Seriously?

Isaiah 53:2 NIV

He grew up before him like a tender shoot, and like a root out of dry ground.  He had no beauty or majesty to attract us to him, nothing in his appearance that we should desire him.

What Do You Make of Jesus?

I feel like I am often in the minority.  Somewhere around eighty percent of Americans have bought a lottery ticket, but I never have.  According to Consumer’s Research magazine, lotteries have the worst odds of any form of legalized gambling.  Only eight out of One Hundred million who play the lottery ever win a million dollars.  The odds of hitting the jackpot in California is one in fourteen million.  What is worse, if you were to win, a million dollars, the IRS takes twenty percent off the top.  After state and local governments take their part, you are only left with $560,000.  It gets worse.  The state pays only the first $50,000 in cash and then pays the rest over twenty years, saving itself $100,000.  In the end, the one-million-dollar prize is only worth about $468,000.  It doesn’t always go well for lottery winners either. In 1985, Donna Sobb won $100 in the California lottery, which qualified her for a 2 million-dollar jackpot.  But when her picture showed up in the local newspaper, a police officer recognized Sobb and she was arrested on an eight-month-old shoplifting warrant.  In 1986, the California lottery winner Terry Garret was arrested only months after winning one-million dollars.  He was caught selling cocaine out of the sports car he bought with the winnings.

The other day I was told in a conversation that my view of Christianity was fine for me but not hers in such a way that it seemed this person could not stomach it like a vegetarian looking at my hamburger or a MAC owner complaining having to put up with my PC.  What must be realized is that this person has the majority view of most people, at least here in California.  Many no longer take Christ seriously…certainly not the totality of Him.  They respect much of what Christianity has accomplished but reject the Lordship of Christ and the need for salvation.  There is no comprehension of the supernatural power of the Holy Spirit, the Bible is devalued and disregarded and the goodness of a life lived in Christ is disdained.

The Bible predicted this low view of Jesus nearly three thousand years ago.  He grew up before him like a tender shoot, and like a root out of dry ground.  He had no beauty or majesty to attract us to him, nothing in his appearance that we should desire him. (Isaiah 53:2 NIV) The root coming out of dry ground is worthless; has no future, no hope in it.  Jesus, the Bible said, would not be taken seriously, have no intrinsic value, nothing to draw people to Him. The miracles, the teaching, and most importantly the Cross would go unnoticed and disregarded.  The Bible admits that those who should have been most likely to embrace Jesus, the crowds of Jerusalem, screamed for His crucifixion.    The Pharisees and Sadducees and other religious leaders of His time tried to poke holes in His logic.  The Roman soldiers who took charge of Him when the Jewish authorities wanted Him killed mocked Jesus and cruelly abused Him.  Even today, the major religions of our time have not taken seriously what is said of Him in the Bible.  The Mormons claim He was the brother of Lucifer and never God in flesh.  The Jehovah’s Witnesses don’t believe He was God and deny that He actually died on the Cross.  Hinduism, Iglesia Ni Christo and Islam all reject the premise that He is God and the only source of Eternal Life.  Jesus is not “good enough” to most of the people of this world and we cannot count on this turning around.

So, what should we do about the reaction of the world to Jesus Christ?  How should you respond to a great crowd of skeptics who work with you, go to school with you, go to the same parties, are at family gatherings you attend and work on your hair?  Make it clear that each person’s sins are monstrous and must be forgiven, that Jesus Christ is the only Savior of the world and the one source of eternal life, that God can transform anyone into a new Creation who has the Spirit of the Lord living within, that every person must be born-again and given a new life through Jesus Christ.  What benefit is there to saying these kinds of things If the people hearing it have no respect for Jesus and don’t really believe in Him?  Consider the Scripture’s take on what is possible when God gets involved in a person’s life.

