In this episode Gina welcomes back Bruce Smith & Justin Hoeppner to have a conversation about the redefinition, redemption and restoration of family. We were made for relationship, first with God and then others, but all of those relationship become fractured, broken and distorted in this fallen world. Bruce and Justin share candidly how God brings about healing when we allow ourselves to be vulnerable with God and each other.
Click below to listen starting at 32:12 to follow along.
From Fear to Family
Justin:
When you’re blind in an area, they call it a blind spot because you don’t know you have it and that’s one of the gifts of the body of Christ, you wonder why you always feel like you’re walking alone and it’s just you and God and nobody else. Part of the way God designed us, is that we would walk in community with people intimately so that we could know Him better.
My outcome was always to know the Father better, and on the journey I made an incredible soul level friend and I’ve started to redefine my relationships through a lot of that. That was very releasing for me. It’s all God’s pursuit. All of it was God getting to know me, and us just taking the time to do it. But I didn’t see that I was afraid to open up. Bruce didn’t tell me for a while, but he’s like, “You got so many layers of fear.”
Bruce:
God brings family to understand family.
Justin:
You can’t give what you’ve never learned and never been filled with. You have to be shown first. The book of Job says it so well, “God speaks to a man in so many ways.” I’m paraphrasing, “To one He speaks in a dream, and it’s three times and man still doesn’t hear or understand.” And this is at the end of the book of Job.
And I’m like, “Everyone on earth should identify with that.” God’s always reaching to us, and there just comes that right season to finally hear, in that right moment. That’s a big part of the nature of my relationship with Bruce.
Gina:
Had you not been willing to let him come close?
Justin:
Then we wouldn’t be sitting here.
Gina:
We wouldn’t be sitting here.
Justin:
As someone who’s walked with people my entire ministry life, this is year 21 for me of full-time ministry, meeting with people all week, every week, as much as I can. It is still so rare to find someone that doesn’t want to just keep having the same two or three conversations over and over and over again, and never make a decision to actually change something.
One of the gifts in this life is when you realize that God’s put truth in front of you. You have to respond by faith and you have to respond immediately. Many people wind up in the same conversations with someone like me or Bruce or with you Gina. It’s the same three things over and over and over and over again. You come to a conclusion that I need to go do this now. I need to do something tangible that makes a change in my world based on the truth that we just discovered.
We usually know what that thing is, it could be marriage, it could be parenting, it could be a job, it could be finances. Bruce and I have talked about it all. But the one thing that he knows, and the one thing that I get excited about is that when we come to a conclusion and we’ve worked through some things it’s not even 20 minutes, 25 minutes or an hour later, that I’m back on the phone saying, ” I did it. Waiting on the Lord to see what happens now.” Time and time and time again, those are the steps.
Intimacy is nice when it’s just healing, the good old, soft inside of you and making it softer for God to do things. But did I really intimately connect with what I was told or what we came to? If I did, then I should be able to say I did something about it. Other than that, I was just getting a nice spiritual hug, which is a good thing too. But it can stop there.
Gina:
It totally can. It does constantly. People want that recognition of pain, and they want that empathy. Empathy is the first step of it. The empathy is like, “Okay, I am cared for, I am safe.” And then we move into being able to receive truth and then transformation. Not everybody’s willing to go there, because there’s a comfort in their pain. So much of our identity is formed by our family of origin. We’re formed by our experiences. What has been done to us, what hasn’t been done for us, and everything in between. That builds our infrastructure. God knit us together, but how we allow ourselves to function and receive and interact with the world, is built based on those things.
This process you guys are talking about, coming into healthy intimacy of being seen and known by God, but then allowing to be seen and known by someone else, because God made us for relationship with Himself and each other. When we let that perfect work have its way and the negative layers are peeled back and now we can finally stand in our identity, now we’re redefined.
Now we go back to my family of origin. Now I’m standing in that place as a biological son or daughter, but not identified by all of that. I’m standing now as God’s son or daughter. All of us have had this situation where you could be 50 years old, and be so healthy and on with your life. You have one conversation with a parent, and you’re back to being 17. It just takes you right back to that place of insecurity, that place of fear, that place of whatever defined you at that moment. How to then take all of this transformative knowledge and truth and then be able to stand in those places?
