Overcoming Negativity with Positivity.

I don't think anything is as draining as dealing with negativity. It sucks the life out of you. Lots of people are negative, some without being aware that they are negative. I think the twelve spies sent by Moses are a microcosm. Ten were negative and two were positive. I think that is how it breaks down in most churches and ministries.

There is such a fine line between healthy processing of legitimate frustrations and negative venting that doesn't serve any redeeming purpose. It takes maturity and depth to process. It just takes a bad thought and a negative emotion to vent. And venting is simply spilling toxins from the heart. It is damaging to relationships.

Besides, negativity is ten times as contagious as positivity! It's so easy for things to spiral downward. It's the human condition. It's emotional entropy!

So how do you arrest negativity and put it in handcuffs and throw it in jail?

Just call it like you see it. "Hey guys, it seems like there is some negativity happening here. Let's deal with it if it needs to be dealt with, but I don't want us to get derailed. So let's disagree if we must but please don't disengage." Then NAME THE EMOTIONS behind the negativity. Locate the seat of emotions.

Also, negativity is best dealt with privately and sometimes "ex post facto." You've got to do a post mortem. You've got to let someone know that they are "bringing the morale of the group down to their level." Most people are totally unaware of how their negative emotions affect others. And no one tells them!

My eyes have been trained to catch anyone yawning during a meeting. It communicates two non-verbal messages to me - I'm tired or I'm bored. Neither one is acceptable! You ought to come to a meeting fresh and healthy and you ought to come to a meeting to inspire and be inspired. Otherwise, your tiredness, sleepiness, boredom, detachment and disengagement will affect the morale of the team.

One negative thought I had to deal over the years as a pastor is this; lots of pastors hear this one from people who want their needs meet. "I'm not sure we should focus on reaching more people for Christ because we need our congregation to mature." Now that is a false dichotomy. There is no such provision made in scipture that we should stop doing the great commission because we need to mature spiritually.That is negative thinking: oh, let's disobey God so we can grow up. Let's stop evangelizing so we can be discipled. That makes zero sense.

We need to help negative people see through their false perception or assumption that is making them negative.

One final thought: The only way to overcome negativity is with positivity!

Have You Overcome the Idolatry of Romance?

I said on Sunday in the third message on STAYING TILL THE END that we are drawn into relationships primary because of emotions. We are looking for love. We are seeking for affirmation and encouragement and attention. We want to feel good. And when what we seek in love eludes us in one relationship; we seek outthe same in another relationship where we think we can feel good again.

Angela Thomas in her excellent book, Am I Beautiful: Questions Every Woman Asks made these comments everyone needs to read (guys included!) :

Here is one thing I can say with great confidence: the man that you love is just a man. He may be your soul mate. He is possibly your best friend. He may be hunky and funny and surprising and strong, but he will never - not in a million years, not if he goes to relationship therapy twice a week and keeps every promise written - be enough to fill your soul...he will never make you whole. He wasn't made to be enough. He could not be even if he tried. He is just a man, and he can give only as a man and interact as a man and love as a man. He wasn't designed to fill the depth of a woman's longings, anticipate every need, and jump through every hoop. He can't. Those deep places inside you were made for God.

The man is simply a vessel. God uses him to give you a part of the filling of His holy love. But he is not the only vessel, not is he able to fill you from his own strength, nor is he the only thing you will ever need. Are you hearing this? There will never be a man on the face of the earth who can make you whole. Being filled in the depths of your soul is only about the love of God...knowing him...hearing His voice...believing that He's wild about you...dancing in His arms.

The man's responsibility is to be the vessel and to be a good one. He is called to listen to God. To obey as the Holy Spirit leads. To love you in the ways God prompts his heart. If he loves you as a man who walks with God and if you realize that the vessel is just a man, there can be an amazing exchange of healthy love. Through the man you can taste a part of the love that God has for you.

