Poured

Every marriage has its quirky side to it.   Ours is no exception.  When I throw something out, either in the garbage or into a recycling bin, it invariably returns, rises from the dead so to speak.  Sometimes this little dance between my wife and I will go through three or four cycles.  I throw something out, it shows up on the counter, I throw it out again, it is back on the table.  We are not always on the same page when it comes to what to keep and what to “recycle”.   A growing number of us are becoming increasingly conscious of the evils of wastefulness.  You are probably like me.  You recycle, you reuse, you repurpose.  You try not to buy items without having a legitimate reason for getting them.  This way of thinking filters down to other areas of life.  You don’t want to waste your time so when stuck in traffic you listen to podcasts, books or informational radio programs and you avoid areas where you know there will be backups and delays.  You count your calories and the minutes you waste waiting in line.  You probably were cut off by someone recently who was not wanting to lose a second by being behind you in traffic.  If someone in my family leaves a glass of milk on the counter, I am tempted to pour it back into the milk container rather than throw it out.  Maybe, you are like that too!

In an age of recycling and repurposing, there are two accounts in the Bible that come across as ridiculous. One is in the Old Testament and the second is in the New Testament.  David was a hero king.  He fought numerous battles, expanded the borders of Israel and forced several kings into subjugation.  It was not always easy; many times, he fought superior forces who had the upper hand.  In one such military endeavor, he found himself and his army surrounded by the Philistines who were bent on his destruction. Holed up in a cave, he had a craving. At that time David was in the stronghold, and the Philistine garrison was at Bethlehem.  David longed for water and said, "Oh, that someone would get me a drink of water from the well near the gate of Bethlehem!" (2 Samuel 23: 15) Bethlehem was his hometown and the water from the well there was more precious to him than the finest of wines.  Three of his mightiest soldiers decided to break through the Philistine lines and grab some of the water and bring it to their beloved king.  When they arrived back with the water, David refused to drink any of it. … instead, he poured it out before the Lord.  "Far be it from me, O Lord, to do this!" he said. "Is it not the blood of men who went at the risk of their lives?" And David would not drink it.  (2 Samuel 23: 15-17 NIV)

This was of course a colossal waste of time and effort and no one would begrudge these three men for being furious with their king for not drinking the water they risked their lives delivering to him.  Yet that is the point.  We all are heading to dust and ashes and everything we gain, hold, make, earn, save or grab will slip from our hands and either be a treasure of Satan’s or an offering to Christ.  We decide the fate of everything that comes to us; we are the judge and jury.  David realized, and perhaps you have too, that love, and courage and loyalty and devotion are bigger than this world.  They are the fabric of Heaven and no human being can hold any of them as his own.  That water was not H20, it was supernatural and could not be “bottoms up”.  It belonged to God because it came from Him.  A Christian cannot measure the worth of her life by what she possesses but only in what she gives over to Christ.  It is astounding, the emptiness that so many accept as normal.  They hold onto all sorts of things: their talents, their time, their social skills, their money and their relationships all the while failing to see what wonderful things our Lord might do with them if He had them.

In the New Testament we have the oft discussed account of Mary, a follower of Jesus, who poured out an entire bottle of expensive perfume on Jesus.  While he was in Bethany, reclining at the table in the home of a man known as Simon the Leper, a woman came with an alabaster jar of very expensive perfume, made of pure nard. She broke the jar and poured the perfume on his head. Some of those present were saying indignantly to one another, "Why this waste of perfume?” (Mark 14:3-4 NIV) Indeed, what a great waste!  And yet the Lord’s reply reveals what God thinks of such actions.  "Leave her alone," said Jesus. "Why are you bothering her? She has done a beautiful thing to me.” (Mark 14:6 NIV) He went so far as to declare that what Mary did would always be remembered and honored!  Have you ever done anything that could be categorized as eternally unforgettable?

