Real Time Christianity

Have you ever been confounded by some lack of a particular spiritual experience…felt impoverished some way in your life with God?    No one is quite so dumbfounded by “missing parts” as the believer hoping to move rapidly through the stages of Christian faith.  It feels unfair that some have this great encounter with God and others that divine revelation that super-charges them.  We seem to be the only ones stuck in the humdrum, jammed into a cubicle spiritually.  Consider the elation Christ felt as a young boy of twelve in His Father’s house.  The scriptures were there before Him, every letter of the Law available to His twitchy finger tips.  He was free to probe the greatest of the rabbis and test their mettle with His questions.  Day and night He was able to breathe in the Father’s words without the commonplace distractions of mundane Nazareth; did not have be interrupted by the roar of his brothers and sisters constant badgering and harassment.  No dishes to wash, no cabinets to repair, no fussy parents to please.  There in the Temple He was free to suck in the full majesty of the Jewish religious experience…but if He had stayed there even a moment past His mother’s press to return home, it all would have spilled out upon the ground like a cracked nightmare.  Jesus went home and in the poverty of an academically barren village, He lived the life given Him and He lived it well.  He gained what visions and ecstatic experiences could not provide Him; a grown up view of Kingdom life.  There is no record of Jesus miracles during the next eighteen years of His life, no burning bushes, no chariots of fire.  It was just weekly trips to the synagogue, daily having to trudge to the well to get water jars filled, nightly sleeping on the same worn out blankets.  Oh, he had the glow of the stars to brighten His evenings and the stir of the crickets to awaken His slumber but everything was always very much the same…the sunrise and the sunset, the musty sun-scorched breeze that never really cooled.  Did Jesus speak in tongues then…did He get slain in the Spirit…did He “prophesy”?  We have no record of any of that.  We simply have Jesus learning obedience in what He suffered so that when His time of glory came, He was ready to follow it through to the end.    Nothing will sanctify you any more than simply doing what God gives you to do and being thankful for the extreme mercy of the Father in showering your heart with the love of Christ.

Then he went down to Nazareth with them and was obedient to them. But his mother treasured all these things in her heart. And Jesus grew in wisdom and stature, and in favor with God and men.

Luke 2:51-52 NIV 

Religious Tinkering

What constitutes spirituality?  Is it an interest in religious matters?  Is it  the capacity to tease out the main idea in a Biblical text?  Is it a way of speaking or a propensity for charitable deeds?  For Jesus, spirituality was grounded in a determination to do whatever He saw the Father doing.  His mind's eye was fixed and never moved from that one focal point.  At every place where He went, He was given over to the will of the Father and in following Him step by step.  Spirituality is nothing more than puffed up personalized morality if it is not squared with the mind of Christ.  We have the gift of the Holy Spirit  not that we might do great deeds of godliness but that we might be at one with Jesus Christ every step.  The blood of Christ is in the washing of personality a mightier work than we grasp.  It is holiness personified...not considered, not examined.  With the cleansing Christ provides we can live a holy life because Christ is holy.    We should not take this lightly.  Holiness is the personal end game for us.  The Lord will never put up with a single bit of sinful waywardness.  He will shred us and consume us with His blazing fire until every bit of rebellion is gone.  This happens now and we should thank God He does not leave all this work until we come face to face with Him.  The trials we face today and the hardships we encounter now are all a gracious work of God to strip us clean and the more we give ourselves freely to Him, the more joyfully we will walk tomorrow.  If the "well done good and faithful servant" were left to us alone, we would simply be disgraced in the end.  But the "well done good servant" is being shaped by God in our momentary troubles and light trials.  As we turn to Christ in faith, we find the old pernicious acrimony toward the Father and what we see Him doing drained from us and replaced with the sweet, happy stream of Christ Himself welling up within.  The great days of our lives are when we are surprised to find Christ seeping out of us as we go about the normal business we have.  At those grand moments, we will grin and laugh happily that we really have been made new!

