How Long Will You Wait?

The problem we face as Christians who sincerely want to see our neighbors and friends come to Christ is the misconception we have about what this means for them to make such a dramatic left turn.  The vast majority of people we contact daily who are not born from above are completely content as they are.  They don't want our assertions or our "great opportunity".  It is absurd to them that they should change their lives so dramatically as we insist and their conscience is not the least bit troubled by what they do.    Divorce is reasonable if they are no longer in love, pornography is enjoyable and maybe even helpful, what we call sexual immorality is moral to them and greed honored.  The itch is meant to be scratched every time it surfaces and the audacity of demanding something approaching limits to freedom is irrational to them.  We are not, and never have been offering something so enticing it cannot be rejected.  Jesus did not say He came to bring peace but a sword.  Most people do not see Christianity as a better life; a less tolerable one perhaps, a constricted one probably.  Even many Christians are a tad bitter about what they find Christianity to be.   The deceit of Satan is thorough and penetrating.  The lie that being in Christ is a meager and impoverished existence is believed almost universally, even many times within the church.  Why would those infatuated with death want to cross over to life?  The Gospel is not seen as good news but a bitter pill to swallow.  What can we do about this?  The Lord has given us two directives.  Pray for the hearts of our family, friends and neighbors and say the Gospel clearly.  Rather than being confounded by a  wasteland of wrecked souls, grab the hope Jesus Himself had when He happily proclaimed His mission...The thief comes only to steal and kill and destroy; I have come that they may have life, and have it to the full.  (John 10:10 NIV)  Not everyone will realize their lives are bankrupt without Jesus but some will.  Not everyone will want to hear what you have to say but some will.    We must not be dismayed by the prevailing blindness.  The Lord is present shedding light in the darkness so not every soul is trapped in the shadows.   The Gospel is even now unlocking rusted padlocks binding hearts and you have that same key in your hand.  Don't worry yourself with strategies for trying to convince people to come to Christ.  Let the Holy Spirit do that work.  Give  the Gospel  away though as if it were the  hope of all mankind; don’t hold back when your time has come to be the great angel of grace, God's personal messenger.  Someone is waiting for you.  God has prepared the way!

Jesus said to him, "Let the dead bury their own dead, but you go and proclaim the kingdom of God."   Luke 9:60 NIV

When There Is Nothing You Can Do

The most frustrating of people are those who have been born again but turned away from the Lord and dismissed His fellowship.  We have the impulse to feel sorry for them; to compassionately coddle them but the Lord isn't in such misguided nurturing.  They must be allowed to go off to the far country, to squander the riches of heaven on "prostitutes" (any substitute for living in close communion with Christ) and wallow in the muck of pigs.  It is only when they reach the end of their rope that they can get a handle on the lunacy of their ways.  But if we try to keep them away from the far country, we usurp the wisdom of the Father who let His son go and did not go off chasing him down the road.  There is much to lose for the prodigal and many may be hurt by his corrupted decisions but it is no use trying to change his mind once he has taken the inheritance and left.  Husbands and wives have shed countless tears over their prodigal spouses, fathers and mothers have sat in a dejected stupor over their prodigal children but it is hopeless trying to herd them back into the pen.  They are gone and the facts must be faced courageously.  So what should be done?  As the father in Jesus' parable waited for his son, so we too must wait for the return of the prodigal.  It is the prodigal's decision alone that must rule and if he chooses to come back, then we throw a party and rejoice.  If he does not, we must accept it and let him have his way as God works the circumstances in his life to pinch him in tightly enough until he is able to face himself squarely.  Our praying does something; it unleashes the full resources of heaven on our behalf as we mourn the departure of the prodigal.  We cannot expect the Lord though to "make him return."  The prodigal is not some trained rat; he is fully human and free to decide for himself whom he shall follow.  When your own prodigal walks away, mourn as terribly as the pacing father in the Lord's story but do not extend him a lifeline.  He must make his way back himself, repent because he chooses to repent and seek out the Father because that is what he has decided to do.

When he came to his senses, he said…"Father I have sinned against heaven and against you…"  Luke 15: 17, 21 NIV

Unperturbed

What seems to frustrate us most, at least for those who live actually, acknowledging  tragedy and wreckage are  the normal parts of life, is that we can't ever swing free of our troubles.  We may hide from them for a while or even make light of them as if we are indifferent to their bite but in the end troubles square us up and make full contact.  The soldier on the battlefield as well as the mother nursing her sickly child is matched up with troubles and they make a mockery of the misty dream-state concocted by teachers of Biblical positivism.  You would think, if you believed some, that the disciples never died, Mary Magdalene never got sick and John found Patmos a paradise.  It is there before us though.  We do get tired of our husband's mood swings, limp with arthritis and wake up to unemployment.  The bank does foreclose on our house and our daughter slams the door on us.  This stuff of life is here and we must recognize the root of it as it is.  We are a fool if we think Jesus never stubbed His toe, woke up with a migraine or failed to sway the crowd.  He, whose own brothers and sisters thought Him a fool and whose mother convinced herself He had lost His mind, lived out fully the farthest reach of sin and taking it within Himself buried that sin in the Cross.  Our sin has been crucified with Christ but its stench remains at every crack and mound.  Its damage remains like scars that seem to get worse with age.  What Jesus Christ has done for us though in taking our sin from us is make it possible for His life to live within ours, for Him to actually transform us that He and us become one new being.  This means that the same strength Christ had as He worked His way to Jerusalem is ours and the faith He had that made Him fearless as the storm threatened to swamp the boat where He slept is the faith we hold too.  We have no monstrosity to fear, no rejection to dread.  With Christ working His way through each part of us, we can be happy as sorrow strikes but not with the happiness of a lunatic but with the joy of the redeemed,  the joy flowing out of the One who has been baptized by death and come up again alive to the brim.  You can, in Christ, face your day not in some drunken stupor brought on by the old wine  you drank before but in the life you have now with the Lord Himself welling up as a fountain of Living water within you.  Drink deeply from that spring and face what comes to you with the strength God provides.  Nothing is too terrible to bear if Christ's very own blood flows through your veins.  It is not God who incites you to worry, not Christ who pushes dread upon you.  The word of God is always "fear not" just as surely as you breathe.  Don't dread the coming storm...be glad God has given you the opportunity to find out just how strong you now are and how unperturbed you can be.

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

The Good Life

Jesus told us not to rejoice that the demons fear us but that our names are written in heaven.  Christianity has become to a large degree a results oriented club rather than what God intends, the opening in which we all build our lives in Christ.    We can feed our lusts by doing this or that, all good and noble activities perhaps, but the Lord isn't interested in those things.  He wants to form Himself in us that what is found as we are uncovered in the light of human scrutiny is Christ there.  The crucible is not the great place, the thrilling spot, the electrifying moment but it is at the sink where the dishes we wash are for God's glory and we do not just tolerate the task but thank the Lord that He might shine there.  As we make the presentation or help an ungrateful child with his homework we have the form of Christ jutting out from the task and it is up to us if we are going to let Him be seen.  We can complain about our classmate or gossip about our co-worker and all the while entertain someone with our craftiness but is that what we want our lives to be?  Are we satisfied with the same personality as Adam and Cain or do we most want to be joined to Christ?  Sodom was not destroyed because it was the center of homosexuality; it was wrecked because God could not do anything with the people who lived there. They resisted to the end the love and mercy of God and if we can't let Christ seep out of us when the work gets tedious and our efforts go unnoticed, then what good are?  It is just when Jerusalem hated Christ most that He did His greatest work.  Can it be said of you too that the love of Christ and His mastery of your soul takes the stage when you future looks grim and your fruit is blighted?  Do you have the look of God as you come to your own Cross?  The imitation of Christ is not some sort of faking it, the play acting of a movie script; it is the deliverance of the human heart from sin by the blood of Jesus Christ resulting in His life working His way through ours in real moments of common actions.

