Session 5: Living as a Son

Opening Prayer and the Plumb Line

Father, I thank you for this day. Thank you that you speak to us all clearly and so differently, too. We are all so unique, but we are all made in your image. Lord, I just pray for this last session, living like a son, living like a daughter. You are such an awesome God, and I thank you for the opportunity to share. Amen.

Living like a son. When I had my transformation in my faith, I did not have it all figured out, and I still don’t. But as I learn and grow in understanding who God the Father is, and how much he loves me and adores me, he slowly reveals more and more of his nature to me, and it becomes easier and easier. The highs are still pretty high. The lows don’t get as low as they used to, because I have a plumb line. I’m a carpenter, so I had to use the plumb line reference at least once. We don’t use plumb lines as much as we used to, but they are still very relevant when you need them. A plumb line is a weight on a string, and you measure off it to find the center. God is the straight plumb line. I’m guilty sometimes of straying a bit to the right or a bit to the left, but he shows me where to stay in the center. He never moves. He never changes.

I was first going to write down my befores and afters, how I used to feel and how I used to do things. But I don’t want to tell you about my befores, because I feel like I have moved beyond them. They are kind of a distant memory. The thought distortions I used to have about myself have slowly faded away, and God just keeps revealing love and acceptance. He encourages me, and he has shown me that I’m actually an encourager. Turns out I’m an encourager. I find my value in the eyes of my Creator, and I find it in scripture.

Known and Cherished

I want to open up to Psalm 139, verses 13 through 17. We touched on it a little today already. I’m reading from the Passion Translation: “You formed my innermost being, shaping my delicate inside and my detailed outside, and wove them all together in my mother’s womb. Wow! I thank you, God, for making me so mysteriously complex. Everything you do is marvelously breathtaking. It simply amazes me to think about it! How thoroughly you know me, Lord! You even formed every bone in my body when you created me in the secret place. Carefully, skillfully, you shaped me from nothing to something. You saw who you created me to be before I became me. Before I’d ever seen the light of day, the number of days you planned for me were already recorded in your book. Every single moment you are thinking of me! How precious and wonderful to consider that you cherish me constantly in your every thought! O God, your desires toward me are more than the grains of sand on every shore! And when I awake each morning, you’re still with me!”

I love the wording of that, including the bone reference. That is how he feels for each one of you.

There were times when I moved through life and something hit me, a struggle or a confrontation, and I would backlash. Now I give way to God and say, “Lord, what should I do in this situation? Where do you see me? What have I done wrong?” Sometimes it is easy to take offense when offense is staring you in the face, and I’m learning that I need to let that go and give him more control. It’s a journey. It doesn’t happen overnight.

Worship and Provision

Did you know that we were made to worship God? Every part of us is made to worship. That is not just for Sunday morning when we gather and sing his praises. Everything we do in life is meant to be worship to God. I have made a habit, before I go to work every morning, of using my hands to thank the Lord. “Lord, may my hands be an offering of praise to you. May I honor you with the work of these hands.” That sets my day just right, because I know he is honored through it. When I go to work, it is a form of worship. When I go to the grocery store, it is a form of worship.

Last weekend I was at Arrowhead Stadium in Kansas City, Missouri. It was a bit of a bucket-list thing. Go Chiefs. I sat there with 80,000 fans in the nosebleed of nosebleeds, and in the midst of an exciting game that went to overtime, I found a chance to say, “Lord, wow. Thank you. You are amazing.” There were a bunch of drunk guys behind me, and it didn’t matter. It was an awesome experience, and God was there with me. Everything we do can be a form of praise to him, in our conversations and in our quiet times.

Living like a son also means I know that he provides. He has always provided. Being a contractor can be iffy. Sometimes you are looking for work and you run out pretty quick. I used to build houses, and I still do, but they are smaller now. I could usually see two or three months ahead of me, but sometimes a contract would be pulled away and given to somebody else. I was left with a crew of five or six men and no work for the next month. That is when the knees hit the floor. “Lord, I trust in you. I always trust in you. Would you bless me and bless my men with work?” I kid you not, the phone would always ring within 24 hours. There was always something there.

Living like a son or a daughter also means you get to love on people. When I get to say “I love you guys,” that is a form of worship to God, too. And I get to live free from fear. I don’t have to earn his love. I don’t have to fear for anything, because he has always carried his love for me, and he always will carry his love for you.

The Starting Line and Plan A

Today we started off talking about foundations: uncovering them, going down, and finding the roots of why the church ever got to the point of not understanding God as Father as the default. The love of God is not a facet of God. It is not a piece you can look at, with another piece to look at next. It is the basket that holds all of God. Everything else you know about the Father and about God is encapsulated in the fact that he is love and he is a Father. So everything we have talked about today has been repair and removal of the things that have obscured this truth. We are just trying to uncover the foundation. When we get to the point of seeing God as Father, we have not arrived at a destination. We have arrived at the starting line, and we get the opportunity to grow in that relationship.