Your responsibility with the man is to let him be just that. He is not your girlfriend. He is not perfect and never will be. He is not your Savior. He is not your filling, nor is he the answer to all your longings. You must let him be fallen and forgiven and in process. You must learn the difference between men who are healthy and those who are not. You must not mistake his opinions for the opinions of God. He may have never called you beautiful or smart or witty. No matter what the man says or doesn't say, God is still wild about you."

How have you overcome the "idolatry" of romance? Because you will never stay till the end in a relationship if the man or the woman takes the place of God in your life to touch your emotions!

Trust The Process

Time is relative. What I mean by that is this: the way we experience it is subjective. It depends on what you're doing. Ever been out with people you love? Time flies. Ever been out with people you didn't like? Time moves so slowly.

The way we experience time also depends on how old we are. If you're ten years-old, holidays is 10% of you life. If you're twenty-five, it's 1%. The older you get, the faster time seems to fly because relatively speaking it becomes a smaller and smaller fraction of your life! By the way, that is why when you were a kid, a two-hour trip in the car seemed like an eternity because relatively speaking, it was much longer for you than the adult who was driving!

So what am I leading us to?

Well, I think most of us have a hard time handling a bad day. We have a very low threshold for circumstantial uncertainty or spiritual discontinuity. We need answers. And we need them now.What we really need is some biblical perspective. When we look at our lives through the lens of Scripture, our perspective on time changes.

We have a hard time waiting for God to fulfill His promise. But what about Abraham and Sarah? They had to wait 15 years before Isaac was born. We have a hard time suffering for a season. But what about the invalid in John 5 who was in that condition for 38 years. And that's when the average lifespan was 20-30. We have a hard time waiting for God to make sense of our circumstances. But what about Joseph? He was a slave and a prisoner for 17 years before becoming Prime Minister of Egypt. Or Moses? He was a fugitive for 40 years! And we have a hard time waiting to fulfill our calling. But even Jesus didn't transition from carpentry to ministry til he was 30.

We need to zoom out and get some biblical perspective. We think in days. But we might need to think in years. Here's what I know for sure: those that God wants to use the most have to go through the longest season of preparation. You might have to struggle a little bit longer so you can learn some more lessons or develop some more character. You might need to suffer a little bit longer so God can reveal a little bit more of His glory in your life!

What I'm getting at is this: trust His timing. Trust the process He is putting you through, He is never early. He is never late. As we grow spiritually, I think we take a different perspective on time. It's less about chronos-time. It's more about kairos-timing. And for the record, He is far more concerned about who you're becoming in the process than when you arrive at your destination.

Often times we want to see immediate results to our programmes. We put something together; we have the goals in place and we expect instant results, otherwise we get discouraged. But some things that time. There is a process involved. It may take several programmes, several more seasons before the results show up. So we need to think process and not programme. Trust the process.

One last thought from Acts 1: "You don't get to the know the time. Timing is the Father's business."

Not much has changed has it?

Deep Pain + Deep Love

John Powell once wrote a remarkable little book entitled, Unconditional Love. In the book he tells the story of Tommy, a former student of his who died of cancer at age twenty-four. Shortly before he died, Tommy came to Powell and thanked him for a precious insight he had once drawn from one of his classes. Powell had told the class: There are only two potential tragedies in life and dying young isn't one of them. It's tragic to die and not have loved and it's just as tragic to die and not have expressed your love to those around you.

Doctors who research on the human brain tell us that we only use about 10% of our radical brain capacity. Most of our brain cells never get activated, both because we don't need them (they exist for wisdom rather than utility) and because we don't know how to access them. The same doctors too tell us that, paradoxically, two things do help us access them: the experience of love and the experience of tragedy. Deep love and deep pain, together, deepen a soul in a way that nothing else can.

Could that be the reason why Jesus commands us to love as He has loved us? Jesus loved us by dying to His rights; His dues; His glory. At the Cross, He suffered deep pain in deep love. And He calls us to take the queue from Him when it comes to making love a verb.

