Connecting The dots

You can easily tell the person lacking Christian faith because he can't make heads or tails of even the simplest of matters spiritually.  The Bible is not a manual of what to do and what not to do.  If that were the case, then anyone could read it and have no problem with what they find in it.  But the man without Christ is constantly confounded by it; whether it be by the miracles described or the "hard teachings".  To try to press the matter, whether it be adultery or integrity, is the most futile of endeavors when it comes to the unregenerate mind.  John the Baptist lost his head trying to convince Herod that he was wrong to marry his brother's wife.  Elijah found himself running for his life after he did his best to show  Ahab and his wife Jezebel the wickedness of religious syncretism.  The Bible is thoroughly flawed and disoriented if you take the word of anyone with "common sense".  You can get away with just common sense if you only want to try to figure out the weather or who will win the next election but it is absolutely no use if you hope to know God.  He must reveal Himself if He is to be recognized and the Lord simply isn't willing to do that for those who will not have faith in Him.  There is nothing logical about the new birth; but it is actual.  It cannot be understood without the mind of Christ making sense of it which explains the disinterest in so many quarters for holiness and righteous living.  Try to get one unredeemed soul to see the connection between sexual immorality and looking at a woman with desire or the linking of calling someone a fool and murder.  It is irrational and ultimate nonsense to anyone not "born from above".  The Holy Spirit does not come upon us to take over things for us; He does so because God has decided mercifully to give us the very nature and character of Christ.  Unless you look through God's eyes, you cannot see the Kingdom of God, try as you may.  It is like a completely color blind man straining to differentiate red versus blue.  Stare all you want at the things of God and you will not see them if Christ is not living within you.   The goal for each Christian is not to get ahold of God but to let God get ahold of us.  This comes by faith in Christ and because of that faith giving space to God to work His way through each part of us.  Obedience, as it is seen in the person born again, is faith in action.  Doing what is directed as the Holy Spirit makes a matter known.  With each faith step, with each act done in the grip of Christ, a bit more light comes and the Ways of God develop perfect clarity.

I pray that...Christ may dwell in your hearts through faith and...that you...grasp how wide and long and high and deep is the love of Christ…    Ephesians 3:16-18 NIV

Christian Service

To enter into Christian service you must decide if there is a stitch of the old loyalties in you.  We strut and fuss over the minister who does his work "for the money" but say nothing of the minister who serves to do a good job, to fix wrongs or set things straight.  No Christian is called to a task or a work; she is only beckoned to a person...Jesus Christ.  As soon as you lose sight of your calling, you foil the One who called you.  Jesus Christ is the beam of light that leads your way and the point at which the beam lands.  Adam thought the good was in seeing rightly when all along the good was the Lord alone.  Christians lose their minds over which strategy is best, what goal is noblest, whose vision is brightest.  What are we doing?  We have not come into this Kingdom to make something of ourselves; we come into it to gain Christ crucified.  Jesus redeems our life from all the nonsensical strivings of the world.  Why do we return to that world so doggedly.  Live in Christ and through Christ and with Christ.  The rest is hubris.  If what is seen is your work and striving, your good sense, noble ambition and successful ministry, then you are no better than the servant who buried his coin in the ground.  But if the world sees Christ when you do your work, if those joined somehow to your work become lovers of God when your day is spent and they turn to Him for life and purpose because the fires of God that burn in you now consume them, then regardless of whether you are seen or not, you have found your Way and your Way is straight and sure.  Christ doesn't come upon you to inspire your effort; He comes to be all you see and do in all you see and do.

All this is from God, who reconciled us to himself through Christ and gave us the ministry of reconciliation:   2 Corinthians  5:18 NIV

What Troubles

There is nothing wrong with being discouraged...if you don't mind denigrating God for the moment.  It is deceitful to say you trust the Lord and despair over your circumstance.  Faith is the hallmark of walking with Christ and to lack faith indicates a falling away.  The disciples got bent over their lack of bread and Christ did not condescend to their self-pitying.  He chided them for their lack of faith whenever they fell to whining.  Nothing unsettles the Christian's life in God more than the unwillingness to see the Lord in each and every circumstance whether we label it good or bad.  If all things work for good for those who love Him, then nothing works for bad.  It is a simple Venn diagram; even a mere child can see it.  If you must complain and feel sorry for yourself, then it is either that you have not tasted the goodness of the Lord or you have completely blinded yourself to your actual situation.  Even the stoning of Stephen worked for his good...just ask him now!  Can you imagine Stephen as he stood before the Sanhedrin shaking his fist at God as the first rocks began to fly?  You cannot because Stephen believed in God.  Do you face anything comparable to Stephen's circumstance?  Take your troubles before Job and whine to him about your trials.  Bring your hardship to Jeremiah and fuss over the difficulty of your task.  There is not a solitary trial you face that should make you cringe in worry and despair.  To be more than a conqueror is just foolishness for the pagan worrywart but it is the actual circumstance for the lowliest of Christians.  Grab your troubles and cast your fear to the wind.  Don't give in to the lustful dread of your end play.  It will work out for your good...not the good of some fantasy you have rolling around in your head of how things should be but it will come to a good conclusion in the Master's great mercy and care for how things are.  Reality never bites...it is the riches of Christ in store for you at every turn you take.

