Crossing the Betrayal Barrier — Part 2

In the first article of this series, I told the story of a dream I received in 1993.

In the dream, I saw people who had become so disappointed with God that they had gone “on strike”—and were “striking out.” Then three scrolls appeared and unrolled in front of me.

The first was Isaiah 49. The servant had genuinely been called by God, sharpened like a sword and polished like an arrow, only to be hidden away. Eventually he reached this painful conclusion:

“I have labored in vain;
I have spent my strength for nothing and vanity;
yet surely my right is with the LORD,
and my recompense with my God.”
—Isaiah 49:4

The second scroll was Isaiah 28. I saw a person sheltering in a dilapidated shack—what the prophet calls a “refuge of lies.” Something had happened that felt like divine betrayal, and the person had found a way to protect himself from further disappointment. Eventually hail and water destroyed that shelter, and the person came out to stand on a firmer foundation.

The third was Isaiah 26, with its terrible image of carrying an apparent conception to full term, enduring labor pains, and then saying:

“We have given birth to wind.”

Then I found myself standing with the Lord on a shoreline. He drew a line in the sand and said:

“This is the betrayal barrier.”

The way across seemed to be contained in those two words from Isaiah 49:

Yet surely.

Thirty-three years later, I’m still pondering that dream. I certainly don’t pretend to understand everything about it. But one question has become more important to me as I’ve grown older:

What actually dies at the betrayal barrier?

Years ago, I probably would have answered, “The dream dies.”

I’m not so sure anymore.

Something does die. I suspect something often has to die. But it may not be the original calling or promise at all. Sometimes what dies is our ownership of it.

And underneath that surrender, something even deeper may be happening to our zeal.

Abraham knew something about this.

God promised him a son, and then Abraham waited. And waited.

By the time Isaac finally arrived, Abraham and Sarah were well beyond the ordinary human possibility of producing the child God had promised. Paul says Abraham faced the fact that his own body was “as good as dead” and Sarah’s womb was barren.

He didn’t have to deny reality in order to believe God. He looked directly at reality and trusted God anyway.

Then Isaac came.

The impossible promise became flesh and blood, crying in the tent.

Think about what that child represented to Abraham. Isaac wasn’t simply a beloved son. He was the physical embodiment of decades of waiting. He carried Abraham’s history with God. He was the future God had promised.

And then came Moriah.

God told Abraham to offer Isaac.

I’ve never wanted to make that story less disturbing than it is. God’s command appeared to contradict God’s own promise: “Through Isaac shall your offspring be named.”

There was no obvious way to reconcile those two words. This was Abraham’s betrayal barrier.

Hebrews gives us an extraordinary glimpse into Abraham’s thinking. It says that he “considered that God was able even to raise him from the dead.”

Abraham reasoned his way toward something beyond what reason could presently see. He knew what God had promised. He knew what God was asking. He couldn’t see how both could possibly be true, but he walked up the mountain anyway.

Apparently Abraham concluded that there had to be a possibility available to God that he couldn’t yet imagine.

Resurrection.

I have called this trans-rational conviction.

I don’t mean irrational or anti-rational. Biblical faith doesn’t ask us to turn our minds off. It doesn’t require us to deny facts, suppress grief, or pretend contradictions aren’t contradictions.

There are seasons when reason takes us as far as it can go, and then relationship has to carry us farther.

Sometimes faith reaches the end of what it can explain and says, I don’t understand this. But I know something about You.

There is another part of Abraham’s story that hits close to home for me.

Years earlier, Abraham and Sarah had tried to help the promise along. God had promised them a son, but the years kept passing. Eventually they devised another way to produce what God had promised, through Hagar.

I understand that impulse.

We can receive a genuine promise or calling from God and almost immediately begin trying to engineer the outcome. We push, strategize, strive. Sometimes we even manipulate.

God promised it, so surely I have to make it happen.

A surprising amount of religious activity can grow out of that mixture of divine promise and human anxiety disguised as spiritual zeal.

But Moriah is the opposite movement. Abraham stops trying to produce the promise and places the promise itself back into God’s hands.

There is a faith that receives Isaac, and there is another kind of faith that lays Isaac on the altar.

The first trusts God for the promise.