Dear friend, do not imitate what is evil but what is good. Anyone who does what is good is from God. Anyone who does what is evil has not seen God.  3 John 11-12 NIV

Uncommon Peace

Are we disturbed by our circumstance, unsettled by our place?  Have we grown weary of the dreary, of the humdrum common existence we share with so much of the world?  Are we tired of doing the same things over and over again,  of having to make do with what we have and of living with so little excitement?  Do we dread the boredom and despise the tedium?  Nothing smacks of the Devil's temptation more than the resistance to God's placement of us.  Lust, coveting and gossip are the symptoms of a misshapen view of what living in God is.  Solomon proved exquisitely the hopelessness of trying to get every itch scratched.  The more his craven mind searched for another syrupy substitute for the joy of God's salvation, the more insatiable his thirst.  We are not made for such wanton wandering.  We are made for righteousness, peace and satisfaction.  The last place the world searches for happiness is at the Cross of Christ.  The blood and guts of Satan's fury resulted in the one hope this world has.  Jesus Christ crucified calms the storm that rages in the human heart and satisfies the thirsty soul.  You will continue washing dishes, putting up with selfish people and unfair circumstances but you can have joy if you look to Christ for your satisfaction.  One moment of closeted prayer, a single cry for help to the God of your salvation and you can find yourself peace in front of the pile of laundry or the critical evaluation.  You are not alone in your weariness but the one who is with you will not let you remain in your self-pity.  He will lift you up from your clouded grind and give you joy if you let Him have a place with you.  Take your Bible and don't try to find something in it, some promise or bit of direction.  Simply go to it so you can be with Christ and let the Holy Spirit wash over you as you read the Words prepared for you this very day.  Let God meet you here...here where your drudgery catches up with His climb to Gethsemane and beyond to Calvary and all self-pity will be consumed by the fire of His raging love for you.  Nothing, not even the tedium of your day, can separate you from the love of God which is in Christ Jesus.  Find a way to rest in Him wherever the Lord's hand may bring you.

Peace I leave with you; my peace I give you. I do not give to you as the world gives. Do not let your hearts be troubled and do not be afraid.  John 14:27 NIV

Indwelling Love

The closer we look at the true morality of our heart, the less confident we become of ever having a family resemblance to Jesus.  Our actual affections should sicken us if we care much about being holy.  If we have come to the conclusion that we are spineless and lack integrity between what we confess about Christianity and what we are, then something supernatural can begin within us.  God is not waiting breathlessly to see if we can make something good of ourselves; the opposite is actually the case.  He is watching for our tipping point when we become available for Him to rework.  At the point of our hopelessness, we may open ourselves to the intervention of Holy Spirit and His marvelous transforming power.  Jesus Christ did not tell us that we were to love our neighbors as ourselves because He thought we could ever do it.  We can barely love our children in some approximation of it, love our best friends as best friends, but our love of the neighbor who takes our legs out from under us somehow is not going to be adored with the affection God wants for him.  We can only hope that Jesus Christ will do our loving for us; that He will assert His will and power in our actions.  The cross dangling from our mirror or hidden within our heart is not a reminder of distant God keeping an eye on us.  It is the statement that Christ in us is the hope of glory and that He is violently at times working His way out of us and into our world.  Let us not try to love through Him but rather let Him love through us.  The purity we seek is not some gilded try on our part but rather bloody holiness brought in by the presence of the Lord Jesus Himself.  True loving of your neighbor as yourself happens only if you give Christ room to do that loving, if you make yourself available to Him to bless those who hate you and cherish the enemies God died to save.  Nothing is more sure than the ability Christ has to make you full of love;  your faith in Him will do the trick. 

...grasp how wide and long and high and deep is the love of Christ, and to know this love that surpasses knowledge — that you may be filled to the measure of all the fullness of God.   Ephesians 3:18-19 NIV

The Expanding of Christ

One of the absurdities of our modern Christian era is the belief that God is after our success...or our health...or some form of self-realization...reaching our potential.    When Peter had to man up and face the Christ He had abandoned, the Lord had nothing to say about Peter's bright future.  He asked Peter if the disciple loved Him.  When Peter made his affirmation, Jesus told him to "feed my sheep".  The inner core Jesus was wanting was love for Him.  The outer stretch was for Peter to be Jesus for the world He faced.  There was nothing in this of "being all you can be" or getting God's blessing.    Being born again is the most devastating of blows to self-realization.  The moment the grace of God works its way in us, Jesus Christ joins us and we are transformed into someone totally new; Christ/us.  We forget to our harm that Jesus never went about figuring out how to make His life better; He sought only the will of the Father.  If that meant sleeping out in the open with His disciples or biting His tongue as the priests questioned Him, He did it.  When the Father told Him to throw His life down just as the adoring crowds began to look to Him as Messiah, He did not hesitate.  This character, this absolute loyalty to the Father is what we acquire when we are born again.  If the Father wants us rich and successful, then so be it but we must beware of thinking this is of course God's will for us. If it is harder for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than it is for a rich man to enter heaven, then we can be certain very few of the wealthy and  accomplished will find themselves on the narrow way.  Not only that, one of the great temptations for anyone wanting to be holy is riches and the achievement of personal goals.  People who want to get rich fall into temptation and a trap and into many foolish and harmful desires that plunge men into ruin and destruction.  1 Timothy 6:9-10 NIV  The great will of God is that Christ be the central part of us.  He must increase is our constant push….and that may not mean we get healthier or more successful in the process.  It is when we are weak that He is made strong…or to put it another way, that He expands His influence in us.   Nine of the healed lepers ran off and completely forgot about Jesus.   It was only the one out of the ten who when He got what He wanted returned to Christ.  Those are not great odds and it certainly flies in the face of modern convention that those who are "blessed" or the ones mostly likely to be loyal to God.  The opposite seems to be the case both in Scripture as well as in the casual observations we make.  God's glory is most often exhibited brightest in the poor and downtrodden parts of the world.   The priority of the Lord for you is that you first seek the Kingdom of God both in your praying and in your wishing and longing...then all these other things we care about will be addressed and attended.

