Before Class on Sunday, I felt God kind of telling me to go 'out of bounds' and approach the Class differently. We have been doing a series on discovering God, but this week's plan in the series was just a goof-off week, and the students - and myself included - don't really like spending our time in class playing games and just talking. We get a lot of that when we leave church and go to Fuddruckers or China Cottage or Applebee's or whatever. So today seemed like a good week to do it, and I just felt God telling me, "I want you to talk about this today. Don't worry. I won't make you look like a fool. And I won't let the class bomb-out either." So I prayed and said Okay.

We talked about some pretty deep stuff. What does it mean to believe in Jesus Christ? We acknowledged that the majority consensus was that believing in Christ meant knowing and believing to be true all the biblical facts about Jesus - but I reminded them that if that were the case, then many fallen angels would have stronger faith than us! If you look into the ancient texts and the original meaning behind Jesus' words when he says, "All who believe in me will be saved," you will find a deeper meaning, a meaning all but lost in our technology-driven, consumerist, modern era. To believe in this sense is to know Christ; and not to know Christ as you know the President of the United States or the Russian prime minister, nor even as we know our friends and family. It is a deeper and more passionate knowing; an intimate knowing. Jesus is saying, "All who are intimate with Me are intimate with the Father; and their intimacy will set them free... All who are intimate with Me will be saved."

We didn't stop there, though. I asked, "Is there really any way at all, do you think, that we can tell whether or not we're really intimate with God?" Nods of heads. "Okay... Like what?" No one knew, or at least no one spoke up, so I tossed a Bible at Jacque and she read some of John 14. The answer, she then gave, was obedience. We talked about how obedience is not salvation, but obedience flows from true salvation. Jesus says that those who are intimate with Him will obey Him; this is inevitable. The way we act always ties in with what we really believe; we never act 'out-of-line' with our beliefs. We always live up to them - or down to them. We all acknowledged the possibility of pretending to have faith when one does not, and even convincing oneself that he or she has faith when really, he or she does not. I left them - and myself - with a "challenge:" explore our own lives, sift through them, and see what it is we really believe.

The cold is getting much better. I think it was brought on by the sudden change in weather, but I really don't know. My sister contracted it a little, I think, and was bedridden most of yesterday. I am thankful I can breathe easy now, even if it is just out of one nostril. I have been doing a lot of reading (books and the Gospels), a lot of thinking, a lot of praying. I've had the time, too. Except for one or two, I've kind of separated myself from my friends without meaning to. When every day used to be spent driving around, eating out, going to the park, whatever, now my days are filled with listening to music, reading, contemplating. And working. I work today. Afterwards, I might watch a Star Wars movie. I watched A New Hope yesterday; excited about The Revenge of the Sith.

This is a C.S. Lewis quote from The Screwtape Letters that I find to be quite amazing (and fitting for my life right now); it is a Senior demon talking to an apprentice demon:

Our cause is never more in danger than when a human, no longer desiring, but still intending, to do our enemy's [God's] will, looks round upon a universe from which every trace of him seems to have vanished, and asks why he has been forsaken, and still obeys.

A lot has been going on lately. Lots of work. Birthday celebrations (Dad's forty-something). Borders Books & Music. Lots of work. Last Friday I started developing a sore throat and I attributed it to Strepp. Nope. I've got a really bad cold and the lining of my nose is peeling like a sunburn. The only difference is this hurts worse. So I've been carrying around a box of tissues and praying it will blow over. I really don't like colds. Once again, it's one of those things you promise to be grateful without, but when the time comes and the cold dissipates, you get on with life and are ungrateful. Unless it's something traumatic, I think that's how it is for just about everyone.

The Enemy has been running circles around me lately. One of the biggest moments when his attack became so apparent was last night at K2. I had to read something for Jeff, and when I started reading it, the most insatiable panic gripped me, a panic darker than any I've ever known. I didn't know why this happened. I had been fine stepping up onto the stage. When I finally understood the Enemy was toying around, I didn't pray - I was too terrified to pray. But the panic vanished in a matter of seconds, and I remembered how the Holy Spirit prays for us when we don't have the words. The rest of the composition ran smoothly. I don't think my words left any kind of spiritual mark on anyone, that part was left to Jeff; I think the Enemy was trying to pass on a lying message to me, You're worthless and you won't do any good. You can't do anything right. Just give up.

I have been able to recognize his assaults over the last couple days, in a varied host of dimensions. But the message they are delivering me is clear: You can never be loved. You're too ugly to be loved. Just look at you - God doesn't like you at all. He hates you. You only exist as an object of His mockery. These lies run through my head, through my feelings, and I have to tell myself, "You know very well what is happening. Don't listen to him. He's a liar and he'll get put in his place when the time comes. God will see to it." Awful temptation, too, has been hitting me when I least expect it - in the dead of night, during school (the worst), and even ten minutes before church. It takes all I am to fight through it. And when the temptation comes, and I stand my ground and plead with God to take them off me, not a few moments passes before it vanishes into thin air and I know they're hands have been taken off.