In Luke 13: 18 is a most provocative and critical statement made by Jesus.  He said that the Kingdom of God is like a tiny mustard seed.  Then Jesus asked, "What is the kingdom of God like? What shall I compare it to?  It is like a mustard seed, which a man took and planted in his garden. It grew and became a tree, and the birds of the air perched in its branches." (Luke 13:18-19 NIV) A mustard seed is the most insignificant and inadequate little package of life you will ever encounter.  It holds absolutely no promise when you gaze upon it yet the most wondrous and glorious of flowering beacons of splendor rise up out of it.  You may tell a completely disinterested and self-satisfied soul that she needs Jesus to put her life together and it could seem like a waste of time and effort on your part, but it won’t be.  Immediately, God will plant a little bity seed of doubt in that heart.  A slight, imperceptible crack in the self confidence of that person will develop.  No one may see it.  No human eye will spot it but the doubt will begin to take root that everything is “fine with me”.  “It is not well with my soul” will begin to develop.

It is this planted Gospel mustard seed that will trigger a chain of events that can be devastating for the soul clinging to the lie that salvation is not needed and sin inconsequential.  God will bring circumstances that make unbelief illogical and untenable.   Questions will arise about eternity and life after death and relationships and purpose and direction.  Christ will become the elephant in the room; always lurking in the mind but avoided like the plague.  Something will happen though that will force a decision about Jesus; turn to Him for help or reject Him and hide from salvation.  It will be a great battle in the soul, a spiritual crisis of epic proportions.  What will come of it, we cannot say, but this will be true.  Jesus will be faced and given serious thought.  If He is received as Savior, all of Heaven’s power will come and join those souls and what seemed so meaningless and small will become the greatest force of good found anywhere in the universe.  When Christ becomes a part of them and He begins to transform them into mighty children of God, the amazement they will have as they look back on what they once were and how beautiful their lives are now with Jesus, they will wonder how they ever thought they could get along without Him.  If someone would try to convince them once they have Christ that salvation is unnecessary and the putting away of sins inconsequential, they would shake their heads and have this one response, “Seriously?”

A Whole New You

How dead is dead to God?  How much of your life can you still hold and make it through baptism into death?  You must completely die if you are to be of use to Him or true to your new self.  The end game of your Savior is for you to be buried and your hopes and aspirations die with you that the Lord Jesus Christ might raise you from the dead and make you good for God and perfect for salvation.  It is the buried seed that springs to life and bears much fruit.  Don't look upon your circumstances as a way for you to straighten yourself up and get things together.  Look at them as the power of God to kill off your old self and make you completely new in Him.  Our hope is not to survive and chase our dreams.  It is to be resurrected with the life of Christ fully alive in us so that the work of God might be manifested in all we do!  The freedom we have as believers is not a license to be some creature other than who we are in Christ.  Imagine a rose bush flaunting its freedom living as a blueberry or a gardenia behaving like a poison oak.  Turtles don’t work at being cheetahs and pigeons never behave like vultures.  Those who have Christ in them are new creations that are nothing like they were before they were born again.  There is a difference of kind between a Christian comedian and an unbelieving comedian.  A Christian physicist is not the same species as a non-Christian physicist and born-again teachers have a different “DNA” than do those still dead in their sins.  God will not be stopped in this process of raising you up in Christ.  He will not allow the diminishing of your soul as His new creation.  The world may look at you as nothing more than a rewrapped version of your old self but the world cannot see into your heart and discover the complete transformation of your being into one who is now joined with Christ and thoroughly remade into someone new.   Be done with the fantasy that nothing changed when God made you one with Christ.  A magical transformation has occurred and you will never be the same again.

We were therefore buried with him through baptism into death…  Romans 6:4 NIV

Good

Luke 18:19 NIV

"Why do you call me good?" Jesus answered. "No one is good — except God alone.”

What Is Really Good?

