As for Me

The Undeserving

2011-07-24T23:34:00.000-05:00

Many of my posts to this journal have focused on the hurting and the needy. Sometimes focusing on my neighbor next door. Sometimes focusing on my neighbor half a world away. It is of the latter that my heart is turned at this entry. I've been pondering my involvement with the organizations I support and asking myself is it enough. It will never be enough, but has my heart become content with my efforts. I fear in recent months it has as we have turned our focus inward toward our own adoption challenges.

Through this introspective reflection, I have been poignantly made aware of the vicious and demonic presence still at large in the lands that I support works of relief and hope. This week I learned of a seven year old child that was murdered by a family member who then committed suicide. No good reasoning was given. This little boy was dear to the workers at the carepoint who regularly fed and cared for him, even becoming one of their "favorite" children. The entire carepoint is devastated. The other children all knew him, played with him. A beautiful smile, a beautiful life, extinguished. Even half a world away I struggle to understand why. I desire to help.

God dropped this into my spirit as I reflected on these events. Supposing, I in all of my American affluence did help. I, having more privilege, more freedom, and more material blessing than most people on this earth will ever know in their natural lives, pooled my resources and I was able to put forth a relief effort of some magnitude. Sounds good doesn't it? Doesn't sound unrealistic - one of the ministries I support is doing just that, sending a team in a matter of weeks to Swaziland. Now suppose that rather than go myself, I send my son. For this illustration's sake, he is grown. Now I can honestly tell you that I have never seen a boy with a bigger heart for others than my son. I am astounded at his compassion and love for others and he is only nine years of age. My pride in him swells my heart and my love for him moves me very nearly to tears. He is truly the apple of my eye and I am honored to be his father, honored to have a part in his upbringing, and I know I will be proud of the man he will become.

Now my son, endowed with the good will and the considerable resources our culture and fund raising efforts, heads to these far off lands to minister. He brings clothing, he brings supplies, he brings desperately needed food, he brings equipment for building water purification wells - something desperately needed throughout east/central Africa. He brings coloring books and crayons for the kids, backpacks, shoes and schools supplies. He brings funds to put kids in school, which is for most their only way out of poverty and death. My son brings life, he brings hope, he brings a future. It would stand to reason that my son would be well received, wouldn't? It would make sense that every place his feet touched down, life and freedom would follow.

What if instead, when he arrived, he was brutally murdered - his body left in the bush for the animals to devour. The resources and goods brought with him stolen and scattered with only a fraction of the intended recipients actually benefitting from our months of hard work stateside. How would his mother and I cope with the loss, the devastation? Would I be justified to never consider those barbaric people again, to harbor them ill will for the rest of my natural days? To never send another cent in support of the people that did this to my child - my first born son? What if this were your child? How would your world unravel?

Consider that God sent his Son, the very apple of His eye, from royalty and unimaginable glory, to an impoverished and dying earth, to a people in deperation. He sent him to bring life, hope, and a future, and they killed him. Their sin killed him, my sin killed him, your sin killed him, we all killed him. This is why we are admonished in the Word to "judge not". There is not one of us who has the slightest minuscule right to look down our noses and judge another person, judge their heart, or their motives. Only God knows the heart. Certainly we will know people by the fruit of their lives, but love is to be the over riding motivation in everything we do. We have no recourse to judge, for when we start down this path, we are on shaky ground, we who like the one we are judging, put our savior on the cross with our own sin.

The good news is, we are not undeserving wretches, cowering before an angry God still enraged that his Son was nailed to a cross for our sakes. Because of this willful sacrifice of ultimate love, we are now all of us adopted sons and daughters, joint heirs with our risen Savior if we'll have him as Lord in our lives. We are no longer the undeserving, we are the favored children of the King. As children, we are emulate his character and foremost in his character is love, grace, and mercy towards the undeserving.

Your Heart Determines Your Reality

2011-04-10T13:17:00.001-05:00

“For as he (a man) thinks in his heart, so he is…” Proverbs 23:7 AMP

The Hebrew here literally means as a man reasons and calculates, those things that he spends time pondering and thinking about, meditating and even worrying about – it is those things that will consume him, it is those things that will overtake and devour his life – become the reality of his existence. This has both positive and negative potential application and we need to be cognizant of both sides of this spiritual law in our lives because we are the ones in control of whether we will walk in God’s blessings or destroy ourselves through unbelief and disobedience.

I am right now in a spiritual conflict in which, I will admit, the enemy has been putting me on my back repeatedly. Attitudes, turmoil, and strife - all of these have been surfacing regularly and I can’t seem to get the upper hand no matter how hard I try. I’ve been feeling the old axiom “one step forward two steps back” for some time now and it hasn’t been the “I’m a little off today” kind of conflict. It’s affecting my relationships, my family, my walk with my Father, my demeanor. Others are noticing and people are commenting. Frankly, I’m embarrassed. I’m supposed to be “Christian-guy” ; “On-fire-for-the-Lord-Fella” ; “Model-Husband” ; “Good-Father” ; “Man-with-God’s-vision-for-his-life”. Right now that vision is murky, I’ve been everything but model for some time, and most days I don’t even want to be around other people.

What happened? Did I “burn out”? Admittedly, there have been amazing changes in our lives in the past 8 months. You don’t initiate the adoption of a “special needs” four-year old with a history of severe abuse and neglect and not have it alter your life in some way. Yes, my job has intensified in pressure and demands fairly significantly in recent months. Yes the economy is going down the toilet and costs are rising affecting our home budget. Oddly (of course) family interactions have been resurfacing in hurtful ways as well. But these are all exterior things. Was my walk with my Lord so shaky that I faltered so quickly? “For as a man thinks in his heart, so he is…”

My problem has never been that of a lack of effort. I have been putting out more effort in more directions than I’ve ever considered possible by myself or most humans, and now, I sit here some months later an exhausted shell, numb and desiring to withdraw. No, my problem is a lack of focus, a lack of wisdom – of putting first things first.

When we fill our hearts/minds with the problems of our lives and this becomes the sum total of what we are acting on, then we’ve already lost the game called life. And the enemy will insure that there is more than enough to fill and even overflow our minds to the point of creating a dizzying array of issues that keep us leaping from one fire to the next trying to play “catch-up” as we endeavor to control all of the issues in our lives. When we enter this arena – we are lost because this is his territory, his chaos, his game and he masterfully manipulates the outcome to his advantage and victory every time because it is our limited flesh and intellect against his timeless spirit and knowledge of the ages.

However, when we do as the Lord tells us further down in this same chapter – the game changes to a whole new venue with a whole new set of rules.

Verse 12 “Commit yourself to instruction, listen carefully to words of knowledge”

Verse 17 “Let not your heart envy sinners, but continue in the reverent and worshipful fear of the Lord all the day long.”

Consider also Psalm 119:11

“I have hidden your word in my heart so that I might not sin against you.”

In this arena, the enemy is defeated. In this arena, regardless of exterior circumstance and external attack, we draw upon a wellspring of strength that is mightier than everything Hell has in its combined arsenal. But this arena begins by what is pondered and meditated upon in the mind and heart. For we know that what ever is dominant in the heart is that which will come forth from the mouth and it is with the mouth that we speak the Word of Faith. Our tongues are always speaking faith – it is constantly rolling from our lips in one of two forms; that which produces life, or that which destroys it. This is why James goes to great lengths to warn us of the tongue’s potential for destruction in James 3.

Where I fail to focus, to meditate, on what God’s Word says about my circumstance instead of what the enemy has convinced me about it, this is when I lose power, lose victory over the circumstance, disengage the power of God to work supernaturally in my circumstance to bless me and make a show of the enemy. You can’t sow doubt, discouragement, and unbelief into the circumstances of your life and expect to harvest a victory. This doesn’t mean you deny the existence of your circumstance. But we DO deny our circumstances’ right to rule and proclaim the Word over them.

For me, and for all of us, it’s a heart condition – the Word has to be in my heart. The Word has to be active and alive in my heart, discerning the thoughts and intents as stated in Hebrews 4:12. For my heart, not my exterior circumstances, determine my quality of life, my relationships, my capacity to love like God loves and fulfill his plans and will for my life. My heart determines my reality.

Performing to the Extreme

2011-03-28T16:19:00.004-05:00

Just a quick entry, but something that was a blessing to me. Was reading in Philippians today, the first chapter and hit verse six which says:
"And I am convinced and sure of this very thing, that He Who began a good work in you will continue until the day of Jesus Christ, right up to the time of His return, developing that good work and perfecting and bringing it to full completion in you." (Phil 1:6 AMP)

These are familiar words to me and probably to most that regularly read the Word or have heard many sermons, but as I'm prone to do, I was pulling the words apart in my concordance when one word stopped me...the word "until". Now this scripture is one that many, including me, rely on regularly to remind ourselves that we are works in progress. We will never see the end product of what God is doing with us while we walk this mortal terrestrial soil as it currently resides in its sin-laden state. We'll never see the end result of God's plan unfolded while we walk in this physical unregenerate flesh. It's a fact. As a matter-of-fact, this flesh and this sin-laden world are the only tools the enemy has left to try to pull us out of God's destiny for us, his only remaining options to trip us up - and they are truly weak options when we really grasp hold of the power of the Word and Victory achieved at the Cross.

Like I stated, I tend to look to this scripture, among others, to remind that regardless of the guilt that inevitably floods forth with my failings, I cannot mess up God's designs or plans for me to the point of being unuseful in the manner He planned. But where the word "until" strikes is in its true and full meaning from translation. The Greek word is "achri" and is derivative of another word "akron" which means "to the furthest point, to the highest extreme of a.) heaven and b.) earth ". It is also related to another word "akmēn" which means "extremity, climax, highest degree".

This should really impact the knowledge of the lengths and depths of our redemption and the ongoing work that God is doing within us. Have you ever thought of yourself as a work in progress "to the extreme of heaven AND earth"? Have you ever considered yourself something the Creator of all that exists was continually perfecting to the "highest degree"?

So you swore today. Repent, put it under the blood, walk the opposite way and don't do it again. You hurt someone. Go make it right, put it under the blood together, and don't do it again. You fell into the old sin habit - find a brother/sister to confide in that you know you can trust to pray/agree with you and put it under the blood and WALK AWAY FROM IT! Sin no longer has victory - Jesus took it, forcibly, at the Cross. Overpaid for everyone's once for all time. Stop buying the lie of the enemy that you are somehow still subjugate to it.

Does this nullify the consequences of wrong and sinful choices? NO! Should this trivialize sin to permit increased frequency? NO! It is still the snaking, coiling, deadly tool of the enemy that nailed my Savior to an instrument of criminal execution. It is still deadly to an entire world that has rejected that Savior. It has still and is still sending millions to an eternity filled with Godless anguish and torment. But to a truly repentant heart, sin holds no power. To those who call upon and know their position in Christ, sin is something to be stepped on and stepped over. And when we find ourselves entangled and tripped we have this peace outlined in Philippians 1:6. God is working and will continue to work in us to bring about the absolute best product, to perform to the highest extreme in heaven and earth.

The Hurting and Discarded

2010-12-03T06:47:00.000-06:00

It has been far too long since I engaged in the rhythmic cadence of placing thought to word through my keyboard. Many, many things have transpired in the past four months, some good, some not. Through it all, regardless of highs, lows, exhilaration, or crisis one powerful truth remains. God is so good, so loving, and so merciful and so constant.

Why wait so long before taking up the pen (or keyboard)? I can only describe my walk and my journey these past months as one who has enjoyed the warm sunlight and surface of the shallows of a crystal blue paradise and then through circumstance, response, and self-action has dove inward into murky grey depths where little light and little warmth penetrates. Though at times I have not walked where I should or followed what I know to be the path God has for me, like a safety line that a diver of great depths relies on for orientation and their very life, He has always been one glance away, one uttered prayer near, constant, anchored, unmoving and pointing to His higher purpose for my life, His protection from the storms that have assailed us.

What is truly marvelous in all of our lives is that we cannot run from this God, this loving Father. As David said in Psalms, where can we go? If we go to the mountain top He is there. If we go to the valley, He is there. The sky proclaims His majesty, the ocean depths His mystery. Even if we walk through hell - He is there. Jesus' redemptive work at the cross was THAT powerful. So powerful, the only escaping His presence is His ultimate sacrifice of love - our will. Even still, as long as we draw breath, He will wait as a gentleman, one prayer away, one "help me" from intervention.

What is also amazing is that to Him, we are not mistakes He has to clean up after. We are not souls roaming His creation that He continually has to enact plan B, plan C, on out to infinity because we keep messing up His intent. In Jeremiah 29:11 He states that He knows the plans He has for our lives, the very purpose for our treading this soil at this time in the history of this sphere. We cannot transgress so badly that He can't redeem our lives and utilize us to His planned purpose, and these are plans that He laid out before the first plant grew or the first animal drew breath.

Look at what Galatians 4 says:

“But when the time arrived that was set by God the Father, God sent his Son, born among us of a woman, born under the conditions of the law so that he might redeem those of us who have been kidnapped by the law. Thus we have been set free to experience our rightful heritage. You can tell for sure that you are now fully adopted as his own children because God sent the Spirit of his Son into our lives crying out, "Papa! Father!" Doesn't that privilege of intimate conversation with God make it plain that you are not a slave, but a child? And if you are a child, you're also an heir, with complete access to the inheritance.” Galatians 4:4-7 (MSG)

I love the statement in this translation "you are not a slave, but a child". Further, in Romans 8 we read:

“For all who are led by the Spirit of God are sons of God. For the Spirit which you have now received is not a spirit of slavery to put you once more in bondage to fear, but you have received the Spirit of adoption, the Spirit producing sonship, in the bliss of which we cry, Abba (Father)! Father! The Spirit Himself thus testifies together with our own spirit, assuring us that we are children of God. And if we are His children, then we are His heirs also: heirs of God and fellow heirs with Christ, sharing His inheritance with Him; only we must share His suffering if we are to share His glory.” Romans 8:14-17 (AMP)

How many of us hang our heads in shame, acting out the lie the enemy has sold us that we are dogs deserving to be kicked; that we should somehow have to make restitution for our lives mistakes before we can know the fullness of sonship? Look at what Ephesians says:

“How blessed is God! And what a blessing he is! He's the Father of our Master, Jesus Christ, and takes us to the high places of blessing in him. Long before he laid down earth's foundations, he had us in mind, had settled on us as the focus of his love, to be made whole and holy by his love. Long, long ago he decided to adopt us into his family through Jesus Christ. What pleasure he took in planning this! He wanted us to enter into the celebration of his lavish gift-giving by the hand of his beloved Son.” Ephesians 1:3-6 (MSG)

We see here scripture referencing our adoption as His children, and God doesn't engage in "foster parenting". We are sons and daughters of the King of Kings, Most Holy Lord of Lords, the very one immeasurably exalted above all heaven and earth and everything that was created, which includes every angel, every demon, every problem, every concern you might carry. He adopted us, and He planned to do so from the very start. And unlike so many adoptive homes where the adoptee is at a slightly lesser status than the birth children within the home, He has named us "joint-heirs" with His only Son.

This hits hard because it is the very reality my family is currently facing. My bride and I are in process of seeking adoption of a specific "special-needs" child. This little four year old boy has grabbed our hearts and what makes him "special" is the cognitive, emotional, and motor-skill delays imposed by severe neglect and abuse - a hurting heart and the resultant impact of a lack of love. I am learning so much through this process and have been continually astounded at the physical impact the absence of loving parents has had on this child. Through the process of engaging in foster licensing, court appointees, case reviews, and social workers, institutions I once considered a scourge and a necessary evil are now, to me, understood to be a necessary good in the face of evil in the absence of a work the body of Christ should have been doing all along.

In the early chapters of Acts, we read that orphan care and the care of widows was the province of the Church, not the state. Regardless of current politics and policies, the failure of the Church through the centuries has created the necessity of government interventions. Christ's love is not expressed in the administrative case review I just sat through. An explanation of God's love and grace is not given to the single mom as she picks up her welfare check. The government cannot duplicate or legislate the holy love that we as light bringers and salt on this earth are to be carrying out one to another.

This journey has already been marked by heartache and sacrifice, even though it feels as if we've barely scratched the surface. Family and friends have questioned our motives. People we assumed would be happy for us have, in some ways, acted like this is a funeral, a death of our known family as they were used to it. Deep emotional insecurities have surfaced in others as they have progressed from "oh that's a nice thing for people to do" to "What do you mean you are adopting?". We've had family tell us "You can barely take care of the kids you have".

This last statement cut deepest and we began to realize that adoption is God's answer to the hurting and discarded, because He never discards people. We also began to realize there is a very real enemy working against us in this and against this child in whichever ways are most effective, and so far those ways have been lies, misinformation, and directed statements of fellow believers - many people closest to us. This enemy seeks to devour and destroy lives. The more innocent the better. Where Jesus said "whoever harms one of these little ones" Satan seeks to do just that through he hands and mouths of people. Death and disease are effective, yes, but how much more devastating the effect of a child abused. With this, the enemy has snared one and statistically speaking, probably two people or more at once. In our case, division and strife now exist between family and our home. Something has been lost as we endeavor to obey in what we know God to be leading us toward - the rescue of one small soul.

Thanksgiving was difficult. No blood family attended our home. No stories were swapped recounting shared youthful experiences. No one freely loosened their belt to increase comfort during the football game or to squeeze in that last piece of pie. But God used the day and us to be a blessing. We were so blessed to have in our home several who might not have otherwise had a holiday experience. We were blessed to share a feast with those who did not regularly participate in this gathering that I have always taken for granted as a happy occasion of grouped family. My eyes were opened to the fact that this is not the case in many homes, and when one 15 year old told my son "this was the best Thanksgiving I've ever had" I was simultaneously pleased and saddened. This boy is an adoptee himself, living in a single parent home in which ties are strained with extended family. Further, mom and son are not the same "race" and even in our enlightened metropolitan culture, it is evident this has further created tensions.

As we enjoyed the food I recall looking around our large table, thankful to have been a part of blessing someone, bringing a smile and hopefully a good memory. But I was also humbled. I was humbled by the inadequacy of my life's efforts to reach those in need. Not everyone at that table was in need. But each of us were scarred in some manner. Each of us were there because we did not have the security of a stable and safe birth family environment to relax in that day.

I have too often overlooked my hurting brother and sister - and these are simply the people I know and interact with regularly. Yet here many of them were, banded together in our own "family", laughing, enjoying a meal, and sharing souls. God was in my home in a special way that day and this is His desire for us - for us to know his love of adoption, of reaching out to others and inviting them into our circle, of building others up when the devastation of words and actions is the norm for them. Adoption is not limited to bringing a child into your home. As adopted sons and daughters in Him, we also have a multitude of adopted brothers and sisters - all of them family in God's Kingdom. Through this journey I've discovered people of character and hearts of gold that do model God's selfless love and have been there to support us unconditionally. These people have been family when family has failed and I have been enlarged for the process.

The boy we are adopting has also taught me a thing or two about love, compassion, and grace. His hunger for love already has him calling me "daddy" and though he has behavioral challenges at times as a result of the tremendous upheaval he is experiencing, upheaval few of us will ever know, I see in his brown eyes hope for love, hope for protection, hope for a life of joy and security. I have vowed to provide that as his father, as best I can. I am so far removed from being that perfect parent and I am certain I have many challenges and "opportunities for growth" ahead. But I now know love towards one not of my bloodline and in my eyes, he is simply a son we did not birth, but a full son of my house none-the-less.

Finally, we need to remember this: regardless of the trials faced, those who have claimed Christ are all moving towards a feast of our own. At this feast will be a gathering beyond count. The Father will look over the banquet with infinite pleasure because His children are finally home, where He meant for them to be all along.

