Blog Archives - Page 12 of 12 - Larger Story - The Lifework & Legacy of Dr. Larry Crabb

Five Seconds

May 24, 2019October 16, 2019
by Dr. Larry Crabb

“I have something I want to share with you. I’m not very comfortable with this kind of language, but – well, here goes – the Lord spoke to me last night”.

I was all ears. I sometimes close them when others say something similar. Neither this women who was speaking to me nor I are fans of “easy-believism”, especially when it takes the form of sharing with a happy smile that God told them what they most wanted to hear. But Debbie, that’s what I’ll call her, had remained faithful to God during good times and bad, aware that the spirit of entitlement that plagues every Christian needs to be resisted. God’s ways don’t always make sense to us. We can’t count on God to respond favorably to every item on our wish list. Entitlement thinks otherwise.

Debbie was stunned by what she heard from God, stunned both by how foolish she was and grateful for God’s call to yield to her God-honoring desires that remained alive within her. Before (with her permission) I tell you what she heard from God, let me first tell you why I do so, I fear being misunderstood by something I wrote in my most recent book When God’s Ways Make No Sense. Debbie’s story clarifies what I meant. In Chapter Seven, I refer to myself as a Christian deist. Deists believe God made everything, set up natural laws like gravity, then washed His hands of any further involvement with what might happen in the world and among the people He created.

I am emphatically not a deist. I believe God is involved, interested, caring, compassionate, and sovereignly engaged in all that happens. *But it doesn’t always look that way.* Nothing escapes His attention, and nothing blocks the advance of the good story He is telling, not the holocaust, not a failed marriage, and not a stubbed toe. All things do work together for good to people who love God and remain confident that a larger story is unfolding in every detail of the smaller story we can see.

But such confidence finally depends on faith, not visible evidence. The lie of deism sometimes, too often, looks to be true: God seems distant and uninvolved. But things are not as they seem. Appearances really are deceiving. But now and again, always on God’s perfect timetable, we get a glimpse of His lovingly purposeful involvement in our lives, His commitment to our deepest well-being.

This is where Debbie comes in. For years she privately struggled with an addiction, a bad habit that curved her energy in on herself, an addiction that brought temporary but intensely pleasurable relief from the felt emptiness of life with all its worries and disappointments. It felt like she was struggling against her sin with no help from God. Was deism true? Was God really uninvolved in her struggle?

But then, after years, after God’s “little while”, she heard Him speak, meaning words suddenly rose up in her mind, uninvited but clear and powerful:

“Debbie, you are sacrificing the joy of giving yourself fully to your husband, children, and friends for five seconds of deliciousness.” Those four words hit her like a liberating thunderbolt.

Five seconds of deliciousness; five seconds of enjoying narcissistic contentment and unmitigated pleasure that left her alone, uninvolved with either God or others; five seconds that numbed the deepest thirst in her Spirit-indwelt soul, to love well. How foolish! She felt both broken over sin and released to live, to love.

I’m no deist. God is always advancing the plot of His story. Sometimes His ways become obvious. Trust Him when they don’t. Celebrate when they do.

Blog

A Crossroads

May 24, 2019October 17, 2019
by Dr. Larry Crabb

Years ago, as a self-declared right-leaning evangelical I got in trouble at a right-positioned evangelical seminary. At the time, I was leading a masters program in Christian counseling that I came to the seminary to establish. My practice was to invite students to join me in exploring our “inner worlds”. The phrase set off alarms. A few influential faculty of the fundamentalistic persuasion worried that I was smuggling Freud into the church. Didn’t Dr. Freud get counseling off track in the early 1900’s by teaching us to see what is going on inside, desires and impulses that needed to be de-repressed?

Perhaps. But I was teaching counselors to look into people’s inner worlds with different expectations and for a different purpose. But for a counselor to do anything other than exhorting moral, God-pleasing behavior that lines up with biblical standards for right behavior unsettles a Christian culture determined to keep Christians under control. It’s a culture that risks becoming simplistic, shallow, and legalistically stifling in its understanding of how the Spirit matures Jesus followers.

I don’t fit into that culture. I believe the Spirit works from the inside out, and that requires an inside look to see what needs to be repented and to awaken what can be released. Let me put it this way:

In order for God’s Spirit to do His deep transforming work that releases Christians to relate more like Jesus, we must open ourselves to seeing our self-centered, self-protective, self-enhancing motivation that bubbles up inside us like a filthy swamp. And we can expect the Spirit to put us in touch with the pure desire of our redeemed heart to love God and love others. Both our ungodly self-centeredness and our godly other-centered thirst must be seen. It’s then the real battle in the soul is engaged, the flesh-spirit battle that is waged in the service of spiritual formation.

That’s too many words. Fewer will do.

Every Christian who longs to be increasingly formed to relate, think, and live like Jesus in the Spirit’s power for the Father’s delight needs to enter their inner world where the one battle that leads to victory is fought.

But facing the complexity and difficulty of that battle is tiring. Most mornings I wake up around 5 unassisted by an alarm and seem reliably plunged into my inner world. God sometimes seems distant and uninvolved, maddeningly unhelpful with current problems in my life. I know He loves me and is a good God. The cross of Christ confirms it. But then I pray. If you could tune into the verbiage running through my mind you would hear something like this:

“God, sometimes You make no sense to me. I’ve got problems You’re doing nothing about, and I’m struggling with temptations and frustration without sensing the strength and relief I know You could provide. Trusting You to always be doing what is best for me is difficult, but I want to trust You.”

Words like that bring me to a crossroad: I can either effectively give up on God as I face my distress and do whatever I can do that helps me feel better about me and my life, or surrender my well-being to however God chooses to advance it. Too often I seem stuck at that junction.

