Stage 5 The Outward Journey
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The Journey Outward We have been working our way through this thing called The Journey of Faith. Each week I am giving a brief overview of the six stages on the journey as put forward in the book, The Critical Journey: Stages in the Life of Faith, by Janet Hagberg and Robert Guelich. By repeating the overview each week, it is my hope that people will understand the basic idea of the journey and their place in it. Overview · Stage One: The Recognition of God. Stage one is where we become aware, in a real way, of the existence of God and we begin the journey of faith. The overwhelming sense in stage one is awe. We are in awe of the greatness of God as seen in creation, and we are in awe of the love of God as seen in the cross. · Stage Two: Learning & Belonging. Stage two is a time for forming who we, and what we believe, in the context of those who teach and disciple us. · Stage Three: Productive & Serving. Here we learn that God has equipped us with certain abilities and gifts, and we want to contribute to the group by using those gifts. The emphasis is serving and being productive for God. Most people stop at stage three. It is comfortable. We feel productive and we are getting positive reinforcement from those around us. · Stage Four: The Inward Journey. Stage four is almost always preceded by some kind of crisis. We are full of questions and not many answers. We question who we are and why we do what we do. We question what we have been taught about God. It is an intensely lonely and painful stage but one which is shared by quite a number of biblical heroes. · The Wall. Towards the end of Stage four is the Wall. The Wall is where our will meets God’s will face to face. We face God. We also face our own ugliness and all of the ways in which we have asserted our own egos, while still claiming to follow God. · Stage Five: The Outward Journey. Having been through the Wall, we have seen ourselves at our worst and have accepted and received God’s unconditional love. We are aware of our faults, but we are more aware of God’s grace. We have a looser grip on ourselves and a greater desire to love and accept others in the way God has loved and accepted us. · Stage Six: The Life of Love. This can only be described as total Christlikeness. It is a life of complete humility, obedience and service.
Before we go on to Stage 5, I want to revisit the whole Wall experience… Stage 4 is a very introverted stage. We have problems, and we can almost seem obsessed with those problems. At least we can seem obsessed with the questions which surround those troubles. When we reach the Wall, we have to come face to face with our contribution to the dilemmas we are facing – our lack of faith, our selfish ambition, our self-protection, our failure to forgive. The Wall is where we have to surrender our will to God’s and experience God’s unconditional love, acceptance and forgiveness. The Wall experience is very different for every person, because the issues we face at the Wall are unique to us individually. There are a few observations I want to make about the Wall experience before we move to the other side of the Wall, which is Stage 5. · There is no time limit on the Wall. Some people move through the Wall very quickly, while others take a long time. Do not put shame on yourself if you’re one of those who seems to spend more time banging your head against the Wall than you do actually moving through it. Allow God to guide you through. He’s not in a hurry. · There is often more than one Wall. I’m sorry to be the bearer of bad news, but the reality is that we will more than likely come upon more than one Wall in our spiritual journey, or maybe it’s just the same wall that we encounter a number of times. It might be that we easily move back over the wall, or it may be that we encounter the Wall at different times on different levels of the journey. Maybe, on one trip to the Wall, God is inviting you to lay down your woundedness so that you can be released from bitterness and unforgiveness. Then later, God may invite you to lay down your strong will and trust Him to take the lead in your life. Both of these require a trip to the Wall, but they may happen months apart. · It’s really easy to hop back over the Wall. What I mean here is that while the trip from selfishness to selflessness is difficult, the move back to selfishness is easy. It’s hard to relinquish control, but it’s really easy to grab it back again. Each time we snatch it back means we have to face the Wall again.
So, let’s look at what’s on the other side of the Wall. What happens when you surrender those things that occupy your life and thinking at Stage 4 and emerge through the Wall with a life that is more surrendered to the love of God? Let’s look at this in terms of the evidence of someone being in Stage 5.
Stage 5. Evidence No. 1 A renewed sense of God’s acceptance. Stage 5 does not bring perfection. It doesn’t make you a perfect and faultless Christian. What it does is makes you more aware that God loves and accepts you in spite of your faults and imperfections. God loves us in our humanness. In The Critical Journey the authors write about what they call “a deep divine humour.” They write, “Consequently, we can really laugh at ourselves and not feel put down, but loved.” We can now look at our own inconsistencies and failures and realise how ridiculous it is to act selfishly, or to hold a grudge or to fail to trust. We are not putting ourselves down. We are accepting God’s grace, while laughing at how truly human we can be. Another quote from The Critical Journey is this. Wholeness looks a lot like weakness at this stage. Wholeness does not make us stronger; it allows God to work through our weaknesses. Wholeness means being very aware of our faults but not letting them trip us up. Wholeness does not mean we are in charge; it allows us to wait for God to direct. Wholeness does not make us complicated; it helps us discover our simplicity. God can use us most in our brokenness, a truth that was very hard to accept until the wall experience. (The Critical Journey. Page 135) A great biblical example of this acceptance is found in Joseph. Joseph’s story of being sold into slavery and then rising to the highest position in the nation of Egypt, was full of people making bad decisions. His father favoured him over his brothers thus prompting them to jealousy. Joseph himself played on that favouritism and seemed to rub his brothers’ noses in it somewhat. The brothers, for their part, being consumed with resentment, did the unthinkable. They sold their brother as a slave. Joseph found himself in slavery in Egypt, where he had a series of promotions followed by a serious false accusation and then someone who promised to help him who didn’t live up to his word. At the end, when Joseph and his family are finally reunited, there would have been ample reason to apportion blame. They could blame just about anyone in the family. They could blame God for allowing it all to happen. The brothers were, rightly, blaming themselves and bracing themselves for a backlash. However, our man, Joseph, rose above all that. He didn’t blame God or his brothers. Look at what he said to them… As for you, you meant evil against me; but God meant it for good, to bring it about that many people should be kept alive, as they are today. Genesis 50:20. RSV This is what makes Jesus’ parable about the unforgiving man so horrendous. In Matthew 19, Jesus tells about a guy who is forgiven an unpayable debt. Instead of being grateful and accepting the gift he’s just been given and adopting the spirit in which it was given, he went out and found a mate who only owed him a fraction of what he’d been forgiven and starts to choke the living daylights out of him and demanding payment. When the guy pleads for mercy, using the same words he himself had used with regard to his own debt, he shows no mercy and has his mate tossed into jail. This pitiful person failed on two counts… He failed to fully appreciate the acceptance and grace he had been given, and he failed to pass on that acceptance and grace to someone else.
