Beloved

by Rachel Gardner

  Your safe person

  Let me encourage you to find someone to talk and pray things through with. Make sure this is someone who loves Jesus and loves praying for you. A good friend of mine once told me that praying for someone is like toasting marshmallows! You don’t need to do much, other than pop the marshmallow on the stick and hold the stick over the fire, slowly turning it. The heat does the rest. Find someone who can help you to stay in the presence of Jesus, especially when it feels challenging, uncomfortable or even painful. Knowing that your friend will be with you as you allow God’s Spirit to work in your life can help you to linger longer in the place of healing.

  God sees with utter clarity who we are. He is undeceived as to our warts and wickedness. But when God looks at us that is not all He sees. He also sees who we are intended to be, who we will one day become.4

  This is your one brilliant and beautiful life. No matter what has gone before, a blank page lies open before you. Everything is still to play for! So, as you grab hold of God’s love and allow it to seep into your heart, mind and soul, may you find yourself growing in confidence, hope and courage.

  Live life with arms wide open. It’s yours!

  My ultimate goal is to end up being happy. Most of the time.

  Taylor Swift

  Finding happy

  Imagine yourself happy.

  Really happy.

  I like being happy. I like waking up, somehow knowing that today is going to be a ‘good’ day. Maybe it’s the weather, or I’ve just got a decent amount of sleep, or I don’t have much to do. But waking up happy is an amazing feeling. And it’s good for us and good for other people too. Have you noticed that when you feel happy, you tend to act ‘nicer’? And when you act ‘nicer’, you tend to look ‘nicer’!

  All in all, happiness ‘works’.

  Until it doesn’t.

  Happiness is elusive, flimsy, passing. It comes and goes like leaves on trees or sales at Topshop! It’s a wonderful feeling that we all crave, and we often discover it when we least expect it. We can make other people happy, and sometimes it can be a great motivator, helping us focus on making good decisions, but in the end it isn’t everything. Which is a relief, because no matter how hard we work at finding and keeping ‘happy’, there will be times when it drains away completely as the pressures of life kick in.

  I remember meeting Asher at a conference I was speaking at. It had been pouring with rain all week, the loos were constantly blocked and everyone’s tents were washed down the hill into a mucky pile at the bottom. It was bad! To make matters worse, I’d pulled no punches about how tough it was to follow Jesus. At some point, I’d encouraged everyone with: ‘Being a Christian is a whole lot harder than not being a Christian!’

  At the end of the week, I was just getting into my car to head home, when this figure in a fluffy hooded parka came dashing across the sodden field, laughing and apologizing and shouting for me to wait. She caught her breath, and her face changed. It all came pouring out. ‘I don’t know what to think.…You said following Jesus is hard. Why does he make it so hard for me?... I’m confused... Doesn’t God want me to be happy? He does, doesn’t he? He wants me to be happy?’

  ‘No,’ I said simply.

  She gasped. We stood there for a few moments, in silence. Both getting colder and wetter.

  Eventually I said, ‘Why would God settle with giving you something that doesn’t last, when he could create in you an enduring passion for him?’

  She was crying freely now. ‘But why doesn’t God want to make me happy? He’s my Father. I’ve had a really bad few years. Everything’s horrible. God wants me to be OK.’

  ‘God wants you to be his. He wants you to be whole.’

  ‘Whole is happy,’ she insisted.

  ‘No, whole is his.’

  I knew where Asher was coming from. Indeed, she wasn’t wrong to want life to be easier. But I didn’t want her to walk away from this opportunity to ask God for the best thing he could give, which wasn’t happiness.

  I wanted her to want to be whole.

  I wanted her to want to be his.

  Completely. Utterly. Forever. His.

  It’s easier to ask Jesus to make us happy than to make us whole, because

  We’ve already got our list made out of what being happy would entail.

  We secretly think we could do a better job of making ourselves feel OK than God could.

  But the problem with happiness is that it is always only skin deep. If your list is anything like mine, it involves having all the things in life you think you need. But a few moments spent in the company of someone who ‘has it all’ would quickly tell you that what we ultimately need, we just can’t provide for ourselves.

  What we need is to be made over. Not simply to be better, but to be new. Happiness (like a plaster) is a temporary solution to our far greater need – the need for God to remake us: ‘Anyone who belongs to Christ has become a new person. The old life is gone; a new life has begun!’ (2 Corinthians 5:17 NLT). This is what wholeness is – belonging wholly and completely to God.

  Fast forward to the present. As Asher and I chatted and prayed, the Holy Spirit began to reveal to us just how broken she was. It wasn’t because she didn’t have the stuff she needed to make life easy. It was because there was a war in her heart. It was divided between wanting to serve God and serve herself. For years she had hidden a damaging addiction to sex that made her create a web of lies. It was painful for her to begin to face the reality of her hardness towards God, even as she wanted to love him more.

  We got on our knees in the mud by my car. As she poured out all the lies and pain and mess, God took her dead, divided heart and gave her a heart that was free and alive to him, a heart fit for his holy presence. It’s what he promises to do when we confess our deep need for him. In the Old Testament he says to the House of Israel, ‘I will give you a new heart, and I will put a new spirit in you. I will take out your stony, stubborn heart and give you a tender, responsive heart’ (Ezekiel 36:26 NLT).