I am convinced that God’s perfect will for your life is to find him in relationship and then to grow in that relationship. That is not necessarily how I was taught, or how I saw the Christian life as a kid. I saw people who were called to the mission field or called to this or that, and some great honor was placed on those callings, on going and doing things and being some kind of minister. Then you find people in the middle of that when something tragic happens, maybe a divorce, a death, a financial problem. I have heard people say, “I screwed up God’s plan for my life, and now I’m trying to figure out what to do next.” There is no Plan B. Plan A is for you to be in connected, close relationship with the Father. That’s it. That’s Plan A. It is a plan we choose every morning. We get out of bed and say, “I choose to be in perfect relationship with the Father right now. I choose to be open to him speaking into my heart.” Then you are smack dab in the center of God’s perfect will for your life.

Then you go about your day. Somebody cuts you off in traffic, and you choose the wrong tree and decide what is good and evil, and you think, “Ah, I’ve disconnected from God. Now I’m slightly out of his will.” So you say, “Oh, Father, sorry about that. Bless them. They probably have some problem. Welcome to my lane. It’s a good one. I hope you enjoy it.” And you are smack dab in the center of God’s will again. I literally say that. You can ask my kids: “Welcome to my lane. It’s a good one. I hope you enjoy it. Bless them.”

Living as a son and communing with the Father is the only way to have Christ formed in you. We do not grow into his image by carefully adhering to disciplines. We grow into his image by Christ continuing to perfect and reveal the Father. It is Jesus’ job to keep revealing the Father, and he keeps revealing the Father in you, so that Christ and the character of the Father are formed in you. That is the only way to grow in it. You can try all the other things. Reading your Bible is awesome, and I read mine every day. But if you don’t read your Bible every day, that does not make you any less of a Christian. It does not take anything away from you. It is not a checklist item. It is an opportunity to grow in relationship with God, and there are lots of ways to grow in maturity and relationship with him. So do it when your heart calls you to do it. Don’t do it because you are bad if you don’t. That is the wrong tree. I like that saying.

Living as a son and a daughter is about getting up every day and simply choosing connection.

I have five practical things you can do to walk out being a son. When we say “son,” we mean sons and daughters. Jesus says that in heaven they are neither male nor female nor given in marriage, but equal. We are equal in God, and his Spirit is poured out on sons and daughters alike, as it says in Joel and again in Acts.

Number One: Model the Father

Number one: you and the Father is the model. Practically, this means every relationship in your life is an opportunity for you to represent what the Father would do in that relationship. The Father wants to relate to the people in your life the same way he relates to you, and he will gladly do it through you. Every relationship.

Here is a practical example from my own life: parenting. I have five children. My first three came along before our family had a good understanding of the Father’s heart. We tried to discipline them the way we had been raised: spare the rod and spoil the child. You teach them to love, to respect, to obey, to have maturity, and you discipline if there is a problem. We were figuring it out and pushing our kids in that direction, and something was not sitting right about it. That became especially clear when our third child, our son, came along and there was a disconnect. His brain moves so fast that he cannot connect a consequence with a choice he made previously. Too much time has elapsed. So he would think, “I did something wrong, I got in trouble, I forgot about that, and now somebody I love is angry at me and I don’t know what is going on.” It was really troubling. Patty, to her credit, went and looked into parenting and decided we could not just do what we had done before. We had learned about this amazing Father’s heart, and she should really teach a parenting class, parenting from the Father’s heart. It would be transformative.

We changed the way we parented, because now the question was: my kid did something wrong, so how would the Father discipline me right now? How would the Father correct me right now? What would the Father do? God never yells at me. Never. When I do something I know is wrong, he is quick to wrap me up, to acknowledge that there is pain in my life, and to be kind. The Bible says his kindness leads to repentance. That is not the parenting I grew up with. I have great parents, don’t get me wrong, but kindness leading to repentance was not how it went. Now when my kids get in trouble, I say, “Hey, you made a choice. That’s not really good. Here’s the consequence.” And they are not on their own. God never leaves me with a consequence and runs away. God walks through the consequence with me, so I walk through the consequence with my kid. “You have to do this thing. Let’s go do it.” I go and do it with them. I get to model the Father.

This is a cheat code, especially for dads. If your kids are going to figure out who God is to some degree from watching you, get as close as you can to the real thing, and give them the smallest amount of room possible to shift over to understanding that God is better than you. We are all going to fail at that, but it is worth the try. No word of a lie, my three oldest kids, when they are in trouble, distance themselves. To this day. I’m the same person. They run. They are scared. They know they said something wrong, so they do not return texts for a few days. They know they did something I would not approve of, so they avoid contact so they will not get called out. My two youngest, when they get in trouble, come close. It is the craziest thing. They are literally in trouble, and they come and hug. That is the difference that modeling the Father makes.

We came into this world with an understanding of relationships that was flawed. How many relationships do you have in your life that model a Father God loving his children perfectly? Very few. But we learn what relationships are like from conversations at work, from siblings, from our spouse. If I’m having an issue with Patty, which never happens, my challenge is not to try to correct her, or to discipline her, or to explain. If I could explain, that is my fatal flaw. If I could just get these words out, you would understand, and then you would not be upset with me. It never works. What I do now is sit there and ask, “How does the Father see Patty right now? How does the Father love Patty right now?” When I start asking those questions, God tells me how to relate, what to say, and how to show up for her. He also shows up for me, and loves me, and pours into me. It is an amazing experience to treat relationships that way. You and the Father is the model, so model the Father to those around you.

