Just for kicks, and because it still applies, here's a little thing I wrote on January 23, 2002:

God continues to move in my heart. I’m becoming more of a mystic by the day – whatever it means to be a mystic. All I know is that there is a stirring in my spirit that I don’t think I’ve had before. Perhaps I have, but not at this depth, and not for this long. It’s a gift, truly. But what a dissatisfying gift. I feel like I’ve been allowed to look into a holy place, but only through a distorted, foggy window. I can make out shapes and colors, but not faces and images. Maybe I just need to grow up in these mystical experiences and gifts before things come clearer, or maybe this is just how it is. I guess I’ll have to answer that one later. All I know is that I dare not chase after the mystical life and experience too vigorously lest I artificially create a world that isn’t there. I want to be drawn seductively by the Spirit of God into his holy place – I don’t want to try to barge my way in as if I had a secret recipe. If I did have a secret recipe, I’d probably try to sell it! This life (that is the mystical life) is not something that can happen by my own choosing, except by the choice to let God move me there. Submission is really the only way. It’s like wanting to taste chocolate, but not wanting to eat chocolate, because eating takes too much initiative and control of the experience.

The power of grace and redemption is enormous. Why do people resist it? Grace sounds too good to be true. Redemption sounds too painful to really pursue. The people of God want community with him and each other. I’m convinced of it. They want that safe place where they can let down their guard without fear of judgement. They want to know God forgives and can heal them of their brokenness. They want real friends who struggle the way they do. They want a depth of experience that has a bigger payoff than any promise of experience they’ve had before.

Brokenness is a frightening place, though. It is the place where you have to face your fears. The fear that what you’ve convinced yourself all along is wrong – that you don’t know better than God, that you can’t provide deep peace for your own soul, that people are incapable of living up to the trust you want to place in them, that money or food or sex or power will not satisfy. The fears go on and on, but ultimately, one must look those fears in the face and say, “Bring It On.” Brokenness is completely abandoning pride. I don’t know of a more frightening concept than that.

Without that, though, we will not experience community. God, in his great grace will not allow it. The deep things of him that you can find and experience with all your senses are too precious, too valuable, too costly.

Not two days ago I said that I will not stay in a place – a church – that makes a practice of patching peoples’ sin up and carrying on with business as usual. It turns my stomach to think of it. And yet, I fail to fully grasp the devastating consequences of that statement. If what I say is to be true, then I have yet to see and taste the life of community. We are all too proficient at patching things up – usually by trying to sew a new patch of cloth onto an old one.

New wine is for new wine skins. For people here and now to experience the “new” wine of community, they will have to throw away their old wine skins. They will have to be broken before a holy God. Some will not be able to handle that. Some will try to get away with something less than brokenness. Those who do get away with it jeopardize the rest of us. They are a danger to themselves, but also the body of Christ.

A radical experience with Hebrews 3:13 is needed. “But encourage one another day after day, as long as it is still called “Today,” so that none of you will be hardened by the deceitfulness of sin.” Community is the place where we encourage one another, and the result of that encouragement is protection – not merely protection from sin, but the deceitfulness of sin. Meditate on that. Chew on it. Be deeply fed by it, and then energized by it.