Murmuring vs. Crying Out

I'm in a trust crisis these days. I won't go into the details but I’m finding out that I have developed my complaining skills to a truly fine point. My trust in God, on the other hand, has some huge gaps in it. Confession is a wonderful thing. It helps me make place for God to give some clarity. If life is an onerous burden then complaining groans underneath the burden. Trust in God, on the other hand, rides on top.

Let's go to Egypt to get some light on this. The Hebrew slaves groaned under the oppression of their slavery (Ex 2:23). The Hebrew word for “groaning” describes a reaction to being weighed down by the burdens of life; to sigh. Now the Hebrew slaves didn’t just groan, they also cried out. It is likely that the Hebrews didn’t even know who they were crying out to, yet it was an act of communication. So when God called Moses up onto Mt. Horeb He told Moses that He had heard the cries of the Hebrews and so began the process of their deliverance.

Groaning in and of itself is a simple reaction to the strain of life. We all groan. It’s where we go with our groaning that makes the difference. In their wilderness wanderings the Hebrews all too often went into murmuring; the biblical equivalent of complaining. Curiously, this word has the connotation of obstinacy; of digging your heals in and refusing to be moved. Murmuring was the primary downfall of those Hebrews that left Egypt. They refused to let go of their slave mentality. They were constantly dissatisfied with how God was leading them and wanted to return to Egypt.

Obstinacy is really the basis of our own murmurings. God is working to transform us into His very likeness (2 Cor 3:18). Yet we dig our heals into our own false self and resist the journey into the promised land of our true being. Here’s what God is just now teaching me: There is a difference between murmuring and crying out. We murmur against. We cry out to. The lesson is this; to learn how to turn murmuring into crying out. What God does not ask us to do is to put a smile on our faces and just “stuff it.”

So here’s the picture. We groan under the burden of life. Our tendency is to murmur and complain. But because we know complaining to be not very becoming most likely we’ll “just stuff it.” But it didn’t go away. It’s still there festering beneath the surface. What can we do? I believe God wants us to go before Him and cry out. Let it come. The trick is to keep it in the “crying out” category and not let it drift into murmuring. So how can we tell which is which?

Crying out has the quality of opening ourselves to help. It is an outward expression of our helplessness to God. In a way, it is a form of surrender. We express a desire to cooperate with God as He works to transform us but we don’t have to deny that we don’t understand it; that it really hurts and we don’t particularly like it. It has within it an expression of pain but with a willingness to endure. Crying out is upward-bound.

Murmuring, on the other hand, has the quality of closing off and resisting what God is doing in us. We want God to do things our way and we’re not happy when that doesn’t happen. We can detect murmuring by a sense of wrapping ourselves up within ourselves clinging to what little ground we think we’ve gained in life. When we sense a constriction within us like we are protecting our own agendas against what God might be trying to do – when we want to go back to Egypt – then we are probably in a place of murmuring. Murmuring is selfward-bound.

Murmuring is our natural human response in our fallen state. The trick is to turn murmuring into crying out. We don’t have to do this “nicely.” It’s a sort of throwing ourselves open against every inclination to stay closed and protective. It has the quality of, “O. K., O. K. Fine! Have it your way! I give it to You. After all, I’m just sheep for the slaughter.” It is, finally, an act of raw will. It is will against unwillingness and thus holds a quality of fighting against inner resistance. It is a surrender but not in the sense of a pious, folded-hands religious pretense. Rather it feels more like an act of violence against self. This is what makes it a crying out.

But here’s the good part. Though the battle still rages, once we break through murmuring into crying out we’re above the battlefield. We’re on top of Mt Horeb and in contact with God. We sense that He hears us. Our deliverance is in progress and we are flowing with it.


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The Lord Will Fight For Us

Not all places are the same along the spiritual journey. There are battles and there are times of rest. There are dark nights and times of consolation. The Lord brings us through the fire and through the water, and He leads us into green pastures. Let us not fight with the path but simply be where the Lord has brought us. For in a sense, all is rest.

