Belovedness on our Island of Peace
“And a voice came from heaven: “You are my Son, whom I love; with you I am well pleased.”” Mark 1:11. Well pleased. Sonship. Belovedness. Accepted unconditionally by the father. At this point, Jesus had not done anything to please the father.
It was everything that I wasn’t believe about myself in October of 2014. I couldn’t believe what I had just done. I sat in the passenger seat of my Toyota Camry after I had let a 14 year old young man I was mentoring drive my car in the neighborhood into the back of my neighbors car, completely tearing off his rear bumper.
At this point we had been in Historic South Atlanta for three years and had developed a deep passion for the young men in the community after seeing all that was up against them. One young man in particular holds a special place in our hearts from our neighborhood. His name is Tony. We first met Tony when he was nine years old. He has a smile that lights up the room. We watched helplessly as Tony progressively make worse and worse decision. He started to get involved with the gangs in our community and manifested itself with stolen cars, weapons and drugs.
I say “helplessly” watching him, because I did everything I could to try and save him. My reaction towards his life was rooted in my unhealed codepedent issues. Phil Hissom, author Serving with Dignity describes codependency as, “If you find yourself feeling trapped in the role of caring for others or with a profound need to control situations and outcomes, you may be suffering from codependence. You may also tend to blame others for how you feel or are waiting for someone else to save you. Codependence has many faces, but at its core it is a futile attempt to extract love from other people. And it is exhausting. What is often missing is the core belief you are already deserving of love yourself and that you already possess the love of God.”
Pastor Paul Tripp says it like this; “Here’s what happens to us all – we seek horizontally for the personal rest that we are to find vertically, and it never works. Looking to others for your inner sense of well-being is pointless. First, you will never be good enough, consistently enough, to get the regular praise of others that you are seeking. You’re going to mess up. You’re bound to disappoint. You will have a bad day. You’ll lose your way. At some point, you’ll say or do things that you shouldn’t. Add to this the fact that the people around you aren’t typically interested in taking on the burden of being your personal messiah. They don’t want to live with the responsibility of having your identity in their hands. Looking to people for your inner self-worth never works.”
The mystics talk about hitting a wall. Well, I hit a car. When this happened, I remember saying to myself, “I’ll never let something like this happen again.” Well, something not as extreme happened a few weeks later. I realized then that I something was disconnected deep beneath the surface of my life. This experience led me back to Christian counseling and the realizing that I had a core lie from my family of origin that had never been healed.
It was in counseling, meditating in the scriptures, long talks with my wife and close friends, and a whole lot of journaling that the Holy Spirit revealed to me a dark family of origin. I grew up believing that I was a failure and never good enough. I had a lot of experiences where I was shamed for misbehaving, and so I became a performer, believing that if I performed, this would cover up my dysfunction that I was a failure. This core lie was never dealt with and so ministry and helping others became a way of measuring myself, proving that I was no longer a failure. As my counselor says, “Ministry is such a great measurement tool.”
I was loving others to become the beloved, not realizing that I already was God’s beloved.
“Our wounds fuel our sin.” What I didn’t realize at the time was that there was a young thirteen year year old child that needed to be healed inside of me. I was trying to provide Tony with everything I didn’t receive when I was his age. When I am operating out of my family of origin, I relive the rescuing tendencies of my past trying to save people so that I feel better about myself.
But, this is fundamentally not who who are! If we are in Christ, we are the beloved of God, with whom he is well pleased with! But, how do we get there? How do we live fully free in Christ? Because, if we’re honest, there’s another force that is at work in us. There’s a core lie that all of us carry. But these are not the voices of God! If we are in Christ, he no longer sees as enemies, but as the beloved. A friend said to me once; “If you hear a voice over your shoulder talking about your biggest failure and it isn’t calling you ‘beloved,’ it isn’t Jesus talking.”
I have voices that rattle around in my head and soul all the time. They’re saying things like, “You’re a failure.” “You’re worthless.” “You’re in trouble.” “You’re no good.” These are the voices of my inner critic, which is that sinful old man.