Laban and Bethuel answered, "This is from the Lord; we can say nothing to you one way or the other.  Genesis 24:50 NIV

The Certainty of Doing

There are countless matters in our life with God that we do not understand and mostly it is because we have not done the one thing He has told us to do.  We hem and haw, complain about the difficulty, ignore it and pretend like it was never there but it was there and until we do the thing, we will never get any closer to God.  We might sound spiritual to everyone else, seem to be religious in all the public ways but at our core, we will know that we are mostly faking it.  We have not actually heard from the Lord in any tangible way and it makes us bitter, depressed even.  We become tightly wound, like a screw that has been turned one too many times.  We flinch at the point of real love, curse under our breath the troubles we face and get perturbed by the frustrating people we have in our life.  All the while, it is the one thing that we have rejected that keeps us from knowing the joy and peace of Christ at the points of certain supernatural contact.  The Holy Spirit waits for us to bend our will to that of Christ and we don't and so He waits longer.  He frustrates us to get us to turn and we won't, all the while blaming everything and everyone but ourselves for the dryness of our spirit.  The promise that out of Christ will spring gushes of Living Water is not fluff...it is what actually happens when we turn to Him for help.  Moses could not "get on" with his life until he marched down to Egypt and met his pharaoh and Hebrew family.  Jacob could not "get on" with his life until he returned to the land of his fathers and settled matters with his brother.  Peter could not "get on" with his life until he walked away from his fishing business.  You can not "get on" with your life until you take heed to the last matter you had before you when you faced God squarely.  No one can help you adjust your life to God but you.  He will not push you along, give you a bolt of nerve or take matters into His own hands and absolve you of your duty.  You must get up, get out of bed and push yourself.  It is only then that the Lord will energize your determination and heal your woundedness so that you will be fit to handle what is before you.  God's will is never confounded; your will in Him can be though if you wait too long.  We are to take matters into our own hands only in this one place; to do what the Lord tells us to do in the strength He gives us.  Keep your mind fresh and alert to all the ways the Savior meets you and many will drink from the living water spilling out of you at every turn where the Holy Spirit brings you.

Whoever believes in me, as the Scripture has said, streams of living water will flow from within him."   John 7:38 NIV

Full Effort

Philippians 3:13-14 NIV

… straining toward what is ahead, I press on toward the goal to win the prize for which God has called me heavenward in Christ Jesus.

What has your full attention?

The other day I was at a very nice restaurant with a good friend and we had a great time together.  The food was delicious and honestly I ate far too much.  I gained a full pound just having lunch there.  As we were leaving, the Lord prodded me to go to a couple with a newborn child and start a conversation with them.  I was not sure why He wanted me to do it; I didn’t know them and it could have seemed odd to the couple but I was certain the Holy Spirit was pushing me to approach them.  Now it could have been that this was just something I wanted to do…they had a cute baby and perhaps I was happy for them and wanted to let them know I was happy for them.  Maybe I just wanted to try to sell the young couple on our church; I am a pastor and that is my job.  It might just well be that it is my personality to talk with people I don’t know and start conversations at random places.  I know anyone who was watching me could have made any of these same deductions.  But I was sure that the Lord in some way that is beyond my ability to explain or prove wanted me to approach the couple who were busy enjoying their lunch and their baby and visit with them a minute or two.  What outcome there might be, I did not know nor did I have any idea what the Lord wanted me to say actually.  So there I was, about to leave the restaurant, with the Lord’s insistence that I stay just a bit longer and inject my life into the lives of two people who were perfect strangers.

Is it true that we each are being moved along by an unseen hand of one who has designs upon us that we may or may not know or care to know?  Do we have a purpose to our lives, a reason why we are here?  Is it to get an education, to work hard and do well in school?  Are we here to be successful in some career or at least make a good living at what we do?  Are we here to buy a house, get a car, pay off our debt?  Is there a purpose to our lives?  Are we here to gain US citizenship, make sure our kids get a quality education, pass along what we have learned to the next generation, aggravate people, watch as much TV as possible, find a husband or wife, develop an addiction, look good when we are old, stay healthy?  What is our purpose here?

There is an interesting account in the Bible that gets at an important consideration if we do think there might be a reason why we are on this planet for a certain period of time.  Most of are not under the illusion that we are going to stay here one hundred years or more and certainly are not going to have thousands of years to get everything done that we think we need to do before we die.  So there is a certain level of urgency each of us faces when it comes to doing what we feel we should do.  David, who already was king of Judah, was invited by the northern tribes of Israel to be their king also.  Their previous king, Ish-Bosheth had been murdered, and so the popular choice to replace him was David.  David eagerly agreed to the offer but the armies of the northern tribes had to sign off on the deal as well. It was not long before nearly three hundred thousand men came to meet with David, soldiers representing all twelve tribes of Israel, and pledge their support of him as king.  In fact, they were fiercely decided on this. They came to Hebron fully determined to make David king over all Israel. All the rest of the Israelites were also of one mind to make David king.  (1 Chronicles 12:38-39 NIV)  “Fully determined” implies an unwavering sense of direction or purpose.  They came to David’s camp for a reason and intended to accomplish the task they had decided upon before leaving.  The army was full of purpose; it was not a spontaneous excursion so they didn’t treat it as such.  They were in Hebron to make David king over Israel and and they did it.

You are not randomly placed where you are without direction.  There is a point to who you are and why you are what you are.  Each of us faces a moment when we realize we really are sinners.  It is not that we have done a few things wrong; we are sinners through and through and we cannot fix that about us.  Some of us then discover that Jesus Christ alone gives us a way out from our sinfulness.  When He died on the Cross, Jesus took into His own body our sins and when Jesus physically died, those sins and their permanent effect died with Him.  To be forgiven of your sins, you must believe Jesus did that, He took your sins into His body and they died with Him and after that, three days later God raised Him from the dead.  Nothing about your sinfulness changes in your life until you decide this is so.  Your sins remain your death, they separate you from God and in the end you are without hope.

But when you by faith accept the work Jesus Christ did in dying for your sins, something astonishingly supernatural occurs.  Christ physically becomes a part of your life.  He enters you and joins you in all you do.  He empowers transcendent life changes that mark how you do things.  You change in ways noticeable and discreet.  Every Christian experiences this, a new life with Jesus Christ in the totality of life.  Jesus called it being “born again”.  If your life doesn’t change, then perhaps nothing is different with you.  You are not born again and not living with Christ in your life.  But if you have been remade by God through faith, then there is a different you in place, a “you” that includes Jesus Christ.