Number Two: Protect Your Identity

Number two: protect your identity. Not that long ago, I feel like I lost a bit of my identity. I had been caught up in the things of this world. I had been caught up in stress and in some unforgiveness, and I was not holding on to my identity. I remember sitting down and talking to God one night. That has been my life: I talk to God all the time. Once you are a son and you have figured that out, you talk to God all the time, even when you are in a bad place. He is always available to talk to you, even then.

I was talking to God about things in my life, and he brought me a picture of a border guard. I see this border guard, and I hand him my passport. He holds it up and says, “I have promises back here for Jonathan Culley. Are you this guy?” It struck me, not in the physical sense but in the spiritual sense: did I align with the identity those promises were waiting for, or had I walked away from it? Did I represent the heart and soul and who God says I am? Or had I started to put on a disguise and a mask of somebody else inside? I absolutely had. The challenge to me was that I needed to reclaim my identity, or I was going to lose this. That was significant to me.

Protect your identity. Do not allow fear, manipulation, or self-doubt to keep a residence in you. And fire your bookkeeper and accountant. We talked in the first session this morning about how, in the early church, dealing with God and being righteous, which meant you then had access to the church, became a transactional bookkeeping relationship with a yearly audit. There was a list of sins that each cost a specific amount, and you had to do certain penances to stay right. It was just a bookkeeping transaction, and that is the wrong tree. So fire your bookkeeper and accountant.

Number Three: Breathe In Love

Number three: breathe in love. An author named Jamie Winship, who writes and teaches on the Father’s heart, found that some people who discovered the message of the Father’s heart and were initially transformed started to wear out and grow bitter over time. He shows that there are two worldviews, and you can only operate in one of them. There is the connection worldview, where community and relationship make us richer and multiply what we can do together, and the sum is worth more than the parts. There is abundance. There is always enough. You have a tribe of people who are there for you. Second Peter 1:3-4 says, “His divine power has granted to us all things that pertain to life and godliness.” The resources are already given. That is a connection worldview.

The other worldview is a separation worldview. It is the opposite, and it is by far the pool most people are swimming in. There is not enough. There are more problems than answers. For the most part, I am on my own. The Father is on the deep end of the connection pool. The news, social media, and the people who complain at work all live in the separation worldview. You can live in this world, but do not breathe that in. Stay focused on the things that feed the connection worldview, the things that remind you of who you are in the Father and of your place as a son. Connect with God every day and ask him, “What do you want to say to your son today?” Put it in a journal and write it down, and let that be the bedrock of who you are. Be surrounded by people who understand God as a Father and who will also speak into your life. These things are critical to counteracting a very negative world that wants to say there is not enough and that everything is a disaster.

My brother was talking to one of my nephews this last week, and he said my nephew had been “blackpilled.” Are you familiar with the Matrix? There is the red pill and the blue pill. If you take the red pill, you wake up and see the reality of everything. You get unplugged from the fake system and you are out on your own, in a different world. It is the truth, but it is not comfortable. If you take the blue pill, you stay oblivious. You stay plugged into the fake system and you are none the wiser, comfortable even though none of it is good or real. The black pill is a newer concept where everything is just crap. Our kids today are growing up hearing that the world is being destroyed and there is nothing they can do about it. The economy is destroyed, relationships are bad, the birth rate is plummeting, society is going to collapse, and there is nothing you can do about it, over and over. There is no hope given, and these kids are turning inward and angry, and they call it being blackpilled. They are not trying to escape the system. They can see it is wrong, and they just want to scream and fight. We are the answer to that. The Father is the answer to that. This world needs what we have. This world needs the love Jesus has, the love we get from the Father. So breathe in love. Do not breathe in a separation worldview.

Number Four: Stay Childlike

Number four: strive to stay childlike forever. As a society, we aim at independence. I got my license when I was 16. The very next day I drove to McDonald’s, applied for a job, and got it. That was the last time my parents paid for any clothing. It was the last time they paid for anything of mine. I got my own car, paid for my own gas, paid for my own insurance, paid for everything. I was independent, and I did not begrudge my parents that at all. I was so proud of myself, because that was the goal. You grow up, you leave home, you take care of yourself, you carry your own weight, you contribute to society, you put it all on your shoulders. That is orphan 101.

At the last A School we attended, just a few weeks ago, I was sitting there while people talked about a bunch of things, and I said, “Father, is there another level? What is there?” He said, “I’ll tell you what I want you to work on, John. You know this independence thing, where you want to tackle the world, tackle your job, provide, be successful?” I said, “Yeah.” And he said, “Stop.” He speaks my language. “Just stop it.” I said, “Okay, I don’t really know what that means.” We have had some really great conversations about that since. You never graduate from being a child.

