The Difficulty of Beginning Again

About 6 minutes

Dear Ray,

By beginning again, I mean renewed attention and dependence within the union already ours. Christ has not left us. His divine life remains ours even when our habits obscure its expression.

We have had methods enough. Even becoming quiet can become another achievement we require of ourselves. Christ is already our life within the noise and weariness. We can turn to Him there.

I keep thinking about how quickly our desire for a new beginning becomes another project. We recognize that something has become stale. Prayer feels strained. Meetings repeat themselves. Familiar words no longer carry the weight they once carried. Then almost immediately we begin designing a replacement.

A new arrangement. A new emphasis. A new training. A new way of meeting.

We know how to do this. We have spent much of our Christian lives learning how to build, organize, explain, and reproduce spiritual practices. But a new arrangement does not guarantee a new source. We can change the container while carrying the same inward condition into it.

We have been taught to activate the mind, repeat a vocabulary, and move through inherited forms. These things can become so familiar that we mistake familiarity for life.

That may be one of the deepest dangers in any Christian tradition. The truth can remain correct while the inward contact weakens. The vocabulary survives. The meetings continue. The ministry is quoted. People become skilled at producing the expected sound.

Yet we can lose sight of the Life already within us.

We can become more precise in speaking about Christ while becoming less dependent upon Christ Himself. We can learn how to describe the flow of the Spirit while continuing to rely upon ourselves. We can preserve the sound after the music has faded.

Room for a Quiet Beginning

Beginning again brings us to the One already given, before we have managed to change our inward condition.

The need to perform, the fear of disappointing people, and the instinct to produce the right response can remain active even after the schedule is cleared. I cannot silence them into resurrection. Christ must reach those places by His own operation.

There may be quietness as we yield to Him. There may also be an honest prayer from a troubled heart. Neither becomes a condition we must achieve before He can receive us. His life supplies what our effort cannot.

That is hard because so much of our identity has become tied to what we do.

Zoe is God’s own life. We do not enlarge or improve that life. We grow in Christ as His life gains expression in our thinking, speaking, and living together.

Perhaps the true beginning will look unimpressive.

Two or three people sitting together without the pressure to create a successful meeting. One honest prayer instead of twenty practiced ones. A period of silence no one rushes to fill. A brother speaking about his actual condition without someone immediately correcting him. A passage of Scripture read slowly enough that one sentence becomes contact with Christ rather than material for discussion.

Perhaps it will look like a meal where no one is performing spirituality, yet everyone remains inwardly available to the Lord. Perhaps it will look like an older brother who no longer needs to control the outcome and a younger believer who is free to discover Christ without first learning an approved vocabulary.

I do not want to romanticize informality. A small gathering can be just as natural as a large meeting. Freedom from a program is not the same as living by Christ. The self can dominate silence as easily as it can dominate a platform.

The issue is not form against no form.

The issue is source.

What is moving among us? What is being strengthened? What do people carry away? Are we producing agreement, excitement, loyalty, and spiritual language? Or is something of Christ actually being received and formed within us?

The new beginning will not arrive as a better system. It will arrive as Life shared without obstruction.

When Reaction Becomes Another Form

The obstruction may be an inherited practice we are afraid to question. It may be our need to impress one another. It may be loyalty to a movement, a ministry, or an image of what the church should look like. But the obstruction can also be our reaction against the past.

Even criticism can become a form.

We could gather around everything we believe is wrong. We could become the people who see what others do not see. We could build our identity around being freer, deeper, or more alive than those who remain inside the old structure.

Then the revolution itself would become another religious system.

The Lord must free us not only from the old form, but from our need to build a counter-form. Otherwise, we carry the same disease into a smaller room and give it a new name.

The saints need Christ Himself as the source of their living. A peaceful setting may serve them, but it cannot impart what only His life supplies.

We cannot create the body by rearranging chairs or becoming more restful people. Christ is already the life of His members. As that life flows among us, His patience and freedom find expression. They are His supply, not qualifications we bring to the gathering.

Living from Christ Now

Maybe beginning again means returning to our first love without pretending we can reproduce our first days.

We cannot go backward to Jerusalem, to some imagined first-century purity, to Isla Vista, or to an earlier season of the Recovery. We carry history now. We carry age, disappointment, knowledge, failure, and wounds. The Lord is not asking us to become younger or to erase what we have passed through.

He has given us Himself as our life in the day that is actually ours.

A new beginning is not the repetition of the past. It is living now from Christ, who is already our life.

Ray, I feel urgency because our years are not unlimited. Yet even that urgency can become another form of human pressure. We can try to force a beginning because we are afraid time is running out.

But Life cannot be forced.

The seed grows in a hidden way. We are not required to bring God’s whole purpose to completion within our remaining years. Nor must we replace that burden with a checklist of quieter accomplishments. Christ is our life now. Whatever proceeds through us must arise from His operation.

An honest brother may give expression to that life.

A gathering may become freer from performance as Christ supplies its fellowship.

A wounded saint may receive something of Him through another member. But neither honesty, informality, nor relief can substitute for the Source.

We may never build something impressive. Perhaps we are not supposed to.

Perhaps the new beginning is quietly recognizing and living from Christ, who is already everything to us.

With love,

Brent

For brief explanations of terms I use in these letters, see Words in These Letters.

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