The Apostle Paul put it this way regarding the union of Christ and any true Christian.  We always carry around in our body the death of Jesus, so that the life of Jesus may also be revealed in our body.  For we who are alive are always being given over to death for Jesus' sake, so that his life may be revealed in our mortal body. (2 Corinthians 4:10-12 NIV)  Jesus Christ crucified becomes part of us, who we are, what we think and what we do.  Not only that, the life of Christ is there in us too.  What this does for us is make us dead to sin…sin no longer controls us like a slave master.  Christ crucified makes sure of that for our sins were killed in His body.  But because Christ alive lives in us too, His vibrancy and power are always ready to spring from us, show themselves in us.  We become alive with the personality and will and ability of Jesus Christ and that Christ-part-of-us will not remain dormant.  It like a seed planted in soil will eventually poke out of the ground and you are the soil where that seed is planted.

We have in the book of Acts a case study of what happens when Jesus Christ crucified and alive lives in you and becomes a part of your decision making, will and behavior.  In Acts 4: 13 is an interesting aside regarding the Christian people.  When they saw the courage of Peter and John and realized that they were unschooled, ordinary men, they were astonished and they took note that these men had been with Jesus. (NIV)  There is something tangible, something different about those who have become intimate with Jesus, who live with Him.  The ones observing it may not be able to put a finger on exactly what they see but it is recognizable.  Sprinkled throughout the book of Acts are some examples of how Christian people who are living with Christ in them look.

In Acts 7: 59-60 is the terrifying account of Stephen who was martyred for his faith crying out for God to forgive the very ones who were murdering him.  While they were stoning him, Stephen prayed, "Lord Jesus, receive my spirit."  Then he fell on his knees and cried out, "Lord, do not hold this sin against them." When he had said this, he fell asleep. (NIV)  To use a metaphor that could make some squeamish, Jesus Christ was seeping out of Stephen as he faced his death squarely.  That mercy he had for his killers was not his own, it was the nature and will of Jesus Christ living within him.  As you are being crushed by skull shattering stones, what you are comes out of you, not an imitation of something.  Stephen felt pity on his attackers because of the one living within Him, Jesus sincerely loved them.

When Paul, on his way to Damascus to arrest Christians, was converted by the personal work of Jesus Christ it was no small matter for the Christian Ananias to approach Paul and offer to baptize him and pray over him.  The prejudices he held were legitimate and based on factual information.  Paul was a real threat to him and his family.  To overcome this fear, Ananias had to possess Jesus Christ living in him who was fearless.  We know Ananias was afraid because he protested the demand of Christ that he go see Paul. "Lord," Ananias answered, "I have heard many reports about this man and all the harm he has done to your saints in Jerusalem.  And he has come here with authority from the chief priests to arrest all who call on your name."  (Acts 9:13-14 NIV)  Ananias the man felt the very natural panic at the mention of Paul’s name; Ananias with Jesus Christ unafraid living in him went courageously to Paul and prayed over him.

Something we have talked about before popped up in the Christian community that first few years after Christ ascended to the father.  Spontaneously and without coercion or any sort of Church direction, Christians started selling off their property and giving the proceeds to the work of the Church.  They weren’t pressured into doing it.  They weren’t even asked.  They just gave generously and sacrificially and it had a stunning effect upon other Christians as well as the community where they lived.  All the believers were one in heart and mind. No one claimed that any of his possessions was his own, but they shared everything they had.  With great power the apostles continued to testify to the resurrection of the Lord Jesus, and much grace was upon them all. There were no needy persons among them. For from time to time those who owned lands or houses sold them, brought the money from the sales and put it at the apostles' feet, and it was distributed to anyone as he had need. (Acts 4:32-35 NIV)  The reason why this was such an established practice is not because of the strategic training and pressure tactics in the Church; it occurred because the resurrected Christ lived in these people and His nature came out of them in tangible ways.  When Jesus Christ lives in you, your will moves in the direction of generosity and away from a drive to acquire possessions and gain for yourself stuff to hold and keep.

The point is that if you are actually Christian you have Jesus Christ, who suffered the Cross to take away your sins and rose from the dead and is not bound by the constraints of this world, living in you and undoing the constraints of your common thinking.  He makes you aware of the miracles that are possible. He opens you up to blessing people who hurt you and take from you and use you.  He gives you a determination to give up what you have to bring God glory.  He makes you courageous and confident and willing to die if you need to die for the Lord’s honor.  Jesus Christ living in you gives you the ability to quit judging people, quit deciding you don’t like them or won’t trust them or don’t want to have anything to do with them and gives you the determination to bless and pray for each person you encounter.  This does not come from you; it comes from Christ living in you.

We waste a lot of time and make ourselves miserable trying to fight off what Christ resurrected is in us.  Essentially we war against ourselves when we act selfishly, react angrily and refuse to love someone we dislike.  Because Christ resurrected has become a part of us, part of our personality…that is who we are.  The most miserable people in the world are those who war with themselves, who will not let Christ resurrected come out of them, show Himself in what they do.  Non-Christians can be perfectly content avoiding mean and irritating neighbors and co-workers and family members but Christians who have Christ resurrected living within them will be miserable if they try to be that way and the same is true when it comes to keeping too much for themselves and being afraid to trust God in stressful situations.  If you want to be unhappy, cranky and discouraged, then do your best to avoid who you are…Christ resurrected living within you.  If you want to be free of care, contented and courageous in your life with God, then let Christ resurrected have His way with you in what you do.  You cannot be at peace if you fight against who you are…but you will have perfect peace if you let Jesus Christ have complete sway within your personality.

Spend a week praying for God’s blessing upon someone who has treated you badly or someone you just don’t like.  Let Christ seep out of you.  Buy a sandwich for someone you don’t know and who doesn’t deserve your generosity.  Let Christ resurrected show Himself in you.  Do something nice for someone and never tell that person it was you who did it.  Let Christ resurrected show up where you are.  Announce your Christian faith in Christ where it isn’t known and see what God does with your courage.  Somehow find a way to give Christ resurrected room to live through you this week.

Are You A Horn Blower?

