No Longer Empty

Based on John 21

Jesus had appeared to us, so we knew He was alive. But we were lost. What did He want us to do?

I was certain there was nothing left for me with Him. Judas had betrayed Him. I had betrayed Him. The guilt of my sin and betrayal that had tormented me in His death was raging worse now that He had returned. I would eventually be face to face with Him. What could I say or do to prove my regret, to prove my love?

I grabbed the most familiar thing to me, my nets, and several other men followed me to the boat. Something about being on the water always calmed me. But this time the waters only reminded me of Him. It would be easier if He wasn’t who He said He was. But I’d walked on the water, I’d seen the wine made out of water, I’d held the overflowing baskets of bread and fish, I’d hugged Lazarus after he was brought back to life.

I’d seen enough to know Jesus was God. And I had failed Him.

It was late when Thomas and James helped me throw out our net. It was strangely quiet on the water. No fish. Even the pursuits I used to be good at were telling me what I knew already. I am a failure. I know. I don’t need more empty nets to tell me so.

I sat down in the boat. My soul ached. I was no longer at home anywhere.

Just as the sun peeked out, a man on the shore yelled to us, “Do you have any fish?”

I was uninterested. James shouted back, “None!”

“Try the other side of the boat,” the man replied. “You will find some.”

What a fool, I thought to myself. There were no fish; we’d been out all night. How could He possibly know more from shore than we knew on the water? But a few of the men did as He said. The boat started to rock. The force of fish swimming into the net nearly capsized us.

What was happening?

I stood up and looked out toward the man on shore. And I knew. It was Jesus.

Without thinking, I jumped out of the boat, crying and calling to Him as I swam to the shore.

When the others arrived in the boat, Jesus had the fire going and said He would cook some of the fish for us. I went on the boat and grabbed the nets. There were 153 fish, and yet the net was not torn.

We cooked the fish and ate bread. Everything felt right again and we were home. None of us wanted breakfast to end.

But when I saw Jesus look at me again, I was afraid. We had not yet talked of my betrayal.

Jesus said, “Peter, do you love Me?”

I’ve never wanted to convince anyone of anything the way I did on that day. I wanted Him to know, but I had boasted in the past of my love for Him and I had failed to live up to my bold claims.

“Of course. You know I love You.”

“Then feed My sheep.

“Do you love Me, Peter?

“Go feed My sheep.

“Do you love Me, Peter?

“Go feed My sheep.”

It was as if He was saying, “You—the most sinful one—you go build My church. Because I know you now go with great humility, you go with a fresh understanding that there is a loving God and you are not Him. You go wearing the grace you will give away.”

I didn’t know how He could ever want me to display Him, but I was in.

The Stream of Calling

The Bible is not a book about lovely, perfect people. It’s a book full of the most messed-up people of all generations, and yet God moves through them.

God has always been in the business of taking the foolish things to shame the wise and taking the broken, imperfect people to display His glory.¹

It was after Peter’s darkest moment that he had the greatest impact.

Jesus comes near to Peter in his brokenness. He shows His power once again through Peter’s inadequacy. He cooks for the disciples. He eats with them. He hangs by the fire with them. And then He asks Peter to feed others, to pass on the love he’s received. Jesus had a message for Peter, for us: all we have, all we do, comes through Him—and is meant to be shared in fellowship with Him. This is who Jesus is and this is what He wants for all of us. He wants us to be with Him and then give away what we have been given from being with Him. When you connect with God like that, He gets really contagious to everybody else.

When I first embraced the audacious call to disciple a generation, somehow I believed God wanted to use my gifts and effort. But that was never going to be my story. And I am not alone. That was never the story of anyone used mightily by God, even in biblical times. That will never be the story of anyone used mightily by God. From Moses, the stutterer who freed a nation, to David, the adulterer who was a man after God’s heart, to Rahab, a prostitute who became the hero of Israel, to Harriet Tubman, a former uneducated slave who freed hundreds, to Mother Teresa, a tiny woman who took on the greatest needs in the world. It’s the “least of these” that He best likes to use, so if you feel like you are not enough, celebrate! And be thankful that you get to be free of the weight of trying to prove you have it all together. You are in company with the unqualified—those God is waiting to blow wildly through.

After my journey into Jesus’s life and seeing all the ways He clearly issues more than enough to cover my weakness, my fears, my brokenness, my failures, my general mess of a life, I finally believed God enough to make my trembly confession—I am not enough—into a blinding spotlight with over a million people watching.

Since then, since I’ve stopped trying to be enough, I’ve led better than ever before. I’ve had more fun. I’ve been more free. I’ve enjoyed working with God so much more than I could have imagined.