Why am I fighting with this spiritual path? Did the Hebrew people have to swim across the Red Sea to flee the Egyptian army? No! God opened the waters before them. So why do I put the Lord behind me while I try to face the enemy head on? Has not God said, “The Lord will fight for you, and you have only to be still (Ex 14:14)?” As I let the Lord go before me He Himself blazes the path. I simply travel along, step by step.

God Reaches Deeper into Us

As I was preparing for last week’s “Reaching Deeper” class it occurred to me that perhaps reaching deeper into God isn’t quite the right way to put it. It is more like God wants to reach deeper into us. That puts a bit of a different spin on it. Sometimes when we think about drawing closer to God we get a bit nervous. God know us – really. There’s no place to hide. God will see us as we really are.

Let’s be honest. We like to hide in the dark (Scripture says this). We try to put a good Christian face on our lives; one that perhaps God will approve of as well as other people. If we think in terms of reaching deeper into God – which means drawing closer to Him – perhaps He’ll demand that we really look at ourselves. Then we’ll have to do all that work of cleaning up our lives.

If, on the other hand, we think of God going deeper into us our job then is to get out of His way. God will still see us as we are but if He really wants to go deeper into us, which He does, then He’ll work with us to get the blocks out of His way.

Still this is not an easy thing to do. God carries His lantern with Him as He reaches into us. He lights up His surroundings and we see what is there. But He works with us to let go of that which is keeping Him at a distance. That’s different than asking us to clean up our act. It’s a matter of letting go (which may actually be the harder task) more than trying to put on a Christian persona or live up to a set of values. He shows us what to let go of and gently helps us to pry our fingers loose. This allows the Holy Spirit to penetrate ever deeper into us and step by step He transforms us into what He means for us to be.

Rebellion in the Wilderness

In our most recent post we looked at a key Scripture for digging deeper into spiritual ground. Repeated three times in Hebrews 3 and 4 the verse reads:

"Today, when you hear his voice,
do not harden your hearts." Heb 4:7

This verse in Heb 3:8 and 3:15 goes on to say:

“…do not harden your hearts as in the rebellion."

What is this ‘rebellion’ part? Now please hold on because this may be a bit of a rough ride. We usually think of rebellion as fighting against the status quo. For the Israelites to whom this Scripture refers the status quo would have been their condition of slavery in Egypt. So their ‘rebellion’ as we may think of the word would have actually been their exodus out of Egypt. This could not have been what ‘rebellion’ in this scripture means.

The development (etymology) for the word ‘rebellion’ in Greek, parapikrasmos, is interesting. It stems from pikraino which means to embitter. Were the Israelites in the wilderness embittered by their slavery in Egypt? Not in this context. Quite the opposite. They were embittered by their experience in the wilderness; by the very freedom that God was leading them into. Their rebellion was that they wanted to go back to their enslaved condition in Egypt.

If we follow the etymology of the word for rebellion even further we come to the root of the word, pegnumi, which means to fix or to peg as in setting up a tent. Now it’s probably not a good idea to place too much emphasis on the roots of words, as the meanings are set more through usage, but I think this begins to develop a picture of the truth that this verse tries to communicate. Kittel’s Theological Dictionary of the New Testament places the meaning of the word in the Hebrews passage as “to be recalcitrant.” It is one of hardening into a position of one’s situation in the world and resisting God who is trying to free us from our slavery to the world. We have driven our tent stakes deep into the ground and we resist being uprooted. The Israelites wandering in the wilderness complained:

"Is it because there are no graves in Egypt that you have taken us away to
die in the wilderness? What have you done to us, in bringing us out of Egypt? Is not this what we said to you in Egypt, 'Let us alone and let us serve the Egyptians'? For it would have been better for us to serve the Egyptians than to
die in the wilderness." Ex 14:11-13

Many times I make this cry. The journey into the depths of God means to be uprooted from our comfortably ensconced positions in the world which have become familiar to us. This is the struggle of going deeper into spiritual ground. We have formed our identity, our sense of who we are, around the templates of the world. This can even extend to religion; to our church and our good works if these have become idols. Whatever ground we have driven our tent stakes into hardens us against the deeper journey.

