesus in their own experience and that have the potential to create confusion at times.

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  Jesus was accused of breaking the Sabbath, even though in reality He did not ever do that.
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  Implied in the next accusation was that it is wrong to call God your Father for some reason. In Jesus' case they wanted to amplify the questionable circumstances surrounding His birth supposedly proving that He was an illegitimate child born out of wedlock and therefore should be viewed with great shame.
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  Implied in the last accusation is that if we call God our Father that we are somehow trying making ourselves equal with God, grasping for power and greatness for ourselves.

Whether or not any of these things can be proven to be true or not, the real issue is more the attitude and assumptions of the accusers, not whether or not their statements may be factually correct. Also, more importantly is the attitude and reaction of the person being thus accused. For though it is impossible to avoid being accused of things based on circumstances that may be used by someone eager to discredit us, our reaction to those accusations and innuendos is the only thing we have control over and are responsible for in the long run.

Just this morning I read some very relevant counsel along these lines in both of the devotional books that I am currently reading. This one from Oswald Chambers was so powerful and relevant for what is going on in my life right now that I had to read it two times to try to let it sink deeper into my own heart.

The only way a worker can keep true to God is by being ready for the Lord’s surprise visits. It is not service that matters, but intense spiritual reality, expecting Jesus Christ at every turn. This will give our life the attitude of child-wonder which He wants it to have. If we are going to be ready for Jesus Christ, we have to stop being religious (that is, using religion as a higher kind of culture) and be spiritually real.

If you are looking off unto Jesus, avoiding the call of the religious age you live in, and setting your heart on what He wants, on thinking on His line, you will be called unpractical and dreamy; but when He appears in the burden and the heat of the day, you will be the only one who is ready. Trust no one, not even the finest saint who ever walked this earth, ignore him, if he hinders your sight of Jesus Christ. (My Utmost for His Highest, March 29 emphasis mine)

In both my current circumstances in my local church and also in the intensity of what is taking place in my new business, I am faced with an urgency to keep my mind and heart free of anything that will draw me away from the presence of Jesus or leave me unprepared to encounter Him when He might show up unexpectedly. I have been making repeated choices to make God the center of my business activities and also my relationship with the church. This has at times set me on a collision course with others who consider being religious more important than being spiritually real. The conflicts are far from over but they do create enormous pressure many times to conform to what is considered norm instead of living life as what many consider to be impractical or even dreamy.

I can see each of these accusations that were directed at Jesus showing up in various ways again in my own life as I try to follow His example of focusing more on His Father than on conforming to religious expectations. I may or may not be accused of breaking the Sabbath, but my whole view of what it really means to be a Christian is very much a controversial issue in the eyes of many around me.

Likewise, the growing emphasis in my own life of focusing more on developing an intimate relationship with God as the most important thing a person should do as a Christian is eliciting resentment in the hearts of some people who believe that I am getting distracted from what they consider more important topics. And the last accusation leveled against Jesus in this verse though totally baseless was rooted in plain jealousy and evil surmising springing up in hearts that wanted to avoid feeling conviction because they felt exposed and threatened themselves.

It is in those times that there is great temptation to back away and try to soften the testimony of what I have been convicted of in my own heart by the Spirit of God who has been drawing me deeper into God's presence over the past few years. I sense that maybe my emphasis of being more accountable to God personally than trying to conform to traditions and dogmas of a church body is raising fears and resistance in the hearts of some who feel they are losing control over people that I am influencing by my testimony. It is at this point that I need to be reminded of who I am going to consider the most reliable authority of what is real and true in my own life.

Jesus stated that it is impossible that offenses will not come into our lives. I suppose that it should not be a surprise then that offenses are occurring in my relationship with the local church or even in my business relationships, but I also am forced to take a very hard look to examine my own motives to see if some of that offense might be caused by real faults and weaknesses in my own character. I don't want to fall into the trap of believing that my own belligerence is somehow a badge of godliness like I have observed too often in other people's experience. I want to keep myself in the presence of God and to maintain an attitude of humility while at the same time knowing that this example of Jesus in the face of intense criticism is the example of how I am to relate to similar circumstances in my own experience.

Rules vs. Truth

For this reason therefore the Jews were seeking all the more to kill Him, because He not only was breaking the Sabbath, but also was calling God His own Father, making Himself equal with God. (John 5:18)

We tend to view this verse from the perspective of looking back and seeing the animosity that finally led many of these same Jews to crucify Jesus because of their hatred of Him. But it might be much more useful to try to get into their minds a little bit to see where they were coming from and then to see how similar we may actually be to the way they viewed their situation.