I taught a while ago on what I call the parable of the Father’s table. It is the parable of the prodigal son, but that is a bad name for it. It is on our YouTube channel if you want to go back and see it. I talk about how the two brothers found different ways to avoid the table, to not be with the Father. The Father just really wants to have dinner with his kids. If you go back and read the Bible and look at all the places where God is throwing a dinner party, you will see that he is obsessed with dinner parties. He took all the elders of Israel up the mountain where Moses was getting the Ten Commandments and his big revelation, and served them a massive dinner. Could you imagine? God loves dinners. In this parable, the Father wants to throw a dinner party for his kids, and both of his kids found different reasons not to come to the table. Eventually the younger brother figures it out and comes home. The Father runs to him, embraces him, brings him in, and throws him a dinner party. The one who sits at the table wins. Both sons had an invitation, and both could have been winners. Even at the end, the Father is pleading with the older brother to come in and celebrate, and the older brother says, “No, I’m not going to do it.”

When the younger brother came in, he was given a robe, sandals, and a ring. This was not just another wardrobe, as though he did not have a good set of clothing. He got the finest robe, a pair of sandals, and a signet ring. Those three things show up significantly in the Old Testament law in relation to oaths and collateral for loans. The signet ring is access. It is the signature you would use to access funds, a bank, or investments. The Father gave those things to the younger brother as part of his homecoming. The message to you is that as long as you identify as a son or daughter, you can represent the Father perfectly. As soon as you step out of that identity, you lose the ability to represent him properly. Independence is not the goal. You become the man of the house when the father dies, and God is not going to die. We never graduate from being kids, and that is a perfect place to be. Strive to stay childlike. The kingdom belongs to the childlike.

Number Five: Be an Ambassador

Number five: be an ambassador. Jesus came to reveal the Father perfectly, and if Jesus is formed in you, you also have the opportunity to reveal the Father. When you model the Father in relationship with the people around you, you have the opportunity to be an ambassador, so people can see what is out there.

I talked in one of the earlier sessions today about a picture that shows up in a number of places in the Bible, of receiving from God and giving out to the world. I am going to mention it again because I think it is significant for The River. Ezekiel’s temple was never built. A sizable chunk of scripture records the dimensions and blueprints of a building that needed to be constructed. There are a number of chapters on Moses’ tabernacle, and a number on Solomon’s temple. Moses’ tabernacle was built and replaced by Solomon’s temple, which was destroyed, rebuilt at least twice, and destroyed again. Ezekiel’s temple was never built. Why do you suppose that is? Anyone?

Here is why: there is a temple that exists, a third temple. Don’t you know that you are the temple of the Holy Spirit? We are the stones of the temple. Paul is pretty clear about it. We are the temple God was constructing, and the place where his presence is meant to dwell is the temple that was designed. It is us. We are it.

Go back and read through Ezekiel’s temple. In chapter 47, it starts talking about a river that flows out from underneath the door of the temple. We sometimes get a picture of it like when the Toronto Blessing first started coming and people would say, “The river is here.” It was like an arbitrary event running across the stage, and you could come and step into the river. There is even that song: if it moves to the left, I’ll move to the left, and if it moves to the right, I’ll move to the right. That is not the picture. The picture is that it gets poured out of the throne room of heaven into the temple, and then it goes out from the temple. I am the temple. It is poured into me, and it goes out from me. All the promises of that river are met by us pouring out. It brings life. It brings healing. And it gets deeper the farther out it goes.

Right at the door, if we all meet together and pray here, cool things can happen, especially if we are all releasing the river that is in us. Those tiny streams become a huge amount of water. But when you go outside the doors, it gets deeper. More love comes out, more glory comes out, more anointing flows when you step out the doors and let some of that go. Then it goes farther: first the local community, then your sphere of influence, then the world. It gets so deep you just have to swim. Why is it that missionaries who have a hard time doing something amazing here go to Africa or Asia and amazing miracles are happening? The Bible does not lie. If you take the river out farther, its waters are deeper. That is also the picture of the Father’s love: we connect directly with him, and it comes out from us and is shown to the people around us. When we are eating from the tree of life, we can give out from the tree of life, and people can get back to the Father through us. That is an amazing opportunity, and you can only do it when you are living as a son and being an ambassador.

Ministry is the overflow of a successfully lived Christian life. You have to figure things out for yourself before you can tell somebody else what to do. If you are going to counsel someone about their marriage, parenting, or finances, you had better have your ducks in a row. I do not want to listen to a financial adviser who cannot make his own car payments. When we connect with God and get Christ formed in us, what comes out of us is the ministry. The problem with the way most people in church are introduced to ministry is that they get saved, they come in, they get discipleship training, and then they are told, “You can sign up for nursery, or work in the bookstore, or join the sound team. We need a janitor.” Everybody was encouraged to come in and plug in. We do not do that here. I want anybody who comes here to stop and receive and align their identity, to figure out that they are sons and daughters. When they get to a point where they can begin to flow out from that, there are so many cool things you can do from that place. But I do not want somebody who does not have that figured out teaching our kids.

