God – Jerry Lout ⚬ Writer ⚬ Speaker ⚬ Mobilizer

December 11, 2025December 16, 2025

Learning Curve

Christ-followers hold that our amazing “sweet-society God” is the only Divine Being in all the cosmos. He’s the God who through the centuries – indeed, through eternity – has joyfully collaborated within his own triune being. This is a thing that challenges, if not defies, our imagination. Self-existent and self-sustaining, nothing of good is absent. Nothing lacks.

Perfect completeness, it can be attested, finds its definition in God. The triune Father and Son and Spirit relish one another’s presence. Each takes extravagant delight in the others. God requires nothing beyond himself to be. Within himself is utter perfection and completeness.

Yet, astonishing as it may be, God has chosen to insist on bringing along others (we, his own image-bearers who’ve been brought into existence by the Lord himself) into this mysterious, glorious mix. He ever works to mingle and play and collaborate with us in bringing about our inner and outer transformation for the good. (and, what higher good for a family of humans could there be than to come to embody and reflect the pure likeness of the Father’s distinctively beloved Son?)

Partnering with God, of course, involves more than merely being together in the same room. The road to spiritual transformation is one of training. What is one of the father’s primary aims? His goal is our joyous, flourishing growth in becoming the best version of ourselves – just as we were created to be. Easily recognizable as a people continuously brimming to overflowing with the qualities and nature and the very life of our Lord. Jesus – the undiluted, non-pretentious embodiment of love. Such a lofty aim may at times feel impossibly out of reach. Until one gladly recalls they are on a With-God pilgrimage.

December 4, 2025December 3, 2025

A-Team

Camaraderie – Collaborating – Companioning.

The three words share common ground with yet another ‘C’ word – a special kind of word capturing what the others might reflect. Community. And, the very creator offering a believer his companioning presence – what a treasure!

“Faith was never meant to be done alone”.

Whoever coined the line understood, and must have surely prized, its profound truth. It reflects the human order when at its best.

The wonder of collaborating with God as a principal partner in life transformation means discovering that he brims with community within himself.

God’s three-in-one Community – boundless in love, delight and power – defies our capacities to imagine or describe. The nature of the divine trinity – God the Father, the Son and the Spirit – intrigues and stupefies the finite mind.

The old Puritans of centuries past coined a pithy term that calls up the warmth of their image of God. A glorious personal being of extravagant love, joy, goodness and peace. God (the Puritans testify) is, in himself, “a sweet Society”.

May we dare to imagine our sweet-society God, radically partnering with his children in the forever enterprise of shaping us, day by day, into the likeness and nature of Jesus. He, who is all goodness, through and through.

November 20, 2025November 20, 2025

Fun Petitioning

Milestones. When they come around, a great many are met with celebrations. My birthday some weeks back was no exception. An unexpected bonus got slipped in. The entry here, published in the TIMES paper where I’m privileged to offer up weekly articles, gives rise to much gratitude.

* * *

This coming Monday, September 29, 2025, is to mark for me another completed circuit around the sun! This time, a noteworthy milestone – since my birth year is 1945. And, it happens that, to my great pleasure, I will be in Okmulgee, the city of my childhood. How cool will it be – strolling her streets on my eightieth, accompanying an assembly of fellow Jesus-followers. Praying with them over this very special community. (If you’re so inclined, come join the fun!)

But wait. Prayer? Fun?

Just to be clear, interceding (verbally appealing to the Lord in the heartfelt care of others) is not to be summed up solely by the word fun. However. If praying, when examined across the pages of the Bible and through the centuries of its practice demonstrates anything, it is this.

Christ means for joy to mark the lives of his apprentices.

“Jesus, full of joy through the Holy Spirit, said, ‘I praise you, Father. . .'”; “I have told you this so that my joy may be in you and that your joy may be complete.*

When petitioning God about things on our hearts we may indeed groan at times. Over the state of our world, over our homelife, over the lives of others in their crushing needs. This is part of authentic praying and is often modeled for us in Scripture. The Spirit of our Lord calls us to it. Bob Pearce, founder of World Vision Intl., captures the sentiment as well as anyone, “Let my heart be broken by the things that break the heart of God”.

