Rest for a Weary Soul

We love to make much of our choosing God and doing something for Him when it is all backwards.  We did not choose Him.  He chose us.  And our work for God is like a candle set up against the sun when compared to the work of His for us.  We get disappointed when ministries do not go well.  Sometimes we grumble about how tough we have it and how hard is our lot in life.  Take a moment to stare up at Christ crucified.  Listen to Him groan as tries to lift up to gather in one more breath.  Taste the blood that drips down from His forehead and onto His cheeks and falls down to the dusty hill below Him.  Smell the sweat as the soldiers pass by you after they finish flogging Him.  Feel the vibrations of the hammer beating down upon the spikes going through His wrists and into the beams of the Cross.  Watch as His body trembles with another blow across His back.  Weep with Christ as the Disciples flee and Judas hangs himself.  Shake in agony over the crowds calling for His crucifixion and the nine lepers running off without looking back to thank Him for their healing.  Stare in bewilderment at the Disciples who fall asleep in Gethsemane and cannot pray with Him for just an hour.  It is all too much to consider, the agony of Christ as He worked His way up to Jerusalem without a single soul walking  at His side that He could count on to lighten His load; to reduce His burden.  The whole mass of humanity was upon Jesus' shoulders and He kept going to the end without a grumble or a complaint.  We live in a fallen world filled with disappointment and suffering and ministry is almost unbearable at times.  Yet we are not alone.  We have a Savior who lifts up from us the full weight of our troubles and carries them upon His own back as we regain our strength and have our hope restored.  Sit down for a moment and let the Holy Spirit sweep you up in His arms like a shepherd gathering a fallen lamb to his breast and be still with all your sorrows and pain.  Our Lord loves you and He will carry you in your time of trouble and heartache.   Give Him time to hold you for He knows how you have suffered and how hard it is for you to breathe.

The Lord will fight for you; you need only to be still."    Exodus 14:14 NIV

Dynamic Change

There are many of us who are weary; we have tremendous burdens that wear down our souls and we are tired of all the difficulties we face.  Not everyone is like this.  Some are cheery and pleased beyond measure with their lives.  All the "breaks" seem to fall their way and nothing much troubles them.  There is though, a great number of us who are going through the motions at work, just trying to get by at home, trudging through mud at school and we need more than just a pat on the back; we need the supernatural hand of God upon us.  Thomas the disciple lived in such a gloom that even the good news of his fellow disciples that Jesus was alive could not shake him out of it.  Only Jesus Christ Himself could lift the despair of his heart.  Our age is one of disbelief; that there are no devils tormenting souls, no satanic power working amongst us.  It is just the circumstances, broken relationships and troubled pasts that we have in the middle of our darkness.  Amateur and professional counselors alike do their best to try to "get at the root of our issues" and after years of probing and manipulating and prescribing, the "terror of the night" is still there.   The misery and torment so many of us suffer is real and it cannot all be explained by our experiences; the wise must take into account the very real presence of unseen evil forces in our world.  Perhaps you have tried your best to get at what is wrong with someone you love dearly and you have gotten nowhere.   You are at the end of your rope with this person and you don't know what more could be done.  God may never show you what is causing the "jangling of nerves" and anguish but maybe if you would give the Holy Spirit space, Jesus Christ could be brought in contact with the broken soul and do what was done for Mary Magdalene.  Are you willing to intercede with desperate determination for the weary souls you know and by God's grace, bring Jesus Christ to them through your praying?  Remember that Jesus told His disciples that some people could only be helped through prayer!  Prayer was not in Jesus' mind the feeble alternative of weak and unsophisticated minds; it was the great blast of dynamite that alone could break loose certain people from their despair and turmoil when the "wise and skilled" come up against those cases too big for them to handle.

After Jesus had gone indoors, his disciples asked him privately, "Why couldn't we drive it out?"  He replied, "This kind can come out only by prayer."     Mark 9:28-29 NIV