The very nature of God is to pour out His life for those who love Him and those who hate Him, to die for the foulest of sinners and the most indifferent of unbelievers.  His life was the ultimate waste.  He was smart, holy, good, creative, beloved and a leader.  He had every reason to live and do something with His life and He threw it away for you and me.  You might argue that the salvation of the world was worth His life but that is because you are on this end of it.  If you were on the other side of the Cross, you would have seen it much differently.  The disciples did.  Peter rebuked Jesus for insisting He would soon die.  For what?

If the nature of Christ is in you, then it is a part of your personality to give up to God indiscriminately anything and everything just because you love Him.  There is no career, no home, no retirement, no friendship or prized possession that is so big you must grasp it tightly and keep to yourself.  Whenever you hold something and tell God that He can’t have it, you shrink spiritually and become a smaller person.  But when you open your hands to Christ and offer Him anything and everything you have, the size of your life grows into a supernatural one.  God takes everything you give Him and makes them is God-sized and God transformed.  We look at some of the things we do as menial, as trivial, insignificant and unnoticed.  When Christ is a part of them, He sees them another way.  He considers them sacred.  You have the opportunity at each moment to become one with God, to live in the vastness of the Holy Spirit.  Open your hands and offer Him whatever you have there.  Christ who is holy will make it holy and you will have joy in exchange.

Desert Life

Isaiah 41:14 NIV

Do not be afraid, O worm Jacob, O little Israel, for I myself will help you," declares the Lord, your Redeemer, the Holy One of Israel.

What Can God Make of You?

When I first became a part of the ministries of Warm Springs Church, I wasn’t the full-time pastor.  My friend Keith Williams was the pastor but he asked me to be co-pastor with him.  So in addition to leading the youth ministries, I also shared in the preaching.  Our income came from my wife who had a good job working in management for a major corporation.  Financially we were fine.  We were living in a mobile home which we liked and our first son had just arrived and Mary Jo and I were ecstatic about having him.  People in the church liked me and were appreciative of the youth ministry we had.  We were experimenting with contemporary music in the service and that seemed to be going well.  I had a great friendship with Pastor Keith and we worked well together…we were on the same page and had a common vision for the church.  And yet something wasn’t right with me.  I was dry and lacked joy.  Although I felt like what I was doing was important, I did not have a great amount of enthusiasm for my work.  Something was missing and I could not figure out what it was. 

Have you ever felt spiritually dry?  You were doing all the right things but there was no passion to any of it, no fire, no bounce to your step.  Perhaps you are there now.  You can’t put a finger on what is missing but you know something is.  Others may not know that there is anything wrong with you but you know there is.  It might be your growing lack of motivation to get up early and read your Bible, to pray, to dedicate yourself to following God’s guidance.  You might be wondering about the whole matter of doing God things.  Is it important for you to think about God, talk about Him, hear from Him?  No one wakes up one morning and decides to be spiritually dry.  It isn’t a goal of most people to give up on having passionate faith; it just happens kind of like catching the flu or getting into an accident in a parking lot.  Plenty of people in churches are not as enthusiastic about their faith as they once were.  They may want to be passionate about God and living a Christian life but they just aren’t and they don’t have a lot of motivation to see this turn around.  You might be like that now.  You aren’t alone though!

One of the highly underrated passages in the Bible is found in the Old Testament in Isaiah 41.  Starting in verse 14, it describes the psychological and spiritual condition of many.  Do not be afraid, O worm Jacob, O little Israel, for I myself will help you," declares the Lord, your Redeemer, the Holy One of Israel.  "See, I will make you into a threshing sledge, new and sharp, with many teeth.  You will thresh the mountains and crush them, and reduce the hills to chaff.  You will winnow them, the wind will pick them up, and a gale will blow them away.  But you will rejoice in the Lord and glory in the Holy One of Israel.  "The poor and needy search for water, but there is none; their tongues are parched with thirst.  But I the Lord will answer them; I, the God of Israel, will not forsake them.   I will make rivers flow on barren heights, and springs within the valleys.  I will turn the desert into pools of water, and the parched ground into springs.  (Isaiah 41:14-18 NIV)