Does it confound you when you are treated badly, when you are ignored and your effort discredited or discounted?  Are you stunned by the rude behavior around you, by the lack of effort you see, by the selfishness and undependability everywhere you go?  It is never those you just see every once in a while who give you the most trouble, it is the ones closest to you: your spouse, children, parents, co-workers, fellow church members, clients, relatives, teammates.    We are too absorbed by our coming and going, what we want to get done, our expectations and fantasies to see how life really is.   The impact of sin is universal and ubiquitous but we have a frivolous demand that it not be here or there, not be where we want a break from it.  Sin is in your sister just as solidly as your supervisor and your political leaders and public personalities.  Sin has gotten ahold of your husband as well as your daughter and it is shut up in your babysitter and kindly uncle.  The sin you see in yourself is everywhere you look and you cannot get away from it here.  Your father acts badly because of sin just as your favorite sports hero and the girl you have had your eye on for months.  Sin is pervasive and swelling in influence and effect.  Rather than growing cynical and bitter about it, face the sin head on.  Know it is there just as surely as it is within you.  Only the fool sees no sin in herself and the spiritually naïve are shocked by its appearance when they make a friendship.  You are a sinner living among sinners so give everyone a break and relax.  Jesus Christ was not rattled by the sin all about Him...He could just as easily forgive the woman caught in adultery as call out the Pharisees who dreamed at night of the woman they wanted to smash with stones because she wasn't with them.  Jesus Christ does not fret over sin taking hold of the friends he "trusts"; He redeems them.  The same work happening with you is going on in those about you.  It is absurd  to fuss and stew over your son's undone homework and your husband's lack of regard for your needs.  They are sinners and Christ is redeeming them just as surely as He is you and your unseemliness.  It is easy to realize how everyone must be patient with you because of the sin you struggle to master; what about those who you find unattractive and unreasonable; can you see how patience is required for them too?  God is not finished with them too.  The work in progress of Christ redeeming mankind is too cumbersome and tedious for many of us to endure and we get exasperated by its snail pace...but the work will be done in you as well as those about you so why not relax a bit and give the Lord room to crucify each of us that we might all live in Christ fully and completely.   So just take your hand off the horn, give up your right to blow up on your wife and don't make it worse for God as He does the redeeming and you in turn grow in your faith that Jesus Christ is Lord of ALL.

In your unfailing love you will lead the people you have redeemed.  In your strength you will guide them to your holy dwelling.   Exodus 15:13 NIV

A Stitch in Time

How badly do you really need God?  If the day passed and you hadn't prayed or read your Bible or sought the Lord in any  way, would it be troublesome to you?  Would you be aware of the power of the Holy Spirit slipping from you; are you distracted enough to be content with a day outside of God?  You can do all sorts of "God things" and never have any conscious sense that the Lord is there with you.  We are so entranced by the machinations of day-to-day living and yet do we have the sense to want more of God than we possess at the moment?  Have we grown sensible and realistic and hardly in any way supernatural?  The commonplace Bible reading that is habitual is of greater use to God than all the outstanding accomplishments of the most skilled trader on Wall Street.  You will gain more out of five minutes alone with God in a quiet moment than all the frantic activity you have planned for your day.  As you engage God, God engages you.  He enters your planning, your decision making and your reactions.  You can work without God and many, many do!  But what good is that?  A pause to readmit the Lord Jesus into your specific moment will work a miracle in your moving forward.  The Lord will show you things as you branch out into the tasks you have, show you your heart, show you the hearts of others, give you wisdom about how you go about even the simplest and most trivial of chores you face.  The Lord will hone your attention, stir up your passion for the proper things, grant you courage and peace as you encounter obstacles.  What may seem like chance encounters will be divine appointments as you stir  around your devotion to Christ.  It is unlikely everything will be easy simply because you give God your time; it may in fact be more challenging.  But you will have the assurance that what comes to you today will be for your good and your life will spill out into the lives of others who need your hands and feet and head and mouth to be completely given over to the crucified life of Christ embedded in you.  Others may not be able to tell how much of your Lord is coming out of you at any given moment but you will know and the more of Him you see in your actions, the greater your joy will be in what work you have today.

Jesus answered her, "If you knew the gift of God and who it is that asks you for a drink, you would have asked him and he would have given you living water."  John 4:10 NIV

The Dogs of Your Winter

It is simply unheard of within scripture of someone with great faith not being tested in that faith.  Try as you may, you will not come across a God beacon who avoided being sorely tried.  Noah, Moses, Ruth, David, Daniel, Mary, Peter, Mary Magdalene, Paul; they all were sent careening off the cliff at some point and you will also come upon your own cliff.  It may not appear suddenly but could gradually arise but you will face it if your love of Christ is actual.  The most comfortable life there is right now is the one without hope, without promise.  Hope is not for the pagan or the atheist but only for the one going through the fires of faith.  If you want to look around at all the pitch dark souls wandering around without Christ and long for their settled existence, you certainly can.  But it would be like Noah's wife perched in the ark ruminating over how easy her aunt has it back in the village.  You are going to face tremendous trials that will bark at your faith but that is all they can do...bark.  The trials have no bite for they cannot get at where you are...hidden with Christ in God.  You are dead and that is what the Lord declares  you to be.  Imagine a great bear snarling at the Lord Jesus Christ glorified.  It is as ridiculous as your trial besting you.  The Lord has you and yes your faith is being tested but that is just the beginning of birth pains for you as you triumph in them and come out victoriously to your place in the pantheon of God's great hall of saints purified by trial.  Resist the urge to envy the untroubled.  Nothing can take away the joy you possess ultimately and it doesn't need to be dispossessed now.  The trial will pass but you will stand and stand with a smile gracing your face as you look back upon it as a toothless barking dog .  Be resolute in your determination to trust Christ fully at the moment the hounds come after you.