BUILDING LIGHT

The world’s message is simple: You are enough. All on your own, you are enough. But that mantra fails us either because we deep down know we aren’t enough or because our self-esteem inflates and we charge through life independent of God and people. Either outcome leaves us lonely and disappointed. Self-esteem is not the answer.

So why are we working so hard to do life, to make a difference all on our own?

John opens his gospel about Jesus with the incredible truth that God came for us and to us, and then he offers this incredible imagery of what Jesus would bring: the light shining into the darkness and becoming the light of men.²

When I think about light, every single light humans have ever built requires energy or some force to light it. Lightbulbs drain and run out, even LED lights eventually. Flashlights, car lights, lamps…they all pull energy from some other source that can drain or become depleted.

Then I think of the light God creates. Fire running wild, the sun burning always, bajillions of stars all burning with great force—all the light that He creates, it needs nothing to exist. It needs no other energy source. It just is.

When I think of our backpacks, when I think of our striving, I realize we’ve been trying to build light. I’ve been trying to produce light.

• We try to give God to people we love, strategizing perfect speeches rather than getting on our knees.

• We try to control and protect our lives from suffering rather than trust that God has good for us in all that He brings.

• We read every parenting book and try our best to build kids who love God and are protected from pain. And when they rebel or suffer, we forget that nearly all our personal journeys to God involved rebelling or pain.

• We start to control and do everything ourselves rather than risk others’ involvement and their mistakes.

• We go through tragedy alone because we don’t want to bother people, believing the lie that we don’t need others’ help in our darkest times.

And guess what happens when people try to produce light? We get tired. Trying drains energy, like every human light that has ever been created.

So what if instead of trying to create light, we simply received light? That sounds so much more fun to me, so much easier. We make lousy lights because we were built to enjoy and reflect light, not to produce light.

The vision of God for our lives is that we would receive His light and then give light to the world. In Matthew 5:14 Jesus says, “You are the light of the world.” Most of the time, the New Testament refers to Jesus being the Light, but when His Spirit lives in us, we are the light of the world. We receive who Jesus is and then give Him away.

The degree to which we believe and embrace our identity as a Spirit-filled child of God will be the degree to which His light shines through us. We are God’s and He is ours. He is in us and through us and with us. That is our identity. And it changes everything.

If we embraced our true identity, we wouldn’t just rest from striving to do impossible things; we would sit in awe of this fierce, crazy, awesome Light that is not contained and that is fully accessible to us.

It reminds me of lying in bed next to Zac the night we first met Cooper as an almost-four-year-old in Rwanda. We both lay looking at the ceiling, barely in touch with some of the enormous challenges ahead. How do we parent a child who has never known love? From where is this unconditional love going to come? How do we discipline him while we are trying to make him feel secure? And how do we form in Cooper an identity as our son when he has never had a category for a mom or dad? Honestly, we didn’t do nearly enough reading about adoption beforehand.

Then, staring at the ceiling, as if he had landed on a solution for the monumental parenting we had in front of us, Zac said, “To the degree that I am able to receive the unconditional love of a God who has adopted me into His family will be the degree that I can reflect that love to Cooper.”

It is so simple and so difficult. Everything flows out of our identity. The front line of the battle in our souls isn’t the fight to become something we aren’t or hope to be; it is a battle to believe the One we belong to and who we are. And when we are settled and secure in that truth, the Light that fills us cannot help but shine forth.

When we aren’t secure in our identity, our actions toward others become more about pride and performance than service and ministry. Part of what always felt angsty to me about being in leadership was that if I was going to do it, then I wanted to knock it out of the park. Simple obedience to God wasn’t enough; I wanted to be admired and incredible in the process.

When I read 1 Thessalonians 5:5—“You are all children of light, children of the day. We are not of the night or of the darkness”—I feel like God is saying, Okay, Jennie, you can keep living like this, working so hard, striving to make your own light in the dark. Or you can walk into who you already are: My child, a child of the day, a child made to enjoy the sun. You can keep trying to be enough all the days of your life. Or you could quit. I promise you all those things you’re craving: peace, joy, fun, not missing these moments with your kids who are growing so fast, enjoying Me again, deep connection with your people, My purposes for your day, confidence. I’m going to show you how to receive all of that. I will even show you how to give it away.

I know it seems backward. You are just going to have to trust me. Jesus’s opposite ways actually work.

BUILDING FRUIT

Friend, you and I are invited to be part of an epic, awesome eternal work, but many of us are missing out because we are still trying to measure up and trying to do it in our own strength. So how are we going to do this? How are we going to leave and change and be different?