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

John 7:38-39 NIV

Loyalty and Its Cost

Is it wrong to want others to like us, to value us and respect us?  Should it not be a noble goal to have people speak highly of us at our funeral, for them to have fond memories of our life and testify of what a good and generous person we were?  So do we leave the path of rightness if it matters to us what sort of reputation we have developed and we care about the popularity we acquire?  Jesus insisted that if we follow Him there will be those who hate us and reject us because of Him.  Does that possibility frighten us?  Are we disturbed by how the Gospel in us is received?  When Christ works His way through our personality, it is not a trifling matter.  It is revolutionary; as upsetting as the day the colonies declared independence from England; as chaotic as when the realization strikes us that our children really are adults and no longer ours to keep in place.  The supernatural effect of the Cross is that the Lord Jesus Christ becomes Lord over one dealing after another and it will crack the care-free web of interacting we have built.  God’s peace does not please everyone.  Hope does not make everyone happy.  Holiness is frightful to many…so is kindness, generosity and mercy.  The world is not ready for a Christian man or woman who fully intends to let God live through the complete personality.  It will jar plenty; stun and mystify enough of the crowd to send some shivers down our spine.  You will not be prepared for being hated because Christ lives through you.  It will seem to you that God should have worked that out in advance; that if you are reworked by the Holy Spirit, He will make the path clear of boulders and thorn bushes for you.  But He won’t.  Just as the seedling needs the pushback of the soil to make it prosper and grow strong, you need the opposition of friends and family to develop spiritual backbone.  You are to be strong and mighty in God and it must be steady she goes for you as you gain some of the circle of isolation Christ faced.  Let Christ be the center of all you are becoming and soon enough you will be able to love those who hate you and let your critics have their say without being perturbed.  In the darkness of strained and ruined relationships, the light of Christ will shine brightly enough to guide your way through to the other side of the dismay you feel.  Just don’t let your attempts at realizing yourself be the instigator for your conflicts.  You are not, and forever will not be your own.  It is you and the love of Christ in all you do now.  Let Him have His way in your visceral response to broken humanity…in particular the part of that humanity living next door to you…or in your house.

Keep yourselves in God's love as you wait for the mercy of our Lord Jesus Christ to bring you to eternal life.   Jude 21 NIV

Comfort Re-examined

What makes you so certain you have all the facts?  Do you know everything you need to know when you make your decisions?  Are you clear on all the factors involved as you move forward?  We find in 2 Thessalonians 2: 7ff that there is a great set of unseen forces at work all around us and we are like mindless bobs bouncing at the whim of a seething  ocean storm if we do not seek the Lord in all we do and say.  The deception is at every level and in each turn; everything that is of God is opposed by the power of lawlessness and we pretend to our great harm that it is not present in our spot of the world.  The vast majority of our personality is hidden from our view and therein is the rub.  What we don't see we pretend doesn't exist but we cannot continue to hide from it.  Forces are at work within us and without and it is the fool who does not bring Christ into each part of his day because those forces are most certainly there already.  If insanity is the mental deviation from the norm, then it is insanity to take into consideration forces operating within each of your moments influencing your emotional reactions and marring your mental acuity.  Yet insanity is sanity when reality goes unnoticed and denied by the acknowledged "norm".  Jesus Christ died to free you from slavery to the rebellion in the universe and to let yourself be subservient to that rebellion without a care is the remaking of General Custer's march into the Little Big Horn.  The Lord broke your bondage to Satan and the will of his cohorts; why put back on those chains by ignoring the working of Holy Spirit in your heart; guiding you, inspiring you, elevating your view.  The man of lawlessness is no comic book character...he is at the heart of our world's misery even in your corner of the world.  Take action.  Pursue with determined fortitude the power and might of Holy Spirit at the very spot where you are in your day through all those spots of your day.  You are at the front line of the battlefield and you must have the eyes of God Himself seeing through you if you are to be of any good in this fight.