For you died, and your life is now hidden with Christ in God.    Colossians 3:3-4 NIV

Dense Lives

Given the density of so many lives, how is it that we would expect God to supernaturally maneuver among us?  The cry for God is nearly universal.  It is just that expectations have been so diminished by failure to encounter Him on our terms  that we schedule ourselves senseless.  The irony of our discouraged indifference is that we scurry about trying to find what in a moment the Lord Jesus Christ can give us.  Imagine the poor widow of Jesus' parable sweeping out her neighbor's house trying to find her missing coin or going down to the park with her back bent over, her eyes frantically scanning the ground for any sign of it among the shrubs.  The distressed poor soul would have been a fool to go out of the country hoping to find the coin in some far off land.  What she did was sheer genius!  She went into her own home and turned everything upside down there.  Is it any wonder that we have had such a disastrous go at this matter of "finding" God when we have gone hither and thither without our wits engaged at all?  The Lord Jesus Christ told the Pharisees that the Kingdom of God was right there with them...it had never been anywhere else and was not disappearing any time soon.  Our frantic chase after something, anything that can match the Presence of God right where we are is pitiful.  Give God enough space in your chaotic mind to meet with you!   Nothing screams more loudly than the wills and whims of the cascading world falling all about us.  The shepherds simply sat where they were in the stillness of the night and God met them there.  The Magi scanned the heavens for some hint of His presence and God met them too.  The disoriented woman at the well stayed long enough at her normal work station to give God a shot at speaking to her there.  Have we discouraged the Savior's efforts at getting through to us because we have been derelict in the one duty we have been given…"wait…"?  Your most productive moment of your day is the point at which you wait for God to wiggle His way into you.  You may not have a marvelous revelation, a fascinating insight but you could gain the sudden influx of Holy Spirit Presence that will re-calibrate your inner core so that God can orient you rightly.  You most likely will not see a blaze of starlight or a vibrant band of angels but you could know how to manage that barking child or gain peace over that tormenting debt.  Your Savior is your Savior.  If you wait upon Him long enough, He will get you through your turmoil with your joy intact.  Isn't that worth something?

I have been crucified with Christ and I no longer live, but Christ lives in me. The life I live in the body, I live by faith in the

Wait for the Lord; be strong and take heart and wait for the Lord.  Psalm  27:14 NIV

Forgetting The Past

Philippians 3:13-14 NIV

Forgetting what is behind and straining toward what is ahead, I press on toward the goal to win the prize for which God has called me heavenward in Christ Jesus. 

When I was in seventh grade, there was a boy named Mark Munschausen who used to make fun of me incessantly.  I was the tallest kid in the school and he was the shortest boy in my class.  He used to try his best to humiliate me in front of my schoolmates for what reason I don’t know.  Of all the other kids at the school, I was his victim.  After perhaps six months of this, I finally exploded.  On the grass field of the school playground while a group of us including Mark were playing football, he said something to me that set me off.  I chased him down and tackled him, began punching him relentlessly and then started choking him.  All the while tears were streaming down my face.  I had never been in a physical fight before…and haven’t since.  Someone must have pulled me off Mark because I don’t remember quitting on my own.  The fight ended, as much as you could call my pummeling him a fight, and as far as I can recall, I was never disciplined for it, never even brought to the principal’s office.  We settled our dispute on the playground and he never made fun of me again.  As I look back upon the “encounter” I must say I never made it my goal to look for other Munschausens in the world to fight them.  I never took out my rage on others of German decent.  I didn’t make it my determination to crush all other short people.  The name Mark has never had a negative connotation for me since the fight.  And freckled kids (Mark was freckled) have not stirred my anger.  All I have since then is a rather indifferent attitude toward the whole business.  I don’t feel guilty for what I did and I am not in any way still disturbed by the teasing I suffered back then.  It might as well have never happened it is so insignificant to my life now.

There is much made of how our past influences who we are today and there certainly is a great deal of truth to that contention.   Children who have been abused are generally scarred for life by it.  Plenty of men and women are afraid to get married after their first marriage failed.  Many people have trust issues because they have never forgotten how someone they loved betrayed them.  Some people won’t eat peas because they got sick at one time eating them.  There are adults who have never gotten over their fear of swimming because someone they knew drowned or of dogs because they were bitten when they were young or of going into dark rooms because they were molested when they were a child.  Perhaps you had a tough time liking someone who reminded you of someone else.  You might flinch when a car comes too close to you as you are driving after having been rear ended.  Plenty of people who came out of the depression continued the rest of their lives saving milk cartons,  old cans and scraps of wood just in case they might someday need them.  Many people try to run from their past by moving as far away from their home town as possible.  Some leave careers because of bad experiences that traumatized them.  The past for many is a terrible prison where they have been trapped; for others the past has kept them from trying new things and making new friends.  The past is not always our friend.

There is a person in the Bible who never escaped his past and it caused his downfall.  The third son of David, King of Israel was haunted by his past.  His sister was raped by his older half-brother and for three long years, Absalom plotted how he might avenge the crime.  As the years went by, Absalom grew increasingly bitter about the lack of action his father took when he heard about the rape and decided he would take justice into his own hands and take vengeance on his sister’s rapist .Absalom never said a word to Amnon, either good or bad; he hated Amnon because he had disgraced his sister Tamar.  (Genesis 13: 22 NIV) Finally, Absalom made his move and murdered Amnon, his half-brother who had committed the rape.  But Absalom’s rage was not stemmed by his revenge.  He then began to plot the overthrow of his father’s government and take the crown from him.  Absalom planned four years the revolt and eventually had enough support within the nation to rebel against his father’s rule.  He was eager in fact to have his own father murdered in the process.  Absalom, for whatever reason, his father’s lack of support when Absalom was young or David’s seeming indifference to the rape of Absalom’s sister Tamar, never forgot how he had been wronged by his dad. In the end, Absalom’s inability to forget his past cost him his life when he was killed in battle trying to destroy his dad.