The creation of a new nature does not come from our own determination. True, we must be determined to change – for if determination is absent, then intention is absent. Without intention, no one will get anywhere. It can be said – and accurately so – that one reason many of those who profess fellowship with Christ do not exhibit the extremity and depth of discipleship and life change that Jesus advocates is simply because they do not intend on that change becoming a reality in their own lives. But even the most hard-edged and determined soul will get nowhere – except caught in the bonds of legalism – if God is not involved. For we cannot change ourselves, it is an unfortunate side-effect of our own rebellion against God. Coming from the womb we are indebted to the sinful nature, and we cannot escape that sinful nature without God’s divine touch and guidance. God will often perform the removal of our sinful nature and the replacement of the godly nature by means of spiritual disciplines – meditation, study, fasting, worship, etc.

Just as your outer appearance is the result of genetics between your mother and father (hence you are a son of man), so the creation of a new nature is the result of divine genetics from our Triune God. We are called the children of God not because they are pretty words (for they have deep meaning), but because the new us – ourselves as found overcome with a new nature – comes from the divine genetics of God. As I am a child to my biological parents, so I am a child to God; as my parents passed on some of them to me, so God breathes His life into me. The truth is simple to grasp: we who have been changed are called children of God because God Himself has imparted Himself upon us. He has worked in the deepest corners of our beings, even in the regions of our existence we cannot reach, and he has changed, rewired, and completely redone us. It is a process, to be sure, but we come to realize that it is not something we did (though we intended and desired it) but it is something God did. So we stake our claim as children of God and it means something concrete and real.

Yet the phrase Children of God can be taken deeper. If my parents are shy, then chances are, I will be shy; if my parents are hardworking or lazy, then I’ll be one or the other. It isn’t just the physical make-up that our parents decide – who they are plays a defining role in who we will be. When we call ourselves Children of God, we are acknowledging that who we are has changed; who God is has become part of who we are. We are not God, but we belong to God in an intimate and connected way. Knowing this, we can look at the scriptural expositions on the make-up of the child of God (examples we’ve been referring to are the Sermon on the Mount, 1 Corinthians 13, and Galatians 5:22-6:10) and understand that the attitudes, personalities, and attributes that become second-nature in the new creation are precisely the ways that God is on the inside! We begin to understand that God is loving and patient and kind, and as God breathes Himself into us, so we begin to find ourselves divorcing the sinful nature for a nature whose outsourcing involves loving and patience and kindness. In becoming new creations with new natures, we are not simply just picking up on a new way of living, but we are living life as God would live it (and has and does live it) in our day-to-day lives. The Sermon on the Mount, 1 Corinthians 13, and Galatians 5:22-6:10 are windows into the being of God, and as God imparts a new creation onto us, we step into the window beside God, and we can say with certainty we are like Christ. We are truly Christians.

Paul tells us that it is not circumcision nor uncircumcision that matters, but the creation of the new nature. It is essential that we explore the meaning behind what he said. When we refer to what someone will automatically do, we call it his or her nature. Selfishness, they say, is basic human nature. In other New Testament passages, the authors go into detail on the nature of sinful man: we have the bad fruit of the bad tree coming to light in such passages. In other passages, the Spirit Nature, or New Nature, is given a detailed description, and this is the good fruit of the good tree. By using the word nature, we acknowledge that it is not something we so much choose to do, but something we automatically do in our daily lives. So whenever someone is selfish, we say, “He couldn’t help it – it’s human nature.” When we are locked in the sinful nature, we cannot help it but to live lives highlighted by bad fruit. When we become new creations – when we become owners of a new nature – we cannot help but to live life in the Kingdom as God would desire us to live – and how God originally fashioned us to live.

Paul brings the reality of the sinful nature and the spirit nature to par in his letter to the Romans. Chapter Seven finds the pen striking a remorseful tone as he dwells on the sinful nature within him and the sin that resides there. He speaks of how he wants to do what is right, but cannot, and how he wishes not to do what is wrong, but feels powerless not to. I have oft returned to these words in moments of frailty after succumbing to sin, looking to identify with one of the greatest followers of Christ in written history; yet whenever I continued down his laments, I was startled by the break in the sorrow and the exuberance with which he penned: “Who shall deliver me [from my sinful nature]? Thanks be to Jesus Christ our Lord – He is the answer!” The answer to deliverance from the sinful nature is found in Jesus Christ. I stumbled over this verse for so long, wondering how Jesus was the answer, wondering what I was missing (remember, these words became rote for me whenever I caved in to sin), wondering why the Answer wasn’t so evident in my life. Now I understand what Paul is saying: The answer that Jesus Christ gives is simply a changing of our nature, a changing of our instincts; we will be conformed to the instincts and nature of Christ.