God Came for Me

Thank you. That was a very good setup. I used to tell this story as something I went through, something difficult, a trial where God prevailed. When I went to A School last year, God totally reframed this story for me. Now I see it as a story of God coming for me. John 14:18 says, “I will not leave you as orphans. I will come to you.” You could tell this as a story of adopting, but that is not what it is about. It is a story of God chasing me down. I was the orphan.

About 20 or 21 years ago, Sarah and I had been married a few years and we had been trying to have kids, and nothing was happening. We started to get concerned and began seeing doctors. Then one day we had a healing service in our church, and we saw legs lengthened and backs healed. We prayed for Sarah, and two weeks later she was pregnant. Yay, God. We were excited, sharing our joy with friends and family. A month or two later Sarah developed some complications, and we went straight into faith mode, warfare mode, praying mode. We had prophetic words. We pulled out all the stops. We were going to save this kid. As I was praying one morning, God gave me a verse from Malachi 3:1: “And the Lord whom you seek will come suddenly to his temple.” I thought, “That’s it. He’s going to come suddenly. He’s going to come through with a miracle.” That afternoon we found out we had lost the child.

A couple of months later, Sarah was pregnant again. Again I found myself praying, and I saw the reference Hosea 1:3. I looked it up: “She conceived and bore him a son.” We found out that day that we had lost the child. Then there was a third and a fourth. On the fifth pregnancy I was again praying, and God gave me Malachi 3:11: “I will rebuke the devourer for your sakes, so that he will not destroy the fruit of your ground, nor shall your vine fail to bear fruit for you in the field, says the Lord of hosts.” We lost that one too. Then there was a sixth.

You see the pattern. We stood with everything we knew how to do. I heard a word from God, got a promise, and thought, “Yes, this is going to be the one.” “She conceived and bore him a son.” How much more specific of a verse could you get? And then gut punch. Rug pulled out.

Screening the Question

On the first one it was a gut punch, but I went right to God for comfort, and he comforted me. On the second one I noticed it did not hurt quite as much. In retrospect, I realized I had started to close my heart. This is a natural human response. Every one of us, when we experience pain, closes our heart, because we do not like pain. So I had started to close my heart, and sure enough, the pain bounced off a little bit more. But I was still in faith. I remember that on the fourth one I was driving the sample to the lab. It was a girl, and I remember thinking, “This is my only car ride with my child.” I went home and sat in the hammock we had, and I just worshiped. I did not know what else to do. That was a great act of surrender. But I only realized a few weeks ago that even though it was such an act of surrender, I was still guarding my heart. I wrote in my journal that it was not until the fifth time that I finally brought God the question: why?

I need to back up a little. I grew up in a private Christian school, which was great. But I learned how to perform, how to conform, how to check boxes, how to behave for approval. I also had friends who were not willing to conform, and they paid the price and reaped the consequences. They were expelled, or whatever else. Put those two together and I ended up with a strong conformance, performing thing. I did not realize it, but I brought that into my relationship with God. How do you go to someone who is in a position of absolute power and authority over you and ask, “Can I trust you?” How do you know they will give you a truthful answer, when they hold all the power and could tell you anything they want? I did not realize I was struggling with that.

You can serve somebody you do not trust. You can preach for them. You can lead worship. You can volunteer. But you cannot have intimacy with someone you do not trust, because if you do not trust them, fear is present. And what do we see in the Bible? Perfect love casts out fear. So there is an equation here: if fear is present, love is not. I did not have a grid at that time for a God who would accept me 100 percent, and I was screening my questions at the door. Even though I went to that hammock and worshiped, which was an act of faith, and God dealt with the grief there, I was not willing to bring the deepest part of me that was asking, “God, but why?” On the fifth time I wrote in my journal, “Finally, I have asked him the question.” But not before screening the question. Before I asked him, I checked my heart, like John was saying, walking in the door. Am I asking in doubt? Repent, repent. Fear? Repent, repent. Unbelief? Repent, repent. Do all this stuff. Because God forbid I come before him with all that stuff, and I do not know what kind of answer I would get. I had better get myself cleaned up first and then go ask him the question.

After that season ended, sometime later, God began to put it on our hearts to adopt. That is a whole different story. But I was not someone who is like a duck in water with little kids. That was not my experience. It felt awkward, and I did not know what to do, so I was concerned about it. I was praying one morning, “God, what are we going to do if we adopt? How is that going to work?” Suddenly he started putting this love in my heart, and I started praying for kids I had never met. I knew then that God can put love in my heart for someone I have never met. We were going to be fine. It was going to be love at first sight, and we would be off to the races. Later that day I found out it was Father’s Day. I did not even know. I thought, “God, you did this for me on Father’s Day? How crazy is that?” I carried that for years, thinking it would be love at first sight.

In the spring of 2015, God brought us here to The River, and for the first time I began to hear the message of the heart of the Father, and that he accepted me as I am. I grasped the message in my head very quickly. It is not a complicated message. But I also quickly recognized there was a gap between my head and my heart. We talked earlier about the orphan and the son. I could look at that chart and say, “I understand the theology, except that I see a lot of these orphan characteristics in my actions and my thinking.” I knew there was a disconnect. It had not hit my heart yet. So I began praying, “God, would you take this from my head and get it into my heart?” Months went by. “God, would you put this into my heart?” I had the whole equation wrong. That is not how it works.