Justin:
Isn’t that the ultimate standoff between the spirit and the flesh? You’re born again, you carry that spiritual man or spiritual woman into the places of a familiar battle, and now the battle belongs to the Lord. It doesn’t belong to you. Be strong in the Lord, in the power of His might, not in your own might. We don’t wage war against flesh and blood. Those things don’t make sense to someone that’s not spiritually awake.
Now you walk in, spiritually awake, to respond to the truth of God in your life. That should give you confidence to respond, but you have to be reminded every single time that you’ve been transformed by the Holy Spirit, and that you are someone new. That’s the ultimate standoff between flesh and spirit is, “I’ve been changed, but the situation and the people that helped me form this way.”
Gina:
And not use this new identity as a platform of condescending and judgment.
Justin:
Or escape. Condemnation and judgment is control. Escape is control. We’re keeping ourselves safe from intimacy. At the end of the day that’s what that is. You don’t want to know, and you don’t want to be known. And because of that, it’s better just to not know yourself, or those other people or situations or circumstances, you can just run from it.
I don’t see Jesus after his baptism running from the enemy. I don’t see Him running to the enemy. I see Him running after the Father. He’s tested and tempted in the wilderness while He’s 40 days hungry. I don’t see apostle Paul running back, and with his fiery spirit attacking all of those people that made him into the Pharisee that he was. I see Paul withdrawing and being intimate with the Father and then being redeployed back in, and sitting underneath the teaching of the current apostles.
You want to talk about a flesh versus spirit battle and a redefinition of family. This guy was like a four star general over the Pharisee movement to eradicate Christians. Now he’s sitting underneath the leadership of those that are the apostles, he gets a redefinition of family, and makes the decision to go face those things, knowing that he is a new creation.
Gina:
Let’s flip it to those apostles that allowed him to come in to sit because he had been persecuting the Church. For them to be able to set aside their fear, that is a huge deal.
Bruce:
If we’ve walked through trauma, pain, baggage correctly, we’ve been given a couple tools. The first tool is that we’ve declared those things that have taken place to no longer be our truth and call them out as lies. They are real experiences, but they become lies. They don’t carry on as our identity. We’ve been blessed with that. We’ve been forgiven. God has wiped that out of our past.
Gina:
When you say “those things have become lies.” It isn’t that what happened or didn’t happen was a lie. It means that that situation, trauma, pain, or experience formed a lie.
It formed a “I’m abandoned. I’m not wanted, I am worthless. I’m ugly.” Those are the lies. And those lies set up strongholds within us. The more we come into agreement with those, the more those become our truth in our identity.
Bruce:
Once you declare that, you’re released from those things, you’re then aware of those things that might trigger you. You’re in a place of intimacy with the Father to say those aren’t truths. “Those don’t define me, Father. I’m not going to allow these things to dictate what I’m going to do.” We’ve been released from those things in the past that have had a stronghold on us.
When we enter into those spaces where it’s difficult with those that we have walked life with, we have a new lens for how we love them. Because now we have a view of what it means to be family. By what God has shown us and what He’s planted in our heart, what does it mean to truly love?
Even though those individuals may be still trying to hurt us in some way, because they’re holding onto things, it changes our lens and it changes the way we love, and it changes the way we interact. It allows us not to dip into those places of negative emotions, which would put us back into a place of trying to control.
Gina:
As we expose those lies, we receive the truth and there’s that redefinition, and you said, “Now the enemy’s going to try to tempt us to go back into that place.” But now we know what the truth is. Now we have this authority, we have this understanding, but that’s also where that relationship and that family comes in, because the enemy can easily isolate me.
I can go through things and get hit with this darkness, and this has happened and I’ll call you Bruce and go, “Ah! I’m under this thing.” It’s that relationship that helps to expose things. When you turn the light on, you shine the light on the darkness, it has to scatter and it doesn’t have room to grow.
