Freely you have received, freely give. (Matthew 10:8)
The great task of the spiritual life is the task of learning how to receive freely from God and from others. It is a command, and therefore it is active and not passive: receive! And yet the act of receiving is the opposite of the act of striving. In this passage, Jesus is sending out his disciples to work his works, and in the sentences above he enumerates those works: heal the sick, cleanse the lepers, raise the dead, cast out demons. But Jesus is not merely concerned with what his disciples do, but with how they do it as well. Don’t just do what I do, he might have said, but do it the way I do it. And I don’t work these works by striving, or laboring in the sweat of my brow. That was the old way of Adam. I work these works by freely receiving them from my Father. Because if I can freely receive from my father, then I can freely give to his children.
But freely receiving can so much more difficult than it seems. It is so frustrating some times! The Lord will show me that I’m striving, when I didn’t even know that I was striving. Or, the Lord will show me that I have become apathetic, when I didn’t even realize that I’ve become apathetic. And neither is freely receiving simply a balance between apathy and striving. Freely receiving from God is something completely different . . . its in a whole new category, and this is why we can’t do it by our own power.
So how is this playing out in my own life? Right now I’m back in the place I was in two years ago; staying at my brother-in-law’s house with my wife and daughter, looking for our next home. Its so weird to be back in this place again! And the way it came about is even more difficult to understand.
The lease on our previous home was not set to expire until June 30th, and we could have easily renewed it for another year. But we felt that we needed to move to something smaller so that we could have more intimate, quality family time and spend less money on utilities. So I informed our landlord that we would not be renewing the lease, and that we would be moving on.
Our plan was to begin really looking for our next place at the beginning of June, since that would give us a full month to secure a place and plan our move. But we got a little ahead of ourselves and started looking at homes in mid-May. On May 13th, the night before we were to leave for our trip to Korea, we found our dream home. It was perfect in every way; smaller than our previous home, yet much nicer. The layout was better, the materials were better, and the price was lower as well. We fell in love with the place immediately, and it was just around the corner from our place at the time, so moving would be a cinch!
We asked the landlords when we could move in, and they laughed and replied, “Tomorrow morning, if you want!” But when we told them that our lease did not expire till the end of June, they said that that wouldn’t work; they needed a renter by June 1st at the latest. So I told them that I would call my landlord and see if he would let us out of the lease early, and they agreed. The next morning, I called our landlord, and he agreed to let us out of the lease on May 31st, since he was able to get the new tenants to agree to move in early in June. I shared the good news with the new landlords, and asked for the documents to finalize it, and then we left for Korea. Everything was on track.
But the day after we arrived in Korea, everything fell apart. I received an email from the new landlord informing me that someone came to see the place after us and offered him more than a thousand dollars a month more than he had asked for the property. He felt that he had to take it, and so he did. But that left us with a predicament: we were scheduled to return home from Korea on the 25th of May, which would give us six days to find a new place, pack, and move out of our old place.
At first, I wasn’t worried at all. But then the day before our move out arrived, and we still had not found a new place. I called pastor Daniels and said, “I can’t do this again. I can’t be without a home for my family. I can’t take this again!” His reply: “The moment you say, ‘I can’t do this again’ is the moment you leave the place of faith and patience, and the bible says that through faith and patience you will inherit what is promised.”
Sure enough, I had to do it again. And every day since May 31st I’ve been searching for a new home for my family. I have looked at virtually every home in the East Bay that Craigslist has to offer, but I can’t seem to find the right one. Further, the rental market is flooded right now. Every home that I do apply for tends to have 10 or more other simultaneous applicants, and so I keep getting turned down. Its so frustrating!
But each time I pray over the situation, I keep hearing the Lord say, “Be still and let me work. I’m preparing the place for you and your family, and I’ve already set the move in date.”
But what does that really mean? Does that mean I should stop looking? That would be apathy. I’ve got to do my due diligence. But then again, I can’t depend upon my due diligence either. God keeps telling me that he’s not going to let me orchestrate it; he’s going to orchestrate it. But what do I do in the meantime?
This is the key struggle of the spiritual life, and it is not solved by principle or by practice; only by revelation. God has to teach us how to freely receive, and typically when he takes us through a trial in which we can’t quit working, yet nothing we do seems to work, he’s teaching us how to work without depending on the power of our works . . . how to work not by might, nor by power, but by the Spirit of the Lord.
The key is faith and patience: stay in the struggle! Don’t give up! Don’t quit! Keep working, keep resting, keep trusting, and believe the Lord to teach you by his power and wisdom to do what you could never learn to do by your own power or wisdom. Freely receiving is something that only God can teach you how to do, and if you and I apply faith and patience in all that we do, he will teach us just that!
