Real, raw, and redemptive.
These were the words I received after I stepped down from the pulpit on Sunday. Two days prior, I was asked by our host if I would give the sermon at church on Sunday. I hesitated at first. And in my hesitation, the Lord was screaming No! You need to do this. So I told the pastor, “If you want me to preach, I’m in.”
Freedom.
What a powerful word.
Have you ever thought about a white flag? Every picture analogy of a white flag has the appearance and smell of defeat; one where your heart is broken that the sacrifice you know they paid, and the pursuit you feel like they must have been called to and believed in, all evaporates in the raising of the white flag. We quit. We give up. You win.
Or do we?
One of the values I love most in the pursuit of Jesus is that a white flag doesn’t signify defeat—just surrender.
What I love about the kingdom of God is that it is truly upside down. All the normal is abnormal. All the natural is supernatural. The ordinary is extraordinary. More is less and less is more. Eternal is significant; here and now is fleeting. Freedom is a powerful word. It turns out that in our raising the white flag over our life, what we actually experience instead of defeat is victory. This is the kingdom of God. This is holy mystery. This is following Jesus. In surrender, we take part in His eternal, lasting victory.
It was here in Cambodia that I surrendered. God had been asking me to share my story.
It’s taken me a while to experience and taste what I’d call real freedom. To own the story of how Jesus chased me down and rescued me. And how even today He continues to pursue me, and to work with me, and never seems to grow tired of me or frustrated with me, to with the lengths I’ve required Him to go in getting through to me and molding me into someone who, I hope, is starting to look more and more like Him.
Shoot, even two years ago, I was still too fragile to talk about it. I was still believing so many lies about myself. I was still wearing so many labels, convinced they were all 100 percent true about me. In some ways, I’m just now starting to trust that what His Word says about me is far more important than what anyone else might say or think about me. My journey to freedom has been a long one. And a hard one.
What I’ve found is that if I’d been willing to grab hold of freedom, at any point in my journey, it was right there, all along. The freedom of believing that God is bigger—alway bigger—than anything we’ve ever done and any place we’ve ever failed, was offered to me at every step. All I needed to do was take it. Believe it. Toss everything else out—all the shame and guilt and fear—and just walk on ahead with Him.
When God told me what to preach about—He and I had a good laugh. If I’m honest, I’ll admit that living missionally (1 Cor. 9:20) is much harder for me than engaging the most hostile skeptic. I am overly sympathetic to disoriented sojourners and unfairly impatient with conservative evangelicals. My tolerance for rules and fear-based legalism is low (ask any of my teammates), and I struggle with a very unmissional response to believers who lean towards the law. To a lot of you, that may sound immature and un-Christ like, and all I can say is that I’m working on it.
So what did God ask me to preach about? Regrets. I’ve made poor decisions that I wish I had never done. Anything not resolved in your past is always seeking to find some way to express itself in your present. Every person deals with regret on some level. The Bible is full of stories of people who made choices that led to regret because the Bible is full of stories of real people. Lives lived under the burden of regret, are not the lives that God desires us to have. God knows us well enough to know that in spite of all the warnings He has given us, we will have regrets. God doesn’t want our regret to keep us tied to the past. He wants us to be free from the past so that we can really live. We have to be willing to look our past in the face and confront it.