What counts, then, is whether or not our natures have been changed by Jesus Christ. In the sinful nature, what came naturally was, obviously, sin and its counterparts and the attributes of a life lived apart from God. In the new nature – the new creation fashioned after the nature of Christ, fashioned as how God originally intended life to be lived – we find that instead of sin and its counterparts coming naturally to us, the holy life – the life built upon God and interaction with God in our daily lives (for this is Kingdom) – comes naturally to us. Where before we had to work to be good, in the new nature we will have to work to be bad. Where we had to work to do good deeds, we will have to work to commit sin. As holiness is, in many ways, alien and foreign to us now, so evil and all its subdivisions will be alien and foreign to us when our natures are changed.

It is when our nature is changed that our lives are changed – Jesus’ words make sense and we look at the Sermon on the Mount and exclaim, perhaps with surprise, “Hey, that’s me!” It is the same for all the other great texts exemplifying the attributes of a new character: we will say, “Look! He’s writing about me!” And when our eyes lay upon those texts detailing the sinful nature, we will wonder how anyone could act that way or be that way, and find it completely unbelievable that anyone could live life apart from God.

So many of us [Christians] are subscribers to the righteousness of the scribes and pharisees without even knowing it. We hear that phrase, "Righteousness of the Scribes and Pharisees," and we imagine the bottom-line being hypocrisy. But at this time, Jesus wasn't too big on the hypocrisy: that didn't come until later. And can we really believe that all Pharisees and scribes were corrupt and hypocritical? No, of course not! That's like assuming that all priests are child-molesters just because a tiny few are (and a sad thing, too). So what is the righteousness of the scribe and Pharisee, if it isn't hypocrisy?

The scribes and Pharisees, even the most devout and holy, made following God all about keeping the law, not about becoming the kind of person whose deeds naturally conform to the law. A lot of times, in our Christian circles and in our churches, at our prayer meetings and our small groups, we surf the wave that says, "Keep the law and you are righteous." No, no, no! The law won't make us righteous! Instead we need to be saying, "Become the kind of people God wants - to be like Christ, to be new creations (this is what matters) - and then following the Law will come naturally."

If we get away from the righteousness of the scribes and pharisees, and really understand- and pursue - this new reality of not so much 'doing stuff for God,' but 'being someone for God,' is it unreasonable to assume that our lives on a whole will be changed? Is it unreasonable to assume that keeping the law will become second-nature to us? Is it unreasonable that, in pursuing and attaining this righteousness of Christ, we will find that we are obeying the Law without too much effort? Is it unreasonable to believe that we will become the kind of people the Bible talks about when describing the children of God? Is it unreasonable that we will become the kind of person who is patient, kind, free of jealousy, and so on if we pursue conforming to Christ instead of just keeping the Law to the letter?

It is when our hearts are bent into submission to the sinful nature that our lives reap bad fruit, we bear fruit of death. You can tell whether or not a tree is bad by looking at the fruit it produces – Jesus told us this. Why have we begun to imagine anything differently? It makes sense, doesn’t it, that if our lives are full of back-stabbing and vengeance, meanness and hostility, selfishness and jealousy, we are a bad tree? Does it not make sense that if the lives we live are underscored with sex on the brain, wasting hours on the latest craze to seduce us, if we’re hateful and argumentative and angry all the time, then we are bad trees? Is it unreasonable that if we’re drunks and perverts, ultra-competitive, driven by divide-and-conquer, dying inside every time someone else makes it – is it unreasonable, then, to assume that the tree is bad? Simply look at the fruit and you can see – if the fruit is rotten, the tree is bad. If you don’t believe me, read Galatians 5:19-21 for yourself. It is sad to say, but the majority of the Christians have not changed; the majority of us model what has been said above. It is as Gandhi said: “I love your Christ. Your Christians are so unlike your Christ.”

What, then, does a good tree look like? A good tree models the Sermon on the Mount – not an exposition on new laws to be added to our lives, but what someone who lives in the Kingdom of God really looks like, without effort. Good trees give off good fruit; they are loving and alive, sparkling and radiant, calm and not pushy, generous with money, time and people, always ready to help. It hurts to see someone else hurting and it is unbearable to hurt another – physically, mentally, emotionally or spiritually. Good trees do not double-cross others, do not lose their cool, aren’t in trouble with the government authority.

None of this comes because you force it into your life; any application of this as laws will undoubtedly fail. A good tree is only good because its roots are anchored right – anchored in the Son. Then they will draw nourishment from God and the tree will naturally grow into a good tree, feeding off the Spirit. Here lies one of the greatest errors in our thinking regarding spiritual transformation: we think we have to force ourselves to transform, when really the attributes of the Good Tree will invade our lives and become second-nature to us; but only if our roots are anchored correctly. In the same breath, if our roots are not anchored right – and no matter what we may say or think can alter where we have truly placed the roots – then it will be seen: our roots will draw up brackish water and our lives will be dark cesspools whose fruits are radiant only of evil, and we are not in any way like Christ, even if we stamp the name Christian onto our cars and sleeves.