Lookin' Good
Lately,
several people have told me, "You look so good!" What an incredible testimony to God's love and power!
What an affirmation that he is making known to me the path of life, especially since walking that path has taken me through
a season so difficult I thought I might die — and did experience a type of death. Praise God for this resurrection season!
Most of my life, I've truly known Jesus Christ and truly desired to honor him. Growing
up in a genuinely Christian home, becoming a Christian at age 8, actively participating in church, eagerly studying the Bible,
marrying a Christian man, rearing our two daughters to know and follow God, living out God's call to write and speak what
he was teaching me — I experienced blessing upon blessing, grace upon grace.
At the same time, other loyalties competed with my loyalty to Christ. Incredibly, I did not recognize these as rival
loyalties. I did not see the subtle, yet dramatic, difference between loyalty to things connected with Christ and
loyalty to Christ himself. Genuinely loving Christ, I prayed to honor him. Fooled by the counterfeit, I could not
see where religious-looking but wrong motives, attitudes and patterns intermingled with godly ones.
Even so, God loved me and acted to answer my prayer. Beginning in 1998, he took me where I didn't want
to go to reveal what I desperately needed to see. For more than a decade, he has gone to great lengths to show me himself,
myself and us.
Now, like Isaiah, Ezekiel and Mary Magdalene, I stand,
utterly astonished, saying, "I have seen the Lord!" As never before, I have seen his radiance, his power, his compassion,
his indignation, his faithfulness, his fullness, his suffering, his resurrection, his mystery, his love.
I've seen myself, too. What a sobering picture! And yet, what a beautiful one! All those
years, I settled for much, much less than what Jesus had purchased. All those years, I looked at myself through a distorted
mirror, a lens that simultaneously puffed me up and put me down. I kept trying to please a counterfeit christ — promising
me everything, but always holding it just out of reach; propelling me into activity, rather than drawing me into rest; calling
for pivotal involvement in God's purposes, yet relegating to the periphery all but a chosen few.
"Now the Lord is the Spirit, and where the Spirit of the Lord is, there is liberty." Today,
as never before, I "with unveiled face" am "beholding as in a mirror the glory of the Lord" and "being
transformed into the same image from glory to glory, just as from the Lord, the Spirit" (2 Cor. 3:17-18 NASU). Whoopee!
I'm looking good!
Speaking of sobering — and beautiful
— pictures, I've also seen us. God has showed me, up close and personal, the state of his church and the inner
workings of the Western "church culture" we all too often believe to be the same thing. It's epidemic, this confusing
of loyalty to things connected with Christ with genuine loyalty to Christ. It's epidemic, this business
of settling for much, much less than what Jesus has purchased. Living on the resurrection side of history, we're demonstrating
little of the authority, power, love and life that characterized the church in Acts — while telling ourselves this is
the best we can hope for, this side of heaven.
We can list many good
things we're experiencing and doing, blessing upon blessing, grace upon grace. Yet, all too often we're like people trying
to function inside a network of plexiglass prisons. Being invisible, these prisons may appear to provide freedom, purpose
and community. Being prisons, they keep us isolated, irrelevant and bound.
Great
news! Jesus Christ loves us. He is committed to freeing us even from prisons we do not see. He has promised to transform all
his people from every nation into "a radiant church, without stain or wrinkle or any other blemish" (Ephesians 5:27
NIV). We will look good!
In obedience to God, I'm
telling what I've seen — of him, of myself, of us. You see, bringing to light what has been hidden is like pointing
prisoners to keys hanging in clear view. It makes a way for everyone who will to step into freedom and to leap, sing and dance
along the path of life.