Can I be blamed for thinking that California is one of the best places on Earth to live?  Of course there is much that is wrong with the state but nearly all of its problems can be pinned on the values and actions of those who live there.  There is something to be said though of a region that has both Yosemite and Muir Woods, the beaches of San Diego and the San Francisco Bay.  California certainly isn’t perfect but there are some aspects of it that approach perfection.  I was driving with a friend through Mississippi and he introduced me to the woods there, pointing out how lovely the forests were.  It was about like when I went with a classmate to visit his family living in Southwest Missouri and he commented on the beauty of the Ozark Mountains.  Now I am not one to denigrate another person’s “pride and joy”  but I had difficulty complimenting the skinny pine trees of Mississippi after hiking through redwood groves in the Sierra Nevada Mountains.  And I must say that there are mountains and then there are MOUNTAINS.  Who am I to tell someone what to like and not like.  Perhaps New York pizza really is better than Chicago style and Japanese cars are better than Russian ones.  Yet am I correct in telling you that you would be happier living in the San Francisco Bay Area than you would be  staying in Amsterdam or Beijing, or Branson, Missouri?  We have a right to our opinions…and every one of us has them!

Goodness has the feeling of being just another aspect of opinion.  If you say you’re good, does that mean you are?  Serial killers and pedophiles and vandals who tag sidewalks may say they are good and really believe they are but is it true?  Probably even Stalin’s mom saw something good in him and Hitler was respected and honored by quite a few people.  It is funny though how easy it is for us to see the good in ourselves and not see it in others.  We use a sort of sliding scale when we evaluate people…whether it is ourselves or others.  Part of the reason we can see good in “bad” people is that there still is in each of us the hint of the good God put in us when he made us.  It may not be developed goodness or disciplined goodness we see, it might only be strand of what was left in us when the Lord put us together but it is there and we fool ourselves into thinking that is who we are rather than the hint of the good of God Himself. 

The account of James and John thinking they were good because they wanted fire to come down from heaven and burn up a poor Samaritan village because the people had the audacity to not want to pay to feed and house Jesus and His disciples is too true to human nature ever to have been fabricated.  As the time approached for him to be taken up to heaven, Jesus resolutely set out for Jerusalem.  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?"   But Jesus turned and rebuked them,  and they went to another village. (Luke 9:51-55 NIV)  I am sure, and probably you are too, that James and John thought they meant well, thought their hearts were in the right place but clearly Jesus saw things differently.  It was not good that fueled their anger at the Samaritans although if you had asked them before Jesus rebuked them, they probably would have seen themselves as good people.  You and I can’t judge them.  We might just as well have said exactly what James and John did if we were there.  This though is the problem with the strand of good we all have and make much of.  All too many of us think we are so good that we don’t need God…don’t need Him to significantly change us, don’t need Him to remake us.

I can’t imagine Jesus was very happy with one of the discussions the disciples had when He was gone.  If it were not for the fact that it was so very telling of the human condition, we might get a good laugh at it.  Also a dispute arose among them as to which of them was considered to be greatest.  Jesus said to them, "The kings of the Gentiles lord it over them; and those who exercise authority over them call themselves Benefactors.  But you are not to be like that. Instead, the greatest among you should be like the youngest, and the one who rules like the one who serves. (Luke 22:24-26 NIV)  Now if we just think a bit about this whole argument, there is a critical observation we must make.  At no point do the disciples consider what part God must play in their lives for them to be good!  It is all about them and their abilities, their morality, their skills, their religion.  God is not even needed.  Did they have to be saved?  Was there any hint in them that salvation was required?  It is fascinating, this strange reluctance to see ourselves, to really look at who we are without God.  We have that strand of good in us to keep us content but the truth of who we are eventually hits us.  We need a Savior.