“We know that the whole creation of irrational creatures has been moaning together in the pains of labor until now. And not only the creation, but we ourselves too, who have and enjoy the first fruits of the Holy Spirit, a foretaste of the blissful things to come, groan inwardly as we wait for the redemption of our bodies from sensuality and the grave, which will reveal our adoption, our manifestation as God's sons.” Romans 8:22-23 (AMP)

Thanksgiving and Praise - Keys to Your Life

2010-08-16T08:57:00.001-05:00

I recently heard an amazing teaching by Pastor David Ellis that showed me that God's Word is so rich and so filled with life and so often we miss so many of the powerful truths and connections that are right before our eyes simply because we've been inundated with the same stories for years. We become so "fogged over" in our quests for searching out God in His Word that we walk right past the obvious. God isn't trying to hide himself from us in the ultimate cosmic game of "peek-a-boo". He isn't pondering how he can next challenge us in a spiritual treasure hunt in an effort to keep Himself from us. Jesus stated that his "yoke was easy and his burden was light". Easy. Light. God wants you to know him, intimately. Easily. Ever been in a relationship that was just easy? You didn't have to nervously re-acquaint or talk about the weather or family or employment or hobbies, it was just easy - you could just be yourself. This is what God wants.

His truths are easy too. Looking at a familiar passage in John 6:4-14 we see the account of Jesus feeding the 5,000. Remember the felt boards in Sunday School? The paper cutouts? Remember the coloring pages - 2 fish, 5 small loaves? Again, this is one of those readings for me where it is so easy to miss truth, where my eyes can almost glaze over as I "speed-read" the passage. Jesus sees a "great multitude" coming his direction. We read the passage as him feeding 5,000 but we also know this is a headcount of only the men. Conservative estimates put the crowd's total size of 10-12,000 with it possibly as large as 15-20,000. Picture it. Jesus and the twelve had just crossed the Sea of Galilee, taken a small hike up a dusty trail to a "mountain" top or to us a hillside, sit down to take a breather and they look out and here is a throng of 15,000 people headed their way.

Jesus says "Hey Philip, where can we get some food to feed these people?" (paraphrase) and right after this the Word says he asked Phillip this "to test him for He Himself knew what He would do." One translation says He asked Phillip this to "stretch his faith". Jesus wasn't perplexed by the scene unfolding in front of him. He wasn't frustrated by the fact that thousands of people were approaching and he didn't have food with him and then lean over to one of his twelve and say "How're we gon'na feed 'em all?" After Adam and Eve had sinned in the Garden, God wasn't playing hide-n-seek in asking "Adam - where are you?" God always knows exactly where we're at, where our faith is at. It is His desire to take us to the next level and His purpose in questioning us isn't to read us a Heavenly riot act but to draw us out - to get us to engage Him on His level so that He can start to move in our lives in the blessings He desires.

Look at Phillip's answer. "Two hundred denarii worth of bread is not sufficient for them that every one of them may have a little." The New Living Translation puts it this way: "Even if we worked for months we wouldn't have enough money to feed them!" Phillip's answer: We don't have enough money!

I have to imagine Jesus cracking a grin here, because the Word says He already knew what he was going to do, but don't miss the lesson. Jesus didn't ask Phillip "Where can we get some cash together to run into town and get some food for this crowd?" "He didn't tap Judas, the group's purse-holder and say "How much do we have in the bag?" His question was "Where is the food coming from?"

It is then that Andrew produces the child with the two fish and five loaves. Do you think that Andrew was policing the crowd, saw a kid with food and grabbed him by the collar and said "Jesus! Got a kid with food here!"? I believe that this boy overheard the conversation and got it. We see Jesus telling us that we have to have child-like faith and I believe this boy, overhearing the conversation, came to Andrew with his food offered it. Why else would Andrew approach Jesus with an unknown "lad's" lunch?

We read in verse thirteen that that after everyone had been fed they had 12 baskets full of fragments/left-overs and these wouldn't have been lunch pails. They would have been large capacity baskets for carrying goods. So what was the difference between "we don't have enough money" to "everyone's full and we've got more leftovers than we know what to do with"? The pastor I heard speaking on this pointed something out that is so in line with what other brothers and sisters have echoed in recent months and something that I think God is trying to capture our attention on because it is critical to our success in this life.

The offering isn't what fed the crowd. How often have you offered up prayer, sacrifice, effort and seemed to hit silence in your petitions? Why? Because the offering was the seed. It needed a multiplier. What was that multiplier? It's in verse eleven: Thanksgiving - praise. Jesus was offering thanks over those fish and barley loaves the entire time He was distributing them. He didn't just say "Holy Father, thank you for this meal which we are about to receive..." and then everyone sat down and ate. Jesus was thanking over that bread and fish continually and a something happened - a cycle of provision took off. To feed that many people Jesus was busy for hours - he was breaking fish and bread for hours to people lined up from all over. He was handing off baskets of food to the twelve who were in turn running them to pockets of the crowd for a significant amount of time, giving thanks for it the whole time.

This is what He wanted Phillip to do - what He knew He would do from the start if given the seed to work with. God has a calling on each one of our lives and if we'll seek out his vision for our lives it will be far more grand, far larger than anything we could come up with on our own. This has a tendency to scare us. "But God, I don't have enough...." Is it money? Resources? Ability? Do you sound like Phillip? Your resources and talents never were the basis by which God is able to fulfill his plans through you - His are. But even the offering of faith must be met with something - thanksgiving and praise. It is the key.

If God has shown you the vision of what He wants to do in your life, no matter how impossible it looks to you right now or how far away, begin to thank him and praise him for it today! Don't focus on the obstacles or your lack or what you don't have or what stands between you and those dreams/visions. Look at the seed you do have and give thanks - this will cause multiplication. Countless are the scriptures where praise and thanksgiving are to continually be on our lips. Joy is strength and sometimes we have to will joy, just like we have to will strength to move. Psalm 35:27 says "Let them shout for joy and be glad". Don't have joy? Then shout FOR joy because later in that verse we read God has pleasure in the prosperity of His servant. Psalm 34:1 says "I will bless the Lord at all times; His praise shall continually be in my mouth."

It isn't for God's ego that we praise. It is through praise that we are moved into the position of God being able to bless. God knows who He is - He's pretty secure in the knowledge of Himself. He's not in heaven insecure or not feeling well about himself and with holding blessing and prosperity if we don't give him some affection. Our praise is the key that unlocks because it activates our faith and takes our attention off of circumstance and ourselves and focuses it on God's ability and when we move into this arena, God has something to work with in our lives. He loves our praises because through our praises He can unleash the floods of blessings He has prepared for us.

This is why he repeatedly brings it to us to praise, to ever be praising, to enter his courts with thanksgiving and praise, to be thankful for all things. Thanksgiving and praise are the keys to your life - the abundant, overflowing, superior, extraordinary life that Jesus stated He came for you to have.

Your Reward is Through Your Fear

2010-08-11T08:48:00.005-05:00

"What you are most afraid of is where your greatest rewards are."

A friend sent me this quote recently and to be honest I was taken aback by it. At first I almost dismissed it as I don't view myself as one to walk around in nervous fear but God grabbed me with the remembrance of things in my own life that I am currently in fear over. Things that when confronted with I tend to sweep under the rug, ignore, refuse to face directly. What do you fear? Is financial uncertainty? Sickness? The future? Do you fear never realizing your potential or never seeing your dreams become realities? Do you fear addressing that broken relationship? What about that habit that keeps creeping into your life that you need help with? Maybe you fear standing up for what is right, whether it be for yourself or for others, based on the Word.

You see, each of these is a storm, a testing of our character and each of these has a tremendous reward on the other side of them - a new plateau of living. But each of these requires complete and total honesty with yourself and a bold determination to face the issue in front of you and not back down from it, not cower or close your eyes from it for its "uncomfortable" nature. It will be uncomfortable. Growth usually is. But the end result is increased capacity, increased ability, and increased strength. These "increases" are necessary for the "increased" blessings that God has in store for you.

Jesus stated that he came for us to have life and to have it abundantly. The Greek here means to have life that is superior, extraordinary, surpassing and beyond what is normal. Very often, the means to these levels of increase are through the very storms that we are tempted to fear. We have to recognize that this fear is nothing more than the enemy's attempts to keep us from the very growth we need to encounter the divine and miraculous provision and blessings of God in our lives. When we stand on "we are more than conquerors in Christ" and "greater is He who is in us than he who is in the world" and the countless other truths in this Word that are life and power then truly we find the "roaring lion" a defeated foe melting into the shadows.

So when you see the clouds darkening on the horizon and the waves picking up, you can rejoice because you know there is something magnificent on the other side of the storm and regardless of its intensity - you are never alone.

God Wants You to Know...Him

2010-08-02T13:10:00.004-05:00

I received an email today, one of many that I often receive, that started with "On this day, God wants you to know...". Most of the time I dismiss these emails. At best I'll give them a cursory scan but rarely will I delve into them with any enthusiasm. Why? Because I've found that most of the people sending me these emails have placed me on an automatic circulation list because I've become to them a "God person". My regular scriptural quotes and biblical views have painted me in their minds as one who would appreciate their automatic electronic deposits. These individuals very often also circulate "This day in your horoscope" and "Today your palm says..." type emails. Since I'm a "bible thumper", I will obviously appreciate the "God wants you to know..." emails.

Further, I see these efforts as a true longing for truth that each of us has innately within us. Every one of us was created to seek God's face and yet so many of us choose to seek elsewhere. If you've subscribed to these types of lists hear me out before getting upset with me. I also subscribe to scriptural emails that deposit daily in my email account from various ministries. Sometimes I have time to read them, sometimes I do not. But I have always viewed these as supplementary reading and encouragement, not my daily dose of God's word. Very often I get the sense that my emailing friends are sending me what is to them, the only connection to God's Word they may have in a day/week and this saddens me.

Do I sound harsh, sarcastic, even judgmental? If anything these emails from the above anger me. Not at the individuals who send them - but at an adversary who has so blinded us. At a culture where we have made Christianity so comfortable that the lines are so blurred that one could pick and choose their spiritual enlightenment as if at a smorgasbord or a drive-thru. "Don't have time for real Word study so I'll get in this little nugget" or "I'll have a little Christianity and some cute horoscope/witchcraft with some tossed eastern philosophy and a side of zen - that should satisfy my craving!" The one who seeks to rend our souls and pull them into eternal torment with himself could not be more pleased with this and a Loving God who cries for us to simply open our eyes and who has given us everything we need to see and walk away from hell sadly shakes his head as we dabble in cute palm readings and "harmless" devils.

I'd like to send one of these emails back to all of my friends to whom I have concern, not as an accusing finger of judgment but as a clarion call. It would say "Today God DOES want you to know...HIM". Everything He has ever done has always revolved around relationship with Him. Creation: so that we would exist - with him. Eden: so that we could walk - with Him. The cross: so that we could be redeemed - back to Him. He's even coming back to get us - to take us, where? To be with Him! The whole Bible is about coming to know and walking with Him. I don't know if there is "extraterrestrial life" in this universe, but even if there is not, I have no trouble with the concept that I serve and love a God whose love for me is so immeasurably vast that he created all of this, just for our wonderment. Billions of stars burst into song, exploding into life and dying before Him. All creation testifies to the glory of His Name and His splendor. And he invites us, daily, to know Him, to walk with Him, to let Him show us the wonders of His love for us.

This isn't done by a daily emailing. Like any love affair, it only happens with time well spent together.

For the Working

2010-07-20T15:30:00.000-05:00

"Servants, respectfully obey your earthly masters but always with an eye to obeying the real master, Christ. Don't just do what you have to do to get by, but work heartily, as Christ's servants doing what God wants you to do. And work with a smile on your face, always keeping in mind that no matter who happens to be giving the orders, you're really serving God. Good work will get you good pay from the Master, regardless of whether you are slave or free. Masters, it's the same with you. No abuse, please, and no threats. You and your servants are both under the same Master in heaven. He makes no distinction between you and them." Ephesians 6:5-9

It is easy for me to skip over verses like these or to easily dismiss them as having little relevance. But this is where the Holy Spirit grips me and reminds me that His Word is eternal and that all of it has relevance throughout time. In Matthew 5, Jesus said that heaven and earth would pass away before this Word did. It is permanent and the soil that we walk around on, that we tend to view as the "permanent" is actually the temporary and fading. The stars that we nightly glance up at, are failing and this Word will outlast them. These verses, the very ones above, have greater permanence and resound through eternity with greater influence and impact than cosmic phenomena light years away or even the elemental fusions of our own life giving sun. There is complete relevance in all of God's Word throughout the book, we simply have to open ourselves to understanding it and finding its application.

In the verses above, Paul is talking to servants and masters, slave owners and slaves. Both groups very common in the Mediterranean Roman Empire in which Paul lived and which affected and influenced every aspect of society throughout all of the know countries and lands on the earth at that time. Sometimes we have to close our eyes and place ourselves very literally in the times, footsteps, smells, and sights of the authors.

Paul was writing to a culture in which the ownership of slaves was common. Middle and upperclass citizens had them throughout to assist with everything necessary for the running of the home or estate. They were nursemaids, cooks, stable attendants, gardeners, plowhands, masons, heavy laborers, practically everything one could imagine. Some were terribly mistreated as you imagine our own nation's terrible history with slavery would indicate. Some were brought into the home as extended family, treated more as the butler in some of the movies we've watched. Regardless, these were the working class of Paul's day, the societal norm of the blue collar worker - the ones getting the work done upon whom the wheels of a society at large depended. Most, if not all, of us would identify.

We'd identify not only with the concept of the working class, but many of us would identify with the notion of not being treated well at one point or another by those in authority over us. Some of us find ourselves in position of authority and therefore find ourselves dealing with individuals for whom we oversee who do not treat us well - either through lack of integrity or through lack of respect. We thankfully do not have to face the vestiges of slavery but we do face a society of entitlement and excessive availibility of litigation. Unionization and administrative policies have both contributed to abuses that have at one time or another permitted excesses in favor of corrupt management or equally dishonest labor practices. The pendulum is ever in motion and typically at its apex either the employee or the employer gains the upper hand. These ever shifting grounds make it all the more critical for us as believers and followers of Christ to be firmly grounded on His Word and on what He would have us do in our jobs and places of employment.

First we must recognize that our employment is not our source, our provision, our living. God is our source. He is our provision. You could lose your job tomorrow. Does that mean your life is over?   Of course not. Your Father has promised to meet your needs and He has never failed once on any of His promises. Your employement, whether it is the culmination of years of academic study and preparation or something you stumbled into, is only a means for God to use you and bring His provision into your life. I once heard a statement that revolutionized the way I consider my work related income: My earnings are simply seed. With that seed - if I am obedient and follow God's will and ways - He can truly bless me with so much blessing I can't contain it.

Secondly, the job IS NOT your life. This has been such a difficult lesson for me to learn and to be honest - I'm still learning it. I don't know if it is just me or men in general but I put my identity in my work. When someone tells me "anyone could do your job" I take offense because I know differently. I strive for excellence, to improve the condition around me and to innovate change. Most around me are content to simply show up and draw a paycheck and my work ethic tends to be against this grain of thought, particularly in an institution as large as the one I work for. I can't shake this either. It is engrained deeply within me, very much to my frustration at times. I can't number the times I've pulled my hair out because supervision wants only a mediocre product and I know it can be so much better with just a little effort, a slight tweak.

Third, we need to start realizing our places of employment are very often the mission fields that God has laid before us. I've written thousands of words in this blog about the work that God has been preparing in my heart regarding the hurting, the orphan, the widowed, the needy. But so many of those people are right around us daily - behind smiles or frowns or even non-expressions. In jeans or slacks, dress-shoes or tennis-shoes. We have to be Jesus to everyone around us as the opportunities present themselves and when you spend 1/3 of your waking day with people away from your family and church family - God certainly has a plan in store for you to be salt and light in the sphere of influence He has placed you.

Dissecting the above verses, I was struck by something significant. Certainly they are an encouragement to do my best at my workplace for God. But this was a cerebral acknowlegement for me. Much like "better be good, God's watching". What impacted me was a study into the Greek. Verse 5 above in showing how we are to relate to our masters (employers/management) the King James translation states that we are to "be obedient...[to them]...with fear and trembling with singleness of heart as unto Christ". This phrase bothered me and would bother most, particularly those who regularly suffer abuses, attitudes, or lack of respect at the hands of managers, directors, administrators, etc. Fear my boss? I get "as unto Christ" but what is this "trembling" all about?

The greek for the word "fear" here has two meanings. One is to be in terror, but the other is to respect as a wife respects her husband. Flip back a few verses to Ephesians 5:22-33 for marrital respect and servitude. Further, the phrase "singleness of heart" denotes a focus of intent, a generosity of effort. Picture, for a moment, someone close to you who has hurt you deeply - a close friend or relative. If you were sitting in your living room and they unexpectedly opened the door and came in demanding they needed a drink, would you gush in love and generosity towards them or would you be somewhat stand-offish and cold, withdrawn and harsh? If you helped them at all would you show them the cabinet and sink or shuffle quietly into the kitchen and silently hand them a glass half-full? What if Jesus himself were to walk through that same door and sit down on your couch asking or a drink? Would you drop everything and serve? Offer him a cool drink, mix up some juice, something to eat, prepare a meal? Can you see the difference in 'generosity of effort'?  On one hand we have the half-hearted and begrudging requirement of one who feels responsible to perform an action. On the other we see the fervor of one who passionately focuses on the objective at hand and meets the need to the best of their capacity.

"But they don't appreciate me" or "I haven't had a raise in three years" or "I give way more than I earn". Ever think these thoughts? I literally have had each of these crawl through my mind recently. "Well, I give them my work, they owe me". Remember who we're working for. It's not for our employer. They simply need a body and if yours isn't there they will find one to replace it. It shouldn't simply be for yourself, because God has a much more broad plan for your employment than simply meeting your financial needs. Rather we are to work "as unto Christ". "But my boss doesn't act like Christ". By no means are we ever to do anything unethical or blindly follow another into sin, but in as much as is possible, we are model Christ to both those above and beneath us.  And we can always praise God for the James 1:3-4 patience that is perfecting us! If we need to see this in action - read chapters 37-41 of Genesis for the life of Joseph and we'll find the abuses we've suffered small in comparison.

So, when was the last time you looked past the face of your boss and saw Jesus?

"Lord Send Me..."

2010-06-26T05:46:00.001-05:00

"Blessed (happy, fortunate, to be envied) is the man whom You discipline and instruct, O Lord, and teach out of Your law" Psalm 94:12

"For the Lord corrects and disciplines everyone whom He loves, and He punishes, even scourges, every son whom He accepts and welcomes to His heart and cherishes." Hebrews 12:6

I open this writing with these scriptures because I have recently been corrected in my thinking by the Lord, even disciplined. When we think of discipline we always think of the unpleasant but we forget the picture painted in Psalms 23 of our Father as the Shepherd equipped with the rod and staff. These instruments "comfort" the psalmist. A shepherd used these to guide, herd, and generate necessary course corrections for the safety and well-being of the sheep. So it is with discipline and instruction. They are necessary for course correction in our hearts and thinking for our benefit and well being because our Father loves us that much. Very recently I underwent course correction in my thinking regarding loving others and compassionate outreach.

God has been working in my heart for some time to engage me in the needs of others, to bring me to a place where I can be utilized to effectively minister to people. This has entailed prayer for an increased capacity to love others, for compassion, for boldness, for wisdom, and for tremendous growth. To look back at where I was in my heart and attitudes and see where God has moved me from and where He is moving me towards is exciting. One of the more exciting and serious aspects is that I know I am called to minister on an international level through short term missions work. By this I mean that God has spoken into my heart some very specific works that He wants me to participate in, works that will require travel to foreign nations, ministering to orphans, widows, and impoverished peoples in HIV ravaged countries, bringing the Word, supplies, and hope to what can only be described as an indescribably desperate scenario where death walks nearly unchecked and superstition, misinformation, and demonic stronghold have nearly choked out the concept of the "family unit" as very many parents are dead or dying of AIDS.

My spirit has gripped James 1:27 which states that "Pure and genuine religion in the sight of God the Father means caring for orphans and widows in their distress...". My heart resonates with the call in Isaiah 6:8 which says "Then I heard the Lord asking, “Whom should I send as a messenger to this people? Who will go for us?” I said, “Here I am. Send me.” In fact, my passion for these causes have grown so strong that I had begun to ignore some basic truths that God needed to remind me of, truths that are worthy of all to be continually in rememberance of.