  Before I left Asher, we talked about who could support her as she made the big changes to her life. Then we prayed that her life would begin to be full to bursting with the evidence of God’s presence in her heart, making her whole: love, joy, peace, patience, gentleness, kindness, goodness, faithfulness and self-control. It wasn’t our list; we nicked it off the apostle Paul, who reeled it off as the fruit of a life that’s being made whole by Jesus.

  But what happens when we live God’s way? He brings gifts into our lives, much the same way that fruit appears in an orchard – things like affection for others, exuberance about life, serenity. We develop a willingness to stick with things, a sense of compassion in the heart, and a conviction that a basic holiness permeates things and people. We find ourselves involved in loyal commitments, not needing to force our way in life, able to marshal and direct our energies wisely.

  (Galatians 5:22–23 MSG)

  I called Asher a while later to see how she was doing.

  ‘Terrible!’ was her reply.

  ‘Oh no! What’s happened?’ I asked.

  She laughed at the panic in my voice. ‘The problem with God giving me a whole new heart is that I feel this incredible passion for getting to know him better. It’s changed my whole life. I’m not in charge any more! I don’t recognize who I used to be or how I managed for so long to convince myself that I wasn’t hurting myself or the people I loved. I can’t see someone suffering and walk by any more. I can’t let stuff go that needs to change. I feel more joy and more sadness than ever before. God hasn’t just given me a new heart; it’s like he’s given me his heart!’

  Exposed so that we can see just how deep our need for him really is.

  Broken so that we can be made whole.

  Asher’s new life is already bearing fruit.

  Grace changes everything

  Nothing about us is hidden from God. He shines a light not only on the pain we suffer, but also on the sin, the wro
ngdoing, we commit that gets in the way of our relationship with him.

  Nobody likes talking about sin.

  But I love talking about it!

  Not in a ‘what-have-you-been-up-to-today’ kind of way. A real conversation about sin is actually all about grace. It’s an ‘I’m-a-mess-without-grace’ sort of chat. So I love it because I know how much I need God’s grace. Left to myself, I’m selfishly ambitious, arrogant, hard towards the people I love. My hunger for happiness (or simply to feel OK) can sometimes drive me to selfishness where I only care about myself. I know how deep my need for cleaning goes – and I also know that by myself I can only clean up the surface (a bit). Only God can clean the sickness of sin that lives inside me.

  The reason why God hates sin in our lives is because it is a bit like a ‘Keep-God-out’ sign that holds us prisoners to our insecurity and selfishness, and ensures we remain broken. Sin is a strong and cruel slave-master. Have you noticed in your own life that you find yourself returning time and again to the sin you commit as a way of feeling better about the sin you commit? It’s a damaging cycle that needs to be broken. No matter how strong we are, on our own we can’t break it. We need a saviour for that. The apostle Paul knew this better than anyone did. After years of murdering Christians, he was met by Jesus in a powerful and blinding vision. He got to see the depth of his darkness as well as the even-bigger embrace of grace.

  What I don’t understand about myself is that I decide one way, but then I act another, doing things I absolutely despise. So if I can’t be trusted to figure out what is best for myself and then do it, it becomes obvious that God’s command is necessary.

  (Romans 7:15–16 MSG)

  Mel asked to meet me to chat. She’d just come back from visiting her friends at university. Their last summer together at church had been amazing. They’d felt so optimistic about their futures and inspired to live for Jesus. But the parting as some of them had headed off to uni and others like Mel had stayed put and found jobs had been really hard. Mel found herself faced with a loneliness that tapped into all her old insecurities about not being good enough.

  She’d had such high hopes for that weekend, but it hadn’t gone to plan. They’d argued over the fact that she’d bought another round of shots. Then she’d got separated from them at the club. The drinks were cheap, and the guys were confident. One guy in particular seemed into her. So she ended up going back to his halls.

  In the morning Mel gathered her things and took an early train home. She couldn’t face her friends. She had to talk it out, so we met. ‘I’m lonely,’ she said. ‘But I’m also reckless – and vengeful. It’s like I wanted to sleep with George to get back at the girls for leaving me behind when they went off to university, and for having a go at me for drinking when they’re such “perfect” Christians. I almost wanted to be the really bad Christian I think they sometimes think I am.’

  Mel is not a bad or a good Christian. (They don’t exist, by the way!) Although I wasn’t glad about what she’d been through, I was so proud of her for bringing it out into the open, to expose both her pain and her sin. To bring both to Jesus so that she could experience him making her whole.

  Paul’s wholeness list comes after another list. This time he reels off evidence of a life lived without any reference to God. Every time I read it, I’m reminded that whether we’re being promiscuous with our bodies or unkind towards strangers, God calls it ‘sin’. And he’s serious about it. Very serious.