There are millions around the world like Absalom who do not let go of their past even though it damages them psychologically.  In contrast Joseph was sold into slavery by his brothers and despite winding up in prison for a crime he did not commit was not governed by all the wrong done him.  In fact he faced his brothers fully and rather than condemning them, reminded them of the part God played in his exile to Egypt.  “And now, do not be distressed and do not be angry with yourselves for selling me here, because it was to save lives that God sent me ahead of you.  For two years now there has been famine in the land, and for the next five years there will not be plowing and reaping.  But God sent me ahead of you to preserve for you a remnant on earth and to save your lives by a great deliverance. So then, it was not you who sent me here, but God. He made me father to Pharaoh, lord of his entire household and ruler of all Egypt.” (Genesis 45:5-9 NIV)

Notice in this that Joseph never blocked out his past; he saw it as redeemed by God.  He did not deny the evil that was in the hearts of his brothers, he redefined though their work.  Nothing you or I have endured is too monstrous to be reconstituted into a resurrection of sorts.  Joseph did not forget his past; he was in a sense governed by it and not how the vast majority of us are governed by our past.  Getting sold into slavery was the only way Joseph would have voluntarily left his father to resettle in Egypt.  When Joseph was falsely accused by Potiphar’s wife of trying to rape her, God used her accusation to bring out Joseph’s own true loyalty to God and moral fortitude and establish the two joined together as his determining personality trait.  The idiotic assumption Potiphar made that Joseph was guilty led to Joseph gaining a rock solid trust in God to see him through any trial he might ever face.  It also landed him in the sole place where he could establish for one of Pharaoh’s most important officials the power he possessed as God’s personal servant and prophet.  We must not pass by this too quickly.  Only at the point of great desperation and need could Pharaoh’s cupbearer be ready to ascertain the most important bit of information he would encounter ever.  The Lord was intervening in his life and he might never have known this without meeting Joseph in prison; might never have been able to help Pharaoh see that God was intervening in the king’s own life if he hadn’t met Joseph in prison.

Given the monumental place our past has with regard to our present, we must see it for what it is.  The Apostle Paul had every reason to be consumed by the pain of his past.  After all, each time he made it back to Jerusalem he must have encountered some widow or orphan Paul personally put in that condition.  He came across in cities all over the western world men and women who had ugly scars because of what Paul had done to them.  It is not easy to live with a past such as Paul’s, especially given the insatiable hunger Paul had to love each soul he met.  If anyone had a dreadful past he must have wished to bury, it had to have been the Apostle Paul.  Yet he never seemed emotionally crippled by his past and he certainly never buried his past.  This is why.

Everything changes when we take for ourselves Jesus Christ crucified, including our past.  When Jesus, God in flesh died on the cross, He redeemed us.  That means He gained for Himself by dying everything there is about us and immediately transformed it into something completely new including what we have faced before.  The transformation cuts both ways…forward and backward.  We have a future that is different and eventually perfect and we have a past that is different and eventually perfect.  When we are born again, God does not leave us with a fragmented and awful heredity that leaves us psychologically crippled.  He makes our past right and good.  No experience we have had once we have been totally redeemed by the Cross of Christ is a gaping wound…it is God’s own place of strength.  Imagine a separated shoulder that after it is surgically repaired is stronger and more helpful than ever.  Your past, once God has had His way with it through the Cross of Christ is your ally and valuable resource for the enhancement of your life as well as the lives of a multitude of others.  It is only as we defy our Lord to make good of our past by unbelief that we limp about, crippled by our past.

Paul’s rallying cry, of “forgetting what is behind”, was not a spin doctor’s challenge to pretend like nothing happened to us before.  He simply stated how it is when we give our lives to Christ.  The past is just as good to us as our future not because we decide it is but because it really is.  Consider this about the forgetting.  Imagine you have suffered a terrible back injury.  All you think about is that back of yours because it through pain demands your attention.  Day and night, each movement and activity is ruled to some degree by your aching back.  Your back comes up in your daily conversations, is a big part of your praying and constitutes your rapt attention.  But suppose that back of yours begins to heal.  You think about it less, pray about it more infrequently and it comes up in fewer and fewer of your conversations.  You don’t even notice your back when you lift something or sit or take a walk.  It is so completely healed that you forget your back.  That is what Paul is talking about your past.  In Christ, as you in faith put your past into the body of Jesus crucified, your past gets more than healed; it becomes perfected…the perfect past for one as important and beloved of God as you.

The revelation from God that you have sinned is the point at which you start to see your past become your great friend.  The Bible makes it clear what you must do about your past.  Repent, then, and turn to God, so that your sins may be wiped out, that times of refreshing may come from the Lord, and that he may send the Christ, who has been appointed for you — even Jesus. (Acts 3:19-20 NIV) When you turn from your sin and face God squarely, which is what “repent” means, a miracle happens.  The Holy Spirit comes upon you, and you are not the same person you were before.  Christ enters you and you begin to work in His power and you think with His mind working by means of your mind and you love through Christ and bless through Christ and help through Christ and encourage through Christ and heal through Christ and pray through Christ.  Everything changes when you turn from your sin and face God.  Your mind does not think with a limp and you do not act lamely but capably, effectively as Jesus Christ lives through all you do.  Repent, for you as a Christian, does not mean a groveling, despair over your past; it is a turning to God that Christ may live thoroughly through you. Our road map through our past into our future is Galatians 2: 20.  I have been crucified with Christ.  That is your past.  And I no longer live but Christ lives in me.  That is what you are now. And the life I live in the body I live by faith in the Son of God who loved me and gave Himself for me.  That is your past combined with who you are now determining what you will be from this point forward.  Take a moment to remember some things that you have had happen in your past…good or bad that have shaped you and influenced you now.  Fling those memories of what happened into the crucified body of Christ and miraculously, perfectly, God will transform them and they will be…each one of them, cause for you to be happy.  They are and forever will be your friend and your help as you move forward in Christ.