In Luke 10:25-37 we read the familiar passage of the Good Samaritan. Key to this passage is a question that should continually be in all of our minds and hearts; one that we forget and too often ignore. Who is our neighbor? The whole point of that parable was to teach us that our neighbor is anyone around us in need. Around us - daily they are all around us. Jesus told this very direct parable to a group of men who knew how to give generously. They knew how to give in full view of others to causes that were popular, were on the rise, were gaining attention and notoriety. But their giving wasn't "giving" at all. It was purchase. With their very public giving, they purchased for themselves respect, they purchased admiration, they purchased admittance to the community leadership clubs. But what would have struck them about this story was the fact that a social outcast by their societal standards was demonstrated to have behaved in a more loving and compassionate manner than any of the "acceptable" and "respected" members of their culture to meet the need of a complete stranger who came upon their path as they went about their day to day business.

Further, he didn't make a big deal of it. There was no fanfare, no pageantry. There was the injured and there was the innkeeper and these were the witnesses. The one in need and the one with the physical goods to supply those needs and the Samaritan put the two of them together with compassion. Nothing else was required. The Samaritan didn't run back to his home church, take up a collection, start a food drive, or even seek to put together a team of physicians for a "those-who-are-waylaid-while-traveling" ministry. He was in the present, in the now, the hands of God to the person in his path.

Now it should not be thought that missions teams, food drives, and the raising of funds is outside of God's will. In fact these are the very means by which the greatest of needs can be met. But how many of us rely soley on these methods to reach a dying, hurting, and hell-bound world. A mission team won't help the local widow. A food drive won't help the co-worker struggling with depression. The only common denominator of assistance in both of those scenarios is us, the compassionate Christian individual. One of the mindsets that God so gently and graciously steered me out of was the notion that I could not fully experience compassionate living until I had touched the problem of the needy, set my feet on foreign soil and touched skin tones different than my own, listening to tongues I didn't understand. Then I would know the fullness of compassion. But that is putting a condition on love. If you live 6,000 miles away my heart is open to you. What about if you live 6 miles away? God's love is unconditional and the single mom hurts just as the orphan just as the addict just as the widow just as...

In Mark 16:15 we are told to go into the whole world and preach the gospel - literally to share the good news of life and redemption. But how many of us immediately mentally leap to far off lands? The "whole world" - it starts at your front door. It is between your driveway and work. It is at your desk, by your locker, at your work station, next to your kid's sports practice, just outside your church, in the restaurant, at the school and everywhere in between. Should we support international missions work? Absolutely! Beyond that, even pray about whether God would have you go! But in the doing so, do not forget that you have a continual field of work around you every single day. "The least of these" - the broken, the hungry, the abandoned, the abused - they are all around us here just as they are in other nations.

The thing God has been so kind and so good to disciple me in is that it does not have to be one or the other, but it SHOULD be both that move our hearts to compassionate action. We simply have to have the courage to pray "Lord send me" into the mission fields of our own lives.

Dangerous Compassion

2010-06-26T03:36:00.001-05:00

What is compassion? What does the face of compassion look like? I used to think I knew and only within the last few years did I begin to realize I had no concept of the word. Like many in this nation, I think I believed myself to be compassionate. I felt the twinge of nagging sorrow for those affected in other nations by calamity, natural disasters, wars, or pestilence. I occassionally tossed in my dollars to support the efforts of the missionary works or the relief efforts to those far off locations as I felt responsible to do something. I later learned these offerings were based in guilt. Guilt for my willful turning from the sufferings of others. These "offerings" were the purchase price to alleviate the naggings of my conscience, to quiet the small quiet voice of the Spirit within me.

But this notion of compassion will not suffice when one begins to earnestly seek God's face for a compassionate heart, for the ability to love others above themselves. This has been the necessary prayer for myself because I've come to realize that God has called each of us to serve. Serve Him and serve each other. To do this effectively we must love and to love we must relate - compassionately. Not everyone around you is experiencing mountain-top living all of the time and when they are in their valleys, compassion is required to reach into their lives, to encourage and partner with them in prayer. To pray for compassion is to pray for God to lay your heart open to the wounds and hurts of others, to feel their suffering and pain. This is true of the neighbor down the street who has lost a loved one, it is true of the addict itching for the needle, it is true of the orphan in the far off land. Compassion does not have limitations, parameters, or geographic boundaries.

We tend to think of the Old Testament as being filled with God's judgement but there are countless scriptures that speak of God's compassion. In doing a quick word study the Hebrew word for God's compassion towards us means to love deeply and to have tender affection towards. In the New Testament we read on several occassions where Jesus was moved with compassion. This Greek word means to be moved to one's very core being, to be moved to one's bowels, their very depth of being. This is God's/Jesus'/The Spirit's compasssion towards us. It moves Him to the depth of His being with tender affection towards us. Compassion moves. It does not permit a stationary reaction. It moves those experiencing it. Moves them to action, to deed, to alter the circumstance. And as Spirit filled believers, this is God's total design and desire for us on this sphere. That we would be moved to change and heal the devestation that hell has unleashed upon men in hatred against God and mankind. We are the ones empowered for this work. We are the ones with the ability to see this done.

But the prayer for compassion is dangerous. It is dangerous to your known way of life and your fleshly/carnal nature. In fact it is deadly. Much of what I have valued has had to die and it is not an easy death. This flesh is continually with us, continually gasping for ressurection in attitudes and intents, in the very way in which we seek to place our needs and desires above others'. When Jesus said "pick up your cross and follow" he was literally saying "stake down your flesh and follow on the path that I have prepared for you to walk even when you can't see where it's going". Compassion can only be fully functional and effective in the heart of one who has done this, who has staked down their flesh, put themselves aside, and is ready to walk in the love that Jesus walked out towards humanity.

Additionally there is an adversary that takes notice of these shifting allegiances. Suddenly strongholds that were present for him to operate through are cast down. Temptations that quickly disabled or incapacitated are scarcely noticed. Increased pressures and desperate measures are required. Compassion is the heart of God within you, "the sleeping giant awakening" so-to-speak. Giants draw attention and make large targets. Strongholds in your heart or your thinking will not be relinquished without conflict. The enemy will fight to retain the footholds in your life, but when we equip ourselves and resist as stated in Ephesians 6 and James 4, he will lose.

When this compassion takes hold of us and we begin to see people through Gods eyes, see souls as God sees them, then this compassion is dangerous to hell itself. This compassion is the motivating force that shakes the very foundations of hell as God's people work to bring the light of the Word and the Love of God into the lives of the lost and dying, whether they are 6,000 or 6 miles away. This compassion will move us to the very depths of our own being, and we will find ourselves in motion. As stated, compassion does not permit a stationary stance but requires reaction in the face of suffering.

I'll close with a quote from Fields of the Fatherless by Tom Davis, a book that I strongly recommend anyone seeking a better understanding of compassion read:

"Compassion challenges us to cry out with those in misery, to mourn with those who are lonely, to weep with those in tears. Compassion requires us to be weak with the weak, vulnerable with the vulnerable, and powerless with the powerless. Compassion means full immersion in the condition of being human."

This is exactly what Jesus did when he came to this earth as fully God, fully man, and exactly what he is asking each of us to do as well.

The Power of Submission through Humility

2010-06-15T09:37:00.007-05:00

Humility is a word that I, like many I'd imagine, struggle with. What is it to be humble? I always envision an impoverished monk in burlap with a rope belt meditating at a monastery. Or I envision someone who always has their eyes cast down, never wanting attention drawn to themselves. I don't think I'd be too far removed from the erroneous notions that most hold of what humility is. What if we were to consider that Jesus was perfectly humble? What if we pictured our same perfectly humble Jesus violently driving money changers out of the temple? What does this do to our notion of humility and why is it important?

Does it surprise us that submission and humility are linked? It shouldn't. Submission cannot occur without humility and both are required of us. We are repeatedly instructed to submit to God and to each other throughout scripture so humility then becomes less of a perplexing notion to leave unanswered and more of a critical component of our daily walk. True submission cannot occur without humility or with pride. Pride and humility are not compatible - they are polar opposites.

Even the core greek words from which they were translated are in complete opposition to each other. Pride comes from the greek word "huperephanos" in which the central greek word "huper" is to "place above, in the stead of, very chiefest, exceeding in". People with excessive pride seek to be placed above others, in the stead of others, in the chiefest positions.

Submit comes from the greek "hupotasso" in which the central root word is "hupo" which means "under, beneath, below, inferior position or condition, moderately". The greek words huper and hupo are direct opposites. People in submission (or walking in humility) place themselves in inferior positions or in positions of servitude purposefully and willfully. They walk in moderation, not the excess of the proud, they place themselves, in their minds and hearts, in service to others. Jesus modeled this throughout his entire ministry on earth and demonstrated it in full for his disciples when he stripped down and washed their feet, a job for a lowly servant, not the King of Kings, Co-creator of Existence, powerful and mighty Son of the living God.

James 4:6-10 says:
God resists the proud, but gives grace to the humble. Therefore submit to God. Resist the devil and he will flee from you. Draw near to God and He will draw near to you. Cleanse your hands, you sinners; and purify your hearts, you double-minded. Lament and mourn and weep! Let your laughter be turned to mourning and your joy to gloom. Humble yourselves in the sight of the Lord and He will lift you up.

I Peter 5:5-7 states:
Likewise you younger people, submit yourselves to your elders. Yes, all of you be submissive to one another, and be clothed with humility, for ‘God resists the proud, but gives grace to the humble’. Therefore humble yourselves under the mighty hand of God, that He may exalt you in due time, casting all your care upon Him, for He cares for you.

From these, we can begin to see humility is important to God and that He is opposed to the proud. The greek for God’s resistance to the proud here comes from the word "antitassomai" which means to "range oneself against, to oppose". Core to this greek word is the word, "tasso", which means to "arrange in an orderly manner, assign, appoint determine, ordain and set". We begin to get the picture that God literally, sets Himself against, in the fashion of placing opposition in an orderly and determined manner, to those who, in their own thinking, are chiefest, think themselves above, desire to be shined upon or illuminated for attention’s sake. This extends to those who refuse others because of some perceived deficiency or flaw or lack of ability.

In contrast He gives grace, which entails His divine influence on our hearts and our lives, wellness, joy, favor, and benefit, to the humble – those who in their thinking are base, of lowly estate and degree. This should not be confused with people who think they are of no value or worth, but rather these are those who in the perspective of God’s majesty, might, grace, mercy, and eternal values, recognize the fact that no one has anything apart from what God has granted, given, or blessed us with and are eternally thankful and grateful. It is to these that God pours out His favor, influence, and blessing - His grace.

But as stated, submission and humility cannot exist within a heart that harbors pride. A further study into the greek for pride, "huperephanos", also links the root "huper" to greek words "phaino" and "phos". The word phaino is to lighten, as in spotlight, shine, to appear, to seem. Related to this word is the word phos, which means luminous. Do we not begin to see the character attributes of the angel of light in the study of pride? As love is the core and defining characteristic of our God, so is pride the defining and core characteristic of Satan. Because pride is such a satanic force in the lives of people, because it keeps people from acknowledging their need for God, because it tore heaven, and because it continues to destroy hearts and lives on earth, we can now understand why God says he will set Himself and arrange Himself in a very determined manner against those who harbor it. Would anyone really want the Creator of Existence, the Most Holy and Mighty God in determined opposition to them?

How do we overcome this deadly force? Lets go back to James 4 where the Word states “'God resists the proud but gives grace to the humble’ therefore submit to God. Resist the devil and he will flee from you.” God gives us the answer to pride in our lives; submission to Him. Place yourself in submission to Him and pride won’t have rule in your life. Submit to his Word, submit to what He has instructed you to do, both in his Word and in your heart. Submit.

Further we are told to resist the devil. Resist here in the greek is a different word than the one used to show God's opposition to the proud. Here it is the word "anthistemi". This word further comes from two greek words "anti" and "histemi". The word anti is familiar to us in our own language. The word histemi means to stand, abide, appoint, covenant, establish, hold up, lay, present, set up, stand by, stand forth, stand still, stand up. Instead of the armed, planned and determined opposition God puts forth against the proud, this is a digging in, a trenching in and establishing against assault. This is what we do when the enemy comes against us. Why? Because we are not omniscient. We do not always know which direction he will come from. So we dig in. We entrench. We brace for impact, like the Roman phalanx - shields up. He cannot penetrate this shield of faith. Ephesians 6:16 says ALL of his fiery darts are quenched by it. So he tries from another direction. Another tactic. Finances, God provides. Sickness, God heals. Relationships, Love overcomes.

When we do this, we know from the Word that the devil must flee. He must. He has no alternative. Why? Because he is a coward. He loves attacking the saints when they do not know the Word or their own method of delivance and protection. Remember, he prowls as a roaring lion, looking for the weaknesses. A lion does not hunt by running up to the herd, looking for the biggest animal and going head to head with it. Lions hunt by craft, by camoflauge, by getting attention away from themselves, by looking for the weaknesses and exploiting them in the weakest and easiest to catch. Satan is looking for the weaknesses in you to exploit. He hunts you by craft and camoflauge, by getting your eyes to look elsewhere than the Word, than Jesus. When we dig in, when we set our foundation in the Word and trench in and prepare to stand (resist) against him, the devil, despite even his own desires, will flee every time. But in order to effectively resist in this fashion, we must first be in full submission to God.

Further, according to 1 Peter 5, we are to be clothed with humility. The greek for this is the word "eckomboomai", which is to get dressed for work, to put on the apron, the work clothes, the appropriate apparel to get the job done. We are to put on humility in preparation of getting the job or work done. Also implied in this is clothing relating to station, identifying the individual. Today, an apron would identify a cook, a hardhat identifies a construction or plant worker, a uniform identifies law or military. Humility identifies God’s people. One cannot have true humility with self-seeking pride or without self-sacrificing love.

Humility, then, is a garment to be put on daily, a choice to be made. The greek for the word humble is "tapeinos" and implies a debased and cast down state. We are not cast down or debased by others, but we are depressing the flesh, casting it down ourselves. This is the conscious choice of the humble, and is what causes humility to become such a powerfully effective force in our lives. It is the true power of not being in chained to the whims of our own flesh, but in putting ourselves in submission to God, in whom all things are possible, in whom we are more than conquerors, in whom is the mightiest power of all heaven and earth, physical and spirit, seen and unseen. This is daily taking up our cross, crucifying and staking down the flesh, and following our Lord. It is not something forced upon people by others. The most down trodden person can still be overflowing with destructive pride and completely powerless in their situation. We choose to be humble, to put down our flesh for the sake of Christ and others. We daily choose to let the offenses of others raise our flesh up in indignation and defense or to find no footing or seed-bed in us by the determination to put our own flesh down.

We are to clothe ourselves with this humility, not to become stepping stones of the world or punching bags for the enemy, but so that we can truly rise up in power and effectiveness against the enemy, shaking the very kingdom of darkness around us, transforming the world and affecting the people that are within our sphere of influence. When we humble ourselves under God, he promises to exalt us and empower us to do the works that He created us for. It is in the power of humility and the state of submission to Him that we are truly free and truly mightiest in the Lord.

Submission - It Starts at Home.

2010-06-11T13:01:00.004-05:00

Continuing in Ephesians I come to a passage that, to be honest, I've been looking forward to like a sick man looks forward to medicine. It might not taste good but he knows it is going to help him become healthier. Submission to others. Not my favorite topic as I have wrestled with pride and even a surprising internal backlash against a sense of inferiority for most of my life. These two facts have often left me described as strong willed, stubborn, a loner, and even "not-a-team-player". Of course I've rationalized it all away to the fact that I'm much more efficient when I work on my own, I tend to be more creative without interuption, etc. How does the old saying go "no man is an island"...?

What this really boils down to for me is submission. Pride and humility are at the heart of it and further discussion will be forthcoming on these, but submission is key. I've never had a problem submitting to others as long as I understood their place in the hierarchy of things, for example, a supervisor, a pastor. I'll even submit to fellow brothers and sisters in the Lord to avoid stepping on toes. For example, if someone is running the skits during VBS and I think they are out of touch with the kids but those placed in charge of skits are really passionate about them and not listening to suggestions, my philosophy has always been "OK, we'll do it your way, even if it doesn't work". (Not sure if that qualifies as submission.) But if given enough "heads-up" I'd rather avoid this scenario altogether and work alone rather than submit, and this has left me quite alone for many years. Disconnected, uninvolved, discontented. I think back to so many instances when I was nearly consumed with bitterness over the ways in which I had been genuinely and significantly hurt by careless or thoughtless actions of others within the Church and there was no good opportunity to reconcile on my behalf because I was already holding these people at arms distance.

But even this doesn't really get to the heart of the matter for me. I've always been quick to forgive others - somehow that is a character trait that I've been blessed with. You can genuinely wound me, but if you sincerely try to make it right and we reconcile, I'll work with you and we'll be brothers in the Lord regardless. However, something changes when I walk through my own front door. The rules change and expectations are different. The truth is I've spent far too many years walking through those door posts and slumping my shoulders from the struggles of the outside and completely letting all guard down, expecting to exert no further effort towards anyone or anything once safe under my own roof and through the past year, God has been showing me that I've had it completely backwards. I don't go "off to war" out in the world and return the exhausted provider for my family. The battle is not "out there", it starts right within me and ends within me, daily.

From my first awakening, I have a conscious choice to make - who will I live this day for? Myself, or others? I can go to work and do a great job meeting all demands and expectations of those above me and still have lived the entirety of the day for only myself. Then I can return home tired, spent, and still living for myself, de-energized to an expectant family and have nothing to give them and wound them with indifference, impatience, and critical speech. In doing so I not only wound my children and rob them of the possitive growth and affection they crave, but I strike at the heart of my very own home, my bride - and here is where I've been needing this medicine.

Ephesians 5:22-24 reads:
For wives, this means submit to your husbands as to the Lord. For a husband is the head of his wife as Christ is the head of the church. He is the Savior of his body, the church. As the church submits to Christ, so you wives should submit to your husbands in everything.

Now why would a woman, specifically my wife, desire to "submit" to the man I just described above? The word submit, in the greek is the word "hypotasso" and had two uses. It was a greek military term that meant to "arrange troop divisions under the command of a leader". In a voluntary sense, it means to "have an attitude of giving in cooperating, assuming responsibility, and carrying a burden". Again, why would anyone desire to submit to one with the attitudes and actions displayed above? I wouldn't. This is where, as husband of the home, it becomes critical to follow through to the next verses because we get so hung up on the introductory sentence, we miss the meat of the whole statement here.

Verses 25-30
For husbands, this means love your wives, just as Christ loved the church. He gave up his life for her to make her holy and clean, washed by the cleansing of God’s word. He did this to present her to himself as a glorious church without a spot or wrinkle or any other blemish. Instead, she will be holy and without fault. In the same way, husbands ought to love their wives as they love their own bodies. For a man who loves his wife actually shows love for himself. No one hates his own body but feeds and cares for it, just as Christ cares for the church. And we are members of his body.

Now I have read this times without count but there are truths here that really need to capture the hearts of men, mine included. Do we fully comprehend how Christ loved and is still loving the Church? Most of us think we do. Part of the answer is found in these verses. He gave up his life for the church to make her holy and clean, by the cleansing of the Word. This love does not always run with natural inclination or depend on how you are "feeling" at the moment. It is modeled for us in the example of how Christ loved the church, gave himself for it. When the Word says he gave himself for the Church, the greek for "gave" literally means "to deliver into the hands of another, to give into one's power or use, to give one's self up". Men, when is the last time you gave yourself over to your bride's use or power to be used as she saw fit.....WITHOUT complaint/grumbling/poor attitude? These negate the whole thing. I can't tell you the number of times my own bride has reminded me that doing something for her really doesn't mean a whole lot if my heart is in the wrong place.

