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

Are You A Hornblower?

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 also.  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

Spilling Out

God has not called you to "be all you can be".  He has no interest whatsoever in you developing your potential or making something of yourself.  He is transforming you that the Son of Man might live through you.  What good really is it that you gain the world and lose your soul?  Anyone can reach their potential and have no need of Jesus Christ whatsoever.  The Lord did not send His Son to die for you so you could do that!  Our Savior gave up His life on the Cross to redeem you from all your scurryings and strivings because it all leads no where but to destruction.  He bought you back from death so that you might be made complete in Christ alone.  Your education and professional advancement and success at getting your children into prestigious colleges is of no use to God at all and even less use to you if the Lordship of Christ is not front and center in you.  If He is not the Life in your life, then you have made a wreck of the opportunity God has given you to be.  Satan is more than happy to let you continue your course as long as Christ is not spilling out of you in your daily dealings.  If Jesus Christ does not tumble forth from you as you get after your work assignments, while you are doing the dishes and as you settle down at the library to start your homework, then it is a meaningless exercise.  But if the Spirit of God generates your whirl of activities, even if they are mundane, then you have lived well.  What good is your sermon if it does not have the taste of Jesus Christ in it and of what use are your flashes of brilliance as you entertain your friends if nothing of it has the aroma of Christ?  Everywhere you go, the resurrected Christ goes with you.  Your challenge is to let Him loose.   Give Him sway wherever you are!  The power of God working through you is the greatest of miracles!  Why would you ever keep that back?  Let just one person in on your life with Christ and a landslide of sweetness might spill out of you into a world waiting for a single soul to come its way with Jesus Christ at the forefront of what she does.

If anyone speaks, he should do it as one speaking the very words of God. If anyone serves, he should do it with the strength God provides, so that in all things God may be praised through Jesus Christ.  1 Peter 4:11 NIV

Holiness Revisited

The moment you begin to drift off course and fall into the casual assumption that God isn't paying attention and isn't too concerned with how you are doing things, you must look squarely at the Lord's response to Nadab and Abihu.  The instantaneous reaction to their relaxed approach to manning the Temple is something to shake loose your cool self-assurance.   We speak ferociously of the grace and mercy of God but the Lord did not ponder long in His reaction to those two .    Aaron dared not even stammer a protest at the destruction of his older sons because he recognized Who was present.  Later when the Lord struck Miriam with leprosy for grumbling about Moses, Aaron witnessed once more the profound  violence with which God handles rebellion.   We may be glib about many things in life but we must not be so with regard to God.  He remains  a raging fire even if we see Jesus as meek and mild. (See Hebrews 12:28)  It may take years to erect a superstructure but in only a matter of moments the entire building can collapse in a heap.  God might be patient with you and you could mistake it for indifference but that might be a disastrous determination.  You are in play because the Lord wants you where you are with whom He has you at the time you are there.  Veer off without consideration for the Lord and His interest in you and the wreckage could be terrible.  The severe cost at which God has redeemed you should stop you dead in your tracks.  The sending of Jesus Christ to face what He did, the Son, the Beloved, informs you of just how seriously the Lord takes this matter of what you do and how you do it.  The wretched death of Christ defines the cost at which God lets you go about your business however you do so.  Each decision you make, every casual turn you consider is marked by the bloody crucifixion.  Does God care if you act in faith or disregard His Word?  Ask Mary Magdalene who watched Christ die.  Ask His mother Mary who cringed at the blood dripping from His brow.  Ask John who stood gaping with horror as Jesus  groaned in agony.  If it is true, that Jesus Christ would have done as He did on the blood-thirsty hill if there was only one sinner on earth needing His life...you…, then perhaps you should reassess how seriously you take your actions day in and day out.   Holiness has largely been laid to rest in our age of forgetfulness but the Lord certainly never forgot the value and importance of holiness nor did the women who stood at the foot of the Cross.

But just as he who called you is holy, so be holy in all you do; for it is written: "Be holy, because I am holy."   1 Peter 1:15 NIV

Fog

Nothing disturbs our sensibilities quite like the prayer that goes dark.  We once had a firm idea how we ought to pray and what we should expect as an outcome but then it all becomes whacked and we lose our mind over the epic disaster we face since we prayed.  We lose the game, we lose the house, we lose the daughter, we lose the marriage, we lose  the will to pray anymore.  Our expectation is that everything should work in a straight line.  Beginning and end all within the carefully orchestrated wishes we hold and yet it isn't.  We find ourselves staring at a great tangled ball of yarn that has no end to grab.  Our problem is that we have so many accounts in the Bible that wind up somewhere and we expect that too.  Job's health gets restored.  Jonah is spewed out of the fish.  Moses makes it out of Egypt.  Joseph is released from jail.  Peter winds up on the doorstep carefree.  But we forget about James martyred, Jonah stewing over the Assyrian revival, Moses pulled away from Israel just as the Exodus ends, John left upon Patmos and Noah stupidly drunk.  The brief moments when God works with us along a straight line  leave us discombobulated.  We assume that is how it always is to be.  It is our right to see things clearly, to be settled and on our way somewhere.  That is not the human experience though and it especially isn't so for Believers.  God leaves us in a fog for great stretches and does so decidedly.  We can't see our way out of our disappointment, our troubles, our frustration and we think something is wrong with us or wrong with God.  Faith is only established within the fog when you can't make heads or tails of your circumstance or God.  The Lord does not show Himself to you nor give you His "big plan" either.  Blindly you must go about your business believing in the Lord who built His life in you by giving up His life finitely in the public square.  There for all to see the love of Christ was established and decided in the heart of the Father who loved you first before you had a shred of interest in Him.    The only way you can live by faith is when faith is forced out of you; not book faith or classroom faith but actual faith played out in real life.  It is then, when the fog thickens and you are left alone to sort out all the things you hoped would come to pass that haven't that you begin to believe God as you should, as you can.  You have Christ in you, living through you and in that is great hope and promise.  For Jesus has already blazed the way for you.  He dangled from the tree with the world looking out at Him and no sign of the Father at any turn of His head.  All He could see were weeping women, crushed and hopeless men, crass and wanton soldiers,  perverse religious zealots and an agony that was unbearably cruel.  Yet there, in the fog,  Jesus Christ stayed fixed upon the Father and His determined faith is also abiding within you.  Rather than give in to the despair of the fog, fix your eyes upon Jesus who knows how hopeless life can be and has given you His faith to keep you going.

"The Lord has said that he would dwell in a dark cloud;    1 Kings 8:12 NIV