We do it by taking seriously the words of Jesus in John 15: “Abide in me, and I in you. As the branch cannot bear fruit by itself, unless it abides in the vine, neither can you, unless you abide in me. I am the vine; you are the branches. Whoever abides in me and I in him, he it is that bears much fruit, for apart from me you can do nothing.”³

Our directive from God is clear and simple: Cease striving. Abide in Me. I produce the fruit. You don’t have to work so hard at this. You can feel urgent for My people and yet keep still in your soul. You can abide. You don’t have to run so hard.

In fact, it’s pretty funny that we think we can build fruit.

Have you ever had a pear from Harry & David, the food and gift company?

These pears alone—the existence of juicy pears this perfect—are evidence there is a God. True? I ordered them for somebody this week, and she almost cried she loved them so much. These pears really are just one of the greatest gifts.

Anyway, when you eat that pear, you know there has to be a God. A cold, perfectly ripe, juicy pear. No man named Harry or David could build these. Humans simply cannot create something like this.

God builds the sweetest, most incredible tasting thing on earth—and it is better than all the man-made processed food in the world. Real pears taste amazing and they’re for our good and they show God’s glory. In the same way, fruit like eternity-impacting relationships, conversations, and actions will emerge naturally as we seek Him, love Him, spend time with Him, abide in Him.

Let me just tell you what we’re doing instead: we are building Nutter Butters. Humans don’t create fruit; we build Nutter Butters. And they taste good. I like them a lot. But everyone is getting sick on the processed sugar we’re handing out in the form of self-help strategies and self-esteem boosts. God gave us a great identity in which we can find deep security and confidence, but it only comes from who He is and what He has done for us.

Let me be abundantly clear: we really don’t need to secure our identity; we need to be knocked over by our God. When we grow in our worship, we forget ourselves. Fixing our eyes on our God consumes us with Him and we couldn’t care less if our identity is all sorted out.

We will live and love out of our view of God.

So we have to lay down some things. We have to lay down our striving and our performing and our pretending and our works that we think are proving our value to other people and to our God. It may be the most counterintuitive thing you will ever do.

But honestly, all those things tend to fall away when we stand before our unimaginable God.

So then really all we need to do is be with Him.

Being with Jesus, who is the vine, moves water and nourishment into and through us as branches. Connection to Him is how our thirsty souls are quenched and also how we receive a steady supply of the water required to produce mature, sweet-tasting fruit.

If a fruit tree doesn’t receive sufficient water, the fruit it’s producing will be sour or dry tasting or even just fall off rather than growing to maturity. An adequate amount of moisture is absolutely necessary to produce the sugars that create an incredible, fully ripened fruit.⁴

For our lives to yield fruit that is appealing and eternal, we need a constant supply of God, His rushing, wild, satisfying water contained in just who He is and poured out on us by our simply being near to Him, knowing Him, pressing up close to His Word and to His presence.

QUIETLY CHANGING THE WORLD

Recently I was watching a movie about the early church. Jesus has just ascended into heaven, and Peter and all the disciples are in the same upper room where Jesus washed their feet. They don’t know what to do.

Someone looks at Peter and asks, “If Jesus were still here, what would He do?”

The future church stands in the balance.

I am sitting there watching this moment, wondering, What is Peter, the person the church of God will be built upon, going to say? What do they do first? They are waiting for the Helper Jesus promised. What do they do first to build a movement to reach the world? It needs to be big and epic and creative and strategic.

Then do you know what he said? “We pray.”

In my bedroom, in my plaid pajama pants with my daughter next to me watching that movie, I just started weeping. When Peter said, “We pray,” my fear and striving just melted away.

We do not change the world with might and power and creative strategies.

We watch God change the world when we pray and abide and believe.

That’s what we do. We believe God is real and we talk to Him.

The lie is this: if it isn’t big, it doesn’t matter. Then because we believe it, we make influence the goal rather than loving God and people with all of our gifts and life.

If you make influence your goal, your heart will become consumed with what the world thinks. You’ll miss the Holy Spirit’s incredible work right in front of you, your soul will get so sick because it will never be satisfied, and rather than give God away through your gifts, you will use Him to get somewhere.

“Make it your ambition to lead a quiet life, to mind your own business and to work with your hands.”⁵ May we desire to be helpful rather than important. May we seek to make God’s name great and not our own.

I don’t want to set my eyes on impact; I want to set my eyes on Jesus and knowing Him more.