What good is it for a man to gain the whole world, and yet lose or forfeit his very self?  Luke 9:25-26 NIV

Hidden But Never Far From You

The last time we saw an age of "no morality" and "no religion" we witnessed the bloody French revolution.  Rationalism brought with it the loss of religious faith and the era of amorality but there was no freedom in it.  There never is such a species of man who lives outside law; the morals of the whorehouse are just as binding as those of the monastery and the debased sorority is far more dictatorial than any fundamentalist.  Jesus said that out of the heart come evil thoughts, murder, adultery, sexual immorality, theft, false testimony, slander.(Matthew 15:19 NIV) This is not modern; it is ancient morality that began in Adam.  We all have this mush of values roiling about below the surface of our consciousness and it is our moral baseline.  The myth of our time is that we can live above ourselves somehow, beyond  the values of our grandparents but it is a lie.  The morality of this age is just as rigid as that of the Canaanites and Philistines.  The drug dealer's moral code is more fundamental than a Baptist's and of much greater risk to cross.  Stalin had the morality of Cain etched upon his soul; millions would have wished it were instead the morality of Christ.  One's conscience is nothing more than the biggest values he holds and a conscience is of no use if the morals it knows are of no higher standard than those of Picasso or Jack London.  We do not need a conscience, we need a Savior and it is the Cross of Christ that dips down below our consciousness and raises us up to a new morality, one of love and patience and faith.  The blood of Christ does not make us more aware of right and wrong; it buys us back and transforms us that we can begin to be holy, not out of fear of a rampaging angel but out of a redeemed heart that has been changed with the heart of God implanted within it.  Your thoughts, if you are honest have never been as warm and cool as a teddy bear; you are more like  a snake in your deepest points.  Only Jesus Christ can make your thoughts pure and clean and vibrant with love as you let Him have His way with you.  The Lord is not your polish to bring out your shine, He is the furnace out of which all things are made new.  Never put faith in yourself; but always trust God to make you right.

Trust in God.  Trust also in me. John 14: 1b

The Daily Dilemma

When we reach the conclusion of a day, do we give much thought to how it went from God's perspective?   There seem to be two non-Biblical takes on a day.  The first is that God really doesn't care much how it went.  It seems laughable to many that anyone would even attempt to ascertain God's view of experiences and reactions.  Commentators mock the fools who claim God gave them victory in sporting events or brought them success at what they did.  The other view is that everything always goes just as God wants it to go and so each decision made and every circumstance is divinely determined and thus "His will".  And yet the Scripture seems to be in neither of these two camps.  God is presented as angry at how some things go and pleased as punch on other occasions.  The details of the day seem to matter to the Lord; they aren't just meaningless minutia or orchestrated point by point as God determines.  We can really decide to turn left or right and in the examples of life lived out in actualities we find in Scripture, God cares which way the people go.  It genuinely seems to sadden and anger God that Israelites bend into paganism and He appears really happy when a single sinner repents and turns to Him for help.  It may appear clownish for a young wife to pray her husband like the meal she prepares or for a basketball player to pray he win his game but even if such praying is immature, it isn't for the reasons often voiced.  We are told to pray for God to intervene in our circumstances; no parameters are set for us.  And if things cannot and do not turn ever on our praying, then what an absurdity it is for the Lord to tell us to pray for our daily bread and the "whatsoevers" of our day.  It is meaningless noise if everything is set in stone by the will of God or not even noticed by Him.  As a young scholar stretches his vocabulary by reading great works and an athlete builds her strength by pushing her muscles to the limit, so we build intimacy with God and develop holiness by turning to Him for the breadiness of our minutes and hours.  Each day is filled with a multitude of "daily bread" moments that God wants us to bring before Him and admit our need for His help.   Why does an old man go to a doctor for medication if not because in his maturity he recognizes his limitations and admits his poverty?  Have we so little faith and are we so childish that we do not have it in us to persist in knocking and seeking and asking?  Are we so calloused by our troubles and failures that we no longer have space in our day to go to God and expect Him to have at least as much concern for what we face as us?  Is God not god enough to care for you and want to wrap you in His arms in a tender embrace ?  Do you not think He celebrates with you your victories and weeps over your defeats?  Aren't you aware of how much He cares about your reaction to the temptation you face, what you decide about your long-standing grudges and how you respond to your critic?  It is odd, just based on what is clearly evident in Scripture, that any believer would dismiss the possibility that God has something to say about His day.  And it seems to be an absurdity that He would do nothing to try to ascertain what His thoughts might be!

Jesus was in the stern, sleeping on a cushion. The disciples woke him and said to him, "Teacher, don't you care if we drown?" He got up, rebuked the wind and said to the waves, "Quiet! Be still!" Then the wind died down and it was completely calm.     Mark 4:38-39 NIV

Careless Giving

Are we conflicted over doing something nice for someone who doesn't deserve it?  Have we tried to avoid the ungrateful and contemptible?  Are we shying away from all those who want more of us than we are willing to give?  The oddness of Mary pouring her perfume on the feet of Jesus was not lost on the disciples.  It was an extravagant waste and even Jesus noted the irrationality of it.  It is deeply human to concern oneself with the nickels and pennies and avoid wasteful expenditures on others.  We can talk ourselves out of the slightest hint of irrational loving if we are careful and purposeful.  What is strange though about the mind of God is that He often wastes His resources on foolish extravagance.  Take a look at the tiny paramecium under  a microscope and you become dumbfounded by its elegant structure.  Yet there are billions of those lovely creatures that go unseen and unnoticed.  The bluebells hidden away in mountain meadows that fade and drop from their stem before a single human notices them and the sparkle of light refracting into hundreds of little rainbows as droplets spray out from a cascading stream no one is watching remind us of the way God thinks.  He wastes His kindness on ungrateful nitwits who don't have the least concern for what He has done for them.  He restores the health of a drunk who goes out in his new found fitness and gets into a bar fight.  He gives us glowing red and pink and yellow sunsets that are ignored as we traipse about with our cell phones glued to our ears and our eyes fixed on the traffic.  Wasteful love and extravagant gifts are the stuff of God and we have excused away our life in Him by refusing to make such lavish expenditures on anyone but those we like.  We might buy a sandwich for a homeless vagrant who begs us for money and feel like we have really made the loving gesture but are we willing to do the extravagant thing, the irrational thing that we could not cogently justify only because it is so much like God to do such as that?  The tree across the way is full of so many loquats that not even the crows and sparrows can make a dent in the harvest and the tree is too tall for the people in the neighborhood to pick its fruit.   God is irrational.  Mary was irrational.  The disciple who preached in the far reaches of the world only to lose their lives for it were irrational.  Zacchaeus was irrational to give half of what He had to the poor.  The one who walks with God and truly loves Jesus will do irrational things because that is the nature He possesses.  Beware of being judicious and careful with what you have and the time you possess.  It may not be the Spirit of Christ ruling you there.   A crazy giver is far more beloved in heaven than the reasonable spendthrift.