Be Still and Know

About six months in, I was sitting with God one day. I had spent about an hour praying and had felt nothing at all. The question on my heart was, “How is this going to get into my heart?” I said, “God, would you give me a verse?” He brought me to Psalm 46:10, which says, “Be still, and know that I am God.” I knew he was putting his finger on something. He was saying, “Stop striving.” I had been asking him, “God, fill my heart with your love. Do the thing. All these other people have it. Do it in me.” And he said, like John said, “Just stop it.” I said, “Okay.” So I prayed a simple prayer: “God, I believe that you want me more than I want you. Would you show me?” Right away, I felt warmth come into my heart and into my body. I could feel his presence on me. That started something.

For me that process was a few months. I want to give you permission: it is different for everyone. Comparison is the joy killer, and it is a real trap. You have heard a lot of stories today, and that is great, because they are all so different. But it is a real trap to think your story needs to look like any one of them. Your story is unique and it is beautiful. Just enjoy it.

Some time after that, I had a really strong habit of reading the Bible every day, a chunk of a few chapters. One day God totally arrested me on one verse. He showed me, “You are kind of going at this wrong.” It was not that reading the Bible is a bad habit. My position toward it was wrong. I still had all this performance, conforming, fitting the box, playing a role. Maybe if I read the Bible for a couple of chapters, God would answer a question. It sounds stupid, and yet this is where we usually are. It is real. It was the wrong tree.

Let My Love Nourish Your Heart

One day I came across John 15:9 in the Passion Translation, and I got stuck for a month, like tires in the mud. I could not read anything else. Jesus is talking to his disciples, and by extension to all of us, and he says, “I love you with the same love that the Father loves me.” Wow. That means Jesus is an absolutely perfect conduit of the love of the God who created the universe and all of us. His perfect love is expressed 100 percent perfectly through Jesus Christ to us. That is a big statement. Jesus does not filter it. He does not block it. He does not twist it. It is pure. Then he carries on: “You must continually let my love nourish your heart.” Those words, “Let my love nourish your heart,” held me for a month. He started unpacking that word “let.”

A few years before, I had visited a waterfall in Ontario and gone underneath it. I do not know if you have ever had the opportunity to stand underneath the flow of a waterfall, but if you can, there is nothing like it. It is all-encompassing, the weight of the water. There is nothing you can do under a waterfall to stay dry. It is something like a hundred gallons a minute all over your body, and it is a really cool feeling. He showed me that his love is like that waterfall, to every person on the planet at every moment. But he also showed me that I had a big old umbrella stuck up. That umbrella was trying to check the boxes, trying to perform, trying to get my heart right before I came to him, trying to screen things before I brought them to him, checking the parts I thought he did not approve of at the door. All of that was the umbrella.

He was speaking to me about the word “let.” I had been asking, “God, do the thing. Do the thing.” He said, “You’ve got it wrong. You’ve got to let me do the thing.” Then I said, “Okay, let your love fill my heart,” and I thought, “That’s wrong too, isn’t it?” It was a head-scratcher for me. I had to think through even the English, because my phrasing defaulted in the wrong direction for a long time. Part of the problem was that putting down the umbrella felt like a trust fall. You know how that goes: you have to have someone behind you, and you cannot see them. I was thinking, “God, if I stop asking you, will you even do anything? Will you actually touch my heart if I stop asking?” I felt it was on me to press in. We get so much of “press in, press in, press in,” which is good stuff, but not if it comes from the wrong place. I thought that if I stopped pressing in, maybe nothing would happen at all. And he said, “Do you trust me?” I said, “God, I guess we’ll find out.”

So I let the umbrella down. His love came into my heart again. I could feel it all over my body and in my chest. He started pouring substance in. Someone spoke earlier today about God being substance: the substance of love. For a month, whatever I was doing, driving down the highway, I would think, “Let my love nourish your heart.” And it would fill my heart again. I got into the habit of asking God every day two questions: “Who are you, and who am I?” For the “who am I” part, he would say, “Jonathan, you’re my son. I love you.” I heard that for weeks and for months. I remember hearing it at one point and responding, “Yeah, I know that now, but can we get to the cool stuff?” I sensed God chuckling, and he said, “That is the cool stuff.” In that moment I suddenly realized I had it all backwards. I did not understand love the way he understands love, and he was reorienting my value system. I do not know what I wanted: maybe a cool prophecy, or a cool bit of theology. You can chase all kinds of things. You can chase great prophetic words, good theology, healings. If it does not come from a place of love, which is the cool stuff, it will be a clanging cymbal, as Paul says. All of those things are subject to love. We talked earlier about the filter of love, the law of love.