Still, where praying can, and often does, include the groan of lament (passionate expression of grief or sorrow), such heaviness of expression does not fully reflect the disposition of prayer. Not at all.

Scripture is generously peppered with the sounds of God’s children, his apprenticing followers, freely voicing their joyous, celebratory (fun-filled) declarations to him. We are urged to jump into the fray. “Rejoice in the Lord always”, Paul exhorts, then adds, as if to ensure that we catch the Father’s happy longing, “. . again I will say, ‘rejoice!”**

A helpful posture of heart is called for at our meetings-up with Christ. Whether in praying or in serving, whether through lament or celebration, the believer is not called upon to “make something happen”.

Teeth-gritting, fist-clinching attempts at praying are foreign to the way of journeying with the Lord Jesus – Inventor of the easy yoke.

November 6, 2025November 5, 2025

For Good Measure

Apprenticing through Practice.

“Measure twice, cut once.”

Carpenter-trainees know the phrase well. When setting out to cut a piece of lumber, the worker employs his time wisely, even when extra seconds of time are called for. By taking care to measure and mark the piece – not once but twice – the craftsman guards against mistakes (some can be costly!) and avoids senseless waste.

The “measure-twice” phrase loops in the head repeatedly during an apprentice’s early tutoring under the guidance of their craftsman-teacher. The mantra, being revisited again and again over time – in both mind and bodily action – transforms an important quality inside the carpenter-wannabe. They are never the same, and happy for the change.

The carpenter apprentice might at first regard the “measure-twice” action as a pointless waste of time. But not for long.

Any successful tradesman in any field has applied himself to (firstly) pay attention to instruction and (secondly) to practice – practice – practice.

We don’t have to look far within Scripture to spot a seasoned follower aligning himself to the way of Jesus Christ.

What does Paul coach the believer in, once they are challenged to reframe their thought life toward things of “excellence”? As a spiritual journeyman, so to speak, Paul invites the following:

“What you have learned and received and heard and seen in me—practice these things, and the God of peace will be with you.”

October 16, 2025October 15, 2025

The Chase

“Practice makes perfect”, so goes the saying.

Aiming for Christlikeness, in the sense of fully mirroring Jesus’ faultless nature, is likely a reach too far. Still. Every believer can go, and is welcomed to go, a meaningful distance in narrowing that gap.

The late Brennan Manning stated with refreshing candor: “When I get honest, I admit I am a bundle of paradoxes. I believe and I doubt, I hope and get discouraged, I love and I hate, I feel bad about feeling good, I feel guilty about not feeling guilty. . .”

A Franciscan priest, and author of *The Ragamuffin Gospel, Manning noted that God’s gift of grace brings to us: “Power to believe where others deny, to hope where others despair, to love where others hurt. This and so much more is sheer gift”.

The priest further lays his heart bare in characteristic self-disclosure, “My deepest awareness of myself is that I am deeply loved by Jesus Christ and I have done nothing to earn it or deserve it.”

In A.W. Tozer’s list of qualities he found reliably present in the nature of God, noted that one of them is God’s Immutability. God’s nature is reliable. He doesn’t change. God loves, and he loves without deviation. His love is immutable, always in “on” mode. “The steadfast love of the Lord never ceases” (Lamentations 3:22)

So, we ask the question. Do I wish to grow to be more like Jesus. . . that is, to love as he loved and called us to love? Or, short of this, could I bring myself to sincerely whisper, “I want to want to love in this way”?

Either position can be a perfect place to begin and to proceed forward from.

October 2, 2025

Starting Point

My friend Mark is a poster boy to the power of love. Abused, then abandoned by his drug-dependent parents, Mark was found years later, languishing on city streets and in alleyways – dysfunctional and angry. A kind-hearted gentleman named Paul discovered him. Paul – just the father-figure Mark needed – took him under his wing. The journey had its setbacks, but authentic father love comes as a tenacious force.