Give, and it will be given to you. A good measure, pressed down, shaken together and running over, will be poured into your lap. For with the measure you use, it will be measured to you. Luke 6:38 NIV

The Shore of Your Choosing

We are prone at every turn to look for something new, something hidden, something interesting to entertain us.  Somehow we think we are better for our curiosity and wiser for our breadth of gathered experiences.  Since Adam, we have an insatiable interest in the side corners of our world and do our best to get at them.  Adam, unlike Eve, was not fooled by Satan's ploy; he embraced the rebellion within it.  Hidden knowledge became a lust for him and he grabbed at it hungrily.  Before the fall, knowledge and insight came directly from God; the fall provided a new way of seeing, of searching out things.  The actualization of self became the idol of Adam and it is ours too if we are not careful.  We are not made to search things out on our own but to see everything through the eyes of God.  The only way we can do this is if we obey Him at each turn.  Faith brings us to recognize our need for God.  Obedience gives us His eyes.  I cannot know love if I am not obeying God nor do I know what to do with it if I am not letting Him be King of my actions.  Lust has been thrust upon us as love; it is the unwillingness to wait for God to show us the way through each holy desire we possess.  Once we turn from Him, we grovel in lust and make no headway whatsoever in seeing and understanding.  Romans 1 is the clear way we head when we let lust take hold of our Godly longings.  Matthew 5-7 is the way we look when we obey God in our longings and let Christ live through us.  The distance between Romans 1 and Matthew 5-7 is a great divide that can only be crossed through the cross of Jesus Christ who has made the way for us to love and hope and faith in the grind of daily living.  There is nothing fascinating or captivating in the moment a man or woman of God gives a cheek to a bad man.  It is an absurdity, a clownish act for all those who have taken the way of Romans 1.  And yet, for the one walking in Christ, doing as He directs, it is the pearl of great price, the stuff of heaven and that has a fascination for him.  You can tell who directs your boat by which shore grabs your attention.  Have you found Romans 1 your harbor or do you lean out after Matthew 5-7.  No law can turn you one way or another.  You must in the end choose who you will serve…

See, I lay in Zion a stone that causes men to stumble and a rock that makes them fall, and the one who trusts in him will never be put to shame.  Romans 9: 33

Abandonment...Really?

Lost in our age is a boundless abandonment to much of anything.  We have grown so accustomed to instant messaging and continual entertainment that we grow weary when any vision or mission crosses our perseverance threshold.  Profit margins are now measured by level of effort and degree of boredom.   If anything requires too much of us or does not make us happy, we give up on it.  A holy life is superficially regarded as unattainable, unreasonable.  Given the volume of meta-messages bombarding our conscious thinking, we cannot make heads or tails of what is important to us.  It all is a blur of instantaneous provocations and titillations.  Is it any wonder that some just jump ship; the drowned life a welcome relief to the bombarded one?  Contemptuous humanists mock the Christian who waits upon the Lord because she seems so mediocre, so juvenile.  The contemplation of the scriptures extended past intellectual stimulation is absurdly dissolute for the mind absent of any real hunger for God.  Depravity is now flipped around on its head; faith and purity are the new perversion.  The corrupted soul is the one waiting upon the Lord . The  cost of waiting upon Christ seems monstrous.   To walk in the Spirit is not a moment of exalted rapture but rather a day in and day out communion with the Lord who does speak and certainly leads.  We read the scriptures not to get something out of them but to be given up to them.  We pray, not to attain but to be with God in His very presence.  We sing songs of praise not to be entertained but to live within the mercy and joy of the Living God.  Who has really abandoned himself to Christ?  Who has become accustomed to the voice of God and fallen in love with the One who speaks?  Who has made his life holy in the wash of the Living Word?  Who has gained the treasure of being consecrated and filled with the joy of true Christian living?  Who has been given The Gift and loved the hand that held it?  Are you too callous to be aware of what great love awaits you if you would just  wait for God a moment longer?  Do you have the patience needed to stay where you are so that Jesus Christ might meet you?  Does it seem the greatest good to be with Jesus and give yourself over to Him?  Would it make you happy to gain just one more bit of God in you?  Have you discovered the sweet perfume of holy abandonment?

 Peter said to him, "We have left all we had to follow you!"   Luke 18:28 NIV

Crossing

What seems so harsh and gloomy, the present reality of death and dying is nothing of the sort.  We have in death the perfect picture of how life gets out of the ditch.  When once we see, perhaps for the first time, that this daily circle will one day veer off to the left and go somewhere else, somewhere completely different, we finally grasp the reality of things.  It is always lurking back there in our minds...the death and dying, but we hardly can face it for ourselves.  God's call from death is a shriek of icy water splashed on us without warning.  This will not continue and you must stop thinking it will.  Every dying man hid from it as you have for the longest time.  Old photographs of relatives long gone are not mere curiosities, they are the perfect text of your own place in God's world.  The Lord wants you to die and you must die.  The cross of Christ will be carried by you and in the end it will kill you.   Does this perturb you?  Are you irritated by it?  Do you welcome it?  The woman in India cannot really see things as the woman in Ecuador;  they are worlds apart and you won't really see things as God does until you take up your cross and carry it fully to its stopping point.  God wants you dead and you will be.  Right now you struggle mightily with the cross and groan under its weight thinking somehow you can cast it off or crawl out from under it but it is yours and you must carry it if you are to come after Jesus.  Scream and cry and fight against it if you think you must but it is better to courageously  face squarely the inevitable than kick away at the goads as it were like the Apostle Paul while he was still Saul.  Die, let Christ kill you off completely.  Resurrection is just as inevitable as the Cross but you cannot reach the former without going through the later.  Give Christ His way with you and He will raise you up and the sin in you will finally be dead.  Remember though that the cross is the cross of Christ given you by Him and not  yours to choose.   Never try to pick your cross...It would be like letting the monkey take the controls of the plane just as it is set to land.    The mercy of God was not in living but in dying and unless the seed is buried...it does not spring to life.

 Then he said to them all: "If anyone would come after me, he must deny himself and take up his cross daily and follow me.  For whoever wants to save his life will lose it, but whoever loses his life for me will save it.     Luke 9:23-24 NIV

Something More

It is presumption to make it out that we can convince anyone of the reasonableness of Christianity .  We can point out that Christianity is reasonable to the believer but that is as far as we can go.  The facts are the facts.  The universe is before us to explore and examine and any atheist or pagan is just as free to look at it closely as the most holy of Christians.  Our task is not to talk people into following Christ.  Jesus never went out of His way to convince anyone of anything.  He showed the disciples his hands and side, gave the congregation on the hillside food to eat but he didn't talk a single unbeliever into going after Him.  Herod and Pilate were classic examples of the bait Satan puts out there.  Neither of the splendid trophies of "churchianity" were offered a solitary nibble of rational evidence.  Christ left both crawling in the dust of their unbelief because each remained in rebellion against the clear facts of his sinfulness.  We must do two things if we want to be evangelists.  We must present the Gospel clearly and simply and we must let Christ rule over us as we walk about.  We are not to "do something" to get the world to believe; we are to be witnesses.  Yet our overriding call as a witness is not to be witnesses of the rationale behind our faith, we are to be witnesses of the faith itself.  You sow the seed of the Gospel at a point where humanity is alerted and it may very well lie there dormant for an unbearable length of time.  At once however, in a blink, that seed may come alive and sprout but we cannot initiate the work of it.  God Himself does it.  He brings a crisis, a despair, a spotlight upon the ugliness of sins and when He does, like lightning, the Gospel will awaken where it was buried and that one soul will choose to give the Cross a go in him and come alive or walk away from it and wither.  What makes baptism such an amazing event is that we witness the power of the Cross worked out in the physicality of faith.  Nothing should so vivify our joy as the sight of one soul socked up in sin released from her bonds and free to be completely given over to Christ.  Let the Lord live through you and when He gives you the word, say the Gospel clearly and without reticence.  God did not fill you up with the fullness of Christ so that you might be a useless bump on a log.  He has given you the opportunity to be a fisher of men.  Get after it!