The second trusts God with the promise.

I think mature faith eventually requires both.

There is another complication here, especially for those of us who believe God still speaks.

We receive what we sincerely believe is a promise or direction from God. Let’s call that A.

Then, quite naturally, we begin imagining what A will look like when it happens. Without noticing it, we create B. Once B exists, we start working out how we’re going to get there. Now we have C, D, E and F.

Twenty years later, we may have trouble remembering which part God actually said.

God may indeed have said A while we have quietly canonized B through F.

Then B collapses. Or C never happens. The door we assumed had to open stays shut. The person we thought would be part of the story leaves. The healing doesn’t happen when we thought it would. The ministry changes. The opportunity disappears.

Eventually we wonder, Has God broken His promise?

But there is another possibility worth considering.

Perhaps God did not break His promise.

Perhaps our interpretation of its fulfillment broke.

I don’t say that casually. This should never become a convenient excuse for irresponsible prophetic ministry. Influential ministers really can make false promises to others in God’s name. We can misunderstand God. We can confuse strong desire with revelation. And … we do, as Paul says, prophesy “in part.”

So, I do think we can receive something genuinely from God and misunderstand the form its fulfillment will eventually take.

Which brings me to the seed.

Jesus said:

“Unless a grain of wheat falls into the earth and dies, it remains alone; but if it dies, it bears much fruit.”
—John 12:24

A seed fulfills its destiny by ceasing to look like a seed.

Imagine never having seen an oak tree. Someone places an acorn in your hand and tells you what it will become. You could study that acorn for years and never imagine the spread of branches, the rough bark, the shade beneath it, the thousands of leaves moving in the wind.

Yet somehow the oak is there.

I’ve come to think about some of God’s promises that way.

I’m standing there clutching the acorn saying, “God, preserve the promise!”

And perhaps God is saying, “I am. Put it in the ground.”

I don’t particularly like that part.

Once the seed disappears beneath the soil, I can’t inspect it anymore. I can’t see whether anything is happening. The form I knew disappears, and for a while all I can see is dirt.

That looks an awful lot like death.

Maybe some of what we call the death of a dream is actually the death of our form of the dream.

The seed loses its form. The life God placed within it does not.

There was another vivid scene near the end of my 1993 dream.

I saw men and women who had crossed the betrayal barrier. They were spiritual leaders who had somehow made it through that place where promise and experience seemed to contradict one another.

Then I saw the Lord with what looked like a branding iron.

Somehow He was branding their hearts with the words of Zechariah 4:

“Not by might, nor by power, but by my Spirit, says the LORD of hosts.”
—Zechariah 4:6

I can still remember how vivid that was.

These people didn’t merely believe the verse. They knew that they knew that they knew.

They knew human zeal was not going to win the day in the Kingdom of God. Not the force of their personalities or the size of their ministries. Not brilliant strategies or sheer effort.

It would have to be the Holy Spirit.

I don’t think the Lord was branding passivity into their hearts. Zerubbabel had real work to do. He had received a real assignment. The temple really was supposed to be rebuilt.

But there is a profound difference between participating with God and assuming responsibility for producing what only God can produce.

I could quote Zechariah 4 when I was a young leader. I believed it.

But there is a difference between believing a verse and having it branded into your heart.

I saw the branding iron before I understood the fire.

I had no idea in 1993 how much of this I would eventually have to live.

Calling is a beautiful gift, but somewhere along the way a calling can begin doing work it was never designed to do.

It starts telling us who we are.

I am the pastor. I am the leader. I am the teacher. I am the person God uses in this particular way.

Then, if the role disappears, something much deeper starts shaking.

I know something about that.

Ministry was almost my entire adult life. I started preaching weekly when I was nineteen. As a relatively young leader, I experienced a surprising amount of success and notoriety. Later, I spent twenty years as a senior leader of a large church in Kansas City.

Those years held a lot: growth, spiritual hunger, wonderful people and remarkable experiences with God. They also held upheaval, leadership failures, community division, mistakes, reform, and loss.

Then, in 2007, the whole shape of my life changed.

Terri had become terribly ill. She had undergone brain surgery and was dealing with PTSD. My father died during that same season. And after twenty years, I retired honorably from my pastorate.

