This is freedom

Poatina Morning Tea devotion given today

Since the advent of email I’ve felt guilty. Since that time I’ve felt guilty because of all the emails sitting on my computer I hadn’t got to. It was overwhelming.

There are some people whose brains work and they are organized. Mike Cleary is incredible! If you ask him for a bit of paper he can find it. He has this whole system.

I’ve been on a quest to manage myself, and email just made it more complicated.

One of the books in the Arrow course is “Getting Things Done” has made a significant difference in my life. It’s very practical and for the last 6 months I’ve been up to date with email! But one of the things that that I’m seeing more clearly, is that it’s one things to get things done – it’s a different thing to know where your “doing” is coming from. What is your motivation?

As a kid there seems to be the dichotomy between what you want to do and what your parents want you to do. If you’re a good boy you do what your parents want; if you have a bit of spirit in you, you may not!

A nice thing is happening in Fusion as people rediscover what it means to be free in Jesus. One of the bits I love in the Bible is where Paul is the angriest! He’s saying, “You blokes, you’re meant to be free but you’re let someone come in with their rules, and you’re not free! They had started following laws, rather than being free with Jesus. Faith is about what is right to do in this moment. Paul says: “You’ve been told you have to circumcise, why not go the whole way and castrate yourself!” He’s angry!

The question of WHY you do what you do is as important as HOW you do it. Sometimes in my relationships with people bad feelings come (and in fact it’s sometimes about unanswered emails) . A lot of my activity can be to do with fixing bad feelings! But that’s probably not the best way to direct my life! Paul says we need to realise it’s not about our feelings! You ARE actually free! Your job is to make decisions with God.

We often experience Christianity like we experience our parents and so we are responding to an external pressure and that’s not healthy! So it’s a wonderful realisation as you discover faith, and discover that you don’t have to be tied up by religion! You discover that it is your job to be in the moment with Jesus and asking what you need to do now. And it’s wonderful that most of us are on a journey to know that – that we are loved for who we are.

Some people who have lived in a religious kind of world have finally hit onto that fact, but then it becomes selfish and their focus comes to be about their personal relationship with Jesus, rather than following Jesus.

Nelson Mandela said

“To be free is not merely to cast off one’s chains, but to live in a way that respects and enhances the freedom of others”.

In Galatians, the Apostle Paul said

“It is absolutely clear that God has called you to a free life. Just make sure that you don’t use this freedom as an excuse to do whatever you want to do and destroy your freedom. Rather, use your freedom to serve one another in love; that’s how freedom grows.”

The more you focus on yourself the more you lose your freedom. Five times in the Gospels, Jesus says the person who wants to grasp their own life will lose it; the person who lays down their life, will find it!

It’s a psychological truth…you grasp, and become smaller…the more you are willing to give up your rights and love others, the bigger and freer you become!

Paul says :

“For everything we know about God’s Word is summed up in a single sentence: Love others as you love yourself. That’s an act of true freedom. If you bite and ravage each other, watch out – in no time at all you will be annihilating each other, and where will your precious freedom be then?

Ours is not a law-dominated existence, but if you believe following your feeling is going to help, you’re barking up the wrong tree. In Poatina, we have agreements – you come into a set of agreements when you come into the village – agreements where we say this is what it means to live in a healthy community. We are living together for a purpose. Once you lose sight of the purpose, those agreements begin to feel like a set of rules.

For most of us, the last place I want to be is in a community where I have to curb my interests for others…. and that attitude is the problem. The danger is, when you see me acting in a selfish way, you can think my actions are the problem. If you start chastising me, you’ve missed the point!

We have agreements about morning tea, a place where we are community together. It’s fairly obvious the whole community doesn’t come. The danger is we start blaming people and start putting rules in place. When our youth work wasn’t going well – the first thing was that the young people started to experience was rules rather than agreements.

When Poatina is working well we should be the freest place on the face of the planet. I love that this freedom comes from the agreements; but when that freedom goes missing a sense of community goes missing.

Paul is calling us to freedom, not religion. The book of Galatians is a hard book – “You idiots – you are losing your freedom!” Sometimes we need to have the hard conversations with one another. And I think in Poatina we are coming to a point of needing those kinds of conversations. They are not easy conversations. I bet Paul didn’t find it easy to write Galatians.

The danger is, we focus on behaviour but that isn’t the issue. Where the heart is, that is the issue. For some, maybe God has had them here for a time and He is calling them to other places. You get the symbolic block of chocolate when you leave – clearly it can never be about all you have given. Transition is important and last two years have been like that.

What is important is to be able to name what freedom is like. What does it mean to have agreements so we are really free; for my “doing”, not to be coming from pain but from my relationship with Jesus?

There is a temptation for faith just to be a personal thing; to be about Jesus, my faith and my feelings. As I read from Ephesians today, I don’t think we’re called to a simply personal faith, but to more than that.

Watch what God does, and then you do it, like children who learn proper behaviour from their parents. Mostly what God does is love you. Keep company with him and learn a life of love. Observe how Christ loved us. His love was not cautious but extravagant. He didn’t love in order to get something from us but to give everything of himself to us. Love like that. (Ephesians 5:1, 2 MSG)