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by Rankin Wilbourne, Lead Pastor
In last week’s post we talked about DARFS – the besetting sins, the dispositions of our heart, the soil out of which grows those weeds that choke out the life of Christ in us.
Honesty, knowing ourselves as best as we’re able, is just the beginning. Then comes the question, “What do I do about these DARFS?”
Get this settled in your mind: you don’t have to live under our DARFS anymore. Yes, as Bishop J.C. Ryle once put it, “The Christian life is one of perpetual warfare.” Yes, there will always be battles and upheavals. But there is such a thing as growth and progress – maturity (Ephesians 4:13). Jesus’ word for this process of change is repentance.
Repentance consists of two parts: putting off the old self and putting on the new self (Colossians 3:9, Ephesians 4:22), or what John Calvin called “mortification” and “vivification.”
How do we mortify our DARFS so we can find ourselves more free?
Again, it begins with the long and thoughtful process of identifying them: the idols that drive you and the fears that surround you, manifesting in overt ways. Identifying these takes time and takes a spiritual friend, even a community of spiritual friends. But once you’ve identified your idols, then you set about the daily habit of weeding them out, by name.
There’s no magic bullet. No secret strategy. What we do have is 2,000 years of men and women reflecting upon this question and offering their wise counsel.
For my friend Skip, it looks like this:
He prepares for the day with prayer and a very deliberate type of reading scripture. He reads a text, reflects upon it, and then prays. His goal is not an exegetical analysis of the text, but to read it slowly – imaginatively entering into the world of the text and then connecting back to his life with Christ as the key to its meaning. This is an ancient spiritual discipline the church has been practicing for almost 2,000 years. What this might look like for you was the subject of last Sunday’s sermon, which you can listen to here.
Ten minutes either right before or right after lunch, Skip prays through his DARFS and either celebrates his victories or confesses his defeats. “We can always start the day over,” he says, “any time we want.” He looks forward, prayerfully, to his appointments for that afternoon.
At the end of the day before bed, he reflects back on the day, specifically the place where he sensed the love of Christ the most and where he sensed the love of Christ the least.
PREPARE the DAY
REPAIR the DAY
CARE for the DAY
Easy to remember and time honored.
That sounds fine for structuring your day, but what about when it’s 3:00 am? A panic attack? Or just the middle of the day when you start to feel anxious or angry or unsettled? Let’s take that up on our next post.
In the teaching series “See Jesus,” Rankin Wilbourne explores scenes from the life of Jesus and considers how Jesus makes sense of our lives.
By Rankin Wilbourne, Lead Pastor
Do you know what your DARFS are?
Last week I had the privilege of listening to one of my heroes, Skip, speak about “The Longest Journey.” The title of his talks is from Pascal’s dictum that the longest journey a person ever makes is from his head to his heart.
Healing begins with honesty. What does honesty look like? In our core, our motivations? “If you hide what is within you it will kill you, but if you bring it out it will heal you.”
We are relentless self-hiders. Or as Joseph Conrad put in Lord Jim, “No man understands his own artful dodges to escape the grim shadows of self-knowledge.”
So much of our present and how we think about our lives has been shaped by our past. Life has to be lived facing forward, but it can only be understood looking backward. To come to terms requires the difficult work of uncovering the ways we have become dishonest, the “brilliant disguises” (Springsteen), the fig leaves we use to cover up our shame – our fears. Skip told the story of Connie Chung asking her parents to drop her off a block from school, “so no one would know I’m Chinese.”
Have you thought about how your past has shaped you?
How those words shaped you?
When you started acting?
Playing a part?
Having a false self?
The imposter.
If Jesus still has His scars, why don’t we still have ours? It may be a cliché, but it’s true: your mess is your message.
Skip challenged us to dig under the “presenting sins” in our lives to uncover, what he called, “the dispositions of the heart.” The soil, to use a biblical metaphor. The ways you have become so accustomed to living that you tell yourself, “That’s just the way I am.” “That’s just the baggage I carry and always will.”
That’s a LIE.
Yes, your past has shaped you, but it doesn’t have to define you or your future. You don’t have to carry those bags around or any further. You can leave them by the side of the road.
“You can see sin lying dead at your feet,” says John Owen.
The deeds of the flesh can be mortified. Your DARFS can be put to death.
So what are DARFS? That’s Skip’s specific acronym for his “besetting sins.” What Tim Keller has called “the sin under the sins.” They vary from person to person. But these are the motivating “idols” – core lies – that we do battle with each day.
I think it might be helpful for you if I list Skip’s acronym:
D – Dishonesty
D – Discontent – This is a big one for me.
A – Approval of Others – Living for their applause, their recognition, my significance.
