Rebuke

The Lord’s rebuke feels so stinkin’ good.
 
Weird, right? Our natural flesh rebels at the thought of discipline—we’ve been taught that correction not only means that we’ve done something wrong, but that there’s something inherently wrong with us. Yet Scripture says that the Lord disciplines those He loves. So what does that mean? Can there really be a discipline doled out of pure, unadulterated love?
 
I was fiddling around on the keyboard in the treehouse I’m living in this month (I’m still in that worship leading redemption season! The Lord has provided a keyboard at last Debrief and at my past and present ministry sites. This month I’m in a small village in the Kampong Cham province living Swiss Family Robinson-style—it’s seriously awesome. The keyboard runs off of a car battery’s power.) when I saw two neighborhood children on our porch.
 
Here’s the thing with kids on the World Race: they’re everywhere. Running through your living space, breaking your things (among the squad we’ve had water bottles, computers, sunglasses and more fall prey to them), wanting to be picked up and spun around for the millionth time even though I am old and have a poor center of gravity. Now I like kids, but sometimes I honestly don’t have the energy for them, especially when they show up during ‘personal’ time. I secretly think I’m a salty 80-year-old woman living in a 24-year-old’s body.
 
We have very long days here: up at 6:30AM for breakfast, house visits in the AM, lunch, teaching English or more house visits in the PM, dinner at 7PM, team time from 8PM to usually 10 or 11PM. This was one of our rare mornings off, knowing that the afternoon and evening would still be jam-packed. I was looking forward to spending the time with the Lord and doing some singing.
 
I asked one of my teammates to close our ‘bedroom’ door to them so they would stay on the porch—I figured someone else would want to play with them or the kids would take a hint and leave on their own. However, as soon as I had written them off I heard the Lord ever-so-clearly say:
 

 
Ouch. He was speaking to me from Mark 10:13-16 that goes a little (or exactly) like this:
 

 
How could I say I wanted to look more like Jesus by spending time with Him, and then spurn the very ones He said made up the Kingdom? It’s hypocrisy. It’s so easy to become this sober, hyper-spiritual person who reads the Scriptures and does good works, but misses the entire heart of Jesus. Crazy, huh?
 
I have to say, it felt good to be corrected so clearly in that moment. The Father loves me too much to let me miss what He has for me, and in that moment it was spending time with these two precious ones. Because I know how good the Father is, and how pure His love is for me, it felt amazing to say I was wrong and to ask for the forgiveness He always has readily available for me.
 
I love being corrected by the Lord. His discipline humbles me, it loves me, it causes me to look more like Jesus. When correction is from the Lord it is free of condemnation and it is coated in this supernatural grace that allows my spirit to receive the word with a yes and amen.
 
I think of the how the Lord’s goodness leads me to repentance (Romans 2:4), and how good and holy the entire process feels. Within each team on the World Race, we practice a little thing called feedback. Almost every night, my team and I sit down and we tell each person on the team affirmations of their godly characteristics and we bring up situations or observations of conflicts that need to be worked out. The point is to call each other into greatness, to spur each other on to looking more and more like the Lord. It also allows us to have a community where there is no gossip—we’re accountable for everything we say or do and it’s all done in the light.
 
Ultimately, we’re supposed to give feedback as soon as a situation happens—that way it doesn’t sit and simmer in our hearts. As we’ve all been walking through this cultural shift (Seriously, everything gets called out during feedback. E-v-e-r-y-t-h-i-n-g.) sometimes we’ve experienced poorly done feedback. It’s so easy to tell someone to work on some behavior simply because you don’t want to deal with them anymore. It’s easy to turn feedback into straight-up criticism for all the things you don’t like about a person. The hard part to wrap my brain around is that sometimes constructive feedback is 100% spot-on, completely correct and completely Biblical—yet it’s not right because the heart behind it is not love.
 
Love, it always keeps coming back to love. Love suffers long. Love is kind. Love does not envy. Love does not boast. Love is not rude. Love is not self-seeking. Love is not provoked. Love rejoices in the truth. Love bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, and endures all things. Love never fails.  
 
I suppose the Lord’s rebuke can be a model constructive feedback. The root is love, the hope is love, the destination is love. Oftentimes my teammates call me out on things that I’ve done or said, but it feels so good to be corrected because I know that they believe the best for me; and that they invest in me because they love me.
 
I’ve been hungering after the supernatural more and more lately. My prayers are often for the Lord to show me His glory, to take me deeper in the Spirit. Yet the Lord has told me to concentrate on loving my teammates well, loving my ministry contacts well, loving the people right in front of me well . . . the supernatural will follow. Because, in fact, His love is supernatural. It is supernatural to love someone to the point of dying to yourself. It is supernatural to prefer your teammate at your own expense. It is supernatural to look like Jesus who, being in very nature God, did not consider equality with God something to be grasped; but humbled Himself and was obedient to the point of death, even death on a cross. When I love well, the Kingdom of God is established and it cannot be taken away.
 

 
Love with a violent desire to have the Good News preached to the poor, to heal the brokenhearted, and to set the captives free. Everything else will follow.