I'm not referring to taking the trash out or feeding the pets or any of the hundreds of other menial chores that dictate our lives - though every one of these are important baby-steps. I'm talking about truly dying to yourself to live for your wife and family, to serve them, protect them, be the stability that God designed you as the husband to be. Scared? Intimidated by these demands? God wouldn't have put it in his Word if He wouldn't ordain and empower you to do it. I look at my beautiful sleeping children every morning and wonder how I can possibly be the father they deserve but I am continually reminded that God knew them before he formed them, before he formed me, and he knew the father he wished them to be raised under and will empower me to train them up properly when I partner with their mother and seek His face.

Further, just as Jesus cleanses all of us by His word, eradicating disease, sin, and every filthy, deadly and dirty thing from us that would keep us from being spotless, unblemished and pure before him - we are called to wash our homes, our families, our wives in that same Word. The greek here is literally to bathe, in the sense of cleansing the blood out of wounds. I am to cleanse my bride, to bathe her and our home in the Word. The greek for "word" here is the the word "rhema" which is "that which has been uttered by the living voice, the spoken word".

It is evident that God's Word needs to be on my lips in my home, regularly and continually and over my wife and children in prayer. Further, just as Christ's action of cleansing his Church with the Word permits him to present a body without blemish, to himself, so my action of doing likewise will build up and purify my bride and my family. Verse 27 in the KJV uses the word "glorious" in describing the Church Christ presents and verse 28 husbands are commanded to do likewise. The word for glorious in the greek is "edoxos" and it means to hold in high esteem, to make honorable, notable, and of high repute.

It is my responsibility as husband to my bride to build her up in this manner. My wife should be held in high esteem by others directly as a result of my actions, my cleansing with the Word through prayer and in the manner in which I speak of her when away from the home. Praise of her should continually be on my lips. The "old ball and chain" joking that occurs should never cross my lips nor should I long dwell in its presence. Freeing her of insecurity by continually praising her in public is one of the most valuable gifts a man can give his wife. The really crazy thing is that in taking such protective care of my bride, I ultimately take care of myself because too often we forget - we very truly are one joined flesh. So too, in taking care of each other, we ultimate take care of the Body of Christ and ourselves!

Uncommonly Wise

2010-06-05T21:37:00.002-05:00

Ephesians 5:15-17
"Look carefully then how you walk! Live purposefully and worthily and accurately, not as the unwise and witless, but as wise (sensible, intelligent people), Making the very most of the time [buying up each opportunity], because the days are evil. Therefore do not be vague and thoughtless and foolish, but understanding and firmly grasping what the will of the Lord is."

Wisdom is something I pray for continually. I count on James 1:5 which states if any lack wisdom ask for it, because God gives it liberally. I've read Proverbs completely though and regularly draw from it. To be honest, I need to read it again and again because there are so many timeless truths in that book that are still daily applicable. Things that I have often wished I had thought of in the moment of decision making or at the time I was doing something that I later regretted. I know wisdom starts with the fear (reverence, respect, and awe) of the Lord as proclaimed in Proverbs 9:10. I know it is a treasure and a companion to be sought.

I know God was absolutely pleased when Solomon asked for it above everything else on the earth. Think of it...this man was given cart blanche an invitation to anything he wanted in the earth - something that hadn't happened since Adam. What does he ask for? A character quality. An intangible. An elusive. God was so thrilled and not only gave this to him but poured out so much wealth on the man he was the talk of nations.

In reading through the verses of Ephesians today one translation starts verse 15 with the phrase "walk circumspectly". This word is uncommon to me so I had to look it up. The greek here is the word "akribos" and it means to "exactly, accurately, dilligently". To "grace-minded" believers such as myself, these words are enemies. I'm supposed to have a little wiggle room for failures and grace to forgive these, right? I get nervous when confronting accuracy and precision, perfection and exact requirement. What I find interesting is how our failure to walk in this manner is linked to a lack of wisdom. So how do I avoid this pitfall? How do I walk wisely, excactly, with precision. The answers are in following verses.

Verse 16 shows us to make the most of the time, to buy up every opportunity. Verse 16 in the King James translation reads "Redeeming the time because the days are evil". The greek word for redeem is "exagorazo" and one of it's meanings is "to make wise and sacred use of every opportunity for doing good, so that zeal and well doing are as it were the purchase money by which we make the time our own". Wow! Purchasing time with zeal and well doing. I've never thought about being able to purchase time. I spend it, waste it, if I'm wise invest it. But here I am to purchase it. This is directly tied to being wise and walking "circumspectly"

Again in verse 17 we are admonished to not be unwise - but to understand what the will of the Lord is. This has always seemed like one of those elusive truths to me. To "understand the will of the Lord". This is the mountaintop of faith to climb - the test of your walk to gauge yourself against. Are you where you should be in your relationship with Him? Do you understand his will for you? It's always been something to be grasped, something to be reaching for, striving for, but very often something just out of reach. This is because I have been looking outward instead of inward. I have been looking for the booming voice in the clouds, the pillar of fire by night, the confirmng word from a church sermon instead of listening for the small quiet voice confirmed by His Word. The greek word for understand is "syniemi" and it means to "to join together, to put the perception with the thing percieved". Its root word is the word "syn" which simply means "with, beside, accompany"

Understanding the will of the Lord is my bringing my perceptions and thoughts in line with his. Where are his perceptions and thoughts? Never more evident than in His Word for sure, but also in our hearts as we meditate on Him and regularly and daily communicate with him. This is where our once a day prayers in the morning or at night don't cut it. We HAVE to live moment by moment in His grace and in His presence. Why? "Because the days are evil". What is so amazingly awesome is that He desires to live every second of every day in this communion with us!

These three simple verses contain within them a series of inter-related truths that are powerful and essential to the Christian walk. We are to walk out our lives and strive for accuracy and exactness, with purpose which we do by seizing every opportunity to do good with zeal - this is wisdom. This is the same wisdom that brings us into and through which we will discover the will, direction and path of our lives as God has designed them from the start - understanding his will. These are the good works he has prepared for us from the beginning as proclaimed in Ephesians 2:10.

Wisdom is not a cerebral infusion, but an expression of the heart. When we understand this, though we won't even notice it, others will find us wise. And God will begin to pour out on you with a smile.

Unsuspectedly Coveteous

2010-05-29T21:01:00.005-05:00

Ephesians 5:5
For this you know with certainty, that no immoral or impure person or covetous man, who is an idolater, has an inheritance in the kingdom of Christ and God.

This is one of those "not me" verses of Bible; the ones where we read them and think to ourselves "thank goodness that's not me". We tend to gloss over those verses. We know idolators and those practicing witchcraft and those who blaspheme the Holy Spirit will find no entrance into Heaven and with assurance we confidently write off those tresspasses as sin we are in no danger of being convicted of. Had I not been recently gripped by the writings of a fellow brother on Thanksgiving I would have probably let this verse go very quickly into my mind, process for a few moments, and back out of my thoughts and that would have been the end of it. I'm not an idolater - I don't worship idols, bow to a Buddha, chant to figurines, etc. I like to think I'm not immoral or impure and I regularly pray forgiveness over myself and protection over my thoughts and my mind. I don't desire to take or possess what others have out from under them so I'm no Ebenezer Scrooge so I'm not coveteous. I'm clear - next verse...

Definition from Strong's Concordance
greek word "pleonektes" = covetous - one eager to have more, to cling to a thing

In all honesty, what percentage of the American culture would NOT be defined by the above definition - eager to have more...clinging to things. Every one of us would love to answer "not I". I certainly would. "But being covetous is being evil and desiring to take from others..." Not by the above definitions - not by the literal greek translations of the word. "But I don't cling to anything!" Really? Give your car to the next person walking down the street. Sell all of your televisions and unsubscribe to cable and use all of the money saved to help feed homeless people. Writing this makes even myself cringe - and I know I have a long way to grow because I too am clinging.

Covetousness is simply the non-stop never-ending desire for more and more and it is the culture of this country. It is the epitome of the famous quote from multi-millionaire iron-magnate Rockefeller when asked how much money was enough? "One dollar more". It is you and I continually wishing for the latest, newest television, better computer, new appliance, replacement vehicle, better home, more clothes to replace the ones we don't wear. It is the lurking unsuspecting desire to improve our quality of life, our station, our way of living, our material goods. It's the job we want to replace the one we don't care for, it's the bigger home with the better lawn, it's the new couch or the new town. It is the bill we've all been sold that we need to ever be seeking to improve ourselves, our standard of living, the quality of our homes. We need to keep up with at least everyone else in the neighborhood, right? It is rooted in discontentment.

We have reached the technological point in our society where something revolutionary is being invented every single day and due to the demands of successful marketing, it has to be projected to the consumer as something you simply cannot live without. So we continue to fill our homes with with items we cannot live without, all the while ignoring a world that is dying without God. What is truly alarming to me here is that the Bible makes no differentiation: covetousness=idolatry. When studying out the greek for the word idolatry, it is tied to covetousness and the worship of things above God, literally the worship of Mammon. Our love of things is a worship just as our love of gods and idols of false religions is. To Paul, and the New Testament believers, it was evident that these were one and the same. "For this you know with certainty..." Why don't we know this with certainty? For me, I suspect it is because we are grown blind by our lack of thankfulness and contentment.

In writing to the Phillipians and their concern for him, Paul says:

Not that I was ever in need, for I have learned how to be content with whatever I have. I know how to live on almost nothing or with everything. I have learned the secret of living in every situation, whether it is with a full stomach or empty, with plenty or little. For I can do everything through Christ, who gives me strength.
Phillipians 4:11-13

Contentment is a foreign word to the American culture. We are not a content people. We do not know how, as Paul states above, to be content with whatever we have. We are movers, we are shakers, we change the conditions, we change the circumstances. We see a problem, we fix it. We see an injustice, we correct it. We are not patient. We don't have time to be patient with so much to correct. "God this need fixed. God, did you hear us? Fine, we'll take care of it!" But until we learn to live in contentment, we will never be able to grasp thanksgiving. Until we embrace these, we will always struggle with covetousness pulling at our hearts as we walk through this earth, ESPECIALLY since we live in the most materially affluent society in the history of this globe. This is something that is critical for us as believers to grasp. It is crucial or it will be a stumbling block to our growth.

I fully believe that if God so chooses, He can and will pour out tremendous blessing such that I cannot contain it upon me as stated in Malachi 3:10. But the question is the condition and goals of my heart. Does this immediately excite me because I begin to think of myself, or does it immediately excite me because I begin to think of the Kingdom. Have I crucified myself (literally translated staked down my own flesh to the point of killing my desires) to the point that God's blessing upon me will generate His blessing towards others, or does He have to worry about what Mammon is going to do in my life?

Let your character or moral disposition be free from love of money [including greed, avarice, lust, and craving for earthly possessions] and be satisfied with your present [circumstances and with what you have]; for He [God] Himself has said, I will not in any way fail you nor give you up nor leave you without support. [I will] not, [I will] not, [I will] not in any degree leave you helpless nor forsake nor let [you] down (relax My hold on you)! [Assuredly not!]
Hebrews 13:5 (Amplified)

Whether we have much or have little is of no consequence. The cure for covetousness is contentment and thanksgiving, and these are found very simply in the fact that we have Him and He is all we need.

Called to Expose

2010-05-25T05:52:00.004-05:00

Ephesians 5:8-15

This passage reminds the believer that we are light in the darkness. We are surrounded by a world engulfed in darkness and we are the only source of light in that darkness. The darkness hates the light because everything within it is exposed by light and it cannot overcome light. We've all heard the analogy, when you flip the light switch in a room, there is no part of the room that remains dark by sheer fact of the darkness not being able to overcome the light. Even in the largest of darkened spaces, a single bulb alters perception, changes the condition. We are to this world, those individual light sources. The good news is none of us are alone. The great news is that the light within us is so much more brilliant than all of the darkness of hell that death and the grave could not contain it.

But more than this, we are not called merely to carry this light around. We're called to do something with it. We are called to actively expose darkness. Darkness of intent, darkness of thought, darkness of action. This does not make us popular with the darkness or those who would wish to carry it or remain in it. This does not mean we see a devil behind every rock and evil intent behind every person's eyes. It does mean that when blatantly confronted with darkness, and our spirits will know it, then we as bearers of light in this world have the responsibility to expose it for what it is and speak truth and light and life into the situation. Again, this may not make us popular, it may not be appreciated. However, it may be the only lifeline someone so lost in darkness has.

As we do this, we can expect opposition. We are not merely exposing people's actions, thoughts, and intents. We are exposing spiritual forces, works, and entities. Those forces seek to remain hidden, cloaked, non-existent in the minds of those so lost. One of the greatest footholds the enemy has into men's hearts is in convincing them of the lack of his existence. It is only as the Word and the Lord exposes in my own heart that I am set free and so it is with those whose minds and hearts are enslaved and enshrouded in darkness in the world around us. We are commanded to expose this darkness at every opportunity, because we are the light bearers. I love how this passage ends...

“Awake, O sleeper,
rise up from the dead,
and Christ will give you light.”

A Tree in the Wind

2010-05-18T07:09:00.003-05:00

I've been on a bit of a hiatus from these writings and I've suffered as a result. I've stated before that these writings are chiefly for myself so that I can revisit and re-ponder what God has spoken to my heart in the quiet times. I've been enduring what I would call a bit of a crisis of faith as of late, and I do not believe this to be overly dramatic or an overstatement. With tremendous spiritual growth we all can anticipate a point or points of testing. It is promised in the Word and it is necessary. It is the only way in which we gain strength, persistence, stamina, endurance, the capacity for bigger and better works.

I would characterize the first 4 months of this year as being very explosive in my walk with the Lord. He is so good and so amazingly full of grace and mercy towards us. How incredible he is to sit in majesty with thousands of angelic beings proclaiming his glory and worth night and day with lightning and thunder encompassing his throne as he watches over all of the universe that he unleashed and yet...He knows my name...He is concerned for my well being...He wants me to succeed in knowing him intimately...He works in me to grow me to the point that he can continue to reveal more and more of himself to me...He loves me THAT much. I have enjoyed the fruit of his goodness towards me these past few months in growth that I haven't seen in many years. God has brought me into connection with fellow brothers and sisters in the Lord that have been a tremendous encouragement and blessing to me and my family on a local, national, and even international level. I literally have people that I now communicate with, support, and pray for half way around the world.

A year ago I was simply praying for God to show me how to love people period. Now I feel continually compelled to be in motion to be doing something for Christ. I know this to be God's working in my heart for in and of myself, I am nothing. I know the scriptures are true when they state my righteousness is as filthy (literally translated "menstrual") rags because I've tested this to the extreme. I've been putting forth those rags most of my life and now I see the worthlessness of my former offerings. It is purely God in me that is driving me to do these things. It is as Ephesians 2:10 states - the good works that he designed for me from the start and the amazing thing is I can't do them on my own. Praise God!

Again, tremendous growth requires strengthening. One of my former vocations was as an Arborist for a local community. I ran the city foresty program and one of the things I continually witnessed was when a home owner would install a new young tree they would stake the tree in. By this I mean they would place usually three to four stakes around the tree and then secure ropes or wires from the tree to the stakes thereby creating stability in the tree from being blown over and allowing the tree to remain perfectly straight. The problem with this was they always had the ropes/wires completely tight which was detrimental to the tree. Staking was a good practice if you left the ropes be somewhat slack. The reason was that you actually want the tree to sway in the wind. The more sway the better. Critical to a tree's development for trunk strength is the swaying motion the wind creates. The wood fibers will actually respond to this motion and increase proportionally in the trunk and in the root flare, where the trunk meets the ground, as a response to the wind thereby strengthening the tree over time. When you overstabilize the tree - you eliminate the tree's ability to do this and actually harm the tree in the long run.

The past few weeks the winds in my life have picked up to gale force and I've been encountering resistance on every front - in my spiritual walk, in physical health, my relationship with my bride and children, our finances. I've been buffetted from just about every direction I can think of and to be honest, I don't think the ride is over. We very much would like to enjoy the fact that we have a loving Father who wishes us to be his children, who wants us to become empowered as his representatives on this earth. If we're serious, we even begin to realize that we need to give no less than all of ourselves to the one who gave everything of himself for us. Then we really start to become spurred into motion to pursue him at all cost, even if friends abandon us and co-workers start to look at us differently.

But these are not the winds, this is not the resistance. The winds come when an ages old demonic power recognizes he no longer has sway in your life and determines that he will end your new-found piety and devotion by pitting everything in his arsenal against your faith in this Word. The winds come when your plans to evangelize go out the window because sickness invades your family and suddenly the condition of other people's souls is a little less of a concern than that of your sick child curled up in their bed. The winds come when the finances you were counting on for those necessary home or vehicle repairs fall through and you are suddenly faced with crisis as bills keep piling up. The winds come when you can feel the gazes and new found friction between you and your co-workers as you no longer participate in the daily gossip pool or supervisor-slam sessions and they direct those efforts of malice towards you behind your back. The winds come when both you and your spouse are simultaneously exhausted and the kids have far to much energy for this late at night and you didn't really appreciate the tone in your spouse's voice or the way in which they dismissed your feelings when you were talking to them about something that was important to you. The winds come when your very own attitudes are less than what they should be and you feel yourself sinking into them, but rather than seeking God out for deliverance, you choose to flesh over spirit.

Listen to what James says in James 1:2-5

"Dear brothers and sisters, when troubles come your way, consider it an opportunity for great joy. For you know that when your faith is tested, your endurance has a chance to grow. So let it grow, for when your endurance is fully developed, you will be perfect and complete, needing nothing."

My growth in this life is fully dependent upon these troubles, these testings and shakings. Without these, I will never know the perfection of patience as stated above. Patience is defined as being consistently constant, enduring. This endurance, this steadfastness, is the mark of maturity and strength and is something that is to be strongly desired. But to desire it is to desire the very trials that make it possible, and this is where we falter. I know I have on too many occasions. We desire to be upright, straight as an arrow Christians with strong supports all around us. We have our small groups, weekly bible luncheons, our community activities, our sunday services - all neatly staking us down. Every minute accounted for in our weeks, schedules tight, cinched off with precise tension from multiple sides just like those young trees. And just like those trees, we've insulated ourselves against the winds and the trials, the very things that will strengthen us.

Now don't get me wrong, I believe small groups, bible studies, and the like are beneficial and cause growth in their own right. I enjoy participating in them and love the encouragement I gain from "iron sharpening iron" in discussing God's word with my brothers and sisters. So many of them are so much wiser than I and I love gleaning from that wisdom. But how many of us have replaced our deep and intimate walk with our creator with these meetings, these gatherings. How many times have we replaced meeting God with meeting others to talk about God? I have. I have often met my Lord at scheduled times in scheduled buildings and in between in uttered prayers during the day only as I needed him. Where is the love and devotion in that? Where is the intimacy and relationship in that?

This addresses the 2nd half of the tree - the roots. Psalms 1:1-3 reads:

"Oh, the joys of those who do not follow the advice of the wicked, or stand around with sinners, or join in with mockers. But they delight in the law of the Lord, meditating on it day and night. They are like trees planted along the riverbank, bearing fruit each season. Their leaves never wither, and they prosper in all they do."

This daily meditating and communion with my Lord is the development of solid root structure. The tree in the wind topples for one of two reasons - it snaps at the trunk for week stem development or it is uprooted for weak root zone development. We fall for one of two reasons - we are broken for lack of strength and endurance or we simply are not rooted deeply enough to withstand.

God is still working in me to show me how to have "great joy" in trials and troubles, but I do find great encouragement in the fact that God uses those things to perfect me, to strengthen me. Those things that at first seem detrimental and even profoundly uncomfortable have eternal benefits and work for my good. God is strengthening me little by little, fiber by fiber to stand in the wind. Trials will come, they are promised, but they only serve to strengthen us, to increase our capacity to bear fruit and be a blessing to others.

One

2010-04-27T07:11:00.005-05:00

Ever seen the bumper sticker or t-shirt that has the religious symbols that form the word "coexist"? Something about that stirs something in me. I hate that logo passionately. I hate what it represents; the notion that it doesn't matter what you believe, as long as we all get along, everything will be ok in the end. I hate the lie that has been sold to countless souls, sending them to an eternal torment and inconceivably and aweful damnation. Most of the faiths in this logo don't even proclaim the existence of a hell or have any notion of the demonic forces they toy with. Worse, the whole thing smacks of religion which is not what faith is about at all. My salvation is not a work of religion but an overwhelming act of a loving Savior and my resultant relationship with him and the Father.