A – Anxiety – The low-grade, constant sort that keeps me worrying.
A – Anger – Simmering, sometimes lashing out in totally disproportionate ways.
R – Resentment – Drinking poison and wondering why the other guy doesn’t die. Envy.
F – Fear – Profound fear. “I was afraid,” the 3rd servant said. (Matthew 25:25)
S – Self-Pity – No one understands me or the sacrifices I make. I’m entitled therefore.
How do you know what your DARFS are? I expect that the first 2 or 3 words in our own acronym can be named pretty easily by most of us. The last 2 or 3 take more time, almost always the help of candid friends, and usually (not always, not necessarily, but usually) professional help.
My wife and I are going to begin the difficult process of naming our DARFS. We are each coming up with our own acronym that points to the areas where we want to see Christ heal us, the dispositions of the heart that are robbing us of Peace and Joy, Love and Trust.
There’s no way for me to reproduce how helpful this is for me as a way to name where I need to be healed. But naming is only the beginning. It’s the most important step, but only the beginning. How do we mortify, put to death, our DARFS?
To be continued…
In the teaching series “See Jesus,” Rankin Wilbourne explores scenes from the life of Jesus and considers how Jesus makes sense of our lives.
By Marshall Brown, Pastor
A couple weeks ago our church staff took a field trip to downtown LA. Our Director of Hope for LA, Dave Kleinknecht, had planned an afternoon and evening for us eating, touring and serving in the heart of downtown.
We began with a walking tour. We started on Broadway and were told of the golden age of the theaters – including when the Oscars were hosted downtown. In the distance, we could see Disney Hall. We walked by City Hall and the adjoining park that ‘occupied Los Angeles’ this past fall. We saw the LAPD headquarters and heard that there are 267 churches in downtown LA.
And then we crossed into “Skid Row,” or as the LA City Council would have it called: “Central City East.” Our entry into Skid Row was abrupt. One moment you are walking along relatively unpopulated downtown streets. The next you are in the midst of a mass of humanity. There are 17,000 people in the Skid Row area – 4,000 who sleep on the streets. The men and women we passed seemed like they were doing nothing. The smell of marijuana was strong. We saw almost no police presence.
One woman – humorously – followed us for about a block trying to identify the perfume that one of the women on our staff was wearing.
At the Union Rescue Mission (URM) we served dinner after hearing the testimony of Jeremiah “Jerry” Johnson.
Jerry was hilarious. As a young man he had fathered two children before losing himself to drugs on the streets. For decades, he was in and out of prison and at one point went 13 years without seeing his children. But he loved his children and wanted them back in his life. And to do so he knew he had to change. Something he had been unable to do before then. He had tried programs and did not particularly relish the idea of trying another one. But he went to URM hoping this time would be different, fearing it wouldn’t.
But it was.
If you have read stories like this before, you know what is coming next. He did not want to stay but he did. He was not particularly excited but he “worked the program” nonetheless. And he got clean. 8 months later, he reconnected to his children.
He did so well in the program that after he finished, URM hired him to a full-time position. A position he still holds. That was a decade ago. Since then, he has not only connected to those children, but he has married and has more children. Everybody loves a redemption story and Jerry has one. And he delights in telling it.
But what stood out to me was how he experienced what Rankin recently called “the transforming moment.” He was at URM doing his thing and he started to attend the worship services. And the penny dropped. He said simply, “I just started to worship.” And his life was changed.
Something about that comment struck me as so right, so biblical. In the midst of our disordered lives what we need above all else is to worship God. More than we need to do acts of service, more than we need right thinking that is based on good teaching – we need to worship. To worship God as the Lord of the universe, the One who creates and redeems, is to acknowledge the order of things.
For various reasons I have been reading and thinking about worship lately. One book that I recently re-read is James Smith’s “Desiring the Kingdom.” The thesis of Smith’s book is that human beings are NOT first and foremost believing or thinking creatures – first and foremost we are desiring creatures. Creatures who are defined not so much by what we think but by what we love.
A corollary of this reality is that the way we change is not so much by changing our thinking (as needful as that is) but by changing what we desire. Which is exactly what happened to Jerry. He experienced “the expulsive power of a new affection” – his former habits and desires were expelled as he fell in love with something, someone greater. Worship changed him.
Now you may wonder: “How do I do that? How do I change what I want? Surely you are not saying that I just need to force myself to worship?” The scope of those questions is beyond this blog post, and it is ultimately a work of God’s Spirit. But I can say that one of the best ways to change is to worship God for who He is and what He has done.