“Let my love nourish your heart.” Nourishment happens in small doses. God does not give you one big semi-truck full of nourishment and say, “Here is everything you need for the rest of your journey into sonship. Enjoy.” He does not do that. You cannot live out of a testimony from 20 years ago. It is a good testimony, and it can bear fruit and be useful today, but it will not sustain you every day of your life. He gave the Israelites manna in the wilderness, and it was good for that day only. He said, “Come back tomorrow. I’ve got more.” As we receive his love in our hearts, we have holes in our hearts. Love is substance, and substance can leak through holes. The bigger the holes in your heart, the quicker the love falls out. That does not mean you did not receive love, or that you did not have an experience with God. It means you were not able to hang on to it for very long. That is okay. As he knits your heart up and closes those holes, you start holding it a little longer. Eventually you get knit up and it starts overflowing, and that is when others really start to benefit from it, because now it comes from overflow. But it is still flowing out, and you still need to fill up. Daily nourishment. Let my love nourish your heart.

Heart Surgery and Zambia

Coming into that season, I had quickly understood the message from a head standpoint. We used to go to a small church where the preaching was fun and interactive. We all jumped in with whatever God was saying to us at the time. I loved it, because I had cross-references out the wazoo. I knew the Bible. I could just see connections. My brain was sharp. But when you go to the hospital for heart surgery, what happens? They turn off your head. They put you to sleep. I did not understand this at all in that season, but God put my head to sleep so that he could start giving me heart surgery. I distinctly remember sitting at a table just over here during one of our School of the Heart sessions. Somebody said something in the room that was the spiritual equivalent of “one plus one is two,” and I thought to myself, “That is really obvious. How come I didn’t think of that?” I was confused, because I was so accustomed to having a sharp brain. God said, “Nope.” Somebody asked me during that season, “Do you ever see yourself preaching again?” I avoided the question and went away thinking, “I can’t even put two thoughts together.” I remember enjoying preaching, but I honestly did not see how it was possible. He turned off my head so he could heal my heart. And he started pouring the substance of his love into my heart during that season, because that was the only thing that could carry us through the next one.

Within the year, we found ourselves in Zambia adopting twin boys. They were 16 or 17 months old, just learning to walk, just learning to talk, just starting to teethe. Fun. They were just starting to become independent, and yet we desperately wanted them to learn dependence. By that age they had already experienced multiple abandonments. Every human on earth responds to pain the same way I responded to the pain of disappointment: close your heart. If the pain is deep enough, you put guards at the door. “This can’t happen again.” We were trying to get through that door, and it was not going to happen. There was all kinds of acting out. It was mayhem. We did not know what to do. We had been just the two of us as adults for about 10 years, and all of a sudden we were away from all our support groups and everything. Sleep schedules went out the window. Every day was just coping, 24/7.

After four to six weeks of this, I realized I was in a bad place. I just kind of went down. I said, “God, what’s happening?” And he said, “It’s because you’re not being nourished.” Because of the constant coping, I had given up my habit of finding time with him every day. I did not know where it could fit in the day. It was always just chaos. So I determined that no matter how early the boys got up, I would get up earlier and spend time with my Father to be nourished. That was the inflection point. It had been down, down, down. Sarah and I both hit that at the same time, and we said, “Okay, we are making space for each other during the day. We are going to protect that. We need it.”

During that time we faced all kinds of trials. Sarah injured her wrist and was in braces for a year. I threw out my shoulder. We both got malaria. I ended up talking to a judge at one point, and he said, “I’ll get you through real fast. I just want a thousand bucks. If you don’t want to give me a thousand bucks, it’s probably going to be miserable.” I went home from that like it was another gut punch. What is going on? We got sent over here, and now the system is against us too. But as I drove into our compound coming back from that conversation, this is what I saw (the photo of a double rainbow was shown on screen). That is God speaking right on that screen. He was saying, “Do you trust me? I’ve got this.” He had been working in my heart. All the trust that had been lost during the miscarriages, he had poured back in. I was learning to trust again. I said, “Okay, God, I trust you. Let’s do this your way.”

The Number 153

As some of you are learning by now, I enjoy numbers. I have one for you tonight: the number 153, sons of God. From a math perspective it is interesting, because you can add 1 plus 2 plus 3, all the way up through 16 plus 17, and it equals 153. That is kind of unique. Sixteen is the number of love, and 17 is victory. You cannot have victory without love. Wrap them together and you get the family of God, sons of God. We find that number with Peter in the boat. Peter is trying to get the fish in, trying to get the numbers in the pews, and it does not work. Jesus says, “Do it the other way. Try the other side.” Boom. He pulls out sons when he does it Jesus’ way.

I was thinking, who knows, maybe the number 153 might be relevant to our timeline. As we got closer, I was counting from the first day we got custody of the boys. Closer to that time, all of a sudden a court date was scheduled on that day. It was a Monday. I thought, “This is it. This is going to be the court date. We are going to get the final papers.” I woke up that morning excited. “Ah, it’s the 153 thing. We’ve got this in the bag.” I said, “God, what do you want to say today?” He led me to Jeremiah 29:11, I think it is. I looked it up: “I have a plan and a future for you.” Good things in store for you. I said, “Great. God, what do you want me to know about today?” He said, “I want you to enjoy today.” Okay, great. Two hours later, the court date fell through. See a pattern here? Years ago I would have taken that as God failing again. But he had been doing so much work in my heart. Now, as a son, I said, “Father, I don’t know what happened there. I guess I probably got the whole date thing wrong. I am just going to take you at your word. You said you have a good plan, and you told me to enjoy today. So let’s do that.”