God is calling us closer to Him. Ours is the arduous work of yielding. The words of Moses in reply to the rebellious Israelites will give encouragement and comfort to those who brave the deeper journey:

"Fear not, stand firm, and see the salvation of the Lord, which he will work
for you today; for the Egyptians whom you see today, you shall never see again.
The Lord will fight for you, and you have only to be still." Ex 14:13-15

Encountering God in the Present Moment

Developing the ability to get into the present moment brings us into a deeper encounter with the Presence of God. We can find the Scriptural basis for this in Heb 3:7-8; 3:15; and 4:7: "Today, when you hear his voice, do not harden your hearts as in the rebellion,…” Three times this is repeated in the same general passage. There are three parts to this Scripture which if we understand them will take us deeper into spiritual ground. These parts are:
1. Today
2. When you hear His voice
3. Do not harden your heart

The Greek word for “Today,” semeron, is used 41 times in the New Testament and implies the present moment. Kittel’s Theological Dictionary of the New Testament defines ‘semeron’ as the time at man's disposal…; that is, the time of actual being. The past is gone, the future is not yet; only in the "to-day" of temporally secured or hampered dealings between God and His people (Kittel’s) can we encounter the Presence of God. This encounter is expressed by the second part of the passage in Hebrews: “When you hear His voice.” Thus, says Kittel’s, "to-day" can be the means as well as the content of revelation.

The problem is that it is not easy to get into the present moment. Either we are regretting or lauding the past or we are anticipating or fearing the future. It is not so much a matter of learning from the past or planning for the future, which we can do in the present moment, but we tend to live in the past or future. I can speak for myself and perhaps you can relate. I fear that if I let go of the past or future and live in the present I will be set adrift in an ocean of uncertain temporality. I therefore try to make the future turn out the way I want it by vividly imagining it. I find myself constantly rehearsing the future. Also for me the past holds a lot of regrets. So I try to go back in my mind to work over the memories of the past so as to make them less condemnatory. In effect then, in my conscious self, I am actually projecting myself into either the past or the future. So I have to let go of all that in order to get into the present moment where I encounter the God who was with me in the past and holds my future course in life.

This is why I believe that entering into the present moment requires practice. It is a spiritual discipline. This is the third part of our passage which says, “Do not harden your hearts.” Here is a powerful statement that we will unpack more thoroughly in later posts. The word for “harden,” sklerotrachelos (don’t try to pronounce it), has to do with unbelief. And this is our natural state in our fallen condition (Ro 3:11-12; Jn 3:19). We are hardened into unbelief.

Here I’m going to step out on a limb and make a general statement; that we cling tenaciously to the past and future because we do not trust God with our lives. Let us make no delusions about this. It does require some doing to come into the present moment with God, which ultimately has the effect of softening up the ground of our hardened hearts. And softened ground is what we need to dig deeper and to draw closer to God. How we do this we will address in future posts. Suffice it to say now that it involves making some ‘sacred space’ in our lives where we can begin taking the risk of letting God hold us in the present moment.

Reaching Inward to Flow Outward

As Jesus performed acts of healing or other miracles where He revealed His divinity the Scripture records that the crowds were astounded or amazed. This is not the sort of “how’d he do it?” amazement that we might experience at a magic show. The Greek words that stand behind the reaction of the crowds indicate that they themselves were experiencing a transformative spiritual presence that was flowing from Jesus. One of these words is ekstasis from which we get our word ‘ecstasy’ (present in Mark 5:42; 16:8; and Luke 5:26). According to Thayer’s Greek Lexicon a state of ekstasis is …a throwing of the mind out of its normal state,… A person in a state of ekstasis is …

“…transported as it were out of himself, so that in this rapt condition, although he is awake, his mind is so drawn off from all surrounding objects and wholly fixed on things divine that he sees nothing but the forms and images lying within, and thinks that he perceives with his bodily eyes and ears realities shown him by God. (Thayer’s Greek Lexicon).”