I led the charge to reform our church governance, and I wholeheartedly supported the installation of a new lead pastor. But there was also something very personal happening.

Terri needed her husband.

Whatever I believed about my calling, loving her was not an interruption of it. I needed to learn that too. Our vocation in Christ is larger than any particular assignment.

Then, rather unexpectedly, I went into the traffic-engineering business with a friend who recruited me to become the first account manager for his new company built around an innovative adaptive traffic-signal technology.

I’m smiling as I write that now, but I wasn’t always smiling then.

I remember wondering, Is this a demotion? Have I somehow been disqualified?

Those questions told me something.

If I was no longer this church-leader guy I had been for all of my adult life, who was I now? If I wasn’t standing on a platform, had my calling disappeared?

Looking back, I don’t think God was discarding the calling. I think He was hiding the arrow.

Isaiah 49 says:

“He made me a polished arrow;
in his quiver he hid me away.”

I needed some time in the quiver.

Terri needed me. Our family needed another rhythm. I needed healing too. Somewhere in those strange years I needed to learn at a deeper level that I was not what I did.

I am His before I am useful to Him. I am a beloved son before I am a minister.

Those sentences are considerably easier to preach than to live.

I wish I could say I learned that lesson once and for all. I haven’t. I’m still learning it.

During those years outside vocational ministry, I stayed alive to God. Early in the mornings, I found myself living deeply in Paul’s letter to the Romans. Those devotional reflections eventually became another book, The Romance of Romans.

From the outside, I was working in traffic engineering. But something else was growing underground.

Another line from Zechariah 4 began to look different to me:

“Who has despised the day of small things?”

I had known bigger things—bigger meetings, bigger visibility, bigger ministry activity.

Maybe I needed to learn not to despise small things.

An early morning with an open Bible. A sick wife who needed her husband. A family finding another rhythm. A page of reflections on Romans that nobody else would see that morning, that week, that month, or that year.

Those things didn’t feel very impressive.

Maybe that was part of the point.

Hebrews 11 also messes with some of our definitions of success.

It tells us of the heroes of faith who:

“died in faith, not having received the things promised, but having seen them and greeted them from afar.”

Think about Abraham again.

God promised him an entire land. But at the end of his long life, how much of that Promised Land did Abraham actually own?

A cemetery plot.

He had to buy the field and cave at Machpelah just to bury Sarah.

God said, I will give you this land.

Abraham died owning enough of it to bury his family.

And Scripture calls him faithful.

Some promises we receive in our hands like Isaac. Some promises we greet from afar. And sometimes even the Isaacs we receive must be surrendered again.

There are even promises whose fulfillment is larger than our lifetimes.

Moses could spend forty years leading Israel toward the land and die within sight of it without entering it with them. David could carry the desire to build the temple, gather toward it, and then watch that assignment pass to Solomon. Abraham could buy a grave in the dirt his descendants would eventually inhabit.

And Hebrews 11 can look at these people and still call them faithful.

That unsettles me in a good way.

Maybe faithfulness cannot always be measured by what was fulfilled before we died. Sometimes we are tending a garden whose full fruit another generation will gather.

This is why I’ve come to think of the betrayal barrier as more than a crisis of faith. It can become a crucible of zeal.

I want to be careful with that word.

Human zeal is not necessarily evil. It can begin somewhere beautiful. We encounter God. We fall in love with Jesus. We glimpse something of His Kingdom and His compassion for people, and something awakens in us.

We say, Here I am, Lord. Send me.

And we mean it.

The trouble begins when our sincere response to God quietly takes on responsibility that belongs to God.

Human zeal says, I have to make this happen.

Something changes when we begin to say, God will fulfill His purposes, and I am invited to participate faithfully with Him.

Those statements can sound almost identical. They don’t feel identical when you live them.

One produces a great deal of anxiety about outcomes, timing, and visible evidence. We need reassurance that the sacrifice was worthwhile. We may even need vindication.

The other still works hard. It takes risks and makes sacrifices. But it gradually relinquishes the illusion of control.

My prayer has increasingly changed from, God, empower what I’m doing for You, to, Father, what are You doing? How can I participate?

That isn’t passivity.