Further, the cross on this logo is reduced to one of several religions. I am NOT a religious person. At times I almost hesitate to say I am a christian as this term in modern vernacular has become so diluted and polluted. When the term was originally issued to early church believers, they didn't come up with it for themselves. Rather it was their persecutors and the world around them that called them "little Christs". Today we've turned it into a label, a brand that somehow includes roughly 1.6 billion souls walking this planet. That's 1.6 billion IF you include those who claim to be "christian" by political, social, or cultural mapping standards such as the United States which claims to be a christian nation and very many of the western European and Latin nations. Sadly the vast majority of these will stand before our Savior and hear the words "depart...I never knew you."

Back to my bumper sticker. Why do we think that we can bring so many divergent philosophies together and "get along"? Why do we think we can continue to each go our seperate way, doing as we please without rules or consequence and not injure someone in the process, not cross someone else's truth? The whole falicy of "coexist" is that this works fine...unless someone introduces absolute truth with absolute standards for right and wrong. Then we've encroached on other's freedom of thought and right of expression. Then we've imposed our beliefs on others. I wonder how that argument would work in court. "The officer then imposed his desire for traffic flow at 55 mph on me, while I was innocently enjoying the right to freely travel 80 mph. I then accelerated to 100 mph just before the crash which involved the other vehicles, at which time I was wrongly mistreated by being arrested for killing the family of five in the minivan". The world of "coexist" doesn't bring peace or unity or harmony. It admonishes negligence and blindness, because that's what it truly seeks. You turn a blind eye towards what I'm doing and leave me alone and I won't critique what you are doing and everyone gets along, even when what I'm doing hurts you or myself.

On most of the stickers I've seen, three of the seven letters are formed by the symbols of Islam, Judiaism, and Christianity. Christianity does have its tarnishes thanks to the crusades, the Inquisition, and even more recently scandals of faith of the past few decades.etc. Looking back we see these things were done outside of the will of God and apart from his Word, we see the absolute falicy of men and their imperfect and very often self centered natures. True Christianity still boils down to the two most important commandments as Jesus stated "love your God with everything in you, love your neighbor as yourself". Reckless LOVE. Our Jewish brothers have been the punching bag of almost every culture and God's blessing still resides upon them. Many follow the Torah and still need to come to know Jesus, but God's covenants still hold true. Islam is as bloody as Christianity has been and is on the rise in violence and persecution against both the Jew and the Christian with no sign of letting up. There is an obvious absence of unity here among these even these, the most established of faiths.

In Ephesians 4:1-6 Paul writes

"1 Therefore I, a prisoner for serving the Lord, beg you to lead a life worthy of your calling, for you have been called by God. 2 Always be humble and gentle. Be patient with each other, making allowance for each other’s faults because of your love. 3 Make every effort to keep yourselves united in the Spirit, binding yourselves together with peace. 4 For there is one body and one Spirit, just as you have been called to one glorious hope for the future. 5 There is one Lord, one faith, one baptism, 6 and one God and Father, who is over all and in all and living through all."

In speaking to the believers, we see here that the Lord desires that we work at cultivating unity among ourselves, making allowance for each other's imperfections and character flaws. But this is unity among believers, among those who call Him lord. Can there be unity among believers and non-believers, among Christians and those who refuse Christ? 2 Corinthians 6:14-18 puts it pretty plainly.

"14 Don’t team up with those who are unbelievers. How can righteousness be a partner with wickedness? How can light live with darkness? 15 What harmony can there be between Christ and the devil? How can a believer be a partner with an unbeliever? 16 And what union can there be between God’s temple and idols? For we are the temple of the living God. As God said: "I will live in them and walk among them. I will be their God, and they will be my people. 17 Therefore come out from among unbelievers, and seperate yourselves from them and separate yourselves from them, says the Lord. Don’t touch their filthy things, and I will welcome you. 18 And I will be your Father, and you will be my sons and daughters, says the Lord Almighty.” (New Living Translation)

Here we are not called to isolate ourselves from the world around us, but to stand up and stand out and stop pretending to be part of a fallen race. This isn't a call to turn our back and "shun" the world but to stop immitating it and be who God called us to be - his holy, set-apart, children who will proclaim and walk out His love and grace and set the nations free through the testamony of their lives and word of their mouths. Boldy and, when necessary, fiercely taking back from the enemy what he has stolen from all of humanity through abuses and deceptions and drugs and famine and disease.

Jesus never promised to bring peace to the earth. As a matter of fact, he promised to bring division and strife. In Matthew 10 where he sends out the 12 for the first time to evangelize and do real work in his name, he warns them the work he is sending them to do is divisive. People will hate them for it. In verse 34 he very bluntly says "I didn't come to bring peace. I came to bring a sword." That sword is the sword of the Spirit as described in Ephesians 6:17, his Word, his gospel, and it is alive and powerful and divisive as described in Hebrews 4:12. It seperates and cuts away sin just as our witness and the Word we proclaim will seperate us from the culture around us that is so rapidly deteriorating. Men will despise us for it, darkness cannot abide the light and there is light within the believer who is passionately pursuing Christ and his directive to "go into all the world". That world starts at your door step and circles 360 around this globe. So from this world, we can expect the opposite of unity to the message of Salvation and the total grace of God's love, but it is only under the operation of God's love can total unit be achieved. Because of this, men strive in vain to "coexist".

Thankfully those in Christ do not. Thankfully those in Christ are new creations - transformed - capable of love and unity beyond the scope of our natural born tendencies by the indwelling of his Spirit. Humility and gentleness follow after those who are bearing the fruit of the Spirit and in that fruit we are able to preserve peace and remain united. The world will never know this unity. They want to, so very badly they want to. They try to manufacture it, particularly with every calamity and disaster that strikes at the heart of men they band together to generate it. But they cannot sustain it because it is of men and not of God. We have this unity forever because we are all of the same body, Christ's body and we are One.

One Check

2010-04-26T07:27:00.002-05:00

I heard something in church yesterday that I needed reminded of badly, one of those things that makes you go out from church 50 pounds lighter than when you came in. No matter how much I'd like to deny it, I had been focusing great attention to the "mountains" in my life. There are currently several of them, seemingly lined up in a row like the Rockies all in front of me. Yes I am a faith person. Yes I believe the grain of mustard faith will cast them flying into the sea (at least I confess I do). But this wasn't getting it for me. Wasn't changing the circumstances. And there is the problem. Circumstances.

I was trying to change circumstances. My attention and focus was on circumstances. My mountains are comprised of circumstances - almost like pyramids constructed of building blocks of circumstances. Each of them are monolithic and massive to me but each of them have been formed by an intermingling of circumstances to cause them to sit squarely in my way, in opposition to where I desire to be. What's wrong with knowing the circumstances? What is wrong with being informed about what you are dealing with? Nothing. What was wrong with Peter knowing that the waves wouldn't logically support a man when he stepped on them? Nothing. But when he took his eyes off Jesus and focused on the waves he sank. Jesus was the Living Word. We have the Word and when we take our focus off of it and put it on the circumstances we can expect very little to move in our favor.

One of the mountains I am looking at is finances right now. We have a particular situation that we are praying over and there are tens of thousands of dollars involved. To us, this is Mt. Everest. I'm not a millionaire, so this is not play money. This is on the order of college savings, retirement accounts, etc. This is enormous, right? Here's something our pastor said yesterday that struck me in the chest. "One check can change your circumstance, but the Word of God does not change or falter". WOW! I've been mulling this one since he said it and he is right on. This Everest to me is a pimple to the One who holds the cosmos in his palm and yet loves me enough to know how many hairs are on my head.

This Everest, or any other mountain for that matter, is nothing to the one who commanded the suns to burst into being, and yet clothes the flowers of the field and feeds the birds. He designed the water molecule with intricate precision so that ice would not be too heavy and sink to the ocean floors causing the earth's waters to freeze over. He calculated the proper amount of iron in the earth's core to generate a magnetic field to repel the harmful electromagnetic bombardment from our own star while still absorbing its life giving warmth. He designed the intricate colorings of the thousands of petals of the spring and the fragrances of each and simultaneously keeps in check the galactic churnings of violent gravaties that consume suns and planets through black holes and balance the galaxies. Is my tens of thousands of dollars too great a mountain for this God? Is cancer too great for this God? Is death too great for this God?

I happen to like a song on Christian radio right now that has a phrase in it that states "we're all just one phone call from our knees" because this is true. No matter how strong our walk, how close to God, or even how "successful" we've become in our own or everyone else's eyes, every one of us is just one word from devestation. Life on this orb is uncertain because this is a fallen planet. Sin was introduced and has been running rampant since the garden. Order was broken and chaos ensued. Jesus changed all of this for us, however. We don't have to live victim to chaos and circumstance. Certainly chaos and disorder occur all around us, but they do not have to move us if we are founded on Him. If we are rooted in His Word. This is what he was telling us with the mustard seed faith. This is what he taught Peter on the stormy lake.

Circumstance does not dictate, because circumstance changes. The only immutable unchangeable in all of existence is this Word, this God, this Holy Spirit. Only here is there dependability, trust, something that you can build upon and remain firmly grounded. When the stock markets are falling and housing starts are nil and inflation is uncontrollable and the news is spouting global problem after global problem such as why oranges are going to be more expensive this year and bombings in Pakistan and earthquakes in Asia - circumstance after circumstance, wave after wave - we have Jesus. We have the Word. Listen to how our God is described in Ephesians 3:20:

"Now to Him Who, by (in consequence of) the [action of His] power that is at work within us, is able to [carry out His purpose and] do superabundantly, far over and above all that we [dare] ask or think [infinitely beyond our highest prayers, desires, thoughts, hopes, or dreams]" (Ampliphied)

That power that is at work within us is HIM. His Word within us, His Holy Spirit. Dig in - entrench yourself. Having done all to stand, stand. These are the principles that cause the circumstances to change. It is not us changing the circumstances but our holding fast to what the Word says that forces the cirucmstances to come into line with our faith.

What's your mountain? Health? Relationships? Finance? All of these are subject to change because all of them are comprised of circumstance and God is big enough to wipe all of them out with one check.

It Starts With Love

2010-04-21T07:15:00.002-05:00

Ephesians 3:18-19 "And may you have the power to understand, as all God's people should, how wide, how long, how deep his love is. May you experience the love of Christ, though it is too great to understand fully. Then you will be made complete with all fullness of life and power that comes from God."

I've heard this passage many times, even sang the "deep and wide" sunday school song as a kid. but I'm beginning to realize something. It is not until a person begins to tackle the awesome nature of God's love towards them that change within them effectively occurs. Think about it. Think of a sin that you've wrestled with, maybe for years, that you've gained victory over. Did you gain victory over it because the Bible said "thou shalt not". Did conviction alone gnaw at you night and day to stop your harmful habbit or slandering lips or other stumbling block? Or was it the empowerment that came when you realized how much your Father loved you, cherished you, was there day-by-day, moment-by-moment with you? Were you moved to repentance by the width, the lengths, and the depths to which our Lord went to ransom you from that sin so that you could stand before a sinless and holy God, completely justified and without blemish as one of his own.

In truth, every sin we commit can be answered by this love. It is this love that moves the lost to him, not our cute t-shirts or bumper stickers or even tracks. People need this love, need to know it is available to them. I love how the verse above tells us to "understand" the width, depth, and height of God's love - you'll spend the rest of your days pursuing this goal. But in searching it out, you'll be completely transformed, for in seeking its depths it will reform your own capacity to love. Your compassion for others will be expanded, your ability to look upon this planet's masses and be moved to action as Jesus was will be increased.

This is something that God is growing me in daily. The more I grow the more I realize I have just scratched the surface. I mention it in previous posts, but I am not by nature and upbringing a tremendously compassionate person. The most terrible thing about this statement is that I am beginning to realize that I was not too different from the majority of the people around me. I was content to turn the blind eye, ignore the plight of others, and justify my well-being above others suffering as earned rewards for poor choices. How judgemental and how loveless did I walk? I still do. This is how I was brought up.

When I was growing up, we had a wheelchair bound town drunk that we used to make jokes about. He never bathed, was unkempt, long haired, and would literally wheel himself miles to the bars for drinks. I recall one night my father picked him up between two towns about 8 miles apart in the dead of winter during a snow storm. He was wheeling away on the side of the road in sub-zero temperatures to get between towns for his next drink, which was obviously more important than his life or safety. He thanked my dad and my dad let him have it. He laid into him as to how foolish it was for him to be out there, how he surely would have died in the elements, what was he thinking? That man did later die in the elements some years later, alone and in his disease. Thinking back to him, I recall his face, the dirt that always seemed to cling to him and the tears come readily forward because I know I did nothing to bring love into that man's life. Sure, I have the excuse that I was merely a teen, but what of the community of 700 people in which he resided? Was there not one person who could have averted that man's course, not one who could have saved him from eternal seperation from God? How many scoldings like my father's did he get? How many verbal beatings was he exposed to, further driving him to the conclusion that he was worth very little so there was very little incentive to live, very little reason to exist but for the warmth of the liquor.

God's invitation isn't just for those of us who grew up in church, or have been blessed to find him. He aches that every single person would know the height, the depth, the width of this love. That they would spend the rest of their days searching this out. They'll never have this opportunity if you and I don't give them that chance. I am confident that I am called to do this on multiple fronts - Jesus said "go into ALL OF THE WORLD" This means I need to be actively figuring out ways to send this word not only into the hearts and minds of the people I am around daily through the witness of my walk, my actions, and my speech but I also need to be active in getting this word into the hands of people around this world. Some are called to physically bring this word. Some are called to help them get there. Regardless - we all have a part to play.

Recently, at the Voice of the Martyrs conference, I was struck by how those standing before me could endure such terrible persecutions, witness such hateful horrors and still desire to continue. It became quickly evident - it was not strength of character that held these people, these souls who except for circumstances were not that different from most of us aside from birth in other nations. What distinguished these individuals was love. Their love for their Savior overwhelmed their concern for themselves. Their love for His commands to spread his gospel, to heal the sick, to minister to the needy. Their love for him was so great as to desire just one more to know this magnificent Savior, even at the cost of themselves. It was love.

Paul states it in the "love chapter", 1 Corinthians 13, that without love all of your best works are noisy and brash and useless. How many efforts are just that before God today? How many churches are throwing up dischord and brash noise. How many of us are creating noise and disharmony? On the outside our efforts and our smiles indicated goodwill and genuine concern but in our hearts another story is told, one which God reads all too clearly. God's love is perfect. His word states that he IS love. We will never achieve that perfection on this earth but we are to search it, to pursue it. God wants us to know the width, the depth, the height, wants us to experience the fullness of his love - and yes his love does fill. It fills to overflowing. When we are filled with his love, we cannot walk this earth and view others the same, even those who seek to hurt you because we then realize as Ephesians 6:12 states, it is not against people that we are wrestling/contending in this world, but against spiritual forces. We see past the person's faults and love them. You might just be the first person in their life to do this and this might be the key to unlocking their heart as the Holy Spirit has been preparing it. It all starts with love.

Levels of Sin

2010-04-13T05:55:00.001-05:00

Question: Does God judge sin differently based on severity of the offense? It's a simple question but one that is difficult for most Christians to answer with honesty. Most would say no, sin is sin, but most of us are not being honest with ourselves, even after we've uttered this pat answer. I know I'm not. We seem to have some sliding scale for offense in which we internally measure what is acceptibly tolerable and what is shamefully intolerable.

One end of the scale might include "minor offenses" such as lending your two-cents worth at the morning gossip session or the course joking in the break room or taking that regular extra few minutes on your lunch because you put so much more into the job than most of the others anyway. Sometimes its simply the thought " I should really help out with..." and deciding not to. Minor things, almost negligible. Ok, yeah, there's a twinge of guilt associated with them, but a quick "sorry Father, please forgive me" and we're on our way.

Certainly these things should in no way be catagorized with the guy who spends hours in front of the computer staring at pornography, or the attict stealing money from her family so she can push the needle in one more time, or the drunken father exploding into a rage for no good reason with fists of fury. Worse still, the criminal who harms or murders the child, or kills another adult, or the rapist, or the sex offender, or the drug trafficker pushing his product with full knowledge of what it is doing to the lives and community into which he sells, certainly these people deserve to feel hell-fire licking their heels far more than the paper-clip pilfurer, right?

Certainly these latter offenders are subject to criminal laws based on severity of offense, but that is based on trespass against other people. What about trespass against a holy and sinless God. One who doesn't measure on a sliding scale, or a curve, but measures against one thing only - the pure and perfect standard of himself. What does sin look like to a being such as he who is without it and cannot be touched by it? In the whole Bible, there are essentially two words for sin that are primarily used, one hebrew and one greek, one for the Old Testament, one for the New Testament.

In the Old Testament, the word primarily used is the word "chata" and it means "to miss the goal or path, to incur penalty, to endure loss, to bring guilt, condemnation, and punishment, to miss oneself, to lose oneself". I love this definition. For one, it characterizes what the people of those times lived and dealt with when confronting the issue of sin. Romans states all have sinned and this was true of the people before Christ as well, but not being under the grace of the cross, I imagine they took sin a bit more seriously than we do today. After all, they had to sacrifice animals, blood had to be shed, and there was a sense of condemnation and fear of punishment. I wonder how differently we'd behave today if we had to think twice about so many of our actions based on the fear of condemnation or blood sacrifice.

Unfortunately, as is evidenced in the numbers and types of opposition Jesus faced, this system also produced a legalism lacking in grace, mercy or love one for another. Note how ready the religious were to discard the adulterous woman's life just to see what Jesus would do and say about the situation. One commentary I read indicates that when Jesus stooped in the dirt, he was writing every major sin the men present had committed detailed with names and that this was why they disbanded. They legally had every right to press this issue and kill the woman but the words Jesus put in the sand had them so cornered with guilt and shame they had no where to go but away from him. It was only in this light then did Jesus ask her "where are you accusers?" and follow with "neither do I condemn you".

In the New Testament greek, the word for sin is "harmatia" which translates "to be without a share in, to miss the mark, to err". I love this definition as well because we get from it that sin causes us to lose out, to lose our share. Between these two we see that we are missing out and enduring loss and even losing ourself when we sin - losing who God created us to truly be. God has a plan for us, his word says so and he has countless good works already planned out in detail for us to be involved with - things that will bless us and grow us and his kingdom. But sin cheats us out of this, it causes us not only to miss the mark with him, but to miss out to lose our share in that plan. There are no levels of missing out either. There's just missing. Either you hit the target or you don't.

The man who complacently failed to follow whole heartedly after Jesus and was "luke-warm" though he went to church and gave in the offering will find himself right along side the murderer, rapist, sex trafficker, and pornographer when told to "DEPART". Why? Because sin still was permitted to permeate and allowed to comfortably reside. Sin had hold when co-workers slandered, sin had hold when poker-night language turned crude, sin had hold when witnessing was less desirable than reputation, sin had hold when self was more important than time given to family. Hebrews 12:1 urges us to cast off this sin that so easily entangles because it doesn't matter if it is what one would consider one of the "minor" offenses or something truly horrendous, our savior had to be ripped and torn open and brutally executed in an agonizing manner for all of it.

God doesn't see levels of sin. He simply sees sin. He hates it. It is repugnant to him because it cost him the one he cherishes and those he loves most. Because of it, very many (billions) of his children will suffer in eternal torment and seperation apart from him - not because he wants them to, but because regardless of his every effort, his giving of everything he has including himself, they have chosen to turn their back upon him, to reject him, to deny his love in their lives. We have a loving God who aches for us but who is also a perfect God and a just God. For us to be so arrogant as to ask him to tolerate sin for our sakes is to ask him to lower himself and become less than he is for our selfishness. But this is what so many demand of him with questions such as "how can a loving God send people to hell?" It's akin to asking my wife to somehow permanently disfigure herself so I could feel less guilty about cheating on her.

