Breathing as a Spiritual Practice

Scripture teaches that Christ not only created all matter (John 1:3; Heb. 1:2-3) and holds it all together, sustaining it each moment (Col. 1:16-17, Heb. 1:3), but that he then became matter in the form of a man (John 1:14)- forever uniting himself to all of it (Col. 1:19-20).

The implications of this are astounding, for if Christ was not actively sustaining everything, it would all cease to exist. But I want to briefly focus on one way to take this giant idea and use it as a spiritual practice.

If Christ is sustaining everything- including you- each moment, you can take each breath as a gift, each heartbeat as a gift, each moment as Grace extended to you from the hand of your heavenly Father. 

Try it.

As you breathe in and out, become aware of how God is choosing you each moment. God is choosing to sustain you in this breath... and now in this one... and now again in this one. 

Notice how the life-giving Spirit fills your lungs, pumps your heart, creates electrical connections in your brain, sustains your being with his breath of life- each moment. 

This is the love of God, the presence of God, the Spirit of God, closer to you than your own breath. Simply becoming aware of this is one way to "rejoice always, pray continually" and "give thanks in all circumstances" (1 Thess. 5:16-18). 

All is Grace.

Selah.

The Bronze Snake

There's a fascinating story in the Bible about a bronze snake on a pole (see Numbers 21). The people of Israel were traveling through the wilderness and began to grumble (as they often did) about how they were running short on food and water, and how they had plenty back when they still lived in Egypt... you know, before Moses had led them to freedom. They began to romanticize their past when their present and future looked scary and uncertain. As a result of their complaining, venomous snakes were sent to bite and kill many people, so they repented and cried out to the Lord to be delivered from the snakes. So God instructed Moses to craft a bronze snake and put it up on a pole, and anyone who was bitten could look upon the bronze snake on the pole and would be healed (Numbers 21:8).

Now, there is much to discuss in this (strange) story, but I want to focus on a particular point. The bronze snake was a method of grace and healing that was initiated by God for the benefit of the people. In its time, it was divinely sanctioned and it worked. People who utilized the bronze snake were using the method that had been specifically given for them in their particular time and circumstances.

But look at what happened over time. In 2 Kings 18, we read about how Hezekiah later became king and how he took the bronze snake that Moses had crafted and smashed it into pieces because Israel had been burning incense to it (verse 4). In other words, Israel had made an idol out of a particular method God had used in the past. It went from something infused with God's Spirit to a tradition/symbol, and then became an idol as several generations passed.

Now, one can see how easily this happened. God clearly initiated the bronze snake and used it mightily amongst the people. There was clear evidence that this remedial method "worked." People were healed. It was God's anointed way forward. Why wouldn't they preserve that thing and get all of the mileage out of it that they could? If God used it in the past, why wouldn't God use it now? After all, God doesn't change, right?

This makes sense to us. God uses a particular method and blesses it and people's lives change and we may think, "Aha! We've found the magic bullet that God has anointed!" And in that particular time and place, perhaps it is anointed and it has life and energy and people's lives are changing through that particular method. So why not preserve that thing and get all the mileage out of it that you can?

And so every generation as it grows older starts to think that their way of doing things is the right way, and often times the only way, because they perhaps learned what God was doing in their own time, cooperated with it, and saw some results. "In my day, we did it this way and it worked just fine." Yes, it may have worked great then. But now, maybe not so much? 

The Spirit of God is alive and creative, always "making all things new" (Rev. 21:5). Isn't God free to work in ways that we aren't used to? Groveling in the past because we've made an idol out of what worked for us doesn't necessarily help much in the present. Perhaps God is not stuck in our past the way we often get stuck there.

What's worse, every generation as it grows older is then also tempted to despise the younger generations and their new methods as a big problem, scapegoating them because they don't understand them. "Kids these days..." or "Those Millennials..." or "This new generation..." or something similar is often the beginning of a big rant about how the world is going to hell because the young people don't respect the idolized and idealized past of older generations. 

Of course, there's legit wisdom to glean from tradition and from people who have lived longer, and sometimes those things are dismissed by younger generations. We stand on the shoulders of people who have gone before us. There may indeed be some needed critiques of younger generations, but not at the complete dismissal of how God may be doing new and beautiful things through them.

I have often heard the phrase, "We need to get back to the way things were done in the book of Acts," because there is an underlying belief that the methods found there are the anointed methods that will work, and if we could just tap into it we'd see all kinds of great stuff happening. But the church in that time was far from some "golden era" that we're all meant to copy and paste into our time. Just read Paul's letters to see that the church in that time struggled with all kinds of issues just like we do today.

Of course, we learn from all these stories and glean all the wisdom from them that we can, and we celebrate how God has worked in the past. But we also listen and discern and cooperate with what God is doing in the present, even as it disrupts our norms and traditions. Because sometimes those traditions have become idealized and idolized and people have been burning incense to them for a long time. Sometimes they can be reformed, but sometimes they must be destroyed like the bronze snake.

So, can you think of any modern "bronze snakes" in the church?

Never in a Million Years...

Never in a million years would we have imagined a God like this...

Instead of us ascending up a mountain to reach God, this God descends to us and even becomes one of us.

Instead of being found only in the spectacular and impressive, this God is found in the everyday and the ordinary.

Instead of us spilling our blood to get to God, this God spills his own blood to get to us.

Instead of returning the hate of sinners with more hate, this God includes, forgives, and heals us.

Instead of gravitating toward the strong and popular among us, this God gravitates toward the weak and marginalized among us.

Instead of using his suffering as power over us in order to punish us, this God uses it as power for us in order to transform us.

Instead of making us earn our way back through self-hatred and self-punishment, this God sets us free and invites us into his fullness of life.

Instead of using external brute force and coercion to get people to change, this God pays the price of change within himself, then gives it to us as a gift.

Instead of keeping his distance due to our unworthiness of his presence, this God creates faith and transformation in us from the inside.

Instead of getting frustrated at our hard hearts and slowness to change, this God patiently woos and loves us from the inside until we wake up.

Instead of sending fear and retribution and shame and sin and death to wreak havoc in our lives, this God turns them all upside down and uses all of it in our favor.

Instead of overcoming by punitive “winning,” this God overcomes with co-suffering “losing,” and calls us to the same.

Instead of leaving us in our chosen blindness and delusions, this God is pleased to reveal his Son in us.

Instead of appearing very powerful, this God appears very powerless. A naked, bleeding, poor, weak-looking man who has been betrayed and abandoned by all of his friends, rejected by both society and religion, suffering alone and dying on a cross- becomes the perfect image of what God is actually like- not a passive doormat who somehow makes suffering heroic in and of itself, but one who becomes the means by which death and evil are absorbed and completely destroyed forever.

Never in a million years would we have imagined a God like this-- perhaps that is one of the more compelling reasons to believe.