So I leave my inner world battle and get up, get ready, and get on with my day: coffee, several cups unleaded; two eggs, maybe oatmeal; and on the 12 minute drive to my favorite breakfast spot Sirius radio, channel 5, 50’s rock; or channel 19, all Elvis. In the process, I enter another world, leaving my inner world with its worries behind. This second world feels better, no pressure, much easier, more pleasant.

Here’s the question: Do I stay there as often and as long as I can? Or do I think of brief times in this less stressful world as only a break from the struggle going on in my inner world? If I mostly live in the world where I can manage my own satisfaction on my schedule, I forfeit precious opportunities to follow the Spirit into my inner world where I can become painfully aware of my relational sin, choose to repent, and become joyfully aware of the new life within me that can now be revealed in how I relate.

While I listen to music I like and eat a good tasting breakfast, I might be living in the illusion that God makes sense: I want to feel good; God provides the means to feel good, the blessings I want in order to experience a hassle free, enjoyable life. But then I live a superficial, self-obsessed life, and mistake it for a Christian life.

When I delve into my inner world, I invariably come into contact with a God who doesn’t make sense. It’s then I discover the opportunity to remain actively open to what the Spirit most longs to do, to form me into a Jesus follower who is slowly growing to relate more like Jesus.

Blog

Why living in the Larger Story matters

May 24, 2019November 8, 2019
by Dr. Larry Crabb

I wonder if anyone these days, including me, takes seriously a rarely quoted verse from the Bible: “…if our hope in Christ is only for this life, we are more to be pitied than anyone in the world”. So many sermons and books and conferences seem to focus on how Christians can live for God and trust in God in a way that will win God’s favor in their lives. And “favor” usually is presented as having to do with God’s blessings in this life, blessings such as a solid marriage, responsible children, meaningful work, good health, and, if you’re a Christian in ministry, satisfying success. No one who enjoys those blessings – and I enjoy most of them – will invoke pity from anyone.

In terms of this life’s blessings, Paul was seemingly not so favored. Writing to Christians who were enjoying what most of us think of as the good life, Paul said this: “You think you are already rich… I sometimes think God has put us apostles on display, like prisoners of war at the end of a victor’s parade, condemned to die. We have become a spectacle to the entire world… Our dedication to Christ makes us look like fools”; those words come from 1 Corinthians 4: 8-10. The ones quoted above can be found in 1 Corinthians 15: 19 (both in NLT).

Among others one thing is clear: maturity in Christ does not guarantee blessings from Christ that are designed by Him to make our lives comfortable. But today’s version of the prosperity gospel, perhaps better labeled as the “blessed life” gospel, has come up with a variety of ways to pray, of promises to claim, of morality to live, and of spiritual practices to do that will apparently persuade God to open the windows of heaven and give Christians a happy healthy experience in this life, virtually problem free; and when problems do arise, we can expect better times coming.

Christianity was once viewed as a guaranteed hope of eternal life in heaven that freed us to live with one goal, to delight our Father and love like Jesus in dependence on their Spirit. Somehow along the way we’ve changed our understanding. The BIG SHIFT has occurred. A doctor’s check-up? Count on good news as you pray. A troubled marriage? A Christian counselor will guide you toward restored intimacy to enjoy. A lost job? Trust the God who only closes one door to open a wider one.

Our Christian culture, with few but notable exceptions, is now focused on the smaller story of our lives, the story that begins at our birth and ends at our death. But the good news of Jesus includes the promise of “many troubles and sorrows” during the years of our smaller story (see John 16: 33 NLT). That’s good news? Yes, but only when we become aware of the Larger Story God is telling.

The Father’s story is designed to form us into the likeness of Jesus, who trusted His Father’s goodness during tough times, even during the agony in Gethsemane and on Calvary, not without profound struggle but with unwavering confidence in the goodness of the story His Father was telling. And He knew that the outcome of God’s Larger Story, an eternity of endless joy in a world where everything was made new, was worth the struggle required to do what mattered most, to delight the Father and to experience the joy of Jesus.

The time has never been more in need of a renewed focus on God’s Larger Story, a Big Shift backwards to the Good News made possible by the Cross of Christ, and a way to live sustained by the anticipation of the Coming of Christ. LARGER STORY is a ministry designed to do exactly that, to shift our focus back to what God is doing in us and through us in the good times and bad times of life, and back to living in glad anticipation of the never ending good times. And only as we more clearly realize what defines God’s beauty and learn, not merely to glance at it occasionally but gaze on it continually will we long to join His story. God’s beauty is ours to enjoy even now as we live in a world soon to be destroyed then rebuilt to eternally reflect His unblemished beauty.

Listen to Peter. As an old man after years earlier leaving a pleasant life as a fisherman and now knowing he would soon die a death by crucifixion promised by Jesus, Peter wrote this:

“…when the Day of God’s Judgment does come, it will be unannounced, like a thief. The sky will collapse with a thunderous bang, everything disintegrating in a huge conflagration, earth and all its ways exposed to a scrutiny of Judgment. Since everything here today might well be gone tomorrow, do you see how essential it is to live a holy life?… So… since this is what you have to look forward to, do your very best to be found living at your best” (2 Peter 3: 10-14 MSG).

If in this life only we have hope in Christ, we are worthy of pity, not envy. But if these short years are followed by severe judgment on this world that ushers in an eternity of perfect joy in perfect relationship in a perfect world in the presence of our perfect Savior, then living now to reveal the God whose heart designed the Larger Story is the only life worth living. Learn about God’s loving plan for you, now and forever, to live in hope-filled community, through LARGER STORY.

Category: Blog

Five Seconds

A Crossroads

Why living in the Larger Story matters