The Jews were God's chosen people on earth. The Jews had been given their laws and instructions directly from heaven through Moses, the prophet that they honored the most in their history. There is little dispute that the Jews had the religion closest to God's will for humanity given all the other mixed up notions about the supernatural that were circulating around the world in ancient times. The religion of the Jews was far superior to that of any nation around them, but at the same time they had failed to obey the true purpose and spirit of all of the laws and guidelines that God had given them, but they had instead turned them into a means of distorting God's true nature in the minds of most people.

Like many people today, the Jews had externalized religion and had come to view it as primarily belief and performance-based, not a relationship with their Creator God based deep in the heart. As a result they had synthesized a system of religion over the years that included a great deal of extra regulations for the purpose of supposedly protecting people from even getting close to violating the commandments given to Moses. They honestly thought they were doing God a favor by building extra walls of regulations around what they thought was right, but in reality they had shifted people's focus away from an intimate relationship with their loving Father in heaven to a religion that had caused most people to have in their hearts a picture of God that was very far from what was true.

These Jewish leaders and teachers had a solid foundation for their beliefs and practices based on their reading of the Torah, the first five books in the Old Testament written by their prophet Moses. When the contents of those books are taken into consideration, it is much easier to see why these Jews felt so compelled to carry out a death decree on Jesus based on what they were seeing Him do in their midst. Consider just two of these commands from the Torah.

Therefore you are to observe the sabbath, for it is holy to you. Everyone who profanes it shall surely be put to death; for whoever does any work on it, that person shall be cut off from among his people. (Exodus 31:14)

Moreover, the one who blasphemes the name of the LORD shall surely be put to death; all the congregation shall certainly stone him. The alien as well as the native, when he blasphemes the Name, shall be put to death. (Leviticus 24:16)

Do you see more clearly now the correlation between what this verse from John talks about and these commands given by God to Moses? The Jewish leaders were not just jealous of Jesus' rising popularity but felt that they were actually defending the very rules that God had given them through their prophet Moses. They were simply wanting to carry out the instructions that God had given centuries before so they might execute God's justice against a common man who was clearly in their minds violating at least two very serious laws of their nation and religion.

We tend to struggle to see this story from that perspective because we start with the assumption that they should have known somehow that Jesus was no common man. But that is to miss the point that this fact was not really overwhelmingly clear to many people at that point in history. They had neither the accumulated evidence of the truth about Jesus' Sonship of God or the history of His death on the cross like we have much farther downstream. Of course they also lacked the faith in Jesus that would be vital to being able to perceive Him differently than just an ordinary man. As a result of all these factors they saw Jesus as a somewhat mysterious person with supernatural powers but that also clearly seemed to be violating the fundamental principles and laws that governed their view of what true religion was supposed to look like.

Their opinion that Jesus should be put to death would have been solidly supported by the above texts and they would have had the upper hand if the argument were to take place as to the right thing to do. The Scriptures clearly stated many times that anyone who violated the Sabbath by working on it was to be put to death. Likewise, His claims as a human to be the direct Son of the God of the universe thereby refuting what appeared to them to be clear evidence that He had been born out of wedlock, conceived from an unknown father source, was nothing less than clear blasphemy. As such they felt that they had more than enough evidence to convict Him of violations and that the law clearly determined a death sentence upon Him. Thus they felt justified in their desires to put Him to death based on the clear rules and punishments laid out in the books of Moses.

How often do we rely so insistently on what we believe is our plain reading of the Bible for our judgments against others? How often do we feel we are justified in the harsh way we treat certain people who appear to us to be out of line with church policy? I had the unfortunate experience of getting caught up just yesterday in a very similar situation. A person felt that they were justified in attacking another person in the church (not even yet a member) and berating them for apparently resisting authority because there appeared to be clear violations of the rules governing how they believe the church is supposed to be run. There was more concern that the rules be upheld than there was for the feelings of the people being attacked. As a result there were wounds inflicted and hard feelings and confusion and pain spread throughout a number of church members that should have never happened if people had been guided by the Spirit instead of the letter of the law.

Not that we are competent in ourselves to claim anything for ourselves, but our competence comes from God. He has made us competent as ministers of a new covenant-- not of the letter but of the Spirit; for the letter kills, but the Spirit gives life. (2 Corinthians 3:5-6 NIV)