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zsY6UrFIsNs

Hunger is the Best Sauce

There is no one Satan is quite as ruthless with as the person who once walked with God and has turned aside.  The enemy shades this person's eyes and takes away his peripheral vision spiritually so that he cannot see how far off the narrow path he has turned.  Everything seems so good and true about what he is doing.  The older brother who despised the mercy his father provided his younger brother felt not the least twinge of guilt for thinking as he did.   Yet he could not have been farther from God if he had shot his father in the head.   The root of the older brother's falling away is that he wanted what his younger brother had...the life of sin and then the easy way out of it.  He was not satisfied with all the good he had done working along-side his father; he had to own the party his father threw for his brother.   Christian people who begin strong are most likely to fall away when they look around and want what God has given another.  The discontent seems holy at first; I deserve better and I am certain God will realize how badly I have been treated.  As soon as God becomes the "unjust judge" or the "inadequate master", Satan has the upper hand in the Christian's life and he is cooked.  There is only one way back for such a believer.  Repent.  Acknowledge your sin and turn to God in humble acceptance of your guilt.  Our Lord does not beg us to return to Him when we drift off and in fact He may become as silent as an Antarctic iceberg.  He did not chase after the younger son who walked away from Him and He let the older brother boycott the party.  We are free to hold our grudges and search for life away from God but it is a glorious day when we realize what we have done and seek out again the Savior who redeems us from Satan's velvet grasp.  What should we do if we have a friend who has fallen away from God?  Rely on the Holy Spirit to make you so alive in God that the person who has made his home in "Balaam's country" will hunger for Christ again.

 "When he came to his senses, he said, 'How many of my father's hired men have food to spare, and here I am starving to death!   Luke 15:17 NIV

Attachment

Jesus gave a simple expectation of those who have become His disciples.  Remain in me.  The implication is that we might not...that it is not automatic for us.  The great deception that runs rampant through the Church is that we can only get so far with praying and then we have to "do something".  It is as if all the pronouncements of Christ on prayer were the ravings of a lunatic or the naïve expectancies of a child staying up late waiting for Santa Claus to come down through a chimney not built into the home.  We pray but not like Christ told us we could pray.  Of course we give it a shot and then when we get bored with it or frustrated by its "failure" we move on to more important business.    Prayer is not a means by which we achieve something, whatever that achieving might be.  Prayer is what makes something, something.  Unless there is prayer in it, what we do is chasing after the wind; fruitless harvesting.  Jesus, noted, "What good is it  for a man to gain the whole world yet forfeit his soul."  We mistakenly file this comment away as a final judgment saying when it isn't.  It is about life here and now.  If what we strive to gain has nothing of Christ in it, then we have cut out our soul then and there and cast it aside.  Do we not realize that our soul is Christ joined to us in a new personality that is born again?  If our Lord is not in our striving, if we are not so completely attached to Him in what we do that our "soul" is in it, then our striving is fuel for the fires of hell.    God expects us to be immersed in Christ at every moment because we can.  The bloody death of Christ makes it possible for us to be attached to Christ so completely that whatever we do is the will of God and whatever we achieve is good fruit. 

If you remain in me, and my words remain in you, ask whatever you wish, and it will be given you.  John 15: 7 NIV

Martyr's Hill

One of the most devious tricks of the devil is to get us to say, "I can't" to God.  Is it really that you can't or that you won't?  Every creature, from the snail to the leopard is made perfectly by God for whatever purpose our Lord has planned.  We make much of genetic deformities as if that is sensible.  What we may call a deformity is in fact a way of expressing disbelief in God's handiwork...as if He is a flawed artist.  If at any point God gives you direction and you are clear it is God, you can be certain you are equipped and prepared for the task.  Nothing about you is out of place or lacking.  It must be dumbfounding to the angels that any born-again Christian would question God's call based on skill sets and talents.  Yet even Moses stood at the burning bush arguing with Almighty God over his fitness to lead Israel out of Egypt!  What slander to confuse defamation of God's work in you with humility!  It is not humble to turn down our Lord because we think we are inadequate for the task!  It is rather outright rebellion against His rule.  Nothing amazes the world quite as much as the fisherman who stands the world on its ear with his preaching or the tax collector who composes the very first book of the New Testament or the lunatic who Christ proclaims will be remembered eternally for her holy devotion.  How will heaven remember you?  Will you be compared to all those called by God who turned aside out of fear or indifference or will you be known as the one who scorned the devil's mocking of your readiness for the task and gave God all you had for your Savior's glory?   Will you stand on the hill of your martyrdom and plant the banner of Christ there, declaring the land irrevocably God's and His alone? 

 "Get yourself ready! Stand up and say to them whatever I command you. Do not be terrified by them, or I will terrify you before them.     Jeremiah 1:17-18 NIV

Certainty

2 Timothy 1:12

Yet I am not ashamed, because I know whom I have believed, and am convinced that he is able to guard what I have entrusted to him for that day.