In closing, let me illustrate from my own devotional life this morning. I woke up tired and grumpy – far from “delighting in God.” But went ahead and read my Bible (I am a pastor after all!). Initially there was no effect; I was still grumpy and far from feeling ‘worshipful.’ Part of my Bible reading was Psalm 145. Before rushing off into my day, I decided to linger for just a moment longer and re-read the Psalm. And verse 3 grabbed me: “Great is the Lord and worthy of praise; His greatness no one can fathom.” As I turned that over in my mind, I started thinking just how far past finding out God’s greatness is. My heart began to warm. I realized I could spend the rest of my days searching out God’s wonders and I would never exhaust who He is and what He has done. The more I chewed on that thought, the more I got excited. Without even meaning to do so, I was starting to worship – to declare to my own heart the greatness of God.
The movement may have been small, but it was something. I worshipped. And was changed.
By Brian Godawa, Elder
Some of us struggle to stay awake reading the Bible, let alone study it. It just doesn’t read like the latest bestselling novel or self-help volume. The stories don’t always flow like watching a movie. Who can get through all those genealogies and census numbers, let alone the detailed food laws? Now that Jesus came, is the Old Testament really all that important anyway? And can’t I just get practical application principles for living my life without having to go all “theological”? We miss the exciting drama of God’s Word.
I grew up learning my faith through the eyes of Christian apologetics, learning about philosophy, skepticism, cults, heresy and other intellectual issues. While this was a valuable part of my spiritual walk, I began to read the Bible through an imbalanced perspective that treated the Bible like a systematic theology, or a textbook of doctrinal answers for spiritual questions, something to be studied scientifically. I thought that knowing all the right doctrines to believe was equivalent to knowing God. I didn’t realize how much my own modern American culture had biased my interpretation. In a different way, I too had missed the exciting drama of God’s Word.
When I began to rediscover the Bible through the eyes of its ancient Jewish context, I discovered that the Bible is primarily a story – a story of God’s plan to bless the world through His chosen people. Yes, it contains doctrinal truths and facts about God, and yes, there are principles for living life – but only within the context of God working out His story with heroes and villains, shocking revelations and plot twists, as well as its creative use of images and symbols. As individualistic Americans, we tend to read the Bible for “practical keys” for our personal relationship with God. But when we see the “big story” of God and His people, we begin to recognize this is our story too, and we learn how we fit in with that drama.
We’ve all heard the story of Jesus entering Jerusalem on a donkey as fulfilling a prophecy. But wow, does that identity come alive when we learn that He was re-enacting a long held prophetic story that God Himself would “return to Zion” after making Himself absent from a disobedient Israel who was in exile for her sins. And God’s depth becomes even more meaningful when we understand the irony of God mocking the worldly kings who would make triumphal entries into cities upon horses of glory laden with riches. The King of the universe who owned Jerusalem and the whole earth could march in with ten thousand angels, but instead comes as a humble servant – which tells us so much more about God and His ways than a mere surface fulfillment of a historical prediction. Jesus was acting out the story of a king, but in a new way that would bring a new kind of kingdom with servants focused on humility and sacrifice.
Story is personal. It gives flesh and bones to the skeleton of truth. It helps us inhabit that truth rather than merely talk about it in abstract concepts. Story fosters relationship with God, rather than mere mental assent to facts about Him. Engaging with God’s story compels a living response: Will we, His servants, follow in the dramatic footsteps of that King?
Brian will be teaching a new 6-week class starting February 19 called Genesis to Revelation: Understanding the Bible as Story. The class will lead us in a journey of discovery of this bigger picture of God’s story. We’ll seek to understand how story communicates to us and connects with our humanity. We’ll take a rollercoaster ride through the ups and downs of the narrative of the entire Bible, exploring some of its exciting plot twists and how it ultimately relates to our lives. Reading the Bible can become like watching a movie—we suspend our disbelief (faith) and get so engrossed in it that we begin to consider ourselves in the story as well. Join us and let’s explore this award-winning script of God’s story together.
by Jeremy Weese, Pastor
“But in fact Christ has been raised from the dead, the firstfruits of those who have fallen asleep.”
Resurrection. In this one word we find all the incredulity of Christianity’s claims, and yet all of its power. It is the one historical event which, if it is true topples every other claim, and if it is not makes Christianity not just another religion, but absolutely worthless.
But in fact Christ has been raised from the dead… and we will be raised with Him.
Resurrection changes everything. I wish I had time and space enough to explore this in full, but here is a cliff notes version.
Resurrection changes how we see death. If resurrection is true, it means that death was never an intended part of creation. We weren’t made to die – we were meant to live forever. It means that death really is wrong, an invader, an unwelcome and intrusive guest. Death is not part of life; it is the exact opposite. It means that when we weep at death, it is the right and proper response.
