A Word that Unlearns & Compliments From a Father

Matthew 10:34 Don’t imagine that I came to bring peace to the earth! I came not to bring peace, but a sword.

Hebrews 4:12 For the word of God is alive and powerful. It is sharper than the sharpest two-edged sword, cutting between soul and spirit, between joint and marrow. It exposes our innermost thoughts and desires.

Romans 12:2 Don’t copy the behavior and customs of this world, but let God transform you into a new person by changing the way you think. Then you will learn to know God’s will for you, which is good and pleasing and perfect.

Jesus, whenrealized rightly, will always challenge the personal ideas, opinions and theology that we claim keeps us at peace.  There are principles, boundaries, strategies, rules and beliefs that, over time, welcomed or unwelcome, have attached themselves rigidly to certain places in our hearts where they should not be. They are the ideas that for no other reason than repetition and time, stay close, bringing us pain and frustration under a religious guise.  Tendencies and habits developed as we seek to attain some sort of semi-Biblical peace absent of the Jesus of the Bible.  They may remain subtle and unexpressed but they can exist fueling our most defining thoughts and desires.  Often we do not think these veils of ideas draped over our spirits and collecting dust are any problem to us at all, in fact we either 1) don’t even realize they are there or 2) actually learn, instead of confronting this cumbersome knowledge to accommodate its consistency in assaulting us.  Like a baby born with chronic leg pain who grows in to a limping man, he does not understand leg pain is unnatural and a limp is the resulting impediment - it is all he has ever known.  As a grown man now it is easier for him to maintain the limp than to treat the pain and rehabilitate his stride.

Likewise, when we are confronted by the living God His Spirit arrests our minds, hearts and bodies and we are presented with the reality of health and freedom - often for the first time in such a pure form.  This health and freedom steps in so foreign to our malnourished, imprisoned lives, but it is more real than anything we’ve previously believed.  This new voice begins to whisper to us Truths that expose our once comforting mindsets as lying, overstayed guests.  The limp of our veiled thinking always becomes evident.  What we once thought was our God-given reality quickly becomes myth, and so He asks to rehabilitate our steps.  We can let Him, or we can cling to tradition. 

The Lord will begin to tell us who we are in Him (He has always been telling us who we are, we have only finally tuned our ears to hear) When we learn it is right and good to accept His affirmation and approval the foundations of these once imperative definitions begin to show their cracks.  Nothing measures up to a compliment from our Father.  So this Word cuts us, separates our soul from our spirit - which brings me to my realization: the more I read the word of God, the more time I spend in His love, the more I allow myself to enjoy the gifts He’s given me, the more I come to see the Bible as a book of deconstruction.  What do you do with a text that shoots a hole through every barrier you grew up believing to be true and right. A Word that dissolves every fear?  What do you do with a Man who challenges your once solid ideas on what holiness and love and life look like? The Bible ‘de-teaches’ all we have taught ourselves and been taught since we slipped out of the womb on our journey toward peace, sufficiency and abundant life.  Jesus compels us to unlearn our charts and graphs of capability to return to a place of simplicity.  A place where children run carefree into His arms and fisherman need only turn to cast their nets overboard and where people who are crippled simply… get up and walk.  Jesus uses His word to ‘de-teach’ the ‘too good to be true’ mentality we adapted to keep from being taken advantage of and within His context we must begin to say, ‘this is so good, I have to believe it is true.‘  Can we wane back to a faith where we trust so quickly in Him that believing promises are effortless?  Can we wane back to a hope that will not only see a light, but be a light in the blackest darkness? Can we wane back to a mindset not too restless to be still under His work instead of soliciting our own?

In the past 2 months the structures of my mind have been carved away by the wrecking ball of a Man who came, not to placate us in our stupor but to cut away lies and expose our white-washed tombs.  With His hands filled with love He is overturning the religious, bartering tables in my temple to replace them with all I need: Himself - Good, Pleasing and Perfect.

(c) Stephanie Diaz-Schumm