How Do You Know That You Know?

Twenty five years ago our family packed up all we had and moved from New Orleans to

Northern California.  It was a dreadfully long trip but on the way we decided to take some educational side trips.  One of our stops was at the world famous Carlsbad Caverns.  As a child I had looked seen pictures of it in National Geographic and had dreamed of one day going to it.  I had been to a number of caves before; seen stalactites and stalagmites, explored creepy caves and stood in caves with all the lights out deep below the earth.  What intrigued me most about the Carlsbad Caverns were the stories I had read of all the bats in the cave.  I had seen pictures of bats flooding out of the cave but I couldn’t imagine so many bats coming all at once.  When we had the opportunity to stand at the entrance to the cave when the bats all came out to feed in the evening, I was not prepared for what took place.  As if shot from a cannon, just as the sun was setting, without warning, millions of bats in a great cloud of flapping fury exploded out of the cave, covering the sky as if a thunderstorm had come upon us.  For several minutes it was nothing but bats whizzing past until the great host was gone.  It was far more bats than I imagined existed in the entire world came out of that cave and I was struck by how inadequate were the descriptions I had read of the bat exodus from Carlsbad Cavern.  The experience of it went far beyond my imagining.  I was no longer a “doubting Thomas” that something so spectacular was possible as millions of bats flooding out of a cave all at once was possible.

Have you ever had a hard time believing something you were told could be true?  Perhaps a movie everyone is talking about can’t possibly be as good as they say.  Maybe a book your friend is raving about won’t live up to the expectations.  It could be a TV show that you have been told is “so funny” won’t be.  A speaker you have been told to catch on a podcast won’t keep your attention.  A college that has been recommended to you is not going to be as good as you have been told.  It could be that someone told you to move to a certain town because it is such a wonderful place but you don’t think you will like living there.  Maybe you don’t believe that someone’s story about what they did is true.  Have you been skeptical of the hype about a political candidate or of a religious teacher or perhaps all that is promised about Christianity?  Do you have some doubts about what you believe?

Of all the people described in the Old Testament, I am most intrigued by Moses.  He was one of only two people who met with Jesus on the Mount of Transfiguration and he is known by many as the “Great Deliverer” because of his role in Israel being freed from slavery.  He was a man of great passions and yet described as a very humble man, more humble than anyone else on the face of the earth. (Numbers 12:3 NIV)  He most likely had a troubled marriage, was a bit self-righteous and like many of us, blamed others for some of his biggest mistakes.  Most importantly, for the sake of our discussion, Moses was not always certain he could trust God.

We are not sure how he came to this conclusion but Moses at some point, before he turned forty, believed God would use him to help his fellow Israelites escape the bondage they were under in Egypt.  His childhood was unusual.  He was born during a tempestuous time in his nation’s history.  The Israelites had settled in Egypt some four hundred years earlier and now were a persecuted people in their adopted land. The king of Egypt became afraid the Israelites would revolt if they continued to increase in number so he ordered that all male Israelite babies be killed.  Moses’s mother put her baby boy in a water-tight basket to try and keep him from being discovered by the Egyptian soldiers and the daughter of the king of Egypt found him floating in the Nile River while she was bathing.  As soon as she saw baby Moses, the Egyptian princess decided to adopt the boy, thus saving him.  Now was this a coincidence that Moses survived the pogrom of Hebrew babies this way?   Was it just luck Pharaoh’s daughter found Moses floating in the basket and when she saw him, loved him and wanted to save him, raising him in her own house and making sure he was educated by the best teachers of the land?  Or was this a miracle and it was God who saved him through Pharaoh’s daughter?  Your interpretation of this fortunate circumstance depends on your point of view.  Those who don’t believe in God would call it a random fluke of life; those who believe in a personal God who operates within our world might say it was God who rescued Moses and prepared him for leadership. 

Certainly Moses had decided something about his survival as a baby and how it came about and by the time he was forty, he had an opinion about God’s existence.  We know he believed God was working through people in normal circumstances of life because when he was forty he was convinced that God wanted him to kill an Egyptian who was beating an Israelite.  The prophet Stephen, in his last sermon lets us in on Moses’s thinking when he came upon the maltreatment of the Israelite.  "When Moses was forty years old, he decided to visit his fellow Israelites.  He saw one of them being mistreated by an Egyptian, so he went to his defense and avenged him by killing the Egyptian.  Moses thought that his own people would realize that God was using him to rescue them, but they did not. (Acts 7:23-26 NIV)  It did not turn out well for Moses though.  The Israelites did not rally to Moses as their deliverer; in fact they rejected him and it was reported to Pharaoh what he had done.  Pharaoh was furious and word got back to Moses that he would be executed for his crime.  Moses escaped to Midian where he lived forty years as a fugitive.