The coming of the lawless one will be in accordance with the work of Satan displayed in all kinds of counterfeit miracles, signs and wonders and in every sort of evil that deceives those who are perishing.  They perish because they refused to love the truth and so be saved.  2 Thessalonians 2: 9-10

Are You Aware of the Big Picture?

There is with each of us a great mountain of unexplored territory.  Our personality is beyond our grasp, even the smallest parts of it.  That is why egotism is such a dastardly sin against ourselves because what we think we are is so far from the actuality.  Just consider your dreams and how profoundly they explore your depths.  You dream of someone you cannot recall ever seeing, create a narrative that is far more complex with plots and subplots than anything you could ever put down in writing, express fears and colossal desires you did not know existed.    In your dreams, lusts and cravings spring up from the pit of you that astound and perplex you.  That is just the brief snippets of the dreams you recall after the first minute of waking.  The boundaries of you that are versus what you think those boundaries of you are far surpass the difference between all of Asia and the little mosquito dancing near a swamp in Viet Nam.  You are not merely the sum of your parts…you go beyond all your parts and all the parts of everyone you know of those you have met over the course of your life.  The shepherds were amazed by the angels…first one and then thousands because they never imagined something so wonderful and spectacular.  Come to Jesus and you will find that what you know of Him and what you think you know of Him is even less than what you know of yourself.  Consider the wonder and awe of those first moments when the shepherds looked up into the night sky and watched the heavenly dance played out above them.  They could not have realized that what the angels announced was so much greater than what they presented of themselves.  Why are we so dreary and lackadaisical when it comes to knowing Jesus Christ?  We seem to be like the poor man who smashed his TV to get at the little people who lived in his box and talked to him from inside it..  Can we not see that Jesus Christ is mercy and love and joy beyond our wildest imaginings and that the glory of His being is the most magnificent of discoveries and one that brightens exponentially with each new exploration into Him?  Have we the persistence of the shepherds who scrambled to see the Christ Christmas morning?  Have we an idea of what consists of the “big picture“?  Do we realize how big Jesus is?

So they hurried off and found Mary and Joseph, and the baby, who was lying in the manger.      Luke 2:16 NIV

In or Out

The moment we begin to dwell upon ourselves, our mental state, our condition, our circumstances, our finances, the things we have or want to have, we have lost our way.  Dwell means to live in a place and as soon as we live at what and who we are, we are stalling the progression God has set before us.  The mirror is a metaphor of our spiritual predicament.  Do we stare into it or look away to Jesus?  Is our eye fixed upon our depression, our loneliness, our discouragement, our frantic search, our health or is it looking away to the Cross of Christ where all the life of God comes bolting forth?  Jesus' statement about clothing and food and not worrying about them in the Sermon on the Mount is mostly misunderstood.  Like the disciples in the boat, we think He was talking about stuff...bread stuff...clothing stuff...car stuff...house stuff...body stuff...relationship stuff.  If that was the point of His rebuke, then Jesus aimed pretty low.  The Cross of Christ was not a triumph for the protection and distribution of stuff.  It was the devastating death blow to all sin and life is the working out in us of the life of Christ within the humdrum of all we do and think.  The moment we fix our eyes on our internal condition, focus upon what is wrong with us or right with us or necessary for our pleasure or happiness, we are like the child who stares into the sun and then can't see a thing.  Only with our eye fixed on Jesus, either through the scripture, by prayer or in doing what God tells us at the moment He tells us to do a thing can we see clearly.  We see the love God has for us.  We see the power the Lord holds in His hand.  We sense His love and mercy and care for us.  We trust God and believe Him.  We live.  Gaze at myself and I shrivel like C.S. Lewis's bus riders in The Great Divorce.  Look to Jesus and keep my mind on Him and the world shrinks and God grows large and I become more and more fit for the Glory I am meant to possess as a Child of the Great King.  As soon as the prodigal son determined to make his way back to the presence of His Father, he lost the identity of me and found Himself to be Us.  The world is too small for us when God makes us His home.

Jesus said to her, "Mary."  She turned toward him…      John 20:16 NIV