As Jesus ministered to the crowds through healings and miracles He was making place for the actual presence of God to become manifest to the men and women who stood around Him. This is the same ‘witness’ that we have to give to world around us. I often think about how we serve others, which is an important part of how we identify ourselves as Christians. Surely that outward focus points us in the right direction. But here is the crucial question: How much of serving others really does engage our created design enlivened by the Holy Spirit within us? How much do we look inward to flow outward?

There is no doubt that we feel good about helping people. But if we keep our helping on a ‘feel good’ level it doesn’t often result in deep changes in a person’s life. Transformative helping calls forth a whole different dimension. Rather counter-intuitively the focus actually shifts from what we ‘do for’ that person to how we ‘be with’ him or her as God has created us to be; that is, in our enlivened inner nature.

God has designed us to be a transformative influence in the world around us. Other things, however, tend to creep into the picture of reaching out. Obligation, expectation, reputation… even a desire for good feelings tends to dominate our motives for helping. Real transformation is not always accompanied by good feelings. It is, after all, a painful process. A person in transformation may go through times of grueling self-doubt, of fear, anger, confusion, envy ... all of the myriad unpleasant emotions that accompany the disorientation of real change. As we become enmeshed with this struggling person we may even become painfully aware of the disfigurement of our own souls. In my own experience the light of the emerging sacred space begins to reveal much in myself that makes me feel inadequate to help anybody. As the good feelings of helping turn into doubts and deep questionings about, “Why am I even doing this?,” it is here that the only answer simply has to be, “Because God has purposed me to.”

In helping others we seek an outward expression of something both human and divine within us. It is usually the case that we get halfway there. We set out to express that desire in our service to others but we don’t very well tap into those deep inner wells where the real source of healing lies. Our task is not to impose our own expectations on how our helping should make a difference in a person’s life. Rather it is the painful work of digging through the layers of our own distorted surface nature, conditioned by the world around us, to tap into those inner springs of spiritual life. As we do this a spiritual space enlarges within us and expands outwardly making place for healing in the souls and lives of others around us.

Struggling through this process deepens us – both helper and the person being helped – because the spiritual space does not belong exclusively to either one. It is God’s deepening work in all involved. It is not really me ‘fixing’ you in a directly intentional manner. It is me opening my inner being up to the work of the Holy Spirit to produce an ever-surfacing sacred space which spreads outwardly beyond my own skin. And so I invite you into this space. It is not up to me to change you. Yet I do not stand apart from you and just ‘do for’ you. I am with you in the struggle because we are both here in this spiritual space struggling toward becoming all that God intends for us to be.

Jesus Himself came into a state of ‘ekstasis’ as He healed those around Him. Mark 3:19-22 records:

Then he went home; and the crowd came together again, so that they could not even eat. And when his family heard it, they went out to seize him, for people were saying, "He is beside himself."

The word used here for ‘beside himself’ is existemi which literally means to stand outside of one’s self; that is, to not be in one’s normal mind. This is how others saw Jesus at this moment. What might have appeared to these on-lookers, and, indeed, the scribes took it as demon possession, was most probably that He was taken up in that same Spirit of healing that He was pouring out on others. As we yield ourselves to the Spirit working within us so it is that same Spirit that pours out into the lives of those that God has purposed us to serve.

The Experience of Going Deeper

Have you ever experienced what has been called ‘existential anxiety?’ It is an uncomfortable feeling deep within us that there is no solid bottom to our lives. It is based, I believe, on our cultural ideal of self-determination; the idea that we must determine our own lives. This on the surface seems like a pretty good idea but there are implications that may not be immediately apparent. If we have the ‘freedom’ to determine our own lives then we must be nothing to begin with. This freedom has in fact become an obligation. If we do not go out there and ‘make something of ourselves’ then we will wind up being nothing.

I have developed a mental image of this. It is like hanging over a bottomless chasm by a thin strand that is in danger of breaking at any moment. Then I will go plummeting down into the dark nothingness below. Existential anxiety is the fear of being nothing. It impels us to build up in ourselves a strong sense of ‘somethingness’ that has value and worth.