What is intriguing about this biographical account is the shift in Moses’s thinking about God and God’s presence in the world.  We can understand how Moses could have thought God wanted him to kill the Egyptian.  It was just as sensible for Moses to think the Lord wanted to use him to lead a rebellion against Egyptian domination as it was for him to decide that God saved him as a baby from the fate suffered by other baby boys of his generation.  An atheist might come to another conclusion.  The fact that Moses lived when other’s died was just a quirk of chance and his belief that he was to lead Israel was something he concocted himself or through the influence of friends or family members but there was no God involved in any of it.  This may very well have been the evolution of Moses’s thinking as he developed a new life far from his fellow Israelites and the Egyptian oppressors.   He fell into a very ordinary existence.  He got married.  He had children.  He raised sheep.  He watched his children move through the normal stages of growth.  He looked for watering spots for his sheep and fought off bears or lions that tried to attack the flock.  Moses kept moving his flocks about in search of pastures.  He fought with his wife and made love to her, had interesting conversations with his father-in-law and the other men of the village.  Slowly he gave up on the idea that God wanted him to help rescue his fellow Israelites from slavery.  Thoughts of God may have continued and he might have even led his family in prayers but any vibrant expectancy that the Lord was personally involved in his life gradually faded.  He had bills to pay and mouths to feed and you can’t look to God to do those things for you.  Forty years without any sign of God makes you more of an atheist than you might care to admit.  Not all atheism is created equal.  Some forms of it are casual and incidental; not a well thought through view of life…more a developed disregard for anything personal about God.  Atheism can be a way of life; it doesn’t have to be a philosophy.

As the silence of God continues, our faith in Him wanes and we pay less attention to Him operating in our world.  Disappointment may be the biggest cause of atheism.  Why didn’t God help me with this problem?  How come God doesn’t change my circumstances?  I thought God would get me a job, make my daughter well, save my marriage, stop me from drinking, grant me a pardon.  We don’t intend to stop believing in God.  It just happens as our disappointments and busy lifestyles deconstruct our faith in a personal and interactive Lord.  I am pretty certain it happened with Moses.  His reaction to the burning bush is a snapshot of practical atheism.  God let him down back in Egypt, why should he trust the Lord now forty years later when God clearly was meeting him out in the hills of Midian.

Imagine if Moses continued to sulk when he met God at the burning bush.  What if he had turned around and walked away when the first sign of God appeared to him?  How different our history would be.  How different would have been everything for Moses?  It is a most amazing moment when God comes to us and it really is God.  We can’t perhaps put our finger on how we are so certain it is God but it is God and the moment we know it is God we are either going to respond with anger and disgust over all the wrong we feel He has done us or we are going to awaken, like a child opening her eyes to the morning light, and recognize the love in His call to us.

The Lord told us to watch for Him to come to us.  He means for us to be ready to see Him.  He won’t prepare us for His entrance.  There will be no trumpets blaring to warn us He is near.  He will simply come.  And when He comes it will be as certain to you as a friend entering into your house that He is there.  His entrance may not be logical…it may make no sense to you at all but He will be with you and you will know He is with you and nothing will be the same from then onward.  Micah the prophet recognized that no one else may watch and wait for the Lord to come to them but he would.  But as for me, I watch in hope for the Lord, I wait for God my Savior; my God will hear me.  Do not gloat over me, my enemy!  Though I have fallen, I will rise.  Though I sit in darkness, the Lord will be my light. (Micah 7: 7-8 NIV) When the Lord comes, you will be surprised by Him and you won’t be prepared for what He does next with you.  He might speak through you or love someone through you or heal through you.  His presence will be most wonderful and although you may have fallen, like Micah, you will rise.  You will rise above your sin and rise above your hurt and rise above your disappointment and rise above your failure and the Great God of All will be there with you.  Nothing can stop the Lord from coming to you.  You will be amazed and in your heart cry, “That is the Lord.”  Watch for Him!  Look for Him.  Listen for Him.  The Lord will come to you.  Be prepared to meet Him!