Stage 5. Evidence No. 2 A new sense of the horizontal life While we were in the unhealed state of Stage 4, we weren’t able to see much beyond ourselves. We needed to go inside and do a lot of soul-searching. At the wall, we laid all that down in surrender to God. Now, as we emerge on the other side of the wall, we find ourselves more able to reach out to others. Once we have the vertical life (our own journey with God) healthy, we are in a much better position to live the horizontal life (our relationship with others). Before the wall, we still interacted with others, but our interaction may have been polluted by self-interest. o Doing things for others in order to get them to like us… o Doing things for others in order to feel good about ourselves… o Doing things for others to get something in return… o Doing things for others as a means of manipulation… At this point, we might find ourselves doing the same things we did before to help others, but there is a different motivation. Having received God’s unconditional love, we now are more able to pass on that unconditional love to others. We become aware that God’s purpose for our lives is lived out by passing on to others the same love and grace we have received from God. Such love has no fear, because perfect love expels all fear. If we are afraid, it is for fear of punishment, and this shows that we have not fully experienced his perfect love. We love each other because he loved us first. 1 John 4:18-19. NLT This is not that unhealthy desire to fix others, or change others, or to be martyrs. It’s not about winning or losing or accomplishing tasks. It’s more about simply being there for others. If something good happens, we don’t feel like they “owe us one”. On the other hand, if they reject our help, we don’t feel dejected. Just as God has been there for us, we are there for others with no strings attached.
Stage 5. Evidence No. 3 A sense of calling After coming through the wall we may discover that our life before the wall was heavily invested in self-interest. We may have done what we did, even good things, for the wrong reasons. Things like… o If we did the things we did in pursuit of applause, then our motivation is going to change dramatically. If you were doing good things, and doing them well, so that others will recognise you and pat you on the back and tell you what a wonderful person you are, then you will discover, in Stage 5, that pats on the back, the applause of man, is no longer important to you. o If you were driven to accomplish because accomplishments made you feel good, that is going to change too. On the other side of the wall, accomplishments will not have the importance they did before the wall. What often happens in Stage 5 is that our motivations change. What we do may or may not change, but our reasons for doing what we do have a different focus. When that happens, we may discover what can only be called a calling from God – a new direction from God for what you do. You might do the same things from a new heart, or maybe God will call you into something completely different. The thing that is important, according to The Critical Journey, is that we are the ones who discern God’s call for us, not some other person who tells us what God wants us to do. This means developing the ability to hear God and sense His subtle directions for our lives. Because accomplishments and accolades are not as important as they once were, we might just find that God calls us to do things that are small, humble or risky. In fact, God may have been inviting us to that direction all along, but we our hearts and minds were too cluttered to hear. Now, we hear God inviting us to different tasks, the small, the simple and the mundane, but things which may in fact have a profound impact in someone’s life. Paul’s testimony is an example here… Obviously, I'm not trying to win the approval of people, but of God. If pleasing people were my goal, I would not be Christ's servant. Galatians 1:10. NLT
Stage 5. Evidence No. 4 Deep calm or stillness Having handed things that previously occupied our minds, we find a new sense of calm and stillness. o When we really forgive those who have wounded us, we find we are no longer dominated by thoughts of what they did to us. There may still be scars, but the wound itself is healed. o When we hand over our fears, we are suddenly not dominated by fear. o In the absence of the drive to accomplish or the fear of not accomplishing, we have peace. Here’s another quote from The Critical Journey: We let God direct our lives from a calm stillness inside, from a peace of soul and mind. We can be ourselves fully as fragile, spotty, incomplete, and imperfect, yet wise, loved, willing and called. It is a miracle to be able to let ourselves be used fully by God despite our shortcomings. In fact, God even fully uses our shortcomings. All are gifts to us. (The Critical Journey. Page 140) When we have this kind of calm, it may appear to others that we really don’t care about things that used to be important to us. In fact, what has happened is that what is important to us has changed. For the Kingdom of God is not a matter of what we eat or drink, but of living a life of goodness and peace and joy in the Holy Spirit. Romans 14:17. NLT
Wrap up Rather than wrapping up with a number of suggestions, as I have in previous messages in this series, I want to wrap up with a series of questions.
Question 1 To what degree are you able to laugh at your own faults and weaknesses, knowing that God loves and accepts you through Christ?
Question 2 How have your priorities changed over the course of your spiritual journey?
Question 3 How do you discern or understand God’s purposes for your life?
Question 4 Can you visualise yourself living at Stage 5? · Do not lie to yourself that you could never reach this stage! · If you are now at a previous stage, start to see yourself living the stage 5 life. · What will you look like? What priorities will you have that you don’t have now? What priorities now will mean little at Stage 5? · See yourself… · Ask God to take you there.
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