As the disciples prayed, the Holy Spirit was given, and then their mission and purpose was so simple and clear. They just walked outside and started preaching Jesus, and they knelt beside the sick and healed them. They told everyone, “The Messiah has come. He is real. He is risen. You don’t want to miss this.”

For the first time in all of history, the church and the Spirit of Christ were on the loose and the Spirit was with His people and in them. That is THE story, and if you think for a second it has changed from that day, it has not. Nothing is different.

What are we not believing about God?

Are we trying to do the work of God without God?

I picture our generation of God’s people, and we are performing and building platforms or hiding in the back afraid. We aren’t looking at God; we are looking at each other.

I picture God saying, If My people would call on My name and they would confess their sins and believe Me, I would free them and move through them in ways they can’t imagine.

That’s the story; that is God’s plan. The way we get to join right now? We quit trying to be great and just let God be great through us.

See, I want to be the disciple who walks out of my time with God full of the Holy Spirit and heads down the stairs to the people who need Jesus and proclaims Him without end until I die. And not because I’m striving, but because the Holy Spirit is in me and has changed me, and what else would I do but go tell everyone I know about a God who saves us from ourselves and our sin?

One night when I was doubting my calling and gifts, rather than flatter me and build my shaky self-esteem, Zac sent me this quote from Charles Haddon Spurgeon:

We would have it so happen that, when our life’s history is written, whoever reads it will not think of us as “self-made men,” but as the handiwork of God, in whom his grace is magnified. Not in us may men see the clay, but the Potter’s hand. They said of one, “He is a fine preacher”; but of another they said, “We never notice how he preaches, but we feel that God is great.” We wish our whole life to be a sacrifice; an altar of incense continually smoking with sweet perfume unto the Most High.⁶

To simply display God has become my greatest goal. What could be a greater calling than to live so that God’s great grace is magnified in our lives? Like Peter, we go feed His sheep with the truth of God’s forgiveness and grace and love and power. Not with flashy gifts and speeches, but in our weakness, because our aim is to build the Name that won’t ever die.

THE SMALL, SIMPLE THINGS

We abide, yes. It seems nearly passive. But notice that immediately after Jesus talks about abiding in John 15, He talks about fruitfulness. The danger of accepting God’s enoughness is that we would become complacent. We would feel like He had it all covered so we wouldn’t need to do anything.

While we have overcomplicated our calling, the solution is not swinging to nothingness and checking out and disabling the work of God through our lives. People need our God, and we are the method God chose to display Himself. We just realize we are empowered by the God of the universe to go and do the work. Again, the way we move forward in this is awfully simple and backward. You ready?

We quit being afraid to do the simple things Jesus said to do.

What did He say to do? He said,

We pray.

We hold tightly to His Word.⁷

We love Him with all of our heart, soul, mind, and strength instead of pretending as if we do.⁸

We love our neighbor.⁹

He didn’t say fight every cultural battle of your day, because He knew the fights of this world will pass away. No matter how important the cultural fight is, guess what? In heaven it will not matter.

We fight for people to believe God. In fact, it all boils down to this: Abide and love.

See, I love John 15 because He gives us such a picture of how this is going to work. He says, Listen. You stick with Me, you abide with Me, you pray, you read the Word, you be with Me, love Me, stay near. You’re just going to be this little branch. I’ll build fruit. I’ll build it through you.

He has a big vision for us, but He will cause the big part to happen. He says, You’re going to display Me. I’m going to go up to heaven, I’m going to give Myself to you in the form of the Spirit, and you’re going to go out and I will grow fruit through you.

I read in the book of Acts about the disciples after the Holy Spirit has filled them, and I want what they have. And then I realize I have what they had.

After Jesus so freely forgave Peter and then gave him a mission there on the beach, the disciple finally had a fierce peace that caused him to stop fighting for his place and start fighting to free people. A single-mindedness flooded him with peace and joy and connectedness and presence and mission and confidence and rest. All of that is ours too, yours and mine, as we seek to make a difference in a hurting world.

So what do we do?

I want you to feel like you can walk away and it isn’t just that your soul shifts, but you actually know what to do when you feel yourself trying to measure up. When you feel yourself feeling like you are not enough. When you feel yourself moving into that kind of sad place of What do I do? I feel paralyzed and I don’t know what to do.

Do you know what happens when we go to meet with Jesus? When we are with Him in His presence? When we are in His Word and we are memorizing it? When we are in our local churches and we are in authentic community and we’re honest about our struggles and not pretending or performing?

No darkness can stand against us.

Nothing can stand against the force of God moving through a soul completely in love with Him.

It is the simple things that will change the world.

It is the old, unclever things that will change your soul.