Heed the Call

The moment you think you have heard from God, act upon it decidedly.  You may be mistaken but the Lord will honor your faith and make even your error work for good.  Our problem generally is not our false interpretation of God's directive but rather our rebellious waffling on the point of action.  We see everything else so clearly...the troubles we face, the insults we endure, the lost opportunity and the baseness of co-workers but do we see the way we react to the Word God gives us?  Do we notice how faithfully He guides us or are we blindly moving forward without a care?  The Lord will show you the way but only as you adapt to His guidance will you see more.  If you haven't heard from the Lord, then return to the last place you strayed from His prod and start over there.  Do the thing He told you to do and renew your commitment to follow God wholeheartedly.  Everything went haywire for Abraham the minute he gave in to Sarah's demand that he produce a child through Hagar her slave.  The harshness of the demand that Abraham send off Hagar and his son Ishmael was the correction Abraham had to make to be certain the Lord was his one and only God.  Is it stunning that Abraham had to act upon Sarah's childish demand for Abraham to get rid of Hagar and Ishmael if he was to get back to where God wanted him before he submitted to her whim the first time?  Give in once to the temptation to follow along a line other than the clear one God has given you and the correction may be brutally painful and seem absurdly unfair...and yet it must be done.  In faith we stay on the narrow path God lays out for us and in faith we return to it when we grasp the immensity of our deviation from it.  Once we have accepted the correction and done so decidedly, the way of God becomes clear and bright.  Never be afraid to follow God wholly; be scared to death though of disregarding His certain command.  You may be kept from disaster by God's grace but there will be a cost in the end, one that did not have to be before you strayed.

The matter distressed Abraham greatly because it concerned his son.  But God said to him, "Do not be so distressed…"  Genesis 21: 11,12a NIV

The Bloody Coup

Until we see the fullness of our depravity, taste  the sludge spewing out from the depths of our heart, we will not grasp the enormity of risk Jesus took to save us.  The humiliation we feel at the sight of our temper spewing poisonous wrath upon some stunned family member or careless co-worker is the edge at which we can get at the real crisis we face.  When a well-shrouded lust takes control of our moral piety, we are at the precipice of the most critical discovery.     We are filthy and corrupt at the core and it is needless trying to make something of our selves.  Our critical need is not self-assessment and adjustment; it is the rush of life Jesus gives us at the Cross.  We are not fixable; but we are destructible.  The sooner we see our true condition, the quicker we will be able to turn away from bandages when we need resurrection.  Jesus did not come to fix us but rather to raise us from the dead.   We are irretrievably ruined by sin and that becomes obvious when we blow up at our four year-old for smearing lipstick on her face just as we are about to leave for the wedding.    The entire town of Sodom may have been self-righteously unaware of the filth it was gathering but Lot knew what was there and although he tried his best to ignore the elephant in the room, he at the point of destruction had to face it squarely.    You are not fixable, but you are redeemable.  The difference in the two is as wide as the grave.  Only the life of Christ can remake the cities leveled in your heart by sin.  Only He can give you life that will turn sinless as He works all through you.  You will never be able to live with the filth inside you; at least not like the lovely woman going into Victoria's Secret hoping to lure her boss away from his wife.  You won't be able to make heads or tails of the tumult you know rages within you until you pursue Christ for your condition.  The woman who grasped after Jesus' garment to stem the flow of blood knew what the rest of the gawking crowd did not but you must decide is so as she did.  Jesus really is the only hope you have and you must choose  to reach after Him yourself and ignore the skeptics who blindly disregard how badly they are bleeding too.

For if, when we were God's enemies, we were reconciled to him through the death of his Son, how much more, having been reconciled, shall we be saved through his life!   Romans 5:10-11 NIV

No Doubt

How do you get to the point of "no doubts"?  Anyone who has ever tried to curse a fig tree to the withering point or attempted to move a mountain into the sea probably responds, "It is impossible!"  Yet Jesus insists it is not impossible and at several points He makes the same assertion.  With faith in God you can do certain acts that are "impossible".  If this is our benchmark where faith could and should be, then it seems a dereliction to not actively pursue it.  Nothing confounds the Christian quite as much as the powerless and fruitless praying he encounters.  But the height should not be determined by the depth and the child who gives up on trying to ride a bicycle because she fell is pushed on by the more experienced at failing father or sister.  Just because we fail at prayer does not mean it cannot be done.  It all has to do with faith in Christ and some attain faith easily and quickly and others by fits and starts.  It is grace that flashes your faith to life but obedience and persistence in prayer that stimulates it to burst into flame.  All at once you will be as stunned as the Disciples by some happy success in prayer but rather than following through with your new life with God you will be tempted to return to your old attachments that snared you before.  Put those crooked longings to death; attack them viciously.  Someone needs your new sensitivity to the Spirit's indwelling.  You are not a misfit in the kingdom; you have the tools needed to move among fig trees and mountains and entrenched demons with assertive sense.  Don't sit on your hands flabbergasted by your struggles at prayer.  Evaluate your praying by two criteria only.   Am I doing what God has told me to do in the Sermon on the Mount through Him (trusting Him in the hard parts of doing) ; am I persisting in prayer heartily enough that my faith in Christ has room to grow?

 "Have faith in God," Jesus answered.  "I tell you the truth, if anyone says to this mountain, 'Go, throw yourself into the sea,' and does not doubt in his heart but believes that what he says will happen, it will be done for him.  Mark 11:22-23 NIV

Life Now

We are not told in scripture to follow after a principle or value; rather we are directed to a person.  The Bible is not a book of philosophical ideas or even of precepts; it is a signpost that points toward One who saves.  Nothing is more fruitless than the flailing efforts at keeping any of the bits of the Sermon on the Mount and anyone who indicates otherwise is a liar.  Before you murder you have already murdered.  Before you have committed adultery, you have already committed adultery.  Before you have stolen, you have already stolen.  It is all there at the front end of the action...the deed is in your head and you can't get at that with determination.  Nothing establishes your need for One Person more than the corruption of your life before you even act.  You know you have wanted something not yours simply because someone else has it.  You know you have despised someone without saying a word to anyone about it.  You know  you had your way with someone and never even touched that partner.  It is all there for you, the complete inability to live a holy and righteous life because if the truth be known, you don't want to live it.  But within some, and that number may be smaller than we think, there is a great longing to be all out for God, to be clean and pure no matter what.  It is then that the dawn breaks and you see the most important part...you need the Savior.   You don't need a Savior to keep you out of hell, you need a Savior to get you out of hell.  Life and death are not that far apart, they are the space between turning to Jesus Christ and not.  The lust that burns within you in a flash and the bitter hatred that flares in an instant have their kindling in the heart that is not depending upon Christ for all joy and peace.  Eternal life weaves its way through you in a twisted and convoluted way until you look to Jesus Christ to redeem each and every thought you have and then it grows straighter and more sure.  And soon enough one day you will only look to Jesus Christ and your victory will be proven fully in the shadowless realm of God's unending Presence.   The Christ life in not a concept but a reality for the one who turns to the Lord to save her from her thoughts and not just her public actions.  The more of Christ we take within us, the more we live and live and live. 

