By Will Haag
At the close of the August 2024 edition of New Wine Monthly Reflections, I asked the following questions: What are ways in which you feel trapped or imprisoned? How do you go about seeking freedom of mind and heart to face such challenges and experience freedom? What are ways in which you seek to break down the prison walls that our minds and hearts construct between people we don’t like or who are seemingly not like us in various ways? To draw upon New Wine’s motto, how do you seek to build relational bridges through Jesus with them in contemporary culture? Let us know your thoughts by contacting New Wine at this page on our website: https://www.new-wineskins.org/contact-us/. Here was the response of one member of the New Wine community, Pastor Will Haag. —Paul Louis Metzger
If only we (the church) were better at sharing the answers to your questions with one another. What a sacred salve this would be to so many, if we were able to be honest, vulnerable, and authentic in the midst of our “imprisonments.” Maybe doing so would unlock or highlight another fundamental practice (or pillar) of building relational bridges through Jesus in contemporary culture?
Honestly, I think this is an issue of beatitudes. In other words, we (the church) are missing out on so much when we “move beyond” the penitent heart posture exemplified in the beatitudes. What happened to our humility and poverty in spirit? Why aren’t we sharing more of our mourning [over sin, shame, and sadness] with each other and the world? How often is our hunger for justice and righteousness put on display (not just for us, but justice for the ‘other’)?
I am convinced that knowing who we truly are and appreciating what God has done and does for us in Christ, will produce lives and attitudes steeped in the Beatitudes. Furthermore, I believe living lives in this manner is one of the primary means by which we are to be “Salt and Light” in the world…. which just happens to be what Jesus talks about immediately following his description of the Beatitudes!
Yes, we should produce and exhibit “good fruit” in terms of love, joy, peace, patience, etc. But, all the more, God is freeing us to be honest and transparent (with ourselves and others) about our mistakes, fears, and foibles. God’s radical, prodigal, lavish forgiveness not only empowers us to forgive others, it also liberates us to ask for forgiveness when (not if) we fall short, harm others, or act out our selfishness.
The world will be attracted to our weakness and our meekness as much as it will our miracles and our so-called getting it “right.” The world (and the church) will be so blessed by our penitence, apologies, and attempts at reconciliation/ restoration. So, again, might we find liberation from our imprisonments (no matter the form) through these often-overlooked pillars of the faith so aptly demonstrated by our Lord during His kenosis, that is, his outpouring of sacrificial love for the world (found in Philippians 2:5-8) As Paul encourages us, may we have the same mindset as our Lord Jesus:
In your relationships with one another, have the same mindset as Christ Jesus:
Who, being in very nature God, did not consider equality with God something to be used to his own advantage; rather, he made himself nothing by taking the very nature of a servant, being made in human likeness. And being found in appearance as a man,
he humbled himself by becoming obedient to death—even death on a cross!
May such humble love liberate our hearts to share freely of our deep need for God and build relational bridges through Jesus in contemporary culture.