Consider the sad case of Joseph and his brothers.  Joseph’s brothers were fed up with Joseph.  They had enough of Joseph being the favorite of their father, enough of his proud strutting about with his fancy coat and enough of the dreams he claimed to have had that according to Joseph foretold that they all, even their mothers and father would bow before Joseph one day as if he were some sort of king.  The boys decided to fix Joseph and with their dad not around, sold him into slavery.  So when Joseph came to his brothers, they stripped him of his robe — the richly ornamented robe he was wearing — and they took him and threw him into the cistern. Now the cistern was empty; there was no water in it.  As they sat down to eat their meal, they looked up and saw a caravan of Ishmaelites coming from Gilead. Their camels were loaded with spices, balm and myrrh, and they were on their way to take them down to Egypt.  Judah said to his brothers, "What will we gain if we kill our brother and cover up his blood?  Come, let's sell him to the Ishmaelites and not lay our hands on him; after all, he is our brother, our own flesh and blood." His brothers agreed.  So when the Midianite merchants came by, his brothers pulled Joseph up out of the cistern and sold him for twenty shekels of silver to the Ishmaelites, who took him to Egypt. (Genesis 37:23-28 NIV)

Evil like that is tough to comprehend.  How could anyone do such a thing and yet it was done.  Each one of those brothers thought he was a better person than Joseph.  Each believed Joseph was arrogant, selfish and self-righteous.  You don’t sell your brother into slavery if you haven’t decided he is pretty bad.  Here is the irony of this.  Each brother felt like he was good, a decent soul because that strand of good was in him, and yet…At least two of them became murderers, one slept with his father’s common-law wife and one sought out prostitutes after his wife died.  We don’t know about the rest…they were at least bad enough to sell their own brother into slavery.  Here is what we see in all of us.  Each brother thought he was the good one…at least better than his brother was and each brother thought his brother was worse than he was, more evil and needing to be fixed.

There is a passage in Isaiah that does not receive the attention it deserves.  It has a profound message describing what God is going to do with us.  He will save us, that is true…or we should say He does save us.  The prophecy was made eight hundred years before Jesus brought us our salvation though and it says something quite important about what that salvation will do for us.  A voice of one calling: "In the desert prepare the way for the Lord; make straight in the wilderness a highway for our God.  Every valley shall be raised up, every mountain and hill made low; the rough ground shall become level, the rugged places a plain.  And the glory of the Lord will be revealed, and all mankind together will see it.  For the mouth of the Lord has spoken." (Isaiah 40:3-5 NIV)  You and I are that desert.  You are the one God will Himself make right so that you are a fit place for Him to live.  The good you think is good will be made perfect.  No strand of self-righteousness will be left to it for God Himself in Christ will make it truly good.  The evil in you will be leveled, and torn out and the glory of the LORD will be revealed in you.  Everyone will see it…that you are perfect, lovely in every way.  God will walk in you and make His home in you and nothing, not the worst of your sins, not the ugliest of evil that could ever be found in you will be there anymore.  There will be no corrupted goodness, no pretend morality or broken love or fractured peace.  Only goodness, real goodness that perfect God can make of you.  He has spoken.  And once again God will say of you.  “You are very good.”

Time Out

Revelation 12:14 NIV

The woman was given the two wings of a great eagle, so that she might fly to the place prepared for her in the desert, where she would be taken care of for a time, times and half a time, out of the serpent's reach.

Have You Been Sent To Time Out?

When I first arrived at the college where I would earn my degree, I came by plane, was picked up at the local airport by a college representative and dropped off at the dormitory where my room was on the second floor.  Carrying my two suitcases up the stairs, I was all alone.  I did not meet anyone in the lobby.  No one was in the hallway on the first floor; no one was in the hallway on the second floor.  I came to my room, which was empty except for two beds, two dressers, a sink and a phone on the wall and I tossed my suitcase on the floor and began to unpack it.  My roommate would not be arriving for two days.  I pulled the blanket and sheets out from my suitcase, made the bed and lay down on top of the covers, wondering what it would be like to go to school here.  Outside my window, I heard laughter and male and female voices chattering.  It sounded like there was a party going on below my room and I wasn’t invited.  I cannot say what is more lonesome.  Being alone in a great circle of emptiness or being by yourself when you can hear the crowds having fun without you.    That night, without a single soul to keep me company, two thousand miles away from my family, my church and my friends, I felt like I had been sent to time out.