"Come, follow me," Jesus said, "and I will make you fishers of men."   Matthew  4:19-20 NIV

Are You Perfect?

Is it possible that you have completely misunderstood what it means to be Christian?  God has not "raised you from the dead" so that you will be the same person you were before.  He died for you so that you might be completely new and the newness is not in your better attitude, your more motivated outlook or your developed skill set.  Nothing could be done with you if all that was before you were improved Bible studies and higher insights into Christian living.  The Lord died for you that He might live in you and be joined to you.  He blew the top off the lid when He was crucified and made you the Holy of Holies; not a sanctimonious museum filled with God "stuff" but the actual place where the Lord dwells.  We have spent so much wasted time worrying about whether as the temple of the Holy Spirit we should be smoking or looking at pornography.  It is all a wash but this one matter.  By dying on the Cross, Jesus Christ joins into your personality, your will and your discernment and that completely alters the playing field.  Paul said that He had been crucified with Christ and He meant it.  This was not religious noise.  He said that it was no longer him that lived but Christ lived in him and he meant it.  He was not spouting  philosophical gibberish.  Why do we so quickly blow past the most important part of being born again?  We are joined with Christ.  Are we afraid of what has happened?  Are we incredulous?  You, when you believed in the crucifixion of Jesus Christ, attained His life living through you and it is time you gave Him breathing room, made a way for Him to work in and with you.  Every point in the Sermon on the Mount is a place where God can live through you and make you fully functional.  You could not love your enemies before but Christ can through you.  You could not swell with joy at one sinner coming to Christ as the Father does but Christ can through you.  You could not hate the world and bless the very ones who make your life so distressing but Christ can through you.  The biggest error we make as a Christian people is thinking we cannot do the perfect thing the Lord lays out for us because we  completely disregard Christ living through us.

...and I no longer live but Christ lives in me…  Galatians 2: 20

The Magic of the Spell

There is in our time a certain morbid fascination with death icons.  Perhaps it is due to the relative ease with which we can kill ourselves and others.  Satan whispers in our ear and we buckle in the knees, unwilling to take a stand against the lunacy of our age because we are beguiled.  Death and sin walk hand in hand and to love the imagery of one is to be wed to the other.  Sin ushered in death; it was not the other way around.  Sin is the enemy; death it's prostitute.  The sin of man so thoroughly disorients us that we can think there is something magical, mystical about death but every sane person despises death; is nauseated by it.  Rarely does the atheist welcome it; even those who seem oblivious to what lies behind it.  Death is the enemy in every way and we should hate it...but not because it is the object, it is rather the verb.  Sin is where all of the horror resides; where the terror springs forth.  We die because sin is there.  Without sin, death would never touch our lips.  We are wrong when we give death the idol's gaze; take your eyes off death and look at sin squarely.  That is the place where you must give all your attention and make the most of your time now in your hand.  Sin must be faced and hated with all the passion you once gave death.   The Son of Man did not come to raise us from the dead; otherwise He would have just gone about emptying graves.   He came to kill off sin and to do so, He had to die.  He never feared death; it was sin that broke His heart.  When Christ bore your sin to the tomb, He buried death with it.  He is the Resurrection and the Life because He wrecked sin in one final violent blow.  We live a righteous and Godly life not to please God but because we realize just how horribly despicable sin was for Jesus Christ and like the mother who stomps on the head of the viper that has just bitten her child, we in the righteousness of Christ's holy life crush the breath out of each sin we find lying at our feet.  Be done with sin.  Despise its poison.  Hate its smell.  Detest its look.  Make certain of the enemy.

The enemy boasted, 'I will pursue, I will overtake them.  I will divide the spoils; I will gorge myself on them.  I will draw my sword and my hand will destroy them.'   Exodus 15:9 NIV

Holy, Holy, Holy

Is there any religion in the world that so completely recognizes the need of mankind more than Christianity?  If all that was necessary for a good life was a better list of self-help suggestions or moral platitudes, then we would be fit for any challenge before us.  The world would be nobler and more reasonable than at any time in history for there has never been a time that such a proliferation of advice has been available.  Suicide should have long been eliminated along with drunkenness and violence.  Yet we are not better off than before...perhaps not worse off but that is certainly debatable.  It is a modern absurdity that religion can help us without a radical transformation of our soul.  Give any system of thought a societal landing spot and it will do nothing to make the people there better.  Cannibalism did not spring up in a vacuum; it originated in a religious subsystem that could not redeem the people who lived its tenets to its logical conclusion.  The treasured and time-honored practices of wife-burning, child sacrifice, abandonment of elders and prostitution all sprang out of religious cultural mores.  We are ignorant of the facts if we think we can make ourselves better people by getting something taught more effectively.  Religious atheism brought us the wonders of genocide and death camps.  The problem facing all mankind is the deadly plague of sinfulness that permeates every level of each society on earth.  One can read the Proverbs day and night, meditate all one wants upon the Decalogue and nothing good will come of it but a more subtle and pervasive sinfulness petrified by pride.  We need a savior completely .   The most common mistake we make is to assume we can gain Christ and then figure out everything else .  Your soul is not fixed by you in any way; only Christ entering you through the Cross can make you actually right...perfectly right.  As more of you becomes engaged with Jesus crucified, more of you becomes pure and holy.  Say "no" to Jesus Christ even for an instant and the wreckage of sin stiffens its neck and won't let you pass any further.  Your temper will stay, your lust will stay, your despairing fretting will stay, your arrogant self-righteousness will stay, your argumentative piety will stay, your cursing heart will stay.  The unbeliever generally can care less if he changes a whit...He is too comfortable to move off his twilight roosting.  But the Christian, who has tasted the sweetness of real holiness will never be able to rest contentedly with his sin self still established.  The only way to be done with it, and it will be eliminated fully, is to give the crucified Savior His way in each part of your doings, to make His life the life you live day in and day out.  Let your body be the Holy of Holies for Christ the King to rule...never say "no" to Him as He works out of you habits sin has worked into you.  Never trust yourself but never doubt the power of God working through you and in you.