Jesus was hardly passive. Neither was Paul. Nor were the first believers.

Jesus described His relationship with His Father this way:

“The Son can do nothing of his own accord, but only what he sees the Father doing.”
—John 5:19

Jesus did a great deal, yet He understood His life as participation in the activity of His Father. And, He only ministered in public for three and a half years before His unjust suffering and death.

There is a world of difference between saying, “I have a vision and need God to help me accomplish it,” and saying, “Father, I see what You are doing. Teach me how to join You.”

There is a phrase in Scripture that means more to me now than it did when I was younger:

“The zeal of the LORD.”

Isaiah speaks of God’s promised reign and says:

“The zeal of the LORD of hosts will do this.”
—Isaiah 9:7

I love that.

God has zeal.

The Kingdom does not depend upon my ability to maintain enough spiritual enthusiasm to keep the whole project alive. God isn’t tired or discouraged. His zeal was at work before I was born and will continue long after I am gone.

I’ve been given the astonishing privilege of participating in something that did not originate with me and does not ultimately depend upon me. Participating in His story is so much more important than making history in the eyes of others.

Paul said:

“I planted, Apollos watered, but God gave the growth.”

That’s a very freeing division of labor.

I can plant and water. I can pray, work, obey, love people, repent when I’m wrong and remain available.

But God gives the growth.

I don’t make seeds grow.

And I don’t perform resurrections.

Now Isaiah 49 becomes even more astonishing to me.

Remember where the servant has arrived:

“I have labored in vain…”

As far as he can see, he has spent his strength for nothing.

And God responds:

“It is too light a thing that you should be my servant
to raise up the tribes of Jacob
and to bring back the preserved of Israel;
I will make you as a light for the nations,
that my salvation may reach to the end of the earth.”
—Isaiah 49:6

Paul later quotes this passage in Acts 13 as part of the mission of Messiah’s people.

There is almost a holy humor in the exchange.

The servant is saying, My calling failed.

And God’s response is something like, What you thought your calling meant was actually too small.

But notice the order.

First comes, “I have labored in vain.”

Then comes, “Yet surely.”

Only after that comes, “It is too small a thing.”

I don’t think we should rush past that order. There is a surrender before the enlargement.

Otherwise, enlargement might simply feed the very thing God is trying to free us from.

And Christians are remarkably good at turning mysteries into formulas, so I need to say something plainly here.

I am not saying:

Give your dream back to God and He will return something twice as big.

Sometimes what God calls enlargement may actually look smaller by the measurements we learned from the world—and, frankly, sometimes from the church.

Someone who dreamed of preaching to stadiums may become a spiritual father or mother to twenty people. A person who imagined building a movement may discover that one of her greatest Kingdom assignments is building a healthy family. Someone who longed for a platform may become an extraordinarily faithful friend or establish an excellent business or school.

Which of those is greater?

I don’t know.

Jesus has made our usual measurements of greatness nearly useless.

A widow’s tiny offering can outweigh the gifts of the wealthy. A cup of water can matter to eternity. Washing dirty feet can reveal God.

A Roman cross can become the place where what looked like utter defeat turned out to be the hinge upon which all human history has swung by stripping the evil powers of this world of their usurped authority.

I’m becoming much less interested in measuring calling by visibility—or even by what happens in one person’s lifetime.

Sometimes the enlargement of our calling is an enlargement of the person we are becoming.

This brings me back to the branding iron.

Human zeal dies hard. Religious zeal may die hardest of all because it has so many spiritual justifications.

Calling can reinforce it. Giftedness can reinforce it. Prophetic words can reinforce it. Opportunity and success can reinforce it.

I’ve discovered that it is entirely possible to say “by the Spirit” while running on adrenaline.

We can preach grace while living by striving. We can teach belovedness while secretly measuring ourselves by productivity. We can talk about trusting God while trying to manage everybody and everything around us.

So those words from Zechariah have to go deeper than our theology:

“Not by might, nor by power, but by my Spirit.”

I saw the brand before I understood the fire.

At this point in my life, I don’t want God to extinguish my zeal. I want Him to purify it.

I still want to care deeply, work hard, dream, take risks, and labor faithfully.

I just don’t want to carry what belongs to God.