Not many would tolerate being called a worm.  Not even citizens of a tiny country like Luxemburg would take kindly being called a worm of a nation.  We are after all people.  We create.  We build bridges.  We write poetry.  We develop computer programs.  We fix dinner.  We have opinions about things.  We are intelligent.  Strong.  Thoughtful.  Here is the ironic part of this way the Lord addresses His people.  Does a worm know it’s a worm?  Do they think of themselves as lowly, as insignificant, weak-minded?  Probably not!  If you called a worm a worm, the worm most likely would just nod at you and see nothing significant about your name for him. Worms don’t take it as an insult to be seen as worms.  Likewise, does a desert know it is a desert?  Does it realize how dry it is or how lifeless?  The desert would probably point out a rattlesnake as a way of defending how full of life it is.  “See, a buzzard flying overhead and an iguana over there!”  “Dry?  What do you mean dry?  Just the other day there was a drop of dew on this rock.  Five months ago we had a full out thunderstorm.  What do you mean it is dry?  No vegetation?  How can you say that?  Look on the horizon.  There is a cactus.  Over there to the right is another one.”

One of the effects of sin is that it ruins our capacity to see ourselves as we actually are.  Sometimes we lose sight of our strengths and fail to recognize our abilities.  Like Moses complaining to God that he could not do what the Lord was asking of him, there are those who are unable to grasp just how capable they are.  Far more often though sin has the opposite effect.  It blinds us to our true shortcomings.   We see ourselves as more adequate than we are, more intelligent, more logical and less susceptible to making mistakes than we actually are.  Just consider how quickly sin impacted the earliest people.  Adam and Eve put on fig leaves to cover their nakedness.  Who were they trying to avoid?  God!  Did they not realize that fig leaves could keep God from seeing what they were hiding?  In the very next generation Cain killed his brother Abel and thought it was reasonable what he did.  A few generations later, Lamech killed a man because the fellow wounded him and thought such revenge was rational.  The Bible tells us that the oldest living human being died in the year of the flood, most likely because he choose to not ride it out in the ark his grandson built. 

Recently I heard a musical artist discuss how hard she worked on her Grammy winning album and in the interview she boastedof its popularity.  I did not know a single song this person had done and so I thought I would listen to some of her music.  It was terrible.  Musically the songs were awful and the lyrics were horrible.  They were perverse and filled with cursing.  I wondered if she realizes how bad her music is and how ridiculous her songs are.  Will she be proud to have her grandkids listen to her songs when she is sixty?  She admittedly is an extreme example of how sin ruins our ability to see ourselves rightly but we all face this same predicament.  We can’t really make sense of ourselves because sin keeps us from having access to enough information to have an informed opinion.

Let us consider one example of this in the Bible.  When Peter the disciple was told by Jesus that he was going to deny knowing Christ, Peter vehemently rejected the notion   Peter declared, "Even if all fall away, I will not."  "I tell you the truth," Jesus answered, "today — yes, tonight — before the rooster crows twice you yourself will disown me three times."  But Peter insisted emphatically, "Even if I have to die with you, I will never disown you." And all the others said the same.  (Mark 14:29-31 NIV)  We all know just how wrong Peter was and for that matter all of the other disciples too.  Peter did just as Jesus said he would and Peter was so shocked by his cowardice that he wept bitterly over it.  Peter was not being a blustery fool when he insisted he would courageously stand by Christ.  He just did not know himself because sin had done its work in him too.  He was like us all, unable to see everything in himself and what he did know he had a warped view of it.

In our Bible passage, you are told that you are a desert.  You are spiritually dry and lifeless.  You are poor and needy and do not know how to get the water that can quench your thirst.  You are a worm that is helpless and inadequate.  Not just you…me too…every one of us in fact.  We might think we are great lions and mighty eagles.   You could insist you are a fertile valley that is producing a great harvest of the sweetest fruits but you would be wrong.  God is not blinded by sin like you are.  He sees you as you are…helpless, dry and barren.  That is not a slam against you; not the cutting assertions of an insensitive critic.  It is just how you are…how I am.