We may get a sense of the void whenever we suffer some sort of loss. Even a small loss might feel quite uncomfortable because it lets us know that the void is there. If you are like me you are pretty good at imagining that the slightest misstep in life will topple the whole structure. If you are not like me, and perhaps that would be most fortunate, you can rebound fairly easily from a significant loss without being too disturbed by the void lurking beneath.

But perhaps it is not so fortunate to be not like me; that is, to have that ever-present sense of insecurity. Because I’ve found it most difficult to cover over the void I’ve had to look for another way to deal with it. I’ve found that no matter how high I’ve tried to build myself above the void I have not been able to eliminate it. In the Biblical sense the void is at the heart of our separation from our true nature which God has created within us.

In seeking spiritual depth, instead of trying to protect ourselves from the void by building high and strong above it we actually turn and head into it. If our inner being has been enlivened in Christ it is no longer in a state of alienation from the Life of our Creator and thus no longer a void. But we really don’t experience it as enlivened until we let ourselves fall into it; that is, until we surrender to it. I should say surrender to Him because what we surrender to is the person of the Holy Spirit. He has moved into that empty space which we once feared and have worked to build a strong wall against.

Our true nature lies beyond our own making. It is that which simply is. It is already created. It is what scripture calls the perfection of our being. This word for ‘perfect’ in the Greek is teleios which can be translated as ‘wholeness.’ Here in the depths of our being lies everything that God has intended us to be. We are drawn toward it because our deepest desire is to be what we truly are.

Our dilemma is that our greatest fear and our deepest desire lie in the same place. Going deeper, then, brings us into the conflict of letting go of those strong towers which we have erected against the very place where we yearn to be. If it be that we have allowed Christ to dwell in those inner regions we will exchange a somewhat slippery existence of self-making for a solid region of absolute being. By this I mean that we no longer need to strive to be something because we begin to find that we already are something. I can say from actual experience that if I have ventured into the void and found there absolute being in the Holy Spirit then I am no longer hanging over a deep chasm by a thin strand. I begin to sense solid ground. You see, my life has become grounded on something greater than myself. I am not my own creator.

My whole spiritual journey is to increasingly give myself over to that eternal solid ground of being which I find within me. This has become a center point around which my whole life is taking shape. I no longer try to cobble something together on the surface. Living from this spiritual center point, a place which I once feared, is bringing the pieces of my life together into a wholeness that is beyond my own self-determination.

Four Dimensions of Spirituality

In his letter to the Ephesians Paul digs deeply into the mystery of Christ. In the realm of the eternal he speaks of four dimensions; height, breadth, length, and depth (Ep 3:18). I’m not really sure what all of these dimensions represent, but I find it interesting that he mentioned four dimensions; which we usually think of as going beyond our three-dimensional world. Since in this passage Paul speaks of the ‘mystery’ of Christ – to make all men see what is the plan of the mystery hidden for ages in God who created all things (vs. 3:9) – it would seem that he desires that we …being rooted and grounded in love, may have power to comprehend with all the saints what is the breadth and length and height and depth (vss. 3:17-18)… of this mystery.

Now on one of these dimensions we do quite well, that of breadth. As evangelicals we are focused on service, on spreading the gospel, on increasing church membership. But what about depth? These four dimensions seem to work together to make up a singular spirituality. Just as a three-dimensional object cannot be missing one of its dimensions and remain a three-dimensional object, so in the spiritual sense we need to attend to all dimensions of our spirituality in order to be whole. The point here is that if our Christian service and evangelical witness (breadth) is not rooted in the essence of who God created us to be (depth) then it will be severely lacking.

I don’t know about length and height, but I would invite you to explore with me the dimension of spiritual depth. What we really have to give outwardly into the world around us is not so much our much doing but our essential being. As we explore this dimension of depth I believe we will find some answers to some of our most perplexing questions about our Christian service. How do we deal with ego – pride? How can we be both self-negating and yet be wholly fulfilled? How can we both suffer with Christ and yet find a profound peace? On the surface we struggle with these Scriptural contradictions but as we dig deeper they seem to converge into a revelation of the deep mysteries of the gospel. I therefore invite you to explore with me the depth of the mystery of Christ.