I don’t want success to be the proof that I obeyed. I don’t want prophecy to carry my identity. I don’t want my preferred version of a dream to become the only version God is permitted to fulfill.

And I don’t want disappointment to turn me into a cynic.

I want to keep the fire.

I can do without the fever.

Maybe that is one of the gifts waiting on the other side of the betrayal barrier: passion that has learned how to rest.

At the betrayal barrier, many of us simply want to resign.

That may have been part of the opening image in my dream. God’s people had gone “on strike.” They had swung enough times and missed enough times.

They were tired.

I’m finished. I quit. Don’t give me another prophetic word. Don’t ask me to believe for another breakthrough. I cannot afford to hope again.

I understand that impulse much better now than I did in 1993.

But over the years I’ve played a little with the word resign.

Maybe there is another possibility.

Instead of resigning, perhaps God invites us to re-sign.

To sign our name again.

Not beneath our contract with God, with all our expectations written into the fine print, but beneath His covenant with us.

The second signature may look different from the first.

When we are young, many of us sign our names beneath dreams of all we’re going to accomplish for God. We have energy and plans and a picture of what faithfulness ought to produce.

The second signature may contain only two words:

I’m Yours.

I don’t know the outcome. I don’t know the timetable. I don’t need everyone to understand. And I release my demand that my life must take the shape I once imagined.

I’m Yours.

That doesn’t feel like resignation to me anymore.

It feels more like freedom.

And none of this means Terri and I have stopped dreaming.

We haven’t.

One of the things we still carry in our hearts is the hope of hosting what we call Haven Retreats—small gatherings where some of God’s change agents can slow down, become peaceful, encounter God, heal relationally, tell their stories, laugh together, and rediscover some of the joy of being alive.

We’ve already hosted a few of these retreats. We have loved them. (Let us know if you’re interested in coming to one. We’ll put you on an “interested” list.)

I can picture spending many hours of whatever years we have left in active ministry doing more of this—Terri and me welcoming people, sharing meals, praying, telling stories, enjoying some solitude, and having honest conversations. I love the thought of people who have been carrying too much for too long finding some room to breathe.

I would really like to see that happen.

But I hold the dream differently than I might have when I was younger.

There was a time when a strong sense of calling could rather quickly become an assignment I felt responsible to accomplish: If God is in it, then surely I have to make it happen.

I don’t feel that same compulsion now.

Terri and I can dream and pray and take whatever faithful steps seem ours to take. We can pay attention to doors that open and doors that don’t.

But we don’t have to force the future.

Maybe the retreats will happen much as we imagine them. Maybe they’ll take a form we haven’t thought of. Maybe part of what we’re dreaming will eventually be carried forward by people younger than us.

Hebrews 11 has given me room for all of those possibilities.

I still expect God to do things. I still believe He speaks and gives dreams and callings. I still want to say yes when He invites us into something.

I’m just learning to hold the future with a more open hand.

The dream can be real without becoming my burden.

I’m more than thirty years removed from that original dream now, and I understand those two words differently than I did then.

Yet surely does not mean I know how the story turns out.

It doesn’t mean I correctly understood every promise, or that everything I lost will come back to me in the form I wanted.

Hebrews 11 won’t allow me to say that.

It means that when my understanding reaches its limit, I still have somewhere to place my trust.

Abraham could not reconcile the promise with the altar, so he trusted the character of the One who had made the promise.

I’ve had to do some of that too.

Perhaps this is what the branding iron meant.

Some truths we learn from Bible study. Others we learn because life has driven them into us so deeply that we know them differently than we did before.

“Not by might, nor by power, but by my Spirit.”

I could quote those words when I was young.

Now I understand a little more about why the Lord might want to brand them into the hearts of His servants.

I suspect I still have more to learn.

Sometimes faith means trusting God for the promise. Sometimes it means waiting for the promise. Sometimes it means greeting the promise from afar.

And sometimes, like Abraham on Moriah, it means placing the promise itself back into His hands.

Yet surely.

Our faith is finally not in our ability to understand the promise.

It is in the Promiser.

And He is the God who raises the dead.

Next: Part Three — Take Them by the Hand: What Survives the Betrayal Barrier