Fast forward. Fifteen years in Mark himself routinely comes alongside men that are barely surviving at the fringes – every bit as broken as he had once been. Mark, like the rest of us, is far from perfect. A yielded Christ-follower, he’s a work in progress. Bearing God’s love.

The beckoning of Jesus to live the great commandment (love God fully, love others as myself) is not only called for, it is doable in a fuller measure than one might imagine.

It can be argued (and often is) that loving fully – i.e. for the most part with all of one’s being – is the mark of a person becoming fully human. God wishes this for us and, since his hopes are for our betterment, he himself enters the fray, lends aid. What aid it is!

But if a person would align himself with this venture (becoming one wholly given to love) they must want it and want it strongly. The hard truth is, few of us start out with that kind of “want to”. The process of being formed to Christlikeness starts (thank God), not with ourselves, but with him, with God.

God is Love.

Who among us would not want to be a loving human being? What person would look at authentic love and react with a ho-hum, “I’m not interested, thank you.”?

So, even though we do not start out all fueled and fired with an appetite to love God in the great commandment way, Christ himself tenderly invites us. He knows that we must begin where we are, not where we aren’t.

I want to want.

Some of us reach a place of saying, “I want to want what I presently do not want, and I want to not want what I presently do want”*.

This kind of simple honesty brings us to the needed “readiness of soul”. Since we cannot experience life transformation by ‘willing’ ourselves into readiness for it.

We begin where we are, not where we aren’t.

September 25, 2025September 24, 2025

One Driving Force

I imagine myself trying to distill to a single phrase the one driving force meant to mark the life of every Christian believer. While surveying this, I picture a gathering of people. I am present and Jesus is speaking to us all. He is giving his own answer to the very question (what most marks the disciples’ motivation, his drive, in living life?).

“You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind and with all your strength. . . .and you shall love your neighbor as yourself”

Love.

God Is Love, the sacred text reads.

The earliest followers of Jesus were utterly taken by the love of God, witnessed nonstop through the sheer volume of words and actions issuing from his Son. They saw it in him. . . saw it demonstrated through him. . . love, at every turn.

When he pardoned and blessed the woman that was dragged into the public square, shamed and condemned by her accusers. And the other instances.

Stretching out a hand, bringing healing to a leper (the untouchables, the shunned of their day). Conferring dignity and high worth on little kids (the unsophisticated and marginally noticed). Assigning honor, even friendship, to a diminutive, tree-scaling government scoundrel.

Small wonder that the Westminster Shorter Catechism answers as it does the question, “What is the chief end of man?”

Man’s chief end is to glorify God and to enjoy him forever.

I quiz myself. Have I ever met such a person who carries out that pair of assignments well – consistently, virtuously? Other than the itinerant Nazarene preacher, human embodiment of the divine?

As with Jesus, so with us. Agape alone supplies fuel for knowing God and for extolling him as beautiful and transcendent Being of the cosmos and beyond. Day in and glorious day out.

Little surprise the tentmaking apostle’s analysis. . . the greatest of all that remains is love. Surely, indeed – given the savior’s gasping prayer over his executioners,

“Father, forgive.”

August 14, 2025August 13, 2025

A Greater Story

There is an interesting thing about vision. Once a person catches sight of a forward-looking hope or dream, they usually move toward it with only a tiny glimpse of additional things to follow. What they hold is a sketchy outline at best. No neatly printed, detailed contract is laid out before them – not to mention fine print!

The life-change adventure begins when we start realizing that “our vision is not our vision alone”. Indeed, when the presence of the Divine makes himself known somewhere along the way, it is then that we may start catching the wonder that his vision overlaps mine and mine converges with his. A new story is now taking shape. God’s story becoming mine as the two streams of narrative (his/mine) merge into one – much like the blending of threads forming a tapestry – eventually fused to make history, i.e. HiStory.

