Breaking Out of Spiritual Poverty

So in our last post we began talking about the abundant resource of God's grace and the ways in which we use it to enter into a redeemed life, now here on earth...before we die.  We talked about grace being two-fold.  It is a means of forgiveness and an abundant resource for living a life characterized by Christ.




Paul says in Romans 6:20

But now that you’ve found you don’t have to listen to sin tell you what to do, and have discovered the delight of listening to God telling you, what a surprise! A whole, healed, put-together life right now, with more and more of life on the way!

This means we might need to consider how we may be returning to our personal places of spiritual poverty and how we may be guarding the door to our internal slum. To live under the first grace (forgiveness of sins) and not the second grace (abundant resources from heaven) is just like getting a job and returning to the slums (see the previous posts)  - we have the resources but make little or no use of them, or we see opportunity for help but we don't trust it enough to let it in.  We are impoverished by sin and bound to its sway.   I mean after all, “We are only human - right?” We can't help ourselves!  ...or can we?


Could it be that we lack a vision for anything better and simply choose not to give holiness much effort?  If grace is in scarce supply who can blame us?  …But it isn't...When we seek to be like Jesus without, well..JESUS, then it becomes a very frustrating, discouraging, laborious process.  And sadly, many Christian circles, though well intended, have done just that.  Which is why many of you, like me, have at times resorted to giving up and resigning to the fact that we are imperfect people (true) and live at the mercy of a perfect God (also true), and if we're lucky He might like us. 

IF we are uncertain if God likes us or not, then it stands to reason we would guard the door to our heart (our inward "slum").  We hide our sin or avoid spiritual conversations or feedback because we aren't sure it's safe.  We may see an opportunity for restoration on the horizon but it feels threatening so we say, “Keep out!” Sometimes we can remain stuck in a mindset that does not have room for grace which means there’s isn't any room for love either….scarcity (see previous post)

 The life we are invited into is more than a botched collection of years filled with eraser marks era-tagged with forgiveness.   The life we are called into is HIS – Christ CAME.  He dared to darken the door of our impoverished ways, make a home among the sewage with us, and offered us a way out.  We are loved out of the slums.  

 And over time, as we make His love our new home, we are able to live our life in responsive obedience to Him.  We become His conduit for love towards others.  It often requires His grace-fuel to energize us into action. But, surprisingly, it is not burdensome.  We discover the unforced rhythms of grace as we watch Christ and begin to work with Him and find ourselves yoked to the one whose ways are not without struggle but whose presence makes the journey easy and light.  This, my friends, is the gospel!  We are forever, and always WITH him and He is forever and always WITH us.  God is forever wooing us out of our impoverished ways and into the riches of His good and loving Kingdom...because He likes us...Abundance!

SO here are a few questions (and it is as much for me as it is for anyone else):

What areas of your life are still impoverished?

How might you be operating from a viewpoint of scarcity instead of abundance?

How might you be returning to the slums? 

In what way do you desire to experience God’s love or restoration right where you are?

AND… here’s a tough one…. How might you be guarding the slums of your heart, preventing that love and restoration from coming in?


What are some things you can do to make some changes today?

Poverty of the Mind

There's something I've been thinking about lately and it has caused me to reconsider my perspective on the way in which I approach how I live my life day to day.  To explain what I mean I need to give a little background. 


While taking a trip recently to an area of the world where poverty runs rampant and there has been extensive efforts towards relief and development, I was struck but a conversation my husband shared with one of the development workers.  She mentioned that even though many of the people she works with now have jobs and could readily leave the slum life, many  have remained there and seem to instinctively choose to live in cardboard houses, sleep on dirt floors alongside steams of sewage, and rarely set foot outside the despairing reality in which they live – many don’t seem to fully understand what is available to them. They’ve been given the resources and now come home at the end of the day having earned wages tucked neatly in their back pocket, but they do not know how to make use of it. 

 

I found myself asking, "Then what's the point of it?" She then made a distinction between economic poverty and emotional poverty.  What they were learning is that it is much easier to transition them out of economic poverty because it involves dealing with issues that are more concrete, like skill building and the marketing of goods and trades. These are things they can engage and grow in.  However, helping them shift their thinking from one of scarcity to one of resource or abundance is much more difficult and will take longer.   

On top of that, even though many had the resources to leave the slum and find a different kind of life, most not only didn’t do it, but also took to guarding the slum’s boundaries so that even those who wanted to help could not get in.  They were held captive by the poverty of their mind because they did not have a vision for anything different.

Now here's where some ponderings come in to play.  I wonder if we do not have a similar perspective to those in the slums.  Figuratively speaking we have built our spiritual internal home in ways that can reflect an internal slum and we find ourselves impoverished.  At some point we have been introduced to God and have taken on some of the “skills” by way of Bible study, church attendance, etc…these are the concrete ideas that were easy for us to embrace early on and they are indeed the necessary place to begin and thereby grow – as was skill building and job acquiring for those in the slum.  But I wonder if we have stopped there? 

 

It seems we have resources but don’t really know how to use them and so we return to a "slum-way" of living.  For example, we have learned from studying our Bible that in our anger we ought not sin, and yet we may be accustom to “heart-sewage” in the form of yelling to get our point across.  We have had plenty of devotionals or heard motivational Christian speakers talk about the pain of slander yet we can often turn to gossiping to sooth our insecurity.  We know that we are uniquely created in God's image, chosen and dearly loved, but we may find ourselves accepting on-going mistreatment from someone and we allow that mistreatment to define us.  We have heard from the very beginning that there is a "God-shaped hole in our heart that only he can fill"  yet we set aside our self-worth in order to be “loved” by someone else and it never satisfies….The list is can go on - right?   The truth of it is, we want to move forward but sometimes we can't, and instead we return to the slums and find ourselves caught in a cycle of sin from which we cannot break free.  On top of that, we often guard the door of our internal soul-slum space while our own fear and pride/shame keep others at arms length and prevent anyone from really getting in and bringing help - including God. 


Sometimes (Now don't shoot me here) we are held captive by the poverty of our mind and we simply lack the vision for anything different.  Just like there was a good life just across town, outside the slums for so many in those impoverished areas; there is a rich, abundant, beautiful life in our midst as well.  Living in the ongoing presence of God's love and participating in HIs Kingdom as a child of the King is what we are made for.  It is life outside of the slums and it begins now...right here...


....But how do we get there? 



This is part one of a two -part post...tune in next time for thoughts on how we can begin to grow a vision for living outside the slum.