“Time out” as an expression has shifted in meaning over the years.  It used to mean “taking a break”.  In basketball or football it is the term used for regrouping and talking about what to do next as a team.  It also has been the idiom for going off and having fun; taking in a movie, hanging out with friends, going dancing, eating at a restaurant.  The field of psychology embraced the term as a descriptor for a mild punishment given to a youngster who is disruptive or disobedient.  If a parent sends a child to time out, it means the child is ordered to go sit alone for a certain period of time in a boring place and “learn a lesson” about how to act properly.  Not many kids like being sent to time out and rarely do we adults either.  “Jail time” is the grown-up version of it.  A boring, inconsequential job is too.  Many of us feel like from time to time we have been sent to time out and it generally isn’t something we like.

The Bible is filled with examples of its most famous people stuck in time out.  Imagine what it must have been like for Joseph, the son of Jacob to wind up in prison for a crime he didn’t commit and languish there for twelve years.   What about Sarah, the wife of Abraham and mother of Isaac who was left behind in camp at the foot of Mt. Moriah as her husband took her only child off to make a sacrifice to God somewhere out in the mountains.  She had to have noticed the taunt and grim expression on Abraham’s face as he shuffled away and wondered what was about to take place and why she couldn’t go with them.  Thomas, the apostle, suffered a sort of time out when for seven days he lived with the disappointment of being the only one of the Disciples not to see Jesus alive after He had been crucified. How about Moses and his forty years of time out after he had to flee Egypt and live in Midian?  Was it not a time out for Jacob, the father of the Jewish nation when he had to run away from his brother and live in near slavery, serving his uncle Laban as a shepherd?  How about the time out Mary, the mother of Jesus, experienced when she left her home in Nazareth to go stay with her cousin Elizabeth because she was pregnant and not married?  David wandered about in the desert wilderness of Israel almost ten years trying to avoid capture because the crazy king Saul wanted him dead.  Was that not a time out?

We almost always assume that when we are in time out, it is something terrible or at least frustrating.  Our time outs keep us from what we like doing, make us wait for something we want, take us away from exciting activities others get to enjoy.  When God engineers our time out, we don’t know what to make of it.  Is He cruel?  Am I out of favor with Him?  Have I lost my best and most productive years?  Am I wasting my life?  Sometimes and we must be open to seeing this is so, we are absolutely off base when it comes to understanding our circumstances. 

In 1889, a publication called The Literary Digest had this take on the automobile.  “The ordinary ‘horseless carriage’ is at present a luxury for the wealthy; and although its price will probably fall in the future, it will never, of course come into as common use as the bicycle.”  Dr. Alfred Vlepeau, speaking for the medical community in 1839 wrote, “The abolishment of pain in surgery is a chimera.  It is absurd to go on seeking it today.  Knife and pain are two words in surgery that must forever be associated in the consciousness of the patient.  To this compulsory combination we shall have to adjust ourselves.”  It was only seven years later that anesthesia was introduced into the medical world.  One more example to make this point!  The “Father of Radio”, Lee De Forest, in 1926 insisted, “While theoretically and technically television will be feasible, commercially and financially I consider it an impossibility, a development of which we need waste little time dreaming.”

Even the brightest and most highly educated among us can be and have been thoroughly wrong.  You too are wrong if you think God is wasting your time because you are in time out.  God cemented Mary’s faith in Him and His plan for bringing the Savior into the world while He wasted her time at Elizabeth’s house.  David developed a theology of what a good and faithful king should be when God wasted his time in the desert.  Jacob learned how painful it is to be deceived and the value of integrity when God wasted his time at his uncle’s house.  Moses learned patience and confidence in God when God wasted his time in Midian.  Sarah learned hope and trust in God’s goodness when God wasted her time as she waited for her husband and son to return.  Joseph learned mercy and forgiveness when God wasted his time in the Egyptian prison.