Everytime you make the decision to value others above yourself by defering to them, there is some pain to the self. Everytime you shift focus to the interest of others at the expense of your own interests, you bring some pain to yourself. And everytime you lay down your rights to build a relationship, you expereince pain.

But it is deep pain and deep love that make sthe work of the Cross a reality in our lives. And the experience of both awakens the brain releasing us to our greater potentials. It is the way to truly stay till the end.

How To STAY TILL THE END amidst waywardness?

Be compassionate as your heavenly Father is compassionate. Jesus challenged us with those words and there is more in them than first meets the eye. How is God compassionate?

Jesus defines this for us: God, he says, lets his sun shine on the bad as well as the good. God's love doesn't discriminate, it simply embraces everything. Like the sun it doesn't shine selectively, shedding its warmth on the vegetables because they are good and refusing its warmth to the weeds because they are bad. It just shines and everything, irrespective of its condition, receives its warmth.

That's a stunning truth: God loves us when we are good and God loves us when we are bad. God loves the saints God loves the sinners equally. They just respond differently. The father of the prodigal son and the older brother loved both, one in his weakness and the other in his bitterness, and his embrace was not contingent upon their conversion.

And we are asked to love in the same way.

How do we do that? First of all, it poses this question: If God loves us equally when we are bad and when we are good, then why be good? This is an interesting question. Love, understood properly, is never a reward for being good. Instead goodness is always a consequence of having been loved. We aren't loved because we are good, but hopefully we become good because we experience love.

But how do we, like God, embrace indiscriminately? How do we let our love shine on the bad as well as the good, without passing down the message that we are compromising with our moral values? How do we love as God loves and still hold true to who we are and what our values are?

We do so by holding our personal and moral ground in a gracious and loving way. And, for this, we have Jesus' example. He embraced everyone, sinners and saints alike, without ever suggesting that sin need to be compromised.

Let's take an example: Imagine that your teenage daughter comes home along with her boyfriend. You already know that they have crossed moral boundaries, and she ask you if the boy can spend the night in your place since it is already so late. What do you do? Do you allow him to spend the night at your home? What is the loving thing to do so that you can sponsor a relationship that stays til the end for you and your daughter and show the boy the genuine love of God?

Your answer should be clear, you tell your daughter, gently but unequivocally, that while they are under your roof and unmarried you cannot let him stay overnight. She objects: "That's hypocritical, my values aren't the same as yours, and I don't believe this is wrong in any way!"

Your response is the non-discriminating embrace of of the prodigal's Father in Luke 15: You hug your daughter and tell her that you love her, that you know that she has already crossed moral boundaries with her boyfriend, but that she may not do so in your house, under your roof. Everything inside of your body language, your embrace, and your person, will clearly tell her two things: "I love you, you're my daughter, I will always love you no matter what. But I don't agree with you on this matter. "

Your embrace doesn't say, "I agree with you!", it simply says, "I love you!" and the affirmation of your love, even as you hold your personal and moral ground will, perhaps more than anything else you can offer her, invite her to reflect upon your moral ground and why you hold certain things so deeply.

A wayward husband comes home to his hurting wife and ask if she would take him back. What should she do? Despite her anguish and pain, like the prodigal's Father, she should offer him her embrace and yet hold on to her moral ground and pave the way for his repentance.

There is a time to stand up for what we believe in, a time to be prophetic, a time to draw a line in the sand, a time to point out differences and the consequences of that, and a time to stand in strong opposition to values and forces that threaten what we hold dear. But there is also a time to embrace across painful conflicts, to recognize that we can love and respect each other even when we don't hold the same values.

There is a time to be compassionate as God is compassionate, to let our sun shine indiscriminately, on both the vegetables and the weeds without denying which is which. When we do that, we make a strong statement that we love one another even as Christ has loved us. It then enables broken people in a broken world to stay till the end.