May I never boast except in the cross of our Lord Jesus Christ, through which the world has been crucified to me, and I to the world.    Galatians 6:14-15 NIV

Soul Ambition

The thing about our personality is that it is so marred and distorted by sin we don't even know really what it is.  We have an idea that we are funny or quiet or rambunctious or generous or thoughtful but what can we know of it as long as we are warped with sin.  Most of us tend to think the best of ourselves; we aren't lazy, we are deliberative, we aren't mean, we are discerning, we aren't perverse, we have an expansive libido.  The free reign we give to self-aggrandizement is startling given the ability we have to see right through the mental tricks others play on themselves.  We say that we know who we are better than anyone else but that is just one more lie of the devil we have swallowed hook, line and sinker.  Just think about your dreams.  They say an awfully lot about yourself and what you harbor within but you can't make heads or tails of them.  It is easy to shine off our dreams as just biological gibberish, white noise of the brain, but they are there within us each day, giving us insight into ourselves and we are just as likely to  blow right past them and roar into our day as notice the stain they reveal.  The human soul is corrupted through and through and the only way out of what we are is to take the Cross of Christ fully and unconditionally.  The crucified death of One meant for the crucified life of the other is in the end a total resurrection for both.  You cannot just get past your sins; they have to be killed off completely and you must if you want to live let this happen.  By faith we receive the death of Christ and make it our death to sin and that is what will happen fully and thoroughly as we give freedom to God to work His way through us.  The Crucifixion of Christ works two ways.  It destroys the work sin has achieved in your death and it crushes your will to live in sin any longer.  The more you accept the cross Christ bore for you, the more you will willingly lay your life down for Him to raise up again.  Mary poured out the perfume on the feet of Jesus because this was intuitively hers alone to grasp as the disciples lounged about.  We pour what is ours out of us for one reason only.  Not for something God might give us to pay us back for our sacrifice but that the warping of sin might be straightened as all we once had gains the life of Christ fully.  Your talents, skills, mental  acuity, personal attributes and disciplines are of no use to you because of the corruption of sin upon them.  Like filthy rags, they are finally in the end worthless.  But give them to Christ and lay them at His feet and you will find them free of the perversion of sin and good for your life and good for all those people about you.  The perfume was never wasted; it was lifted up into heaven and returned back again as a living sacrifice free of selfishness and pride; of use to both God and man. 

Do you not know that your body is a temple of the Holy Spirit, who is in you, whom you have received from God? You are not your own;  you were bought at a price. Therefore honor God with your body.  1 Corinthians  6:19-20 NIV

The Scalpel in Your Hand

Have we realized that we are hopeless and a tangled mess unless Jesus Christ lives through us?  You have to be born again to grasp this.  Those who aren't may well be perfectly happy how they are; content to do as they see fit.  But once the Divine spark settles on your kindled soul, you cannot remain that way.  Smoke begins to rise and choke you.  It gets a bit too hot to comfortably wait out whatever it is God is doing with you.  Disaster becomes imminent.  The whole kingdom you have erected looks to fall as you realize just what you really have.  It is Christ, King of Kings who has become part of you and He will not let any aspect of you stand for long against His dominion.  And so you will see that this and that must go, not because you are rule bound but because you know with Christ there they are no good.  Before they all seemed perfectly acceptable and perhaps even noble but now they are dirty and in the end sinister.  The world looks upon your silly changes as a bit diabolical; if not odd.  But you know they are the next stage in walking with Christ fully.   Given the potential outcomes, you cannot wait another day with these things hanging to you.  It is impossible for the light of Christ to shine brightly enough that the hard cases might be drawn to the real God if you do not jettison the old ways, old values, old interests.   The proof of your transformation is your growing adherence to the lifestyle found in the Sermon on the Mount.  It will not be you bringing this about and that will be certain; it will be Jesus Christ working in you.  To delay giving the Lord full sway in you will make it tougher for those needing Christ near you to gain Him.  A thorny hedge blocking entrance into a lovely garden is of value if you must keep certain enemies out but if you are the thorny hedge because you have blocked out Christ from you and the way into the Kingdom is barricaded off by your behavior and attitudes...take up the scalpel in your own hand and surgically remove immediately the place of rebellion in you.  God will not do this work for you.  You must do it.  But when you do, you will find the greatest of miracles happening.  Out of you will flow rivers of Living Water and the world at your doorstep will finally see what it is to drink and never thirst again.

If your hand or your foot causes you to sin cut it off and throw it away.   Matthew 18:8 NIV

Human Personality

The unredeemed human personality is a fiber of tangled thoughts and disjointed behaviors joined within a chaotic will all held in place by sin.  It only seems random, this life we hold, because we have given it over to the monster of unsanctified ego.  In one moment we feel pure and unperturbed and the next a roaring fit of distortions and maladjustments.  We do what we do because we think we must or to appease a lust or stem an impending disaster.  The panic that swells within because we can't make things work is an indication that we are out of whack; not just now but all day long.  The new life we have in Christ is a complete identification with the Salvation of God.  At any point we turn from it, we lose our way.  The world is an endless wave of opinions and strategies and misperceptions.  Rather than seeing God in the simplest red light or lingering indigestion, we give up on Him quickly and find some other way of making sense of things.   If we could just bend a bit toward God when we read something or hear a report or face a change of pace, we would do wonders for ourselves.  The Lord is on a continual mission to bring us back to Him in trust and affection and we fight and squirm in that work like little children chaffing at a seat belt.  At each turn look to Christ.  Look to Him determinedly, believing He will meet your there too.  The muddy path is just as golden as the crystalline one if you have Christ straight ahead of you.  The moment you push Him to the back of you, even the most warm and lovely of days can melt into a storm of wild winds and dismal dark clouds.  Take the time as soon as you think of it to turn to Christ hopefully, expectantly.  Read the Scriptures not to get something out of them as so many do but to be with Christ like two lovers sitting silently upon a couch.  His very presence transforms you, remakes you, beautifies you, comforts you, straightens you, inspires you, redefines you.  Nothing is more sure than this.  Christ is with you and He loves you.  Settle in beside Him and wait a moment for Jesus to quiet the storm. 

Then he got up and rebuked the winds and the waves, and it was completely calm.  Matthew 8:26 NIV

History in the Making

If we look back upon the losses we have endured over the years, we might see certain trends...bad breaks, poor timing, lack of attentiveness to crucial details, slovenly habits, dysfunctional relationships, distorted views of self.  It could be that we got sick at the wrong time, were tripped up by our lusts or were mistaken about the character of certain people.    The regretful glance backward that morphs into self-pitying is corrosive to the working of God in you.  The very thing He came to do, redeem your life completely gets hindered by the regret you keep eyeing.  If we take God at His word, that Christ came to save us from our sin, then the obstinate pout must be put away.  But you may wonder how God could do this, how He could make the ugly moments of your past "redeemed".  His answer to you is the same as it was for the withered Elizabeth past child bearing.  "Nothing is impossible with God."  The worst of your circumstances are made new by Christ upon His sin bearing.  They are bought back and rebuilt...remade just as thoroughly as if an old wreck of a car were blown to smithereens and the molecules of it put together into the most spectacular of yachts.  "Nothing is impossible" includes your past and what has been done to you and by you is of no account anymore.  What matters is what God will do with it and that is, "make all things new."    The Lord is not afraid of your past even if you have built it up into a monster.  He has faced it squarely while dying on the Cross and mastered it.  You have nothing to hide anymore...it is out in the open...out in the bright sunlight of God's love for you.   Is it not perfectly reasonable that the bearing of your sin took place as day splintered off into darkness and the redeeming of your life came to pass as the first sparkles of sunlight broke upon the dawn?  You can moan about the missed opportunities and the regrettable decisions you have made but what is the point of that?  It is like weeping over winning the lottery or despairing over the successful surgery that saved you from cancer.  You have been redeemed!  Never look past that.