Take a moment to consider what God promises to do for you.  He says He can make the parched ground in you become springs.  He is able to help you.  He can take away those mountains that are in your way.  He will not leave you to fend for yourself.  He will see you through the difficulties you face.  He will be there with you and make you into a sort of Garden of Eden, a person whose spirit is thriving rather than barely getting by on fumes.  What our Lord is promising you is something you cannot gain from friends, from family or success.  It can come only from Him.  But how do you access this “living water” that bubbles up inside you?  Jesus said this of gaining His living water.  “Whoever believes in me, as the Scripture has said, streams of living water will flow from within him." (John 7:38 NIV)  It is not a matter of doing but of believing.  As you believe Christ is with you, that He is helping you, that He is comforting you, you will find His help in all sorts of places without any logical explanation.  Encouragement will arise in you.  Guidance will come to you.  Support will be available for you.  No one can explain how Christ does it, making water bubble up in you when you are dry but He does.  Is it a miracle when God provides you a friend that you need, when He gives you some way out of your financial difficulties, when He sees you through your confusion?  Perhaps we would call it a miracle…or maybe we would just say that God loves you and has a lot of different ways to be there for you!

The Mountain

Psalm 125:1 NIV

Those who trust in the Lord are like Mount Zion,

which cannot be shaken but endures forever.

How Does Your Faith Look?

Imagine a mountain of any sort.  It could be snow-capped, rising above the peaks of a dozen other mountains or a hill that stands out in flat desert wasteland.  The mountain can have a city sitting upon it or be a barren rock where few plants grow.  What does that mountain signify to you?  Does it trigger memories from your past or create an image of what you would like your life to be?  What do you think of when you look at the mountain and how does it impact your senses?  Are you drawn in a mysterious way to the mountains or are they frightening because of their immensity and the danger many mountains present to those who climb them.

Many important events happened on mountains in the Bible and mountains often symbolized theological themes in the Bible.   Abraham had one lasting memory of a mountain, Moses several.  Peter, James and John never forgot what they experienced on a mountain and someday it will be a mount upon which our Lord will return.  Perhaps what makes a mountain so captivating is its great power and steadfastness.  Mountains simply are not moved.  Another quality of the greatest of mountains is their endurance.  The Psalmist has this in mind when he compares the believer who puts His faith in God to Mount Zion. Those who trust in the Lord are like Mount Zion, which cannot be shaken but endures forever. (Psalm 125:1 NIV)  The next verse gives a brilliant picture of how God protects us.  As the mountains surround Jerusalem, so the Lord surrounds his people both now and forevermore. (Psalm 125:2 NIV)

Like Mount Zion, the person who trusts in God lasts forever but just as the mountains surround Jerusalem, God guards His people and protects them.  So we have the believer being like a specific mountain, Mt. Zion and the Lord being like the range of mountains around Jerusalem which contains Mt. Zion.  We are like a mighty mountain, the Bible tells us, if we put our trust in God.  But even more importantly, it is the Lord who is a mountain of protection for His people.  We will pause here and consider these two points carefully.

Many have lost their way because they get these two declarations confused and miss the point of them altogether.  Our faith is not in our faith.  It is in Christ who saves us from all that Sin creates.  If your faith is in your faith, you will certainly be shaken because at some point your faith will be shaken.  Your faith can be knocked down and wrecked by trials too great for you but your salvation is not dependent on your faith.  It is dependent on God whose salvation it is.  Like what happens when a great wave of the ocean strikes you, you can find yourself knocked off your feet spiritually by someone who talks you out of what you believe about God and convinces you that you are naive to think Christ can save you.  A book you read might be so persuasive in its arguments against the presence of God that you can doubt His existence.  Some person you trusted who built up your faith in Christ may commit a terrible sin and suddenly you wonder if Christianity itself is true.  If your faith is in your faith, you can become like a house built upon sandy ground that falls apart when a horrific storm beats against it.  Consider these examples of faith in faith.

When the Apostle Peter boldly proclaimed that even if all the other disciples fall away from staying with Christ, he never would, Peter was showing his faith in his faith.  Peter declared, "Even if all fall away, I will not." (Mark 14:29 NIV)  We know of course that Peter did fall away and his boast comes across as pure bluster to us but at the time, Peter was supremely confident that he could and would if necessary die with Christ if Jesus’ dire prediction came to pass.  He had faith in his faith.  It is one thing to have faith in God, another altogether to have faith in one’s faith in God.