God's love for us is total and beyond our ability to record even in all of the volumes of books in all of time. His complete sacrifice cast his grace so far beyond our sin with a recklessness as to whom it fell upon that we cannot wear it out. But that grace, rather than granting license to sin, brings even greater power to triumph over sin. Jesus echoes this in statements like "you have heard it is wrong to commit murder, but I tell you....to hate is the same as..."; or "you have heard it is wrong to commit adultry, but I tell you to look at another lustfully is the same as..." - just to have it in your heart is "...the same as" under this grace. This demonstrates that this grace covers but it also empowers to live a much higher calling.

This is why God so desperately wants us to get this sin off ourselves when we commit it. I've done it. I've sinned, felt bad about it, held onto it for days and days and THEN finally came to the Lord with it. This is so far from what God wants. 1 John 1:9 shows us that he simply wants us to come to him with a repentant heart, confess it - get it out, and he takes care of the rest - it's done, gone. This isn't a license to jump right back into it. He wants a heart change. Repentance is about turning the opposite direction from whatever it was you were embroiled with and walking towards God and staying on that path. But once this is done, there's no continual self bashing, no continual condemnation. It's done. Grow past it and go on!

It doesn't matter what it is, God wants your repentance so that he can move you back into his blessing, his path, so that you can be a partaker again of the life and plans he has for you. His son died horribly for you to be able to come to him for this very reason. Certainly some actions have earthly consequences based on man's laws. If I murder someone, I can expect jailtime, regardless of how right I make it with God. But my life may just become the most effective tool for Christ in that prison. It's not an end-all based on man's definition of sin, but on God's definition of redemption. It's not about levels of sin.

Bound With Them

2010-04-11T07:51:00.006-05:00

This entry is a heavy one, I'll warn from the start. I imagine I'll read and reread it many times in the future to reconnect, re-anchor because the content and message is so fundamentally important to my obedience to my Lord that it will shape my very Christian walk from this day hence.

It starts by my having attended a conference. We've all done it - particularly as youth/teens, maybe even went to some as adults. Remember the exilaration? Coming home fired up for God. Gonna make those changes, gonna read that Word daily, pray an hour daily, be that light at school/work/etc. No fear. Bold. Joy and courage flooding the heart. Truly the epitome of the mountain top experience. Did you stay there? Hopefully some alteration in your path did actually occur. Hopefully some change in the way you were living did truly happen. I have lost track of the number of times that for me, it did not. I cannot recall how many of those experiences I've encountered God only years later to look back on with vague rememberence. Memories of "wow, I was really on fire for God back then", wondering what happened. Wondering how I grew "lukewarm" or even cold.

Yesterday was not a "mountaintop". It was more like staring into the chasm of my own innaction, one that afforded me a poor night's sleep and kept me tossing and turning and prompted my early awakening to pray. I attended the Voice of Martyrs Conference and left repentant and challenged. Repentant to have been complacently sluggish for so many years, innactive in the body of Christ, coasting. Challenged to become a viable and alive member of this body, this faith, this church that exceeds the building I weekly attend but rather is comprised of people around this globe, many of them risking abuses and injury willfully to gather together to simply praise our Savior, to spread word of his love to their neighbor, the very ones who seek to harm them.

Yesterday I gained a true sense of this "body of Christ" like I've never had before, and it is hurting. There is so much hurt in the body and we cannot sit idly by, content to engage only our own families and work weeks and home church activities. We are called to more than a passing gift to the missionary who speaks in our churches once every few months. Hebrews 13:3 says "Remember those in prison as if you were there yourself. Remember also those being mistreated as if you felt their pain in your own bodies." This obviously speaks of the persecuted church in Paul's day and I'm sure many of us are aware that somewhere out there, around the world in distant nations, someone is imprisoned for their faith, for handing out biblical literature, for witnessing. But that's the problem, in our minds, it's out there - away from us - half a globe away.

This scripture is telling us to remember these saints as if it were US! If you were beaten by a metal cable such that your back was bloodied and bruised, would you pray once or twice month or even a year for deliverance? If your spouse and children were murdered by locals while you were away because you witnessed to a family who's father did not approve, would you be content to accept a one time prayer of support or would you ache for daily strength through the uplifting of others? We don't seem to get it here in the U.S. that we are ONE BODY with those who are suffering these things. We have tremendous freedoms that everyone around this globe can only dream of but we do nothing with them except enjoy them. We have at our fingertips tremendous technologies and resources and we are/will be held accountable for our use of those gifts.

This is obviously a very condemning statement and I believe there are a very good number of precious people who God is rising up to make a difference, who are answering the call to make the difference, to stand in the gap and to meet the needs through prayer, support, finance, and getting the Word into the hands of the people. I am so grateful for organizations such as Voice of Martyrs, Children's Hope Chest and locally the work of Known to Me as those who have orchestrated these projects/efforts have answered the call to do more, to stand in the gap, to bring awareness, to call the wake-up alarm. There are brothers and sisters in the Lord in these and a few other organizations that I am just starting to know that I feel so blessed to have come across because they have heard this call and they are broken by it. Broken enough to to be moved to action and to work to bring others to this awareness.

For me, however, I find myself having not done enough. I certainly have not lived out Hebrews 13:3. To be honest, I've ignored my brothers and sisters in prison. You can't change the whole world, right? You can't take on all of the problems. I subscribed to VOM email alerts about a year ago and I am ashamed to say that when they have come, some of them I've given a coursory scan with good intent to further study, good intent to further pursue, further write to encourage but never gotten around to it. Sometimes, two or three will come a week and I simply have too much email the way it is so "sorry, I don't have time for this now"....delete. That was person being beaten who needed encouragement...delete....or a family in which the father/pastor was just killed for his faith...delete...

We don't like to think of a persecuted church because we don't like to think about persecution period. But persecution is on our doorstep. We have no concept of it here and I think if we all honestly thought about this we'd agree. If we'd spend time with these men and women who have been shot at, had their churches bombed, been hauled off to unknown darkened locations in the night and beaten, watched their own newly converted, newly baptized congregations slaughtered while praising the whole time...we'd all agree we don't even know what persecution is. To us, persecution is worrying if someone will "not like us" or if we will be "uncomfortable". But persecution is coming to America. This nation is becoming increasingly God-less in its leadership, laws, and direction and furthermore - here's the big one - JESUS PROMISED IT!

We don't like this but we cannot ignore what Jesus said in John 15:20 "if they persecuted me they will also persecute you". Paul in 2 Timothy 3:12 states that everyone who wants to live a godly life will be persecuted. Again - it is promised to each of us. I don't think he was referring to the rude "snicker" behind your back because that's not where it stopped for him. This does not mean that I need to go out and foolishly seek martyrdom, but neither should I be surprised when as my walk and my witness become more ferverent and outspoken, so too will resistance to the light within me. This is such a foreign concept to the American believer because we have never suffered for our faith, truly suffered. And why is suffering for our faith desirable? Because it purifies our intents and desires for God. It causes tremendous growth and brings tremendous reward to our lives. Jesus also said in Matthew 5 that those who are persecuted for righteousness' sake, their's is the kingdom, great is their reward.

I had the privilege to speak to a pastor from Ethiopia and another from Pakistan, both speakers at the conference. On the stage they were amazing speakers and captivating to behold. Certainly their testamonies were enthralling and many around were drawn to tears as they recounted not only the horrors they had witnessed but the profound joys of serving our Lord in the midst of such unspeakable hatred against His Name. When face to face with them however, I felt their spirits, I felt their radiance, their peace, their joy. Truly, fear had no hold on these men and they could rejoice in the face of whatever the devil threw at them. Their lives could be taken the next minute and they walked in the knowledge of a God so loving they would willingly and gladly give everything they had, their lives, their children's lives, if just one more person could come to know him.

I think many people left the conference staring at the same "chasm" I was - the chasm of shame. Shame at our own innaction, but also repentant for that innaction and thankful for the Word they had received and motivated by it. For it is the Word that lays our path and we cannot afford to ignore any part of it. We cannot afford to fail to share any part of it. Our next breath may be our last. So many around the world are purposefully placing themselves in harm's way to spread this Word, this life, knowing that their next breath may be their last, may actually be taken from them in hatred against what they are trying to do in love. Hebrews 13:3 cannot be forgotten, it is the very least we can do for we are one body, one church and we are bound with them.

The Boldness of a Child

2010-03-31T07:15:00.010-05:00

How approachable do we view our Father? Is he on a throne in the midst of heaven beyond reach? Probably not to most of us. But how approachable is he? Do we quickly, readily and regularly come to him with our cares, concerns, conversations, and dreams? Do we regularly partake in communion with him - not the wafer and juice, but the fellowship of souls, the intimate knowing of persons? When we fail/fall/sin do we immediately run to him?

My study in Ephesians 3 has the word "boldness" sticking out today. In 3:12, the New Living Translation states "Because of Christ and our faith in him, we can now come boldly and confidently into God's presence". You won't find much of that in the Old Testament. As a matter of fact, you find a lot of people dropping dead when they violated the regulations about coming in contact with God's presence through the Ark and the Holy of Holies. The High Priest, when he entered the Holy of Holies in his annual sacrificial prayer, had a rope with bells tied onto it and if those outside heard it stop jingling, they knew the priest had been struck down and would drag the him out. I digress. Christ's work was so all sufficient that all of the price of sin was so overwhelmingly paid that the sin barrier was wiped away removing all obstacles between us and the Father. AMEN!

Back to "boldness". This passage is similar to Hebrews 4:16 in which we are admonished to "come boldy to the throne of grace". Boldness is laced throughout the New Testament as a characteristic indicative of one who has embraced the totality of Christ's work at the cross, who has been filled by his Spirit, and who now freely comes before the Father to obtain help and mercy. I decided to do a little word study on "bold", "boldly", and "boldness" and here's what I found.

In the New Testament there are three greek words or concepts for boldness that are used. The first is the word "tolmao" and it means to dare to do something terrible and fearful. It is used when Joseph of Arimathaea went with "boldness" before Pilate to obtain the body of Jesus for burial. He overcame his fears, probably risking his own life and/or reputation to ask this Roman governor for an executed criminal's body. I think many people approach God in this manner yet today, and yet this is not the boldness that we are instructed to approach him with in Ephesians or Hebrews. How many of us have attempted this kind of "boldness" when we've tried to witness to others - you know, the kind where the words get stuck in your throat and your heart races as you try to overcome your concerns about your reputation, and potential ridicule as try to do the right thing and project the light of Christ's love to the world around you? Sadly, too often this is the "boldness" that I've attempted and I don't think this is what the apostles walked in.

Another kind of boldness is listed in Romans 15:15 where Paul is telling the Roman church that he is writing to them in a more stern/bold form. This word is "tolmeros" and means "to bear one's self boldy, to deal boldy with". Paul is basically explaining to the Romans that though he knows them to be filled with good works and good things, he is having to be very frank and bold with them in his writings - to the point, not pulling any punches. In a way he is prepping them for the fact that though they have things that are praiseworthy, he is also chastizing them with honesty and bold statments of truth.

The final word/phrase and the one that characterizes most of the uses of the term in the New Testament is the word "parresia". This means "freedom in speaking, unreserved speech, free, fearless, confidence, cheerful courage, assurance". A derivative that is also used is the word "parresiazomai" meaning "free spoken" and "to assume a bold bearing". Parresia is how we are to approach the throne of grace. It is the word used in Ephesians 3:12. Parresia is how we can pray to the Father because of the work at the cross and Jesus sacrifice. When Peter spoke at the Day of Pentecost, he was parresiazomai - free spoken, with a bold bearing.

Boldness is the characteristic of the believer who has grasped their position in the kingdom; boldness to speak to their Father, boldness because of who resides within them, boldness because of the fact that the blood was shed and all sin forgiven. These disciples were fishermen, not eloquent speakers and theologians. Peter was a man of action, not words. When they came to arrest Jesus, he didn't dialogue, he whipped out a blade and swung, taking the ear of a servant. After the indwelling of the Holy Spirit, though, Peter's boldness and speech marveled the multitudes. Free spoken - bold bearing. This is not arrogance. Arrogance is drenched in self-pride and none of us has claim to anything that permits pride, for nothing of ourselves is deserving of the grace and mercy that God has lavished upon us. Arrogance is what cast Lucifer from heaven and we can expect no audience with the King with arrogance in our hearts. Boldness is assurance, confidence in HIS work and in our position as he has defined it - not listening to the lies of the enemy as to our unworthiness, but to the truths of the Father and his Word as to the total sufficiency of his sacrifice. God himself has commanded us to come into his presence with this kind of boldness - unashamed, confident, secure, with cheerful courage.

My own children give no second thoughts for asking me of every want and desire on their hearts as I'm sure most of yours do. They do not cower in fear when they hunger, they do not agonize over whether they are worthy to approach when they are cold and in need of additional clothing. They simply and "boldly" proclaim "I'm hungry; when's dinner?" or "I'm cold - can I put on a sweater?" In many instances, they very often help themselves. They are confident in the knowledge that they are my children, that I love them, and that I care to see their needs met.

We are God's children. How infinitely more does he love us? Didn't Jesus ask the crowds this same question "you know how to give your children good things, how much more will my Father give to those who ask?" God expects us to come to him with "parresia"; with the boldness of a child.

Flesh vs. Spirit: Slave vs. King Part 2

2010-03-26T12:41:00.002-05:00

The fruit of the Spirit - we as New Testament, New Covenant believers are too familiar with this phrase. We've lost its meaning as we've glossed over it in scripture, heard it countless times from the pulpit, probably even colored little apples and grapes in sunday school as children. Jesus stated that by a tree's fruit you would know the tree. The Word later states that by a person's fruit you would know them. The same applies to us. By the fruit of our lives, the outward evidence of God's inner working, people will identify us as the people of God, the light of the world, the holy people of a holy Lord. Do you stand out as such in your day to day? My answer is all too often not as much as I should.

This fruit of the Spirit is more than unintended and accidental good behavior if we follow after God. It is a harvest of holiness that each of us should be sowing, guarding, working to bring forth in our lives. In the greek we gain further insight into each of these words and they shed tremendous light into what the first century believers were hearing in their own vernacular when Paul listed the following fruit/evidence of the Spirit:

Love: first and foremost - it is the essential nature of God. It means to welcome, be fond of, have affection for and can only be know by the actions it prompts. Another concept of this word "agape" is "a love feast" and the sense of inviting others to a feast of charity. To walk in this kind of love is not to show love only towards those one has affinity towards, but to open up the "feast" to everyone who crosses your path. It actually seeks out the opportunities to do good to others that arise in life. Paul, in Corinthians states that without this kind of love, everything else is for naught and we become noisy instruments (clanging cymbals). As our pastor recently put it, "it is the curtain rod upon which everything else hangs".

Peace: a state of tranquility, harmony, enabling a state of security and prosperity - friendliness, freedom from molestation, wholeness, quietness. Being so assured of one's salvation and what we've been called to that we fear nothing from God and are content in him for whatever our walk on this plane brings us.

Longsuffering: always associated with staying constant under trials, patience, endurance, constancy, steadfastness, slowness in averaging wrongs.

Kindness: Goodness in action in tenderness and compassion as opposed to indignation against sin. The root word "chrestos" means "fit for use or able to be used". Also meaning good, virtuous, mild, and pleasant. Only in kindness will we be fit for use in God's hands.

Goodness: uprightness of heart, life, morally honourable and pleasing to God and therefore beneficial. This greek word and it's root, "agathos" differ from kindness in that kindness is the gentle gracious aspect of goodness. The latter also includes the notion of doing good to others, but is not always by gentle means. Christ driving the money lenders out of the temple is an example. Goodness includes gracious tenderness but is not limited to it.

Faithfulness: the character of one who can be relied upon. This is tied to the concept of assurance, a guarantee, a pledge. To be confident in, to trust. Obedience is the action resulting from this trust and is the outwart expression that evidences the invisible inward faith.

Gentleness: a meek disposition, mild, soothing. In the Old Testament, the meek are those who wholly rely on God rather than their own strength to defend against injustice. It is the opposite of self assertiveness and self interest. It stems from trust in God's total control of a situation. This can only come from the Holy Spirit and not from human will.

Self Control: one who masters his desires and passions rather than letting them master him. From the greek "kratos" meaning "strength". Controlling the power of the will under the operation of the Spirit of God. Also from the greek word "egkrates" meaning "having power over, mastering, controlling, restraining, strong, robust".

Against the above fruit of the Spirit there is no Law. This statement continues a line of truth earlier stated that this salvation, this pursuit of God, this new and holy life, this indwelling of his Spirit is incomparibly superior to the Law by itself. The Law was given to restrain the evil tendencies of man, but they were ever present. When the fruit of the Spirit is in place these inborn tendencies have no place and the Law has no claim or judgment against the fruit of the Spirit. The fruit of the Spirit surplants these tendencies in the believer's life who is actively taking up their cross, crucifying their flesh (again see earlier posts for "staking down the flesh") and following Jesus. In this there is complete and total freedom. In this a slave is made a king!

Flesh vs. Spirit: Slave vs. King Part 1

2010-03-25T07:03:00.006-05:00

Still working through and meditating on some truths that God has been dealing with me on and decided to do a comparitive study today. God has really been dealing with me on getting the flesh out of my day to day, removing that which trips me up so readily and constantly. We are all going to be fighting this one for the rest of our days on the earth so in no way do I think I'll achieve the pinnacle of "fleshlessness" in the next months and live a perfect life for the remainder of my days as an example to all. But as I am striving for a deeper daily communion with my Father I am realizing that my flesh impedes my closeness and more of this sin-nature, tainted dna I can "stake down" (see previous posts) the deeper I can move into relationship with Him and into his will for my life. I want this so badly. As I pursue this, I find that the old "little" sins, such as the sarcastic comments once spoken about the obnoxious and rude individual who obviously deserves to be taken down a notch or two, suddenly are uncomfortable to my ears and not something I really want involvement with. The Spirit speaks much more regularly and with deeper conviction the closer we get to Him and it is our choice to listen or to ignore but if we truly want a deeper relationship then we should not be surprised when his voice starts to become more and more clear in our hearts.

The passage of Galatians 5:16-26 urges the believer to walk in the Spirit rather than in the flesh; to take up a lifestyle of spiritually centered living and daily decisions rather than walking out and living what is natural and desired by our attitudes and unregenerative thoughts and "flesh". The works of the flesh and the fruit of the spirit are both spelled out and a deeper study into what each of these really are is merited. So often we see these lists as "thou shall nots" and "thall shalls" and gloss over them because we don't take the time to ponder their relavence in today's vernacular. When Paul wrote these, they were very clear. The flesh works kept the people chained to an old covenant, the Law, which condemned them. If they stayed there they stayed condemned and ultimately remained out of fellowship with God. But Jesus fulfilled the old covenant and those who would walk in him and walk in the new Spirit with the evidence of the fruit of the spirit in their lives, against these there was no Law. These statements were poignantly clear to the first century believer living in the Mediterranean rim near the Jewish nation.

What are the works of the flesh as outlined in Galatians? What are those things that keep me bound and chained, keep me from fulfillment of freedom in Christ and life, keep me from the potentials that God has created for me? The following is a study of the words as written by Paul and the original greek words translated from Strong's Concordance.

Adultry: being sexually unfaithful in mind and/or action to one's spouse. This ranges from the fling with the other woman to what Jesus pointed out - simply looking at another with lust in your heart - it's all adultry and in our society it is everywhere from swimsuit model covers to internet images to redlight districts.

Fornication: being sexually promiscuous outside of the marriage covenant - casual sex among singles etc. Living and working near a "college town" this is something that is rampant throughout the university setting.

Uncleanness: impure motives, lustfull, luxurious living, sensual - this is splashed all over reality television and the media and is the epitome of self centered living.

Lewdness: disgraceful, soiling the clean, insolent disregard for decency, base or uncontrolled speech, shameful

Idolatry: placement of anything in a state of worship or focus above the Lord - America has no end of this but it extends even to the believer. "I'll give you everything Lord, but I really don't want to sacrifice my comfortable home, or my weekends with family, or my friends, leave those alone and you can have all of the rest of me!"

