This morning, I awoke exhausted from the weirdest dream. I was slogging through a battlefield, fighting some unidentified enemy in a war without explanation.
So I was already drained when I realized I couldn’t eat breakfast because some buddies and I were starting a fast today. It seemed like such a good idea a few days ago. All of this was bouncing around in my head as I got into my new car only to remember it doesn’t have AM radio. I’m trying to wean myself off talk radio because it tells me a thousand times over that the world is going to pot. Great. Another fast on an already difficult morning.
Then I reached my office at Eagle’s Landing First Baptist Church and encountered a secretary who wasn’t wearing her customary smile. She pointed at her watch and told me I was late in placing my first phone call for a series of scheduled media interviews. That only reminded me I needed some time to work on new songs for the next album. Then there’s the upcoming tour . . .
If a barometer could measure the degree of being flustered, my needle would have been nearing the red side.
Yet at some point during the first interview I started thinking, Man, God is good. Shut up and deal with this. This is awesome. I started talking about everything God is doing with Casting Crowns and with our ministry at church, and I got pumped. Later, I ran into someone who asked, “Hey, what do you think about your record being number two in the Billboard 200?” All I could say was, “That’s pretty awesome,” but inside I was doing cartwheels and praising the Lord. My tense morning was a distant memory. Life was good.
Then came the email.
I learned of a problem with one of the kids in our youth ministry, and my heart sank. Right about then, someone showed up for another big appointment I had forgotten about, and a crammed day lost another hour. I found myself feeling gravity again.
So I’ve been up and down from the moment I awoke. All of this happened today. And it’s only 11:00 a.m.
I sure am glad I have my own Jesus. If I didn’t have my own personal walk with him, my life would be one giant vat of emotion, a tempest tossing me from one whim to the next. Which is why I have learned I need my own Jesus — my own relationship with the Lord of all creation. I can’t live by what I feel but by the truth God’s Word reveals.
This last line may sound familiar because it’s part of the bridge in “East to West” — a song I wrote about learning to accept and live in the reality of God’s forgiveness. The lyrics describe where I’ve been in my walk with Jesus over the past few years. No matter how many times my old life comes haunting, God calls me to rest on his truth and not on what I feel or think.
As Christians, we can’t live by what we feel or go off our gut, because it is rotten (Philippians 3:19). We have to live by truth. God has been constantly reminding me lately that his Word is truth. And truth is truth. It doesn’t only become truth when we start believing it. Truth just is — for everybody everywhere and at all times.
I try to rest in that fact and not in how I feel about it or what it means to me. Who cares what the Bible means to me? We need to know what it means. That’s where I have to allow God to redefine my thinking. He tells us in Romans 12:2 not to be conformed to this world but to be transformed by the renewal of our minds. What always gets me about this verse is he’s telling believers we still need to be transformed. It means I have a saved spirit but I still think with a lost brain, and slowly but surely my mind has to be transformed. Such transformation comes but one way — by truth. By his Word.
KNOWING WHAT YOU BELIEVE
Back in 1998, one of my former youth group kids called me a few months into his freshman year in college. He attended an institution of higher learning, yet he wanted answers to a kind of test he didn’t expect.
“Man, I need help,” he said, his voice almost a quiver. “These professors are pounding me. The entire culture here is mocking everything I ever heard you say.”
He spent the next several minutes asking questions, though one unsettled me more than any of the others. He told the story of an assertion someone made in class that left him too befuddled to reply, which is why he had called me for help.
“Now, what do I believe about that again?” he asked.
Less than a year after leaving the cozy spiritual nest of our church group, where everyone shared the same beliefs and lingo, he was facing the white-hot furnace of a hostile universe and its ungodly world-views. And he folded like paper in fire.
He didn’t have his own Jesus.
I’m not saying he hadn’t experienced salvation; he simply didn’t have a meaningful connection to a living Lord through his own intimate fellowship. The walk, what little existed, wasn’t personal. Reading between his worry lines, I could hear his confession: “Mark, I don’t really have my own beliefs. I just have yours, and you’re not here. I don’t know how I’m going to get through this. Your Jesus didn’t come to college with me.”
The more he talked, and the more I thought about it, I concluded he needed something deeper than quick answers from a book or enrollment in a discipleship course. He needed his own Jesus, his own nurtured, daily fellowship with the one true God. He wasn’t cultivating his own faith, much less living off of it.