I love when Jesus raises Lazarus from the dead and He says, “Lazarus come forth.” He was dead in the tomb for three days and he comes out and Jesus could have restored him completely, like fully clothed and clean, but He didn’t. Lazarus comes out, still bound in the grave clothes. Then He tells the community, “Go loose him. Unwrap him.” basically remove the grave clothes. There’s intentionality with how God designed us to live in relationship.
Like Justin was saying earlier, he was saying, “Me and God, I’m good. I don’t need anybody else. I’m intimate with the Father, it’s just us to the end.” But there’s this interesting intentionality that God is like, “No, I’ve made you to also work this out with one another.” There’s something powerful in that, and something intentional in that and something not to be missed.”
One of the greatest tools the enemy uses is isolation. He brings accusation and then he does everything he can to cause you to isolate whether that’s going to church on one Sunday and the recording going on in your head, “Look at all these people. They’re not thinking the things that you’re thinking. They all clearly having an amazing relationship with their husband or their wife or their kids or with Jesus. And you’re not, you better not tell them who you really are, because when you do they will reject you.”
It’s further isolating, further pulling you away, because the enemy knows that if we’re willing to be intimate with one another and with God, that he has lost his power. He’s lost any pathway in, to build up strongholds again.
Bruce:
We’ve been designed by God to be intimate. We have been designed by God to love together. We’re to love together in community as a family. If we ever get to the point where we believe we can walk alone or we can handle this alone, then that will then put us in a place in which darkness will show you something different.
There’s fear in that first step towards relationship, truth, and trust and not controlling it. That’s why it’s so difficult for all of us to take that first step. It was difficult for Justin. I pursued him. It was three or four times of saying, “Let’s get coffee, let’s get coffee, let’s get coffee.”
Gina:
A lot of people that I’ve walked with, especially those that grew up in church, they have had experiences where that ends up not being a safe place. They have taken that risk to be vulnerable with someone, and that vulnerability turned out to be harmful. The tendency is then to isolate, shut off, pull back, and say “I don’t need spiritual community. I don’t need to be a part of a church, I’m just going to do my own thing.” That is the grand risk.
Relationship is risky. When you fall in love, you’re exposing your heart to be either accepted or rejected. With Jesus there is not a risk. He is safe. He has demonstrated His love. But with people we’re all broken and we’re all in different places on our journey. We may experience being hurt and being able to take that to the Lord, being able process that, being able to know that it’s okay to be hurt, know that it’s okay to be angry. God can walk with you through that.
But the moment that I choose to partner with bitterness, the moment I choose to partner with offense, the moment I choose to not even consciously partner with unforgiveness, and I isolate myself, and then I start closing myself off to other believers to, and I don’t allow myself to take the risk to find someone who’s safe…Then that’s just a very dangerous place to be. It’s a place where the enemy can wreak havoc. It’s a place where we are susceptible to deception and other voices that are not God’s voice.
I want to acknowledge the fact that that can happen and it’s painful. Those are things, just like family of origin, that can form us and create tendencies and patterns that can affect our marital relationships, that can affect our relationship with our kids. God is constantly pursuing us, and His tender-loving-care does not want to leave us in that place. There’s more. He didn’t make us just to survive. He made us to thrive. I want to acknowledge and recognize the fact that it can be very difficult and a very scary thing.
If we are willing to trust Him, even if our emotions and our feelings don’t want to. If we’re willing to do the work to find a person, a mentor, a pastor, a leader, or a friend who has a healthy relationship with the Lord, who is a safe place, then those things can be redeemed. Those things can be transformed from something of pain and ugliness, to something of redemption and beauty. God can use those things for our good and for His glory. I’ve experienced that profoundly over and over again.
Bruce:
The ultimate prize here, as people walking on this earth, is when we receive in intimacy, His genuine love, we’re in a place to then give that same genuine love as family, as community, in relationship in an intimate way. Think of the redefinition of an army of people, a community of people that everyone looks at each other as genuine true family, with genuine true love, in genuine true intimacy.
That’s God’s view of living in community. That’s His view of family. That’s His view of how to love, and at what level. That’s the beautiful picture that I am given, and that excites my heart when I meet with every individual that God brings beside me.
Justin is the worship pastor of New Community Church in Vista, CA
Check the rest of this conversation The Redemption of Family
Check out the Dwell Meditations