Sorcery: literally the use of drugs or medicating - poisoning with incantation and a goal of altered consciousness. I never equated drug use with witchcraft/sorcery but in the Old Testament and historically divination and incantation went hand in hand with drug use to produce altered states of consciousness and mental states.

Hatred: the complete opposite of agape love - emnity. Jesus put it this way - "you've heard it said not to murder, but if any of you hates - you've already committed murder in your heart". Ouch!

Contentions: the expression of emnity - to quarrel, again based in dislikes and hatred towards others.

Selfish Ambitions: a desire to put oneself ahead of others, seeking to win followers, creating factions and divisions

Dissensions: standing apart, refusing involvement

Heresies: Dessentions arising from diversity of goals/oppinions, a self willed choice/oppinion that is substituted for submission to the power of truth leading to division

Envy: to long for, a displeasure in hearing/witnessing the prosperity of others to the point of desiring to deprive others of said prosperity

Murders: to kill, slaughter, cause death

Drunkeness: denotes habitual intoxication and regularly partaking of intoxicating drink - tied to riotous behavior and revelry - those who revel in a behavior

Revelries: rioting, carousal, the consequences of drunkeness, to riot

In this passage we are told that those who practice the above will not receive/inherit the Kingdom of God. So often we hear this phrase "inherit the kingdom" or "receive the kingdom" and we think of when we die or when Jesus comes. That is not what these words meant. There is a difference between the kingdom of God and the kingdom of Heaven. The greek here is not referring to an actual physical place but rather the right to rule or the authority, royal power, dignity, dominion. The dominion of God. We have the kingdom now. The kingdom moves with the believer, it is a sphere of dominion and authority that radiates from God's children to everything their spirit/lives touch or are associated with. This is not a stationary thing. Though the earth had been turned over to Satan by Adam, Jesus, before ever enduring the cross, could look the pharisees in the face and proclaim "today the kingdom of God is in the midst of you!" To say this to them meant the full might and sovereignty of God's power, authority, and rule was in their presence. Further, when he sent the disciples out to preach, teach and heal, we read that he sent them to proclaim the kingdom of God.

When Jesus instructed his disciples to pray "thy kingdom come", he was not telling them to pray out a gradual transition or progression. The greek spells out an event of catastrophic and violent overturning. This is how we as administrators of God's will on earth are to take from the clutches of Hell what Satan took from Adam. We are to violently shake the gates of Hell in all of its manifistations around us and in us; in the broken and shattered lives that surround us daily, in the bondage and sin around us. This is what Jesus did on this earth. This is why the demons feared him. This is why Satan fears us, fears the Word in us, fears what we have been given. This is why he works wihout ceasing to keep our minds and hearts blinded and distracted and numb to the power and life God desires we walk in.

The kingdom of Heaven is always the kingdom of God, but the kingdom of God is not limited to the kingdom of Heaven. If we'll get the flesh out, start walking out the kingdom and become the instruments that God desires us to be then we too, can overturn the hurt, the poverty, the brokeness that surrounds the world around us, whether it be in our backyard or half a world away. God is not limited by our reach or what we perceive to be our reach - he lengthens it, expands it, grows us and enlarges our abilities beyond it. Put down the flesh and walk in the spirit and enjoy the abundant life of true kingdom authority!

God's Masterpieces

2010-03-20T07:42:00.003-05:00

What comes to mind when you think of the word “masterpiece”? For me I think of works such as Michelangelo’s perfectly and smoothly chiseled David, or his tumultuous and energetic Sistine Chapel. I long to peer into the depths of the eyes of Da Vinci’s Mona Lisa. I recall the experience of standing inches from a Seurat, making nothing of the myriad of dots and colors and then gazing in amazement as I backed away and they merged to become fantastic snapshots of 19th century life. Water lilies drift lazily in peaceful streams under stone bridges in the countryside as captured by Monet’s brushstrokes and I long to step into the tranquility of those canvasses. Masters, each of these men, creating works the likes of which have never been reproduced and likely never will. Each work worth extraordinary sums for the unique nature in which they were created or the hand that created them – deemed priceless.

So what does it mean when God calls us his masterpiece? Is the word so diluted by paintings and sculptures and works of men that will ultimately fail the test of eternity that a timeless God who labels us so loses relevance? Consider the expanse of the universe and the images pulled from deep space, the ones that astronomers indicate must be billions of years old because the light has traveled so far to reach us. Simply consider the fact that there IS a universe so vast, and we haven’t even seen the edges of it. We’ve scarcely adequately studied our own solar system, even the depths of our own oceans.

God doesn’t say the heavens and the cosmos are his best work; he doesn’t call the creation in which we are placed the culmination of his abilities. He doesn’t even call the very Heaven in which he resides the pinnacle of creative talents. He calls you and me his masterpiece. According to Ephesians 2:10, we are created for more than just to be placed on a shelf and admired. We are created for good works. I find it encouraging that God has a plan of good works for my life. That means that he has a plan. That means that I don’t have to struggle to find myself, find my plan, find what my life is supposed to be about. I simply follow his leading. And this plan isn’t just being thought up as we walk through this life. “Well, he did this so we’d better compensate by doing this”. God had my life mapped out before I existed, had the impact of my life on this earth figured out before I took one step onto this soil. God knew who I would talk to, who I would witness to, who would watch my life, who would be affected by it, who I would change, who would hurt me, who would be hurt by me, and who I would love from my first breath to my last. He has the whole thing mapped.

Do I throw my hands up and say, “well if that’s the case then I have no choice and so I’ll just do what I want”? NO! God told the nation of Israel "before you is blessing and cursing, life and death, choose life". You DO have the choice. Next to giving up his Son, it's the greatest sacrifice God gave, to allow his beloved creation the freedom to turn away from him if they so choose. I believe every choice, every decision is a fork in the road and compounded these create millions and even billions of end results and I believe that I serve a God who is omniscient and big enough to know the end from the beginning of every single one of those paths. I believe God has a plan and if I follow him and pursue him as he desires me to, then I will ultimately find myself in the flow and center of that plan. My God is all powerful, powerful enough to wipe away my sin and past mistakes, he is all knowing, knowing every end from every beginning and what is best for me, and he is omnipresent, everywhere and always with me. God has prepared the good works for us, all we have to do is step into them, because we are his masterpieces and he cherishes every single one of us because he created us for just this reason.

Overcast Grace

2010-03-18T14:14:00.002-05:00

Rough one this morning. Ever read your bible because you're SUPPOSED to (it's what all good Christians do)? Most mornings I jump into the Word and relish it. I love it! Not this morning. I had to fight my way to the bible and fight my mind to stay focused. To be honest, even after reading the same passage five times nothing seemed to really differentiate the paper and words in front of me from the newspaper - pretty sad. I fully empathized with Paul's statements about how the athlete has to "beat his body". I'm sure the recent Olympics, though filled with energetic and smiling athletes, were also filled with people who on more than one occasion begged for the alarm clock to stop, or their muscles to stop hurting, or their coach to just go away. I awoke with a cramp in my leg this morning, my mind stayed afog as I refused to rely on the calorie rich jolt from soda for dieting's sake and so collapsing into my couch, with the Word before me and my digital concordance I stared. And I stared. Stared.

Then I prayed "God help me. I need this Word. It is life to my bones and bread to me and I need you to speak to me today so that I can follow after you." The only thing that caught my interest was the word "grace". At first I almost purposed to ignore it. This is such an over talked about topic. Aren't there "um-teen" hundreds of books on the subject. There are certainly very moving songs regarding it. The Church is inundated with messages about God's grace. Give me "march into all of the world and take back all that the enemy has stolen and you will prosper for mighty is the Lord your God!!!" (this is NOT a quote from scripture so please don't try to find it). Grace is present in the New Testament almost as much as love, to the point that I tend to ignore it. Always we must be careful not to go from one ditch to the other. In so many teachings that focus on only grace and love, the holy, awesome, and fearsome splendor of a sinless God and his resulting and terrible judgment against sin is ignored or muted. But in contrast to this, to be so fearful of ignoring the "wrathful nature" of God's judgment that we forget about his grace, mercy, and love towards us leaves us cowering as beaten slaves in the corner, not seated as children of the King, which is what he clearly desires according to Ephesians 2. It states that he desires to show us "the exceeding riches of his grace".

I had my hook so I delved in. Exceeding - seems simple to me. Plenty, enough, more than enough. Here's what the greek word translates "to overthrow, overcast, to throw over or beyond anything, without caring where it falls". I envision making a bed and casting the sheets over it. You cover them by overthrowing the fabric so that it will fall down and cover the bed. This of course is a paltry comparison. God's grace was overthrown, without limit, covering all of us, covering our sin, when repented, covering all of creation.

Grace has been defined as "unmerited favor" or "getting what we don't deserve". Certainly I believe this to be true. When I studied out the rest of the greek for this, it also carries with it the concept of that which affords joy, pleasure, delight, sweetness, and loveliness. God's grace towards us doesn't just affect only us. It brings him delight and joy as well. How often do I fail to walk out that kind of grace, even to my own family? When the rude person cuts me off in line, can I walk out joy, pleasure, and loveliness towards them? This is the grace he has spread over all of us - every single one, over all of creation.

Ever think that God finds delight in the waterfall? Joy in the symphony of the evening insects? Pleasure in the rhythm of the rainstorm? But I am the culmination of it all, of all creation. Even the angels marvel and say "What is man?" Without grace I would never see his face, enter his presence or even know of his love. Grace does not give license for sin, but grace allows me, an imperfect man, to come to the one who can wipe away my sin and still present me to himself blameless, spotless, perfect in his sight. I am so grateful for that grace and for the fact that no matter how badly I think I've messed things up, as Paul says "his grace is sufficient". His grace has been cast beyond everything, everything in my life, everything in yours. And he did it with reckless love, not caring on whom it landed. He covered it all in grace.

Stumbling and Falling

2010-03-17T10:27:00.003-05:00

Reading through the introductory verses of Ephesians 2 today and Paul is discussing our former state of being in sin and trespasses. I've always heard it's good to know where you've been so that you'll know where you're going. This is probably why Paul brings this to light to the church at Ephesus. In Genesis, Abraham built altars as monuments that marked the landscape of where God did specific great things, but he didn't stop and live there, he went forward to where God was leading him. In my study on the opening verses the following questions kept coming to my mind - what is it to sin, to trespass? We are so familiar with these terms that they are generic to us - probably because they are the best terms we have to describe walking out from under God's desired will and plan for our lives in not quite so many words. What does it mean to sin, to trespass? "...forgive us our trespasses as we forgive those who trespass against us" Ever find those words awkward?

I grew up in rural southern Illinois and we owned wooded land when I was young. I recall signs all over those river bottoms "NO TRESPASSING" and these for me have always tainted my definition of the word. I conjure visions of grey cloudy days in heavily forested muddy lands near the Wabash river basin where land owners were seeking to prevent poachers and high schoolers from encroaching upon the borders of their timberland for purposes that inevitably resulted in property damage. Every time I hear the Lord's prayer in a translation that uses the word "trespass" I think of those river bottoms, as if God a was property owner trying to keep trouble makers out. Not a very accurate picture.

Doing a word study I found a couple of interesting things in the greek translations of the words for trespass and sin. To trespass carries with it the notion of falling. But not just falling down, as in "I fell into sin" but to fall ineffectively by the wayside, to be incapacitated. The image of a line of soldiers charging in a battle came into mind. In battle, men fall. In life, people fall. In this Christian walk, Christian people fall. The psalmist in Psalms 91:7 reflects God's promise of protection while "a thousand will fall at your side, ten thousand at your right hand". The enemy has every one of us targeted, has each of us scoped. How does that make you feel?

God says that he has the very hairs of your head numbered. Satan also knows you, and as long as you lie motionless and float downstream with the rest of the world towards hell, you draw little attention from him. The moment you begin to stir and stand as a child of the King, you are zeroed in on, targeted and aquired. Start taking back the world from him as Jesus commands ("go unto the world") and you are guaranteed to have him array forces to move against you. I have personally felt this in recent months. As my walk with the Lord intensifies, as my passion for truly and deeply knowing him grows and things that have held sway in my life for decades begin to lose their grip I find new attacks, new frustrations, new "opportunities" to walk out God's grace, love, and patience towards others.

Sin: missing the mark. That definition just came to me recently. I always knew that it was to fail, to rebel, to go the opposite way that God wants us to go, but recently I learned that it is also aiming and just plain missing. Aiming a bow and arrow and missing the bullseye. It doesn't matter how much you miss, unless you hit the bullseye, you still missed it. That by itself was enlightening. "All have sinned and fall short". No matter how perfect you try to be on this earth, you will miss the mark at some point. This innaccuracy was brought into our bloodstream in Eden and has been present since. It necessitated the cross. Every single one of us will miss the target and I tend to miss it daily. But doing my study into the greek yesterday another aspect of this word jumped out at me. The word translated "sins" in Ephesians 2:1 is the greek word "hamartia" which means "to be without a share in". This is the greatest tragedy of sin and the ultimate wage of sin as outlined in Romans. Sin robs us of our share in all that God has provided for us, sent his Son here as exchange for our redemption for. Sin steals, kills, and destroys in our lives - daily. It takes from our relationships and robs us of intimacy with our Father. To be in sin is to be without a share in life, abundance, provision, health, and every good thing that God has promised. When we tolerate even the "smallest" of sins in our lives we tolerate loss, we are tolerating a "missing out". Why? Why is sin worth this? And what of a world drowning in sin and dying?

How tragic and and ultimately saddening it is that Satan has convinced an entire race that the baubles he has to offer, the pleasures of carnal flesh, the sin-life and self-indulgence of rebellion that lasts a mere 80 years at best and is plagued by pain and misery is so much more preferrable to the actual, true, meaningful life that God has for us that is for all eternity - forever. Yet look around. Every day you are surrounded by them. Lost and perishing. Bound, gagged, and being led off to slaughter. Unaware of their approaching eternal seperation from a Most Holy and Mighty God who is surrounded by beings we have yet to imagine who continually sing his praises. This plane is as close as they'll come to Him and I am as close as they are to knowing Him. Unless they come to a saving knowledge of him, this life with all of its problems, struggles, pain, and difficulties is the only "heaven" they will ever know. They have smiles on their faces, they greet me with "good morning" and "its-a-beautiful-day" but they are being led to death and torment that we have never conceived of in our worst of nightmares, one that they will never wake from or escape, one that they will share with Lucifer and and all of his fallen hosts for all of eternity. Can I look at myself in the mirror and honestly stare into the depths of those eyes and tell myself "I did my best - I did everything I could to get the Word, the life-line of the Word to catch hold in their heart so the Holy Spirit could work in their life"? Will I be able to look my Savior in the face and say such?

I think Psalms 91 speaks of protection from those who would do me harm, both spirit and men, but I also think it speaks of the world through which we walk daily. A thousand at your side...ten thousand at your right hand...stumbling and falling.

Purging Egypt

2010-03-12T07:12:00.010-06:00

Strange title today. I tend to be drawn to the strange ones. I don't label them for the benefit of the reader, I do it for myself. Not so I can relish the thought of someone else thinking how clever I am. They are markers for me alone. Like landmarks on the landscape of my life, they denote specifics that stand out that I can readily recognize. This path of words lengthens with every entry and I am a visually oriented person.

Today studying and meditating on some readings I've been doing on a book by John Bevere, God powerfully brought together several things he's gradually been teaching me over the course of the last year as I seek him. So much like our Father to have the complete picture of where he is taking us and not be limited by the fragmented view that we are as we view from the "here and now" only. The concepts I am referring to seemed to me to be good in and of themselves, but seemed completely disjointed truths; like reading that adultry is bad (and typically led to being stoned in the Old Testiment) and that honoring your parents leads to long life on this earth. OK, cool to know, right? Good word. Thanks God. I'll certainly try to live these out - easy enough. Take it up a notch. If you are a liar you go to hell and also you are to love your neighbor as yourself - again, not so much related truths, a bit tougher to live out, but sure, I'll do my best to make sure I love other people and tell the truth. "Thanks again God, I can really feel you growing me!" How many of us have left Sunday services with these morsels of moral direction, contented that we've somehow satisfied some listening or growth requirement by our Heavenly Father? Is this the "good news" that Jesus instructed us to go out and preach to the world that would change it, revolutionize it, save it from hell, death, damnation?

Towards the begining of this year I completed a fairly in depth personal study in Galatians. I decided about a year ago I was going to go through all of the Epistles, the letters of the New Testament. About the same time, I also began to pray that God would soften my heart, help me to become a more compassionate human, draw me closer. I knew love was central to God's core being and that He desires that each of us walk it out towards each other. After all, Jesus said the entire Law and Prophets (essentially the whole Old Testament) was summed up in love your God completely and love your neighbor selflessly. I think we mentally acknowledge this and we strive for this, but it truly doesn't reach the heart of most of us, particularly that last part. This is what I was wrestling with. I knew that I too easily dismissed my neighbor. Remember when the crowds asked Jesus "who is my neighbor"? We too easily refuse to engage the hurt, the lack, and the shortcomings of those who surround us every single day. To be honest, I don't have it within me. I knew it then and I know it now. It was that realization that caused me to begin to pray thus. I realized that if I didn't have it, if I couldn't muster it on my own then it must be something that God had to do within me, something that I had to seek out in Him.

As I've been reading through John Bevere's book "A Heart Ablaze", he essentially contrasts the passion that Moses had for God and the manner in which the nation of Israel withdrew from God even when they were simultaneously being provided for and led by Him. They all experienced the same miracles, were all delivered from the same annihilation, were all invited to the same mountain top to meet God in the same way. God delivered the entire nation and being no respector of persons, God's plan wasn't to single out Moses to bring only Moses to the pinnacle of communion with himself. God longed for an entire nation of priests, not a designated clan. But the people of Israel couldn't let go of Egypt, couldn't put away the "benefits" of their old lives, though those lives were marked by slavery. We constantly read where hardship brings forth statements like "Why did you lead us out here to die out here in this waste? We were better off in Egypt." What hit me was that of any of them, Moses should have been the one who had trouble leaving Egypt behind. He never knew hardship in Egypt, he knew only privilege, authority, comfort and wealth. What was the difference? What's the shift in mentality?

Simultaneous to this, I am really being impacted by a series called Radical (link at the bottom) by a young pastor named David Platt in which he is peeling down what it means to truly be a disciple of Christ; and most of us comfortable "christians" won't like the answers. Jesus turned away a lot of people, people who were enthusiastic followers, excited about the miracles, caught up in the rumors of a "messiah" a true prophet from God. They knew he was something, because he was shaking up the entire religious order of things, but very often, and usually at the most inopportune moments (at least from a recruitment standpoint) he'd turn on the crowd and say things like "If you want to be my disciple you have to pick up an instrument of death that convicted felons carry in shame to their own executions and follow me, and hate your parents. If you really want to pursue me, then you'll have to eat my flesh and drink my blood." Can you picture what the twelve were thinking? "Uh, Jesus, you just lost them at 'Hello'. "

This past Sunday at church, our pastor began teaching on Galatians 5:16-25. He mentioned the Fruit of the Spirit and how first among these was Love. He compared love to the curtain rod upon which all the rest of the others hung. Towards the end of that passage it speaks of crucifying the sin nature and it's desires and that's when God struck. A year's worth of gentle nuturing, soft whispers to my spirit and quiet insights hit me like a wall in a high speed crash, the ramifications I am still dazed by and trying to comprehend. All I know is that I don't want to let go. David in Psalms speaks of deep calling out to deep and there are depths of revelation, life, and holiness that most of us will never scratch the surface of because we are unwilling to pursue God in the manner that he pursues us. I'm catching just a glimpse of this "depth" and I want it. Back to the Word.