James and John angrily called for Christ to let them pray for fire to come down from heaven and destroy the Samaritans in a particular village that did not want Christ and them to stay there. And he sent messengers on ahead, who went into a Samaritan village to get things ready for him; but the people there did not welcome him, because he was heading for Jerusalem.  When the disciples James and John saw this, they asked, "Lord, do you want us to call fire down from heaven to destroy them?" (Luke 9:52-54 NIV)  Here is the terrible problem with spiritual pride.  Although it may be grounded in God-thinking, it isn’t grounded in God.  James and John had plenty of faith in their ability to pray and by praying, bring down fire from heaven.  They clearly though had not much faith in God’s ability to remake and reorder lives.  It was clearly impossible in their minds for God to do anything much with the people living in the Samaritan village.  They were too far gone to be redeemed.  Jesus however thought differently and did something about it.

Let me illustrate the difference between faith in one’s faith and faith in God from a recent experience of mine.  I was working at a school as a P.E. instructor and somewhere on the school grounds lost a bracelet I was wearing.  I had been working with the kids both on a large grassy field as well as an asphalt play yard.  I searched everywhere I had been for the bracelet to no avail. As I looked to the ground, my heart looked to the heavens and I asked God to show me where the bracelet was but I still didn’t find it.  Finally, because the children were at recess, there were staff members of the school walking about supervising the kids.  I asked one of the workers if she had seen my bracelet but she told me she hadn’t.  However she encouraged me to not give up on finding the bracelet.  She had recently lost a small, diamond studded earring and searched high and low for it but the earring was nowhere to be found.  One day she spotted it in her driveway, completely undamaged.  Somehow it had gone unscathed, despite the number of times cars were parked in the driveway.  She told me not to give up on finding the bracelet.  I must admit, that I had quit thinking God would show me where the bracelet was and just smiled and thanked the woman for her encouragement.  Less than five minutes later, a girl who had been walking with the recess duty woman came to me with my bracelet.  It was not my faith that brought that bracelet back to me but rather the God of my faith that returned it in such a miraculous way.

When Jonah was sent by God to tell the people of Assyria in Nineveh that judgment was coming, he did not want to go because he thought the Lord would be easy on them.  If they asked God for forgiveness, Jonah believed God would let them off without any punishment for all the wicked things the people of that country had done.  Jonah’s faith was in his religion of right and wrong and punishments and rewards but not in God who is really God.  He did not think God could really fix all those Assyrians in Nineveh and make them a blessing to the world.  His faith in the religion of making people pay for what they do wrong was strong but His faith in the God who is really God was weak and broken.

Our Lord’s declaration to two blind men that Jesus healed is widely misunderstood.  As Jesus went on from there, two blind men followed him, calling out, "Have mercy on us, Son of David!"   When he had gone indoors, the blind men came to him, and he asked them, "Do you believe that I am able to do this?"   "Yes, Lord," they replied. Then he touched their eyes and said, "According to your faith will it be done to you"; and their sight was restored. (Matthew 9:27-30 NIV)  Jesus was not telling the men that they were healed because they had enough faith to get a healing.  They were healed because their faith was in Christ to heal them and He did it.

God does not want you to work up our faith and try to blow it up like a balloon so that you can get the things you want.  He simply tells you to trust Him in every matter.  There is so much you try to fix and so many problems you stress over because you don’t know how to solve them and the Lord tells you to settle down and trust Him with it.  Rather than fuss over something that bothers you, first go to Christ and the Holy Spirit may put a solution in your heart that will take care of your problem.  Perhaps He will begin working in someone else who will lift the problem off your shoulders.  God could simply give you peace while you wait for a solution.  God does not care one bit how great or small your faith is.  He simply wants what faith you have to be in Him.  Here is something you can say to remind you of how great God’s love is for you and how willing He is to help you.  Make this simple statement as you face the trials before you.  “Jesus is my Savior.  I put my faith in Him.”