Dear Friends,

There was no Word of Grace message last week for one of the few Mondays since October 1998. I was traveling on business in the east and chose to spend my free time outdoors in the Green Mountains. I also thought readers needed a rest after the nineteen message spiritual autobiography series.

To share myself as intimately as I have these past weeks takes a toll. Some readers tell me the personal stories speak to them the most. Authenticity makes testimony credible. But there are objective gospel truths that should stand on their own without fingerprints on them. I am uneasy when I tell those truths through the lens of my experience. It is easy for people to say, “Ah, that’s just Kent,” and leave it there without personal reflection or application.

Motivations are something I can’t read. But what I am looking to do with these messages, what burns in my heart and mind to say, is the Lord loves you and wants a close relationship with you forever. I long ago gave up on all the teaching that our obligation is to make ourselves loveable to God. I know a lot of miserable people who make others miserable too because their efforts at becoming loveable always come up short.

Those who know they are loved by God can bring their imperfections home to be worked out and can submit their failures for forgiveness. He will not leave us broken or forsake us. There is no one unlovable to a God who is love. But there are those who don’t know he loves them, those who reject his love because they think they don’t need it, and those who think they are unworthy of being loved. It is for these I really keep writing.

This message marks the seventeenth anniversary of the messages. There is nothing special about this milestone except my renewed hope that if I keep retelling the message of God’s grace long enough it will find its way into your hearts and minds as the truth of your very being. Now, I begin a new passage on the journey, a still earth-bound hiker taking the long trek towards eternity step by step.

. . .

Driving northwest through the mountains of New Hampshire, then across the Connecticut River to Vermont, the beauty of the woods, pastures and cliffs under a cool blue sky and white clouds, my compacted spirit decompresses.

My breathing slows and deepens as I look for the red and gold in the crowns of maples and beeches just beginning to turn into autumn. Brown is the prevailing tint of my own drought-stricken land far to the west. These overwhelmingly green woods and meadows are a balm to my desiccated, chapped soul.

The color green has triggered my desire to pray and worship since my mother taught me David’s Twenty-Third Psalm as a four-year-old. She promised me a Tonka toy cattle truck filled with all kinds of rubber animals if I repeated the Psalm from memory at church.

Verse-by verse, I learned David’s bucolic metaphors for God’s care for me. With my questions to Mom about meaning, I began to know a kind God who loved me completely and forever. Though I didn’t know the word “grace” at the time, the concept became the foundation of my spiritual belief. My first Bible reinforced the lesson with a cover depicting Jesus holding a lamb. Green, growing things speak to me of our Creator and the abundant life he supplies us.

David sang out about this God:
.

You show me the path of life.

   In your presence there is

          fullness of joy;

   in your right hand are

          pleasures

          forevermore.

(Ps 16:11)

.

This is the God I know loves me and who I love.

Many of my friends and acquaintances grew up learning about a harsh and complicated God, who demands perfection, but is sad or angry if he doesn’t find us sinless and ready for his return at any moment. That perception of a stern, perpetually disappointed God coupled with an apocalyptic theology focused on Christ’s imminent return for the final judgment does not result in spiritual strength. The effort required to attempt salvation via self-control will eventually contract souls into the painful and enervating hypo mobility of spiritual neurosis.

Self-control is a gift of the Holy Spirit found in the same package with love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, generosity, faithfulness, and self control (Gal 5:22-23). The gift must be received, but cannot be replicated by our effort. The writer Thomas Erich says, “Joy, truth, and meaning tend to be surprises. The art of living isn’t to freeze the kaleidoscope, but to remain nimble and curious. The tightly focused mind tends to yield weakness, not strength” (With Scripture as My Compass [Nashville, TN: Abingdon 2004], pp 69-70).

The Twenty-Third Psalm is an antidote for spiritual neurosis. David describes God as kind and nurturing. But much more than this, he identifies God as the actor in the relationship between us.

The Psalm does not lay out a self-improvement program. God is the shepherd who knows his sheep and their needs. He provides for those needs. It’s all God and it’s all grace!

Every human action in the Psalm but one is acceptance of God’s care and provision. The one exception is “the walk through the valley of the shadow of death” (v 4). Even there the Lord walks through with us and protects us.

Nearly six decades later, I pray the Psalm in gratitude as I drive along through the New England countryside, pausing with each verse to meditate on God’s goodness.

In next week’s message, I will share my prayer on that meandering drive from Manchester, NH to Stowe, Vermont.

“O taste and see that the Lord is good. Happy are those who take refuge in him” (Ps 34:8).

Under the mercy of Christ,

Kent

————————–

Please note that the content and viewpoints of Mr. Hansen are his own and are not necessarily those of the C.S. Lewis Foundation. We have not edited his writing in any substantial way and have permission from him to post his content.

————————–

Kent Hansen is a Christian attorney, author and speaker. He practices corporate law and is the managing attorney of the firm of Clayson, Mann, Yaeger & Hansen in Corona, California. Kent also serves as the general counsel of Loma Linda University and Medical Center in Loma Linda, California.

Finding God’s grace revealed in the ordinary experiences of life, spiritual renewal in Christ and prayer are Kent’s passions. He has written two books, Grace at 30,000 Feet and Other Unexpected Places published by Review & Herald in 2002 and Cleansing Fire, Healing Streams: Experiencing God’s Love Through Prayer, published by Pacific Press in spring 2007. Many of his stories and essays about God’s encompassing love have been published in magazines and journals. Kent is often found on the hiking trails of the southern California mountains, following major league baseball, playing the piano or writing his weekly email devotional, “A Word of Grace for Your Monday” that is read by men and women from Alaska to Zimbabwe.