LEARNING A FEW LESSONS
Recently, I’ve been learning some hard lessons. First, I can’t forge spiritual transformation or growth. I’m not the Holy Spirit. I can teach biblical truths and try to reach people through song, but I can’t make someone listen or even care — let alone change. My responsibility is to tell the truth in love as God grants the opportunity.
Second, many of us believers, even longtime members of the body of Christ, have genuine faith but parasitic practices. Sometimes our only experiences with God have trickled down secondhand from the lives of more mature believers. What we know of an authentic walk with God actually belongs to someone else — it isn’t grounded in our own experience of God.
This book was generated as I asked myself — as I now ask you — some difficult questions. Is your walk with Jesus Christ characterized by personal faith, personal prayer, personal study, and personal disciplines? Or do you get by with the overflow from more mature Christians?
Do you have your own Jesus?
Perhaps reading these words makes you uncomfortable. The notion sounds almost heretical, which is to say it denies Scripture.
Your own Jesus.
Yet the longer I walk with and serve Jesus in the local church, the more crucial the question seems. Every believer must have his or her own Jesus, for Jesus is the only way to salvation, peace, and contentment, both in this world and the next.
It sounds weird. It sounds like I’m insisting you find your own way, as though there are as many versions of Jesus out there as there are people. In fact, there is only one — and he is the only true way (John 14:6), and he is the same yesterday and today and forever (Hebrews 13:8). What has multiplied is the number of fragmented, faulty, human-generated Jesus versions.
This is precisely why you must have your own Jesus — your own personal walk with the one true Jesus.
Everything in life stems from our walk with God. We need our own, everyday, walking-around friendship with God. Just him. I’m using “your own Jesus” to convey just how much God insists on the personal.
Your youth pastor can pour into you. Your small group leader can pour into you. Your favorite band can pour into you. All of these folks are terrific, and they’ll encourage you in your walk with Jesus — but you will have nothing more than empty religion until you develop your own friendship with the Lord. You can learn from others, but they can’t live your life for you.
You must pursue Christ for yourself. You must find your own Jesus.
The Jesus.
FINDING THE RHYTHM OF GOD’S HEARTBEAT
The apostle Paul writes in his letter to the Ephesians, “There is one body and one Spirit — just as you were called to the one hope that belongs to your call — one Lord, one faith, one baptism, one God and Father of all, who is over all and through all and in all” (4:4 – 6).
If we stop reading there, however, we miss a key component. The next verse clues us in to the truth that Jesus, the “one God” to whom Paul refers, must be ours in a personal way: “But grace was given to each one of us according to the measure of Christ’s gift” (Ephesians 4:7, emphasis mine). This passage speaks to the uniqueness of each believer as God gives us spiritual gifts for the benefit of the church. God made you unique because he wants a fellowship that is uniquely for the two of you — Jesus and you.
But how do we maintain a fellowship with God that makes us his voice, his arms and feet and hands?
The question contains the answer. Fellowship. Communion with God. The personal disciplines of Bible study, prayer, obedience, and practicing the presence of the Holy Spirit. There are no shortcuts.
Yet this book is about more than reinforcing essential spiritual disciplines. I want us to avoid something that will short-circuit our time with God. I want to help us learn to recognize and overcome the seemingly incessant opportunities for compromise, great and small, that neutralize so many believers.
Compromise is the assassin of fellowship with God. We’ll learn how to spot potential compromise and, through growth in the Lord, wade through the muck and emerge resembling Jesus rather than feeling so guilty and hopeless.
All of it is designed to inspire us to find the rhythm of God’s heartbeat, to obey God’s bidding even in the simplest of matters, and to submit to a Lord who died for us and asks us to live for him. I can think of no more important subject for young people today, because as go the individual walks of believers, so goes the body of Christ.
I’m so passionate about this subject that I urge you to visit www.castingcrowns.com, select “Blogs,” and click on “Mark Hall’s Blog.” Take some time in the coming days to supplement your reading of this book with a series of videos titled “Crowns’ Camp.” They touch on many of this book’s themes.
And as we’re told in John 15:5, Jesus is the vine, and we are the branches. He grafted us in, each branch a unique part of the growing vine. It has to be individual. It has to be real. It has to be personally cultivated. You have to be able to call Jesus your own.