Episode Transcript
CONSECRATE
Wake up, sleeper, rise from the dead, and Christ will shine on you.
Jesus, I belong to you.
I lift up my heart to you.
I set my mind on you.
I fix my eyes on you.
I offer my body to you as a living sacrifice.
Jesus, we belong to you.
Praying in the name of the Father, and the Son, and the Holy Spirit, amen.
HEAR
Habakkuk 3:17–19 NIV
Though the fig tree does not bud
and there are no grapes on the vines,
though the olive crop fails
and the fields produce no food,
though there are no sheep in the pen
and no cattle in the stalls,
yet I will rejoice in the LORD,
I will be joyful in God my Savior.
The Sovereign LORD is my strength;
he makes my feet like the feet of a deer,
he enables me to tread on the heights.
CONSIDER
It was the summer of 2019, and my life was in free fall in the throes of Descent #17. You may be wondering where this strange nomenclature came from. Every summer for the past several summers, my friend Mark Swayze brings a group of student worship leaders to Nashville for a retreat. He always invites me to spend a couple of hours with them. It has become my practice with this group (and with most others I am with) to ask them to share the Word from God they are presently standing on. It usually evokes an immediate response of “Oh snap! I’m not sure” and then a quick flipping through the pages of Scripture in search of one’s life verse.
As the sharing moved around the circle and all the familiar and predictable texts came to the fore of the sharing, it came to Jonah. I will forever remember his text. He closed his eyes as he quietly spoke the words:
Though the fig tree does not bud
and there are no grapes on the vines,
though the olive crop fails
and the fields produce no food,
though there are no sheep in the pen
and no cattle in the stalls,
yet I will rejoice in the LORD,
I will be joyful in God my Savior.
The Sovereign LORD is my strength;
he makes my feet like the feet of a deer,
he enables me to tread on the heights.
Never had anyone brought this text in response to the exercise—and rememberized, no less. As he spoke the words, the Spirit of God began to etch them on my heart. Whatever word I thought I was standing on at the moment, it was clear that Jesus was giving me a new word.
Verse 17 describes the stripping away, hence the designation “Descent #17.” On that nondescript summer day, I was nineteen years into a descent approaching its third decade. It began as a slow stripping away of an impressive false self that had been forged over the first thirty-ish years of my life. I built an identity centered on high performance, achievement, and accolades, forged on the fragile scaffolding of how well I did plus what others thought of me. There is a Bible word for such a condition of soul: slavery. My entire economy of self-worth was chained to maintaining that false identity. No matter how much good I did (and I did a lot of good), at the core, it was really about myself.
At the tender age of thirty-three—the age Jesus died, I like to remind myself—a cross was planted in my life in a most surprising way. I was recruited into a very prestigious (and thankfully fairly obscure) ministry role for which I did not apply, nor was I qualified for. The unlikely conditions of the cross were set as I walked out of a life where I was loved and could do no wrong into a place where I would be despised and could do no right, a place of jaded jealousy and torturous transformation. It became my decade of detoxing from the nascent narcissism of a performance-based identity.
Think of the gears in your car. Park. Reverse. Neutral. Drive. We must live our lives in drive. We will only understand our lives, however, in reverse. We live by looking forward. We learn by looking back. Jesus took that decade and turned my life from a false-self-actualizing ascent into Descent #17. All the things I relied on to prop me up in my own eyes and the eyes of others were stripped away. As I fought and resisted this testing of my faith, he slowly taught me to let perseverance finish its work so that I might become mature and complete, lacking nothing.
On that summer day in 2019, I happened on a defining word that continues to happen in me today. Thanks, Jonah.
PRAY
Father, thank you for the stripping way of Descent #17. We confess we would never choose that way. That way had to choose us. That way is Jesus, the one who being in very nature God did not consider equality with God something to be grasped but made himself nothing (Phil. 2:6–7). Thank you, Jesus, for choosing Descent #17 and showing us the royal way of the glorious cross, where everything the world, the flesh, and Satan intends for evil you turn to good. Holy Spirit, help us let perseverance finish its work. Lead us into the rejoicing of Valley #18, not because everything has worked out but simply because of who you are. For your name’s sake, Jesus, amen.