"Fear not, for I have redeemed you; I have summoned you by name; you are mine.  Isaiah 43:1 NIV

Today See God

Is it a crazy assumption that God will do now as has been described of Him doing in the past?  Nothing unsettles our sensibilities quite like the long wait for God to act today as we have heard He did before.  Every rational thought argues against willful  anticipation of supernatural entries into our fussy world.  It seems absurd to the common mind that the Lord still operates within the same paradigm as records indicate He once did.  And yet that is precisely what we are expected to believe when we take even the most casual glance at the Scriptures.  The" Fairy Tale" motif swirls about within the interpretive dance steps of  the normal Christian's take on life lived out daily.  In fact what is "Christian" today is generally not what once was Christian when everything said about God in Scripture was believed.  The Church assumed rightly God acted in their today as He had during the today of Moses or Elijah.  They realized the Lord would grip them relentlessly "now" even when they went through the fire, even when they fell into the water.  It did not come easily.  Peter had to first get wet and Silas had to wait in twitching pain for his prison midnight but eventually they came around.  Personal experience made the difference for them just as it does here for us.  The prayer had to be uttered, the cry bellowed, the worship to the God of heaven offered.  It was only then that Elijah saw things just as Moses had, Peter saw things as Elijah had and Paul saw things as Peter had.  The skeptic does not die peacefully but in fits and starts and with loud moans and lusty screams.  The man without God is a hollow shell.  But add the Lord Jesus Christ to him and He lives vivaciously, vividly, like a bright beam of sunlight piercing the night sky.  You, joined with the Lord will see all that Elijah did, all that James did and not feebly either but decidedly, firmly.    We stumble over little unseen miracles because we live with meager faith; we grip the majesty of God with the loosest of holds because we are  more content to hear about God than we are to know Him.  "Taste and see that the Lord is good", implies that you must do something about your hunger and thirst if you are ever to gain the smallest sense of God.  The historical documents have been given us not that we might dream of days gone by but that we might do the very things the saints of the past did.  Stay in the shallows of common faith and you will merely read the tales of God; go out of the harbor where storms threaten to dump you in the sea and the Majesty of the Almighty will find you .  You will no longer make your way through the shadow lands of legendary ghosts;  you will instead enter the actual world where Christ reigns and you join with Him in His Glory.  Stop making so much of the God of ancient times if you don't intend on taking hold of the Christ who today stands before you and whispers, "Come".

Aware of their discussion, Jesus asked, "You of little faith, why are you talking among yourselves about having no bread?  Matthew 16: 8 NIV

What Keeps You Back?

 

Matthew 17: 19 NIV

Then the disciples came to Jesus in private and asked, "Why couldn't we drive it out?"

Are You Being Held Back From Something?

When our family was much younger, Noah was four or five and Jacob seven or eight and Rachel was a newborn, we went camping up into the Sierra Mountains to a National Park that is our favorite as a family.  At the western edge of the park down around two thousand feet, the Marble branch of the Kaweah River weaves through the Buckeye Flats campground.  We felt just as adventurous as Lewis and Clark as we stumbled upon a magnificent pool of water formed in a crevice of the mountain that ran along the north of the river.  There was a natural water slide created by a groove in three giant boulders over which the rushing river flowed down into the pool of water below.  The pool itself was thirty to forty feet deep and although icy cold was refreshing in the hot summer sun.  Holding Noah, I rode down the water spilling off the giant boulders that served as a water slide and together we plummeted into the water, coming out laughing and shivering from the cold of the chilly water.  Jacob took the slide down too and for a while it was both a bit scary and exhilarating for him.  But then as we played around in the water, a father and son that had come before us climbed the rock cliff on the other side of the river and came to an outcropping and stood there staring down at the water below.  They were about fifty feet above the river and to our astonishment, first the father and then the twelve year old boy jumped out into the clear mountain air and plunged down to the pool below.  We gaped at one another in amazement at the daring of the two.  To accomplish this safely, they had to leap out from the cliff so they wouldn’t land on the shallow rock directly below the narrow ledge.  When the two came out of the water, we expressed our amazement at what they had done.  But both the boy and dad acted like it wasn’t that big of a deal; the water where they landed was deep and actually the jump was quite safe.  We had a hard time believing them but Jacob kept looking up at the outcropping and then down at the water, clearly trying to decide if he was going to take the leap too.  The question for him was how much faith he had in the pair who had taken the plunge, that it really was safe for him.  After several minutes pondering whether or not to believe he could jump off the cliff without killing himself and following an extended period of questioning Mary Jo and me if we thought he could survive the jump, Jacob decided what he would do.  The question of jumping or not was answered by the faith or lack of faith he had in what we thought and what the father and son said to him.

Faith is at the core of many decisions we make.  It determines whether or not we will apply to a certain college.  It powers the move to pursue a better job or start homeschooling.  Faith is what leads us to choose a career we really want rather than the one everyone else thinks we should select.  Faith is what decides whether or not we ask that particular girl out, or if we should “pop the question”.  Faith is at the center of the decision to finally start writing that book or begin a conversation about God with a co-worker.  Faith is the determining factor in tithing as well as the decision to take a tough class or build a friendship with a grumpy co-worker no one likes.  Faith attempts the impossible, tackles the challenge accepts responsibility.  Faith has reshaped kingdoms, toppled dictatorships and led to research that has changed the course of civilizations.  It is faith or the lack of faith that has decided whether or not couples stay together and determined if a failing student would go one more term to college. Faith is at the center of many of the most important decisions we make.

One of best examples of how faith operates is found in the Bible.  In Numbers 13 and 14 is the famous account of the twelve spies who were sent out by the people of Israel to explore the land that the nation was about to invade.  None of the Hebrew leaders had ever been to the land of Canaan and for that matter nobody among the more than a million Israelites hoping to move into Canaan had ever been there either.  Not many of us would relocate to a city or a country sight unseen.  The twelve spies were given the task of finding out exactly what sort of land Canaan was, how fertile the soil and the sort of defenses the people of the land had built.  Moses commissioned the spies and off they went.

The report they gave upon arrival back to the Hebrew camp was split.  Ten of the spies reported the land to be fertile but the inhabitants giants and the towns where they lived mountain fortresses.  The infamous “grasshoppers’ line came from these spies too. 

We saw the Nephilim there (the descendants of Anak come from the Nephilim). We seemed like grasshoppers in our own eyes, and we looked the same to them." (Numbers 13:33 NIV)  This group of spies downplayed the quality of the land and emphasized the impossibility of conquering the people who lived in Canaan.  The other two spies gave a contradictory report.  They talked glowingly of the fertile soil and the succulence of the fruit grown there.  The cities they said were easily conquerable and the people of Canaan unprepared for a fight.  Now how can two groups of people who went to the exact same places together have such differing takes on what they saw?  It is simply this.  Faith defines understanding, not knowledge.