Then we realized there was a real battle for the boys in the spiritual world, and things started ramping up more than they had in the last five months. It escalated. The next day I sent out an SOS email asking for prayer. Someone sent back a picture of me as Gandalf, standing in the gap against the Balrog: “You shall not pass.” That is exactly what it felt like. Sarah and I were standing just like that. We had never seen so clearly that there was a spiritual claim, that they did not want to let those boys go. It escalated Tuesday and Wednesday. One of the boys would be in the other room, and I would be speaking in the spirit, and all of a sudden you could tell he was being tormented in real time. We had not experienced anything like that before. It escalated again on Thursday morning. One was up super early, so I tried to give Sarah some space to rest and took him into a side room, and it went south fast. Fighting, screaming, everything.

Remember Father’s Day two years before, when I had said, “God, it’s love at first sight, you’re just going to drop it in there.” I had not felt that one time that whole season. I was asking, “God, where is that thing you promised me?” I did not feel it. It was not there, as far as I knew. But that morning I did something I had never done before. As he was fighting, I hugged him. I held him close and began speaking over him. “I’m your father. I will not abandon you. I’m not going to leave you.” Scream. “I still love you.” Scream. “Nothing you do can change my heart toward you. I still love you.” For an hour. It was breaking me, because all I could do in that moment was see myself doing the same thing to God through all the stuff I have been through in my own life: fighting, “I don’t trust you,” whatever, got to protect myself. And he was saying, “I still love you. I’m not leaving you.” I began to say, “Let my love nourish your heart.”

God did not give me the Father’s Day thing. He did not give me a feeling of love. He gave me something so much more valuable than that. He gave me the substance of his love, which does not have to be a feeling. He gave me the ability to actually be a conduit of his heart. I had not had that before. I was speaking, “Let my love nourish your heart,” and he fell asleep in my arms after an hour plus. I held him, because I wanted to be there when he woke up. I wanted him to wake up in my arms to train his physiology that I had not left. It felt like an epic win when he woke up and his attitude had changed. The same thing happened with my other son that afternoon, except he did not fight, he ran. We were in the bedroom trying to do nap time and he was away. But I did the same thing, because now I knew how this one goes: the Father is going to win. I chased him down and hugged him. Same story. “I’m your father. I will not leave you. I will not forsake you. Let my love nourish your heart. I still love you.”

Then I started thinking about the 153 again, because they had just become my sons to me. I looked back and realized that when we took custody of them, a nanny had stayed with us for three or four days. God did not care about that. “That’s not legit yet.” I had been counting from there and looking for paperwork. The church is so interested in getting people in the door, filling the pews, getting numbers up, getting the paperwork looking right. God does not care. He wants sons and daughters whose hearts have been reunited to their Father. That is what matters, and that is the number he chose to count and stamp with “sons of God.” Isn’t that cool?

Put the Umbrella Down

John 14:18: “I will not leave you as orphans. I will come to you.” That is the Father speaking through Jesus to you and me. The Father will not stop at anything. The trials we went through on our journey pale in significance compared to what the Father is willing to go through for you. I did not cause the boys’ pain, but I became the face of it, because that door was closed and I was the one trying to get inside, and they thought, “Oh, it’s the pain again.” Just because you have experienced pain in your life does not mean the Father caused it. An explanation is not going to make it better. It is only love that can heal a broken heart.

We all have pain. You have heard some of mine. It is all different, but we all respond the same way: we close our hearts to protect them. I am not asking you to revisit your pain. But are you willing to open the door you closed to it? The one outside the door right now is not the one who caused the pain. The Father is here right now, knocking at the door of your heart. “Will you let me in? Will you let the substance of my love flow into your heart and bring healing?” This is not a next-week thing. He is here right now. Are you ready to put the umbrella down? Are you willing to say, “God, yes”? Even in my head I catch myself saying, “God, let your love,” and then I think, wrong again. No. Are you willing to trust that if you stop striving, if you stop checking boxes, he is going to catch you, he is going to be there, he will show up and he will encounter your heart? If you are not sure you can trust him, take it from me. I walked that path. I did not think so either, but I discovered he is trustworthy. It does not matter if you are fighting inside right now, if you are indifferent (“Yeah, whatever”), or if you are running away. His response to you is the same. Arms around you in love: “I still love you. Let my love nourish your heart.”

I want to invite you tonight, not to pray a prayer, not to do anything else, just to let him love you. Come up and receive a hug from Father God. Each one of us up here tonight is representing our Father, and there is nothing more special about anyone up here. We are going to pray a very simple prayer: “Father, let my arms be your arms.” Then we will give you a hug. It might be short. It might be long. You might feel something. You might not, and that is okay. Comparison is the joy killer. But I guarantee the Father will do something in your heart even if you do not feel anything. I have had that many times. I do not feel something, and later on I get a witness, and I say, “Thank you, Father. I know you actually answered my prayer there. You did something.” He is trustworthy. So come up and get your hug from the Father.

A time of prayer and ministry followed.