You sit down every day with Him in His Word, you look eye to eye with a small group of people, and you tell the truth about your soul. You don’t leave the church. You build the church. You do the simple work of loving God and loving people. It is messy, hard, not too glamorous. And that sounds like Jesus.

TO KNOW HIM AND LOVE HIM AND GIVE HIM AWAY

There is a hungry, thirsty world out there, and they long for their lives to mean something. Your neighbors are going through divorces, the death of children, abuse, and they pray at night that there is a God. You can take Him to them. Do not miss getting to give God away to people. It is what we were built for. We use our gifts, somehow, some way, anywhere, any time. Forget about size or numbers or reach.

Oh, I fear we have glamorized what it means to follow Jesus. We think it happens on stages and in books and on blogs, but it happens around tables, throughout neighborhoods, and in living rooms. I bet the top five people who have changed your life were eye to eye across from you, investing time in your life.

You want to know what the big thing is? It is one person sitting with one person and opening the Bible and saying, “Do you know Jesus?” That is the big stuff.

Then I think about all the excuses we give ourselves about why He could never go out through us. It’s the story of my whole life. These are still the lies that I fight: We are not enough. We don’t have enough. There is not enough.

But then I think about being part of this epic story of God. Can you imagine?

He is waiting. He is waiting and He wants to go crazy through you. You don’t feel like you measure up? Then you are exactly who God is looking for. You are the one. You are the one He is after. He wants you and me: the losers, the broken, the sinful, the ones who know and accept how great is our need of Him. That is how He works. Every single person in the Bible, besides Jesus, was broken, afraid, insecure, fearful, busy, did not have enough time, did not have enough money, did not have enough of anything—and God moved through them to change history.

Eternity is going to be shifted. Because finally a little army decided nothing on earth would hold them back.

Just how will eternity change?

Many new people, new ideas, new buzzwords, new strategies will rise up and claim to be the answer to our thirst and to changing the world for God. But it is in the old, quiet connection to the vine that power flows. Jesus is with you. He is for you. And the only way we will enjoy the work and joy He has for us here is to do life with Him!

Make it your goal to love and know Jesus as much as humanly possible and ministry will happen.

Jesus lays this out to His disciples so beautifully for us in John 15–16. I want to launch you into the world with a crystal-clear vision of how we live out the awesome calling of God for our lives, and so I took Jesus’s words and rewrote the heart of it here.

Hear His heart and vision for you:

There is so much I have taught you, so much I have shown you, but I want to make plain the most urgent thing. I want you to understand what it means to do this life without Me here beside you. Trust Me, it is better if I go away. I will send a Helper who will fill you, equip you, remind you, stick with you. This relationship with Me is just beginning.

Let Me tell you how to enjoy it as your lives unfold. Because here, in this world you will have trouble. But take heart; I have overcome the world.

Do you remember when we walked through the vineyards together? We saw the vinedresser pruning back the branches. That is how the Father tends to you, cutting you back. It is painful and may seem unjust at times, but He only cuts back the branches He loves. Do not fear pain; receive it and watch as it causes much more fruit to be born through you.

Do not strive to produce fruit. It is impossible. I am the Vine and the Source; you are simply the branches, attached to Me. As you stay near to Me, intimately close to Me, I will flood you with nourishment, with life, with peace and joy, and your little branch lives will bear an abundance of fruit. This is how it works.

If we don’t stay connected, you will wither up. You will feel empty and thirsty and overwhelmed with this life and your sin, and you certainly can’t help anyone else. But if you remain in Me and near Me, I will not only give you water and life; I will build healthy life-giving fruit through you. The overflowing wine, the spring of water welling up, the miraculous bread for the hungry, the healing and rest you long for, the power and hope over death—all of this will pour into you and through you to a starving, thirsty world.

But never forget where all of this and more is found.

Remember, it is only in Me, with Me, through Me, because of Me that you have life to enjoy and give away.

“Make yourselves at home in my love. If you keep my commands, you’ll remain intimately at home in my love.”¹⁰

—Jesus

Goodness, I believe in you! I just know that Jesus can shift the world through you. As we wrap up here, dream big and imagine how God could move as you set down this book. What are your hopes and dreams?

STEP INTO THE STREAM

When you put down this book, what will be your first step of obedience?

WADE IN DEEPER

Write a letter to yourself. Tell yourself

• what you hope for,

• what you are leaving behind,

• what has changed in your view of Christ through reading this book, and

• where you hope to be in one year.

QUENCH YOUR THIRST

The lie you are rejecting is ________________. The truth you are believing is that Jesus is enough for ___________________.

THE OVERFLOW

How could you give this truth away to someone this week?