The spies who said it would be impossible to conquer Canaan and disparaged the suitability of it as a new homeland had one sort of faith and that faith determined what they saw.  The spies who reported the land preeminently lovely and the inhabitants easy to conquer had another kind of faith and in that faith each group possessed, came differing outlooks.  This is not an isolated case but illustrates how everyone thinks.  The sort of faith you have decides for you much about what you see and how you interpret what you experience.

In Matthew 17: 19, the disciples were frustrated by the lack of success they had casting out a demon.  Jesus’ response was pointed.  "Because you have so little faith. I tell you the truth, if you have faith as small as a mustard seed, you can say to this mountain, 'Move from here to there' and it will move. Nothing will be impossible for you." (Matthew 17:2 NIV)  What we see in many arenas of life is confirmed by Jesus.  There are certain things we don’t do because of too little faith and there are other things we can’t do because of the lack of faith.  The disciples were unable to heal a boy with a demon because of the obvious shortage of faith they had.  Jesus though asserted that they could easily have cast out the demon if they had even a small amount of faith.  It did not require even great faith to do something so astounding as free a crazed child of an afflicting demon.

Now here is the difference between generalized faith that is popularly promoted in self-help articles, TV shows and infomercials, or as it should really be defined, “self-confidence”, and what the Bible means by faith.  Jesus never told the disciples or anyone else that they needed to believe in themselves.  In fact, we are reminded again and again at various points in Scripture to not trust ourselves.  What we are to do however in regard to faith is trust God.  Jesus makes this crystal clear in John 14: 1. Trust in God; trust also in me. (NIV)  Without getting terribly technical, the word translated “trust” is the same Greek word as is translated “believe” or “have faith” in other parts of the Bible.  We are told here to have faith constantly, always in God; at every moment have faith in Jesus.  Let’s get just a bit more technical.  The Lord tells us to keep believing “into” Him, always getting deeper with our faith into God.  Nothing should diminish our faith in Christ, no circumstance or trouble is to get in the way of burgeoning faith in God.

The justification for this demand of God is really quite amazing.  In my Father's house are many rooms; if it were not so, I would have told you. I am going there to prepare a place for you.  And if I go and prepare a place for you, I will come back and take you to be with me that you also may be where I am. (John 14:2-3 NIV)  Before we can express the justification for our building faith in God, a correction to the translation of this passage needs to be respectfully noted.  The word “there” as in “I am going there” is not found in the Greek text.  It more accurately reads, “I am going to prepare a place for you.”  The implication of the NIV is that Jesus was going to the place of many rooms to prepare a place for us but that was not what Jesus was saying.  Jesus was going to the Cross to prepare a place for us. The cross was what His very next step was.  He was not about to go up to heaven.  He had a much more earthy task before Him; to die for our sins.  It was at the Cross that Jesus Christ gave faith its power, its crushing strength.  Jesus demanded our faith in Him because by dying on the Cross, He put us in our place.  We are in this work of God given the very power of the Lord in all we do.  What Jesus did at the Cross was enable us to be joined to Him that His knowledge of what we can and cannot do is ours, His assessment of what we are capable of accomplishing is what we can see through what He sees.

Because our sin separated us from God and kept us from His mind, the Cross broke apart that terrible barrier.  The Holy Spirit became free to enter us fully and make us the very body of God once our sins were removed.  This was not possible before the Cross.  The prophet Isaiah expresses precisely what every person faced before the Cross. But your iniquities have separated you from your God… (Isaiah 59:2 NIV) We could not have faith before Jesus died for us because faith had no object; no place where it could land.  Once we were free of the broken state of our life with God when Jesus died for our sins, we had God in whom we could have total faith.  This is not some mental gymnastics where we fool ourselves into thinking we are something we are not; this is the change that comes over us when we put all our hope in Jesus Christ to save us.  Our salvation is a totality salvation, a salvation to heaven but more importantly a salvation to God.  We are saved from our sins in order that we might be joined to Christ and that His works, His miracles, His accomplishments could take place through us.  Salvation comes to us that we might be put together to Christ and then we can do what He does.  Impossibility has only two explanations when we are combined with Christ and we acquire His mind.  We are either attempting something God doesn’t want done and we have rebelled against Him or we have failed to wait upon Him to act through us.  We have done something impulsively, without God’s authorization to move forward.

Faith is not based on what you can do or who you are but rather faith is solely a total dependence upon Jesus Christ to work through you and in you.  As He shows you, He also empowers you.  As He pushes you, He also enables you.  Faith is the assumption that we do not act independently but in union with God at every point.  That is possible only because Jesus Christ died for your sins.  You are joined to Christ and so you act now according to what He guides you and when He does, every time you can do it.  This is not mystical gibberish but how it is when you are made alive in Christ.  You can do whatever God gives you to do at the time He tells you to do it.

Take time this week to pray fervently.  Take each moment it comes to you and join your mind to that of Christ.  Pray as you walk and pray as you drive and pray as you work and even as you talk with people.  Pray at the restaurant, during the movie, when you are online and while you are eating.  Pray to Christ that He might pray with you and join His mind to yours.  As you do this, the work of God will begin to happen through you and miraculous works will happen.  Faith is not in your abilities but in Christ who lives in you.  Once you begin to put this into practice, praying through the mind of Christ, you will begin to see perfectly how God will work through you.

Head to Toe Him

One of the great movements of God is the flattening of the ego.  We think we know exactly what God wants to do with us, we prepare ourselves for His great interventions and then everything falls apart.  We go through the crushing despair  that wrecks our preconceived ideas of how God should be; of how He must be.  We also lose our sense of who we are; we are not basically good and well arranged, we are instead rebellious children who want our way above all else.  As God flattens us, He also picks us up off the ground and grants us favor in His Kingdom.  We learn to trust Him unconditionally.  We obey Him with finality.  We stick to Him when others about us turn traitorous.  God will not let you off the hook if you have given Him your life.  He will complete what He started which is to make you His completely both in how you are and how you look.  The family resemblance will be unmistakable when the Lord finishes with you.  The patience of His grace, the courage of His will, the integrity of His personality will be what is found in you too.  Until you look and sound and taste just like the wine and bread of Christ, you will feel the firm working of His hands upon your soul.  You are not in God's hand being polished; you are being remade and that does not come easily or quickly.  Taste and see that the Lord is good.  Is that not where you too are approaching?  It is not an imitation of Christ that you are gaining so much as the reality of it; Christ in you, the hope of glory.  The day will come when it will be impossible to separate the Christ from the you just as it is impossible for the one who knew your mother to be able to separate you from your mother as you approach her age.  The resemblance will not be at just one level of personality but through and through Christ will be seen in you.  That is where you are being taken and eventually you will get there.  The Cross of Jesus Christ, the redemption He established through it is the certification that you are being perfected even now as you walk through the fires and crushing of day by day life.  Give up on your hope of having a comfortable and clear life.  It will not happen as long as you are still a step away from the endpoint of being fully Christ's from head to toe.

God has chosen to make known among the Gentiles the glorious riches of this mystery, which is Christ in you, the hope of glory.   Colossians 1:27 NIV