In not having a contract neatly incorporating fine print detail, we discover a priceless insight – usually well into our pilgrimages. We have been spared much of what we were not ready for at any given crossroad on our long and beautiful and hard and precious trek.

Learn from the past, look to the future. . live in the present.*

Now is the favorable time**

Parting from a world of rain-starved earth and barren cotton fields (Dust Bowl territory), Clyde and Thelma lived in the present. In time “the present” became their past. What a surprise it would have been to either of them had they discovered beforehand that they would one day come to joyous faith in a loving Savior for whom their hearts longed. And how distressing, that the life of their young son would be snatched from them by the swift waters of a Phoenix irrigation canal.

It was in the “present moment” of grief that my mother and father’s story merged with a greater story, a forever story.

June 19, 2025June 19, 2025

Tropical Twister

As I guided my Suzuki dirt bike onto the path leading to our remote Africa home, something felt different. What was it?

The narrative unfolds in detail in the Amazon-published memoir, Giants in the Rough*.

A distressing spectacle now caught my eye. Just adjacent to my family’s home stood our African pastor’s house. . . its’ roof missing!

The past hours had found me miles away on a pastoral visit to another leader’s home.

While the land of Kenya was no stranger to the occasional disturbances of nature (mild earth tremors along its ancient Rift Valley, floodings from torrential downpours), the thought of an Oklahoma-style tornado blowing in seemed quite remote.

Though the earth give way and the mountains fall into the heart of the sea; though its waters roar and foam. . God is our refuge and strength. Psalms 46:1-3 NIV

To my relief, I found my wife and our two little ones safe and unscathed in our still-in-tact dwelling.

I crossed the few meters over to Pastor Moseti’s place. Large remnants of twisted corrugated metal sheets and shredded lumber – the makings of his former rooftop – adorned the limbs of nearby Eucalyptus Trees. The pastor, who survived the horrific storm without a scratch, recounted, in measured disbelief, his up-close encounter.

As a deluge of rainfall and raucous winds assailed the mission station, William Moseti stood gazing out his front window.

“I was watching the roof of your own house over there”, he exclaimed. “It was lifting, then settling. . . lifting then settling, and I thought, surely that roof might get taken away!”

Suddenly, Moseti heard a great ripping and crashing above him. Able now in the aftermath of it all to relate his story from a place of safety, the pastor concluded with his trademark smile,

“And now I was quickly getting very wet.”

June 5, 2025June 4, 2025

An Island Revisited

Irish pirates had kidnapped Patrick as his family was enjoying a holiday at the sea. He was just days away from celebrating his sixteenth birthday.*

Appealing in prayer to heaven during his six years in captivity laboring as a slave, Patrick met the Lord and readily yielded up his life. A dream alerting him that he would be rescued was followed by another dream, notifying him that a ship awaited him. The ship would bring him back to his homeland. Patrick set out toward the port and soon found himself aboard the vessel.

Patrick’s time back in Britain eventually drew to a close as a result of yet another dream. This dream featured a voice with clear Irish accent calling out,

“We beg you, come back and walk once more among us.”

His appeal to church leaders about returning to Ireland as a bearer of Christ’s love was met with sharp resistance. Everyone feared the barbaric Druids who ruled much of the island would come after Patrick and kill him. Responding to his heart’s prevailing conviction he set out on his own, and the saga of an island nation’s spiritual transformation was born.

Patrick’s years of fruitfulness – proclaiming Christ in his adopted Ireland – were nevertheless marked with intense opposition time and again. At least one attempt was made at finishing him off with poison. He writes,

“As every day arrives, I expect either sudden death or deception, or being taken back as a slave or some such other misfortune. But I fear none of these, since I look to the promise of heaven and have flung myself into the hands of the all-powerful God, who rules as Lord everywhere.”

So, Saint Patrick’s account, penned in his own Confessions, brings to us the gift of – as Paul Harvey would have said – the rest of the story.