What struck me was the concept of crucifying the sin nature and its passions. Jesus also spoke of taking up the cross in Luke 14:27. He was referring to crucifying your flesh, your passions, your sinful desires. This is what separated Moses from the entire nation of Israel, including his own brother Aaron. Moses crucfied his sinful nature, desires, and passions. Do you know what the greek for crucify translates? It literally means to stake down, to make something stay in place by completely destroying the power of the flesh through intense pain. This is what the crowd heard when Jesus said take up a cross. They didn't hear "you can purchase your golden cross as a reminder of your committment". They heard death, pain. We are to put down and stake in place our flesh, this is the "working out of our salvation" that is spoken of in the New Testament. It gets better. The greek for flesh is the word "sarx" which not only implies one's physical body but the totality of our earthly being apart from the divine. At what point do we start to dispair here? Does any of us have this within us? The short answer is "no".

What I'm realizing in all of these studies is that in my insuffieciency, it is God who is sufficient. If I could have authored my own salvation, I would figure out a way to do it without God and short cut the whole process. That's the way we people operate. We seek the short cuts, the easy way, the check list to mark off. I did numbers one through three so now I'm ready! But God is so infinitely beyond this method of limitation, this finite brand of human thinking. "In my weakness he is strong". In the Galatians passage we see the phrase "against such there is no law". The whole reason we dispair in the struggle to overcome our flesh in our own strength is the same reason the cross and the blood were necessary; because the law and the prophets were not enough by themselves. The law, the Old Testament Law defined sin, put a stamped label on it, brought it into the light of God's judgement and justice, but did nothing to redeem. Look at it.

The Law identified what was right, what was wrong. Today secular society very often epitomizes the Ten Commandments with the statement "Thou Shalt Not". The law was unbreakable, unyielding and final, but continually, people were broken upon it. They were stoned to death, executed, cast out. Punishment was harsh. Atonement was expensive and always involved the life blood of living creatures. Death was continually present and people were continually required to soak their hands in blood. Jesus' once-for-all at the cross was so overwhelmingly sufficient that it not only bought his own salvation from such fate (remember, he was 100% man) or just a few of his close friends and relatives. It paid for all mankind for all time. Every last one of us. No matter what you've done, it's been paid for, you could say, "over-paid" for. This ushers us into the Spirit and in Galatians, we are told to live by the Spirit for against the Fruit of the Spirit there is no law. It was at the cross that God moved us from the curse of the flesh and its works listed in Galatians to the Fruit of the Spirit.

It's because of this love for us, the love of a perfect being towards an entirely unworthy race of offenders, that Jesus can make the demands in Luke 14 of what is required of us if we are to be true followers of him. If taken literally, they sound harsh. Hate your parents, hate your wife and kids, your family, carry your cross. Because it's harsh we "translate" it. "Jesus didn't really want you to hate your family, what he was saying was...". Jesus wants nothing short of everything, total commitment, all of you. That's it. Everything. In comparison to your total affection, devotion, and love for him, your love for everything and everyone else around you will look like hate. But He brings it full circle. "Husbands love your wives as Chist loved the Church".

God wanted nothing less of the nation of Israel when he freed them from four centuries of slavery. He orchestrated the removal of a nation of people from the geo-political powerbase of the world who had been there for 20 generations so that he could bring them to himself and fellowship intimately with every single one of them. When they left there was not one of them sick or weary or disabled. That is impossible in a what is estimated to be a nation of two and a half million people. He gave them absolutely everything they would need to make the journey to himself, all he required was all of them and only one man in a nation of two and a half million people was willing to answer that calling. One man ascended the mountain and saw God. The rest of the nation cowered at the feet of the mountain, unwilling and afraid. They knew their hearts weren't ready to meet this Most Holy One. Egypt still had part of their heart, part of their desire and devotion. After all God did for them and the invitation He laid before them, they hid and fled - how that must have crushed his heart. The picture is one of sadness as he had Moses tell them to go back to their tents and it is after that we read he instituted the order of the priests and the regulations of how they were to enter his presence only annually. His desire was for a people of priests, a people of communion and fellowship. One man heeded the call.

This is why Jesus tells the crowd pick up your cross, count the cost. We're so used to the notion of alter calls where people raise their hands if they want to know Jesus and we feel good because we've led them to the Lord. Then we wonder why this country is gripped by shallow Christianity that is nothing but a facade and thin veneer of religion that is inneffective at best. We've missed the idea of asking people to count the cost, missed the notion of asking them to think about what it means to pick up the cross. When Jesus did this, he turned people away. One minute the crowd would be enthusiastic and when he laid out his invitation, people left irritated and upset. Jesus was saying to those people what God was saying to the Israelites: "you've got to get the world out of your system to follow me". He's not interested in half-hearted followers. Hot or cold. Get off the fence. He loves us all incomparably more than we know how to love him or each other, the proof is in the lengths he went to redeem us. The invitation is timeless. It's the same invitiation given to the children of Israel, the same one Jesus was giving to the crowds who were attracted to his miracles and teachings, it's the same to you and I. It's an invitation to love like no love we've ever known. "Will you follow me recklessly - as recklessly as I pursued you, considering nothing else in this life, willing to give everything for me as I did for you? Will you put nothing in front of me in value including family, possession or goals? Will you purge Egypt?"

Shaking Off Death

2010-03-09T08:08:00.003-06:00

I screwed up yesterday, fell into sin, and God called me on it. What was it? None of your business. I've confessed it, repented and it's under the blood. But sin is sin and we've lost sight of the fact that sin is deadly. We tolerate it, allow it to flow around us, permeating our homes, coming into our lives, sleep with it. It has teeth and talons and without the saving power of Jesus' work at the cross would drag every one of us to hell. It murdered even the innocent Son of God, flaying the flesh from his body, rendering him a bloodied, beaten, and broken man, sending even the one who was there at the formations of the worlds to hell. But we're ok with this because we've conveniently forgotten it. We all know that Romans 6:23 says "the wages of sin is death" and subconsciously, we've chalked this up to a listing of "salvation" scriptures to quote should we ever be bold enough to actually lead someone down the trail to Christ.

God is working in my heart get rid of the junk that snakes around my ankles and trips me up. In Hebrews 12:1 the word puts it this way "let us strip off and throw aside every encumberance (unnecessary weight) and that sin which so readily (cleverly and deftly) clings to and entangles us" (Ampliphied). In Exodus through Deuteronomy, God had to lead the Israelites in the desert for 40 years to get Egypt out of their hearts before they were ready to go in and possess the promises he had for them. Did you know it was only a jouney of a few weeks from Egypt to the Promised Land. It took them that long to "throw aside every encumberance and the sin which so readily clings". I believe God is calling everyone of us to get rid of the junk. He is coming back for a Holy Church and what we've been is anything but holy. He wants commitment like none of us have yet realized. Want to know the depth of the commitment he's looking for? Study Luke 14. But in that commitment, He will take us to heights we've never imagined. We haven't been capable of imagining them because our spirits haven't been in sync with his to the degree that he wishes. He can't reveal himself to us until we align with him. He is the unchangeable one so that means we are the ones who have to align.

For me, I've got to lock down these lips. Words can be terrible things and too often they flow too freely. We forget they are how God formed all of creation. They are little faith filled energy packets and when we are speaking the wrong things into being we are doing far more damage to our own lives than we can comprehend. James says the tongue can set the world on fire and I've come to believe it. It's as innocent as the good natured joking about the guy who deserves to be ridiculed because he's obnoxious and gets himself in trouble, or the boss who knows better than everyone and gets proven wrong. But it's also following the link on the web browser to the new SI Swimsuit cover to look over the curvateous adultress splayed on the sand, or allowing impatience within you to snap into rapidly rising anger towards others, or seeking self above others in a multitude of ways beyond count. "So easily entangles".

Do I have to be a neuorotic mess all day wondering if I'm about to fall into sin? I don't believe so. I believe the Word that states the Holy Spirit is given to us a helper, to be with us, help in time of need. I believe that if we are pursuing holiness, that God honors this and helps us dodge the potholes. Does He jump them for us? NO. Yesterday I felt the twinge in my spirit that I was involved in something I should not have been, but I continued, and that is sin, that is rebellion. It doesn't matter how you paint it, it is what nailed my Savior to an instrument of criminal torture and condemned him to die. That was the Holy Spirit in my spirit leading me and God's word promises He will do this when we pursue/follow him. No doubt, we'll have to choose. In Deuteronomy 28-30, God lays out for the nation of Israel the blessings of following him and the curses and hardships of going their own way, and in 30:19 he puts it to them "here's life and here's death, choose life!" Likewise, he'll never override our will, but he will help us see the difference.

Today, he's calling to me to shake off the sin, get rid of the extra weights, shake off the death, and choose life.

A Life Well Lived

2010-03-07T00:02:00.006-06:00

It's late and I sit here a full week after my grandmother has been laid to rest. Sure, all of our grandmothers and grandfathers are destined to pass, afterall grandparents are old. Old people die, blunt, harsh, true. Nursing homes and convalescence centers are filled with them. Many of them forgotten. Some have regular visitors. The very wealthy ones live in "assisted living communities". Regardless, they are all marching towards the same end, an end that seems an eternity away to someone such as myself. So the passing of my own grandparents should be natural and expected. But it dawns on me, I do not consider my parents "old" and they are grandparents. Relativity brings perspective to bear but relieves none of the sense of loss. Regardless of the fact she was 80, regardless of the fact she was in the late stages of alzheimer's, her time on this plane was not complete by my selfish estimation. Why? Why was she timeless to me? Was I in daily contact with her? Was she a part of my daily prayers? Did she regularly visit? Did I have regular contact? Sadly the answer to all of these questions is "no". Then why?

My grandfather passed a full thirteen years ago. With his passing, I watched my tall and elegant grandmother wither to an echo of her former grace. The loss of her soulmate was evident in her very countenance and in the very manner in which she continued to live her life. The kindness of her smile never left her face but the warmth was sadly hollow. A woman who I recall trekking through the U-picks for berries became a solitary shut-in, never leaving her property. This is not an indictment, simply the facts. When Glen Benson died, most of Mary Benson did too. Sadly, though, I did indict her for this. But in examining, I've become less critical of this because I think I've started to tap the tip of the iceberg that was the soul entwining love they shared.

I used to think that grandma stopped living when grandpa died because he was her rock and when he passed she had nothing but I've since realized this to be erroneous. In the decades of photos of her the constant I see in her eyes is tranquility and elegant quiet grace. I now realize he was the energy and she was the rock. He was the headstrong horse and she was the soft hand reigning him in. He was the strength, make no doubt about it, he was the drive, but she was the constant, the unwaivering. In this I've come to a closer understanding of the inseparable nature of my grandparents and why so much of my grandmother disappeared when my grandfather left this earth.

The funeral home that interred my grandmother put together a collection of imagery from photos that my aunts supplied and with those created a slideshow with a moving musical score that is touching to say the least. From those images, I saw a whole new dimension of my grandmother that I wish I had investigated while I knew her in life. I say "knew her" because even those caring for her did not have much of her recognition in the last months as the progression of the disease stole memory and brain function. It was honestly about a year ago that we last had cogniscant conversation and even then she drifted. Prior to that I wish I had explored the depth of her.

From the pictures, I see a radiant, beautiful girl from an enormous family. She would turn heads today and I watch as she becomes smitten by a chiseled and good looking young man and both of them fall hopelessly in love. It's tangible. You can feel it, almost smelling perfumed hair and aftershave in a manner that no camera phone of today would ever capture. You watch as they pose for portrait after portrait, knowing they are documenting their youth in the only known media for doing so at the time. They "pretend" to be movie stars but in fact, possess far more elegance and machismo than any of the red carpet peasants of today's tabloids. Photogenic to a fault and never sparing a smile for the lense how many hundreds of photographs must be in the archives of those shoe boxes. First one baby, then three, then five. Then a grandbaby, then five, then ten. Buzzcut hair, long hair, perms, buffonts, plaid, leisure suits, jeans, blouses. 1950s, 60s, 70s, 80s, 90s, lives fully lived. One can feel the bitter winter cold, the warmth of summer days, smell the lilacs on the bush in the lawn that has long since been cut down, hear the cattle that have long since been sold. Barns have been razed, burn piles turned to hotdog fires, abandoned cars to childrens' playgrounds.

It has become evident to me that the two of them truly were inseperable, that they never did belong apart from one another. In a tragic manner, part of me wishes that she should never had never had to have suffered on this earth without him, that somehow she could have left when he did. But I know her trials are over and that she is now before her Savior with her husband. I know I will see them again and when I do, I know I will see the radiant beauty of the youth of their spirits, which was ever present regardless of the failing of their flesh, and that is ultimately what is beautiful about them, about each of us.

I've spent a great deal of time in thought this past two weeks since my grandmother's passing. I've not really shed a tear and this bothers me somewhat since I shed many at my grandfather's passing. I think I am far more at peace and far more happy for her release than I was when my grandfather died.. When grandpa died, it was my family's first real experience with death and it was the end of an era of close knit family bonding. This is also and end of an era, but in the ending, the torch is being passed to us of the next generations. We've been given a tremendous heritage, we've been shown the way. We can follow in the steps of great and Godly ancestors or we can live unto a selfish and inconsequential nothingness. I have two grandparents who are both before their God today with forty-plus decendants and very many of them following in their steps toward the same end. I can only dare to do better.

I'll leave off with a quote that I find applicably poignant.

"As a day well spent brings happy sleep so a life well lived brings happy death" Leonardo Da Vinci

Days of Grace

2010-02-26T08:19:00.003-06:00

I feel it, the tug. It is the tug at my heart to act, to do something. In recent months I've been exposed to the international orphan crisis through blogs, websites, conferences, dinners, meetings, and friends. Topics covered include everything from feeding and educating the children, adoption, orphan care, empowering native families to provide for themselves, and ultimately, bringing the Word of God to the people. You obviously have to start with their physical needs because it's difficult to tell a starving HIV infected 5 year old who has watched their parents die that Jesus is the way if all you have is a smile.

I began to really be serious in asking God to soften my heart and help me to become compassionate about a year ago. I did this with trepidation, conjuring visions of picking up homeless people in my car or taking the guy with mental problems who wanders the city streets to a restaurant for a burger. I never conceived that God would enlarge my focus to a global scale towards the destitude and dying. That is not to say I don't notice the homeless guy or the struggling single mom. It's more like God is saying, "You want to see the least of these? I'll show you the least of these!" None-the-less, I find in gaining a new global perspective, I am now far more keenly aware of my own microcosm. God has grown me multi-dimensionally, something that I could never have done though my own "intellectual" soul searching.

In recent years, I've become very much aware of a movement of God's grace and an awareness of his overwhelming love in the body of Christ. I've read authors such as John Bevere who have exposed the heart of God to me in a manner I've never considered before.
Worship music has gone to new heights both in radio airplay and in the WOW, Hillsong, and other cds. Artists are bringing home the heart of God and how much he values and loves every single one of us, infinitely more than each of us could ever consider. We've all heard the statement "if you were the only one, He still would have sent His son" and it seems cliche. But to really grasp that statement and its magnitude and realize, "Wow, I think if I really was the only one He would have".

Reading in Ephesians 1:7-10 today it struck me that Salvation was not God's backup plan for us, his "plan B". Neither did he find himself in the position of "We'll we've purchased them, the blood covers it all, guess since I AM love, we'd better lavish grace on them too". The word for grace also denotes profound favor. These verses show that God had a plan, an intelligent, laid out plan from the outset, to purchase your life from hell, so that he could adopt you into his family and lavishly pour out favor and love on you for eternity.

We don't serve a reactionary God, one who says "oops, didn't count on that - but since I'm omnipotent I'll deal with it." We have a Father who knows the very end, every end, from the beginning, every beginning. He knows the plan he has for your life, my life. He loves your life - you - who you are, more than all of the volumes of history could record and he has a predetermined plan to lavish grace and favor upon you. He's had it from the beginning of time, for every one of us. According to these verses, His great pleasure will be to bring it all together when he can bring us all together in Him. Since the Word also says He's the only one who knows the day and the hour, I can just imagine how excited he must be with anticipation and yet how heartbroken at the same time. Heartbroken because he committed the ultimate sacrifice. He left it to us to choose to embrace or reject him.

Here's where the tug comes. It's all well and good if I realize God's love for me. It's great to feel good about being a called son of the Most High God, an adopted Heir, a slave set free. It's amazing to comprehend that as an heir, I am heavenly royalty, a son of the King of Kings and Lord of Lords. That's all wonderful. I love it that I can feel good about the Chris Tomlin song I just heard on the radio or I can bask in the sunlight of this beautiful world I walk through while driving my vehicle on the way to my job praising God all the way there for my healthy children and my beautiful wife and my warm home. But does it stop there? Did Jesus call us to feel good about our salvation or to do something about it? All of these things build my faith, but does James not say faith without works is dead? How dead is my faith, then? How dead is yours? Tug.

The days of grace are certainly upon us. God's love is being revealed to the nations like never before, and in our affluence this country will have the most difficult time accepting it because we don't need this kind of love. We've learned to be very much content without it, to chase after all of the trappings of the two story home-two car garage-1/2 acre lot-2.5 kids - car and minivan-American birthright. With subconscious efficiency we've learned to tune out an entire globe full of hurting, needing people who look to the most affluent culture in the history of our world and who profess to be a "Christian Nation" for help. Jesus said it will be most difficult for the rich man to get into heaven. The poorest in this country is rich compared to the world around us.

Recognizing the love and grace of God are a tremendous first step for the redeemed, but we are called to do something about it. It's like a starving man discovering a buffet of every conceivable and desirable food. Is it enough for him to appreciate that it is there or should he partake of it and bring others who are dying of the same starvation he was, especially when the provider has told him to? How contemptible would it be for that man to eat just enough to keep himself alive, but never tell the scores of people whom he knows are likewise dying of the existence of the banquet and its host who has freely invited all. Would the host be pleased with that man? Would God be pleased with us?

This obviously gets into our witness, but beyond that - how is our faith tangible? Yes, faith is tangible. It is not some ethereal "I believe" statement. It starts with belief in the depth of the heart but must be expressed in our reaction to that belief. If we truly believe that Jesus is the Lord, the Messiah, the Son of God, then we will do everything he commands. How many hurting have you walked past today? Have you hated your mother and father today? Have you left everything and followed him? Have you taken up your cross? Tug.

These are heavy considerations and every single one of them are ones that I am wrestling with. What am I doing to prove to my Lord that I am one of the faithful, one who loves him? In the light of his calling, my actions thus far have been inadequate, I'll be the first to say it. I'm simply so thankful that God is opening my eyes to these truths now and is equipping me to change the sphere he has placed me in. What's really neat, is that sphere is enlarging beyond my ability to comprehend, but so is his grace!

First Post

2010-02-25T14:44:00.001-06:00

Wow - I've done it. I've walked through the door to my first blog post. I've heard of blogging, thought it to be something akin to tweet-ing, text-ing, or the more 30-something-friendly "FB-ing", but here I am: entering my first blog. Not really sure where this road of words will take me or the reader. A warning from the outset - I type fast, really really fast. Very often I type faster than I think and only later edit. Almost always I am careful not to offend but the strength of my convictions will quickly become evident and rarely do I curb them.

I've journal-ed for years. In junior high, Mrs. Buntin made us do it in composition class. Like the rest of the early teen-aged boys I moaned, but inwardly I found I truly enjoyed it. I enjoy peeling back the layers, dissecting, examining. This continued in high school as Mrs. Freeland had us writing about experiences and our surroundings. At that time, I recall writing of park benches, moonlit nights creating fields of dancing diamonds on dew covered grass and symphonies of chirping crickets. As an adult I continued this practice, not so much as a "journal" but as daily thoughts on my readings of the Word. I suppose this is then the next progression of this expression; the difference being - this format is exposed. My notebooks filled with thousands of paragraphs at home are at best, reading for someone to go through if ever they seek to put me on the same pedestal as a Galileo, Abraham Lincoln, Machiavelli, or other great and noted figures from World History in which every scrap of writing is examined. I sincerely doubt this will be the fate of those notebooks. But here, well, here I am admittedly nervous. Here is tremendous exposure.

I'll leave it at that. I have no real plan for frequency of posts, topics, or even intended audiences. This may be for an audience of one or a site of encouragement for those engaged in the same struggles I've faced or am facing. Regardless, I'm here and now we'll see where "here" takes me.