  When you follow the desires of your sinful nature, the results are very clear: sexual immorality, impurity, lustful pleasures, idolatry, sorcery, hostility, quarrelling, jealousy, outbursts of anger, selfish ambition, ­dissension, division, envy, drunkenness, wild parties, and other sins like these. Let me tell you again, as I have before, that anyone living that sort of life will not inherit the Kingdom of God.

  (Galatians 5:19–21 NLT)

  They’re all sin because they break God’s law and his heart. I don’t want sin in my life because I don’t want to live in rebellion against the God I love. I don’t want to break his heart, hurt other people or hurt myself.

  God’s law, which Jesus summed up as loving God with everything you are and loving others with everything you have (Matthew 22:37–39), is not a random set of rules that someone came up with years ago to exact power over others with. His laws are a reflection of his character – who he is. He is love; he is faithfulness; he is goodness. Read through Paul’s list above again, and ask yourself, ‘Does God ever do these things?’ You’ll find that the answer is always ‘no’. Of course, God doesn’t have a brutal temper, pursue selfish ambitions or use people, then throw them away. He doesn’t because he can’t. Not because he is powerless, but because he is holy. He calls us to be holy too – to read a list like this and readily confess our need to be cleaned from the sin that hurts him and us and others.

  God longs to forgive your sin, heal your brokenness and set you free to be fruitful beyond your wildest dreams.

  Stone woman

  The Pharisees (the Jewish religious leaders we read about in the four Gospels) believed that sinful women like her were damaged beyond repair.

  The Pharisees believed that men like him were dangerous.

  That’s why they had lain in wait to catch her ‘in the act’, so they could use her to expose Jesus. It was perfect: they’d lock her up until morning and then drag her into the crowd surrounding this preacher from Galilee. He’d be bound to feel sorry for her. He might even attempt to forgive her (which is blasphemous, as only God can forgive). Either way, they were convinced that he’d expose himself as a fraud (John 8:1–11).

  Morning comes, and the familiar crowd of religious leaders and Pharisees gather in Jerusalem. Jesus is among them. ‘Get out of the way! Make room!’ comes the shout, as some henchmen drag the terrified woman into the crowd. Seeing her shaking, people spring back as if touched by fire. ‘Disgusting,’ an older man mutters. ‘Who is she? Vile creature. She smells of the sin she’s been charged with.’

  One by one, the men shuffle closer, their mutterings of judgment getting louder. Then someone shouts across to Jesus, ‘She’s a sinner! We caught her in her adulterous act. Moses says we should stone her. What do you say, Jesus? Here she is.’

  The crowd of men pull back again, like a wave on the beach. The woman and Jesus are left in the middle, and it goes quiet.

  The trap is set. Jesus will lose. The woman will die. Law is law. There’s nothing anyone can do.

  Then Jesus squats down. It’s the Sabbath. He’s forbidden to write more than two words on parchment, but no-one said anything about dust. With his finger, he starts to write. At first no-one can make out the words, but even before they read their names and their secret sins exposed to all, they get it. The judgment they want him to mete out on this woman, he’s about to mete out on them.

  He looks up and shades his eyes from the bright sun. ‘If you are free from sin, you cast the first stone. They’re over there.’

  Then he continues to write.

  They walk away, one by one, leaving Jesus alone with the woman. But instead of her being safe, she’s now in the most danger she’s been in so far, because there is one person without sin who could easily cast the first stone – and he’s the man standing in front of her.

  ‘They’ve gone.’

  ‘Then I don’t condemn you. You’re free to go. You’re free to sin no more.’

  He walks away.

  It wasn’t just the woman who encountered mercy that day. The Pharisees, trapped by their sin of pride and convinced that their judgments on others brought them closer to God, did too. I wonder what this did for them? Did the woman go away and sin no more? Did the Pharisees realize their need for a softening of their hearts towards God?

  We don’t know.

  But maybe we get to complete this story in our own lives. Do you hide your brokenness from others for fear of being judged? Is there sometimes a Pharisee lurking in you who is quick to dish out a har
sh judgment on others, even yourself? Do you consider that God owes you a happy life for being a good girl? Have you continued to be in a position of spiritual influence and leadership, even when it’s meant hiding a sin that you’re struggling with? It might well be because you’re afraid of letting people down or don’t know who to tell, but all the time you hide behind your mask, you will suffer. Ultimately, any lack of authenticity will haunt you, rob you of fruitfulness and slowly erode your confidence that God could use you.

  But if you recognize any of this, you’re not alone.

  Be whole

  So many of us wrestle with the harsh voice of judgment in our heads from time to time. However expressed, it comes from a niggling fear that nothing we do will be any good. We try so hard to control our sin by keeping it hidden or ignoring it. Then, when we find we can’t hide or ignore it any more, we fall for the lie that we are broken beyond repair. That all we can hope for is to ask Jesus to help us hold the fragments together.

  But there’s always hope, because God is always willing to make us whole.

  It starts with a one-to-one with Jesus. He alone has the power to condemn us. He alone is the only one without sin who could point the finger or cast the first stone. But he doesn’t. Instead, he took all our sin to the cross. He became the one who was condemned so that we could be free: ‘In Christ. God put the wrong on him who never did anything wrong, so we could be put right with God’ (2 Corinthians 5:21 MSG).