Now this is eternal life: that they may know you, the only true God, and Jesus Christ, whom you have sent.  John 17:3 NIV

Free Pass

We have misunderstood grace and made something of it that it has never been.  The idea that grace is a "free pass" is foreign to the scriptures...especially when you read much of Paul.  Grace is not that God lets things go as if they don't matter much to him.  Under that sort of grace, the new birth would be unnecessary...he could just turn away from all the evil we have absorbed and pretend it is not there.  We are born again not so that we can keep on as we were before but to be completely changed and for that to happen, the effect of sin in us must be addressed.  Like a surgeon whose mission it is to explore the torn ligaments and do something about them, the Lord takes on the full effect of sin and cuts at it in every point.  We cry out to God for mercy and wonder why we suffered this or that.  We moan about the trials we face and wish we hadn't lost our temper, stared long at the actress partially dressed, given up on a ministry we started.  The two go together and cannot be extricated from one another.  I argue too much and God works at that, cutting apart my self-assurance through failure.  I am not contented and God cuts at that too, taking even the holy things from me until I see the joy of simple trust in Christ to make my day right and good.  We have been hurt badly by the sins of others but that does not mean the universe is out of control and that the Lord has left us to fend for ourselves.  He is, in it all, building a perfect saint who is cleansed in entirety of sin and whose hatred of all things idolatrous still there within knows no bounds.  The past is not a plague unless we say it is so.  God has taken the worst Satan has thrown your way to strip your soul of all love for the world and to remake you into the perfect bride of Christ.  You cannot love your neighbor completely unless you despise each tie to sin you find in yourself and then you will be able to truly welcome him as your brother.  The circumstances in your life...both what you define as good and bad...are being used each in its own way to break off every bit of evil attached within you and in the end, the grace of God will have done its full work and your joy will be without limits.

Consider it pure joy, my brothers , whenever you face trials of many kinds… James 1: 2

Reshaped by God

Nothing quite upsets the  Christian like the realization that she is not her own.  The mental assent of it is comfortable and in ways pleasing but the working out of it is discombobulating.  As soon as you give Christ your life it is His and He may not work it out the way you want it.  Like a ball of clay in the hands of a master, you will be reshaped until the Lord is satisfied; not until you are fine with how things are.  Esau was "hated" by God not because he was such a foul person but because he never had God in mind as he went about his business.  He lived for his own today and not any further.  Jacob in his complicated passion, wanted all God had and more.  Jacob could work for Esau if he might have the birthright and lose his father's affection if he could get the blessing. In the perversity of his scheming, always Jacob had at the front the vastness of God and the Lord blessed Him in his madness.  Before we see something in God and Jacob that was never there; it must be reminded that Jacob was clay and the reshaping of him took a lifetime.  While Abraham had the faith to give at God's command his son Isaac freely, the Lord stripped Jacob without warning of each delight he treasured.  First it was his mother, then his sweetheart Rachel and finally his beloved son Joseph.  At each point Jacob could do nothing to take back the lamb on the altar.  His hands were tied and he was left to wait out the terrible reworking of his heart until God was finished with him on it.  Jacob was not his own and this became dreadfully clear to him with each lamb God took from his grip.  You can wallow in self pity over the shape God is pounding into you or you can be satisfied with the mercy God has to not leave you as an Esau "hated" but reworked like Jacob "loved".

...so the potter formed it into another pot, shaping it as seemed best to him.   Jeremiah 18:4 NIV

Nothing Lost, Nothing Gained

The sinfulness of man is not a physical inheritance...in other words the newborn baby is not already built with sin in him.  But sin all about makes him inherit a nature plagued by sin.  We are not launched into this world sin ruined but we are brought into it sin surrounded.  As soon as we begin making our way about morally we give temptation its way and then we are cooked.  Sin has us internally and externally.   Only Jesus resisted sin fully from the moment he first began to act morally.  At no point did He let temptation hold sway over a decision of His.  The average person gives so little thought to sin, let alone temptation that he hardly notices the evil he lets wreck him.  The cross of Christ is more than just a cleanser of sin, it is a redeemer of the sinner.  By faith in the Cross of Christ, we gain the nature of God living throughout us.  We no longer are the slave of sin but the destroyer of both temptation and sin.  We are not weak little children just trying to get by spiritually, we are wunderkind, powerful conquerors who have the capacity to live pure and holy lives.  The question is not will we but when will we let the might of Christ have full sway in the parts of our day.  We don't have to be a slave of lust or anger or greed or deceit or pride; we are because God dwells in us the overcomer in each place we find ourselves.  We cannot choose the temptation but we can submit ourselves to the might of Christ  and be done with that sin at that moment.  Nothing good comes of relying upon yourself...it always turns bitter for you...but when you turn to God to take back your moral place and live again in holiness, the joy of your redeemer will swell within you and you will feel the very goodness of Christ sweeping over you.    The heart has been raped and scourged and pummeled by sin but in Christ you can determine "not this time" because the Holy Spirit will as you turn to Him protect you from that tormenting temptation.  We laugh at sin and make light of it at the bar or at the club or in the gym or as our employer begins to manhandle us but it is even disguised, the beast that takes you apart.  Confess your sins rather than  belittle their magnitude.  God will forgive them immediately and scrub you clean of their poisons.  Just don't pretend they aren't there or don't matter.

"Why are you sleeping?" he asked them. "Get up and pray so that you will not fall into temptation."  Luke 22:46 NIV