Resurrection changes how we see life. It tells us life is a good thing. Which seems almost too simple to mention, until you find yourself overwhelmed by despair and life seems hopeless and meaningless. Resurrection is the promise that life really is good – no matter how tinged with death it has become. And it is the promise that our end is life; life forever. Death is no longer the last thing – it is the second to last thing.
Resurrection changes how we see ourselves. Resurrection is different than our souls living on after we die. Christianity does not teach the immortality of the soul apart from the body. It teaches about a resurrected Savior with a new and whole body. It teaches that we too will be resurrected with bodies – bodies that are whole, pain free, and don’t decay. And if that is true, it tells us something shocking: our bodies are good. Physicality is good. As C.S. Lewis writes: “It is no good trying to be more spiritual than God… God likes matter. He created it.” It means that we should take care of our bodies, in every way. It means we are built to enjoy our senses. It means the invigoration we feel after a run, the bliss we feel tasting a great meal… all of these are good and right.
Resurrection changes how we see other people. If life is good, if bodies are good, then we must care for people’s physical needs. It is no good trying to save someone’s soul apart from their body – God doesn’t work that way, and neither should we. Resurrection is the theological imperative behind our work in our city and across the world.
Resurrection changes how we see the world. God created the world and He said it was good. God is green. Sunsets are supposed to make us catch our breath. The night sky is meant to make us feel small and yet significant. This world, even though now it is tinged with death, is still stunningly beautiful. And one day it will be fully restored, just as we will. Resurrection is a defense of beauty as much as it is a proclamation of life.
Resurrection changes how we see our responsibilities. The great chapter on resurrection, 1 Corinthians 15, ends with this appeal: “Therefore, my beloved brothers and sisters, be steadfast… knowing that in the Lord your labor is not in vain.” What is the ‘therefore’ there for? Since resurrection is true, our work here – on this world, at this time – is never fruitless. At the same time, resurrection denies any attempt to place the ultimate responsibility of restoration in human hands. Resurrection is God’s work; it is transformation beyond our ability.
Resurrection changes how we see our past. If God can bring life out of death, then there is nothing and no one that cannot be redeemed. God doesn’t throw away what He has made – He fixes it, He restores it. That’s what resurrection means: bringing life out of death; faith out of doubt; courage out of fear. And that is our hope. No matter where we have been, no matter where we are right now. We are not so far down that Jesus is not willing to come to us; not so lost that Jesus will not find us; not so broken that Jesus will not restore us; not so sick that Jesus cannot heal us; not so dirty that Jesus cannot clean us.
Resurrection changes how we see our future. Often the picture of life after death is one of disembodied souls floating on clouds, playing harps. No wonder no one is in a hurry to get there. This leads many people to repeat this oft-heard phrase: “I want Jesus to return, but I want to ________ first.” Resurrection is the denial of all such qualifications; it is the affirmation that just as God will make our bodies glorious, so too will He make life itself too marvelous for words.
Finally, resurrection changes the way we see God. What is God’s mission? What is He about? Resurrection! From Genesis 3 onward, God has been working to restore life to the world, to fix what is broken, to reform and renew the shattered pieces of His world and His people whom He loves. Jesus’ resurrection is the firstfruits. Paul says, Jesus is the firstborn of many brothers and sisters. What does that mean?
There will be more.
Resurrection. It is the first stone in an avalanche of life. It is the turning of the tide in the sea of death. It is the torch that sets the world on fire. It is our one hope, our one assurance, our one destination, and the driving force that sends us out.
Jesus who died lives again, and we will be raised with Him.
Resurrection. It changes everything.
“The gospel is the announcement that in one person’s history death is no longer the [last thing], but was only the second to last thing. It has now become past history. Death lies behind Jesus, qualifying him to lead the procession from death unto new life…
“It means that the salvation we enjoy now is like borrowing from the future, living now as though our future could already be practiced in the present, because of our union with the risen Christ through faith and hope.”
Carl Braaten, On the Uniqueness and Universality of Jesus Christ.
“Now if Christ is proclaimed as raised from the dead, how can some of you say that there is no resurrection of the dead? But if there is no resurrection of the dead, then not even Christ has been raised. And if Christ has not been raised, then our preaching is in vain and your faith is in vain. We are even found to be misrepresenting God, because we testified about God that he raised Christ, whom he did not raise if it is true that the dead are not raised.
“For if the dead are not raised, not even Christ has been raised. And if Christ has not been raised, your faith is futile and you are still in your sins. Then those also who have fallen asleep in Christ have perished. If in Christ we have hope in this life only, we are of all people most to be pitied.
“But in fact Christ has been raised from the dead, the firstfruits of those who have fallen asleep.”
Paul, Letter to the Saints at Corinth (1)