Can you imagine the voice running in the head of the younger son in Luke 15 as he came over that last hill to return to his Father’s house. We all know the story. It’s the story of the Return of the Prodigal Son, or in its proper context, the story of the the two lost sons, as both sons were lost. We all know that the younger son ran off, spent all his money on wild living, becomes so desperate that he goes and gets a job feeding pigs for a farmer. He becomes so desperate that he begins to eat the same food as the pigs.
But then he has awakening. He says to himself, “‘How many of my father’s hired servants have food to spare, and here I am starving to death! I will set out and go back to my father and say to him: Father, I have sinned against heaven and against you. I am no longer worthy to be called your son; make me like one of your hired servants.’ So he got up and went to his father.”
He returns to tell the Father three things; 1) I’ve sinned against heaven and against you. 2) I’m not longer worthy to be called your son. 3) Make me one of your hired servants. His motive to returning to the Father’s house was not to return to becoming a son, but to work as a servant.
As he comes over that last hill, his Father sees his son, runs to him and embraces him. The son now has the chance to tell the Father those three crucial statements. He says, ‘Father, I have sinned against heaven and against you. I am no longer worthy to be called your son.’ But something so interested happens here as Jesus tells the story. The text says, “But the father said to his servants,”.
Do you see what the Father has just done here? He interrupts his son in the midst of shaming himself! He only let him speak two of those statements, and then beautifully Jesus says, “But the father said to his servants.”
The younger son was operating in such a place of shame that all he could think of himself was as a servant. It was the loving Father that interrupts him, reminding him that he was always his son. The question needs to be asked, at what point during the story did the younger son ever lose his belovedness as a son of the Father? Never!
But those voices were still there in the younger son. This is why it is imperative as we embrace our belovedness that we face these voices head on with the power of the Holy Spirit, dig them up, root the out, talk about them, name them, and then surrender them to God. God cannot heal what we conceal. We must be willing to dive deep into those past hurts, sins, and emotions and allow the Holy Spirit (who is referred to a counselor in John 14) to heal us.
What has helped me greatly in healing of my codependent issues is to dive deep into the theology of black pastors and leaders. Why? The opposite of codependency is a deep peace with Christ where you don’t rely on others for a sense of happiness. Some call this differentiation. “Differentiation it is the ability to be connected to your thoughts, values, and feelings, while also being close to someone, especially when that person is very important to you.”
I call this belovodness in Christ on our Island of Peace. Howard Thurman, who was the pastor and mentor to Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr coined the phrase “Island of Peace” within our soul. In his book, Meditations of the Heart, Thurman says; “A beautiful and significant phrase, “Island of Peace within one’s own soul.” The individual lives his life in the midst of a wide variety of stresses and strains. Each one has to deal with the evil aspects of life, with injustices inflicted upon him and injustices which he wittinly or unwittingly inflicts upon others. We are all of us deeply involved in the throes of our own weaknesses and strengths, expressed often in the profoundest conflicts within our own souls. The only hope for surcease, the only possibility of stability for the person, is to establish an Island of Peace within one’s own soul. Well within the island is the Temple where God dwells—not the God of the creed, the church, the family, but the God of one’s heart.”
An Island of Peace. What a beautiful description of the inner peace that only Christ can offer to us who have repented our sins and have been given the Holy Spirit. It’s on this Island of Peace that the Father continually reminds us that we are his children, not a servant. It’s on this Island of Peace where we dig up these voices, bring them to the light of the gospel, and surrender them to God.
It’s this Island of Peace, which I believe many of the civil rights leaders and pastors had to go in a world that was trying to kill them because of racism. I believe this is what led Thurman to write; “The awareness of being a child of God tends to stabilize the ego, and results in new courage, fearlessness and power. To the degree that a person knows this that he is a child of God, he is unconquerable from within and without.”
When we are so rooted in our belovedness of God, we are unconquerable from within and without. The apostle writes about this regularly and all that he endured for the sake of the gospel. And this journey has been one that God has had me on my entire life. My full name is Daniel Mark Crain. It was only until recently that God’s opened my eyes up to what my name mean. Daniel means, “God is my judge”. And in the gospel of Mark, he portrays Jesus as a servant. I cannot be a servant of others until I embrace that God is my judge!
Let me share a story about what this means. I was reminded of the challenge of racial reconciliation on a trip to a city just outside of Atlanta leading up to a gathering that OneRace was putting together. As I drove through the city on the way to the church, I passed a monument to a Confederate General in the town square.
I was there to meet with a group of 20 pastors, ministry and community leaders at a local church in the area to share about the work of OneRace and to invite them to the Jesus+Justice Gathering. The meeting was going okay as I shared about God’s heart to unite the church, the story of OneRace, my own story of journeying into racial reconciliation and then I opened it up for any questions.
It was at this point that the meeting went wayward. One young man expressed his frustration at a post that OneRace had made last year about anti-racism work, another vented that OneRace wasn’t doing enough around one specific topic, and another shared that he wasn’t going to get involved with OneRace if they didn’t speak to an issue close to his heart.
I walked about of that meeting completely drained and was reminded once again how divided the church is around race, culture, and class. As I drove back into the city Abba Father was gently enough to remind me that I had not done the interior work to prepare myself for a meeting like this. As I began to pray, meditate, and study the scriptures I sensed the Father leading me back to Jesus’ Sermon on the Mount from Mathew 6. I re-read the phrase, “Blessed are the peacemakers, for they shall be called children of God.”
I heard the verse like I’d read it for the first time wondering how I had never seen this before! Jesus literally called peacemakers, children of God. If I’m going to be a peacemaker in this world, I have to rooted in my belovedness, on my Island of Peace as God’s child! When I’m not living as a child of God I can very easily judge and condemn the white community for their complicity in racism and try and solve and fix the black and brown community. But, when I am so rooted in God’s love as his child, I can give and receive freely, not needing anything from anyone, because I get it all from God!
And lastly I want to leave you with this. When I presented this content (Loving Freely) for the first time, I did it for a group of Christian men at a retreat in Northern GA. Over the course of the weekend we spent time discussing our belovedness in Christ, family of origin, triggers, the false self/true self binary, and other nuggets from the scriptures. At our last session I gave the beloved sermon and then extended an invitation.
The invitation was this. One of my favorite books of all time is Henri Nouwen’s Return of the Prodigal Son. In the book Nouwen spends hours sitting in front of Rembrandt’s painting of the The Return of the Prodigal Son and writes his book based upon different reflections from the painting. One of my favorite observations is when he talks about the hands of the Father gently resting upon the shoulder of the younger son. These hands represent so much in this painting. It’s the hands of a loving Heavenly Father resting on the younger son’s shoulders reminding him that he’s home. Nouwen says it like this; “It is the place within me where God has chosen to dwell. It is the place where I am held safe in the embrace of an all-loving Father who calls me by name and says, “You are my beloved son, on you my favor rests.” It is the place where I can taste the joy and the peace that are not of this world.”
I invited the men to come forward and for the other pastor and I to put our hands on their shoulders and speak over them, “You are my beloved child, whom I love, with you I am well pleased.” We witnessed grown men cry as they heard the words of a Heavenly Father, maybe for the first time. And these are the hands that rest on my shoulders now reminding me that I am the beloved of god. That the Heavenly Father delights in me and loves me so much that he would send Jesus to die. It’s the hands of the Father that reminds of my Island of Peace within my own soul.
What brings me back to my belovedness on my Island of Peace is meditating upon scriptures like Ephesians 1. I do this because I regularly hear the voice of Abba Father saying, “Why are you looking externally for everything I’ve put in you internally?” There are thirteen descriptions reminding me of who I am in Christ;
Blessed in the heavenly realms with every spiritual blessing in Christ.
Chosen in him before the creation of the world.
To be made holy and blameless in his sight.
Predestined in love for adoption to son-ship through Jesus Christ.
Freely given us his glorious grace through Christ Jesus.
Redeemed through his blood.
Forgiven of our sins.
Been lavished with God’s grace.
Has made known to us the mystery of his will through Christ.
Also chosen, having been predestined according to the plan of him who works out everything.
Included in Christ.
Marked with a seal, the promised Holy Spirit,
Guaranteeing our inheritance until the redemption of those who are God’s procession.
So, receive that you are God’s beloved child, with whom he is well pleased! Build up your Island of Peace in Christ and rest knowing that you are the child of the Heavenly Father!