We are mistaken if we think this promise of God’s is just about the future!  It is about now, today.  For I know the plans I have for you," declares the Lord, "plans to prosper you and not to harm you, plans to give you hope and a future. (Jeremiah 29:11 NIV) Our Lord knows what He is doing with you at this moment, with the time He is wasting now.  You may not have any idea what that plan is and He may not tell you but Christ has thought this through and He has every detail, every moment that seems so wasted plotted out so that you will be exactly the sort of person He wants you to be when He gets this done.  Why did Jesus waste so much time being an infant, and then a child, a teen and a young adult?  Why not just be settled on earth as a man fully grown, get those disciples and in only three years save the world?  It is because God had a plan and for Jesus to save the world, He had to be a human being in every way…and that meant wasting His time being born, growing up and dealing with all the frustrations and pleasures of being an actual human being.

God has your life thought through in His mind and He has you right where you need to be so everything He wants to make of you can and will be accomplished. The Mona Lisa took time.  The Sistine Chapel took time.  The Golden Gate Bridge took time.  And you also take time to finish or to put it more precisely, to perfect.

The Breakthrough

Micah 2:13 NIV

One who breaks open the way will go up before them;

they will break through the gate and go out.

Their king will pass through before them,

the Lord at their head."

  

Are You Stuck In A Rut?

Years ago, not long after we moved to California, Mary Jo and I decided to take a trip back to see her family in New Orleans.   The road trip is forty hours of driving plus whatever stops you might take along the way.  We had two foster children with us and it felt like a great adventure for us all.  Our car was an old Chevy Malibu that the kids in the church called a “hooptie”.  The cloth lining to the roof was hanging down because the oldest boy had poked at it and stabbed it with a pencil.  Carved on the outside of the door he had put his name.  The Malibu had a rebuilt engine and new tires but the air conditioner was shot and it had nearly two hundred thousand miles on it.  We thought our hooptie could make it all the way and back but we weren’t sure and so with a bit of trepidation we took off down the highway.  I always drove whenever we went anywhere together; I guess I had learned that from my dad who never let my mom drive when the two of them went places together.  Our plan was to drive all night after the first day of driving and it had worked until it started raining buckets and we could barely see the road in front of us.  Not only that I got the flu and a fever began to rage through my body.  A few hours later my back went out and I could not stand when we stopped to get gas.  Mary Jo tried to take over the driving but it was clear she was too tired to go any further and so we gave up the fight and checked into a hotel.

There are times when life gets too big for us to handle.  We try our best to keep going but we have nothing left in the tank.  Maybe you have never hit that low spot when things seemed hopeless; when it felt like if you did not get some help you might fall apart.  The world is filled with people who have, who face trials and difficulties that are too big for them, too painful and too long lasting to manage on their own.  You certainly aren’t alone if what is before you is daunting, maybe even frightening.  Some have cancer and haven’t told anyone.  Others have a son who won’t try to find a job or who drinks too much.  You might know someone who has a mother with Alzheimer’s or a daughter battling depression a grandchild who is autistic or a husband who no longer can work.  The bright sunshine of the morning may cheer the hearts of many as they climb out of bed but not all of us.  You might be one who just wishes you could pull the covers over your face and stay in bed for the day…or the week…or the month.

The Bible has a number of case studies of those who came to the end of the rope.  One in particular brought most of his difficulties on himself.  Those of course are the worst kind, the ones that have years of guilt and regret attached to them.  Famous for his other name, Israel, Jacob might be described as a momma’s boy by some.  He had somehow got his twin brother Esau to trade his family right as the firstborn for a bowl of his brother’s lentil soup.  It must have been pretty good or Esau was unfathomably hungry to let go of such an important privilege but he did.  The problem with a birthright is that it doesn’t do much for you until your parents die.  It might mean you don’t have to do the dishes as often or clean out the latrine but it is a pretty inconsequential honor for the majority of your life.  Jacob had it but what was he to do with it?

His mother had an idea.  When her husband Isaac announced that he was going to bestow a special blessing on Esau which would be binding and supernaturally inspired.  Jacob tricked his blind father into thinking he was Esau and dad unwittingly gave the blessing to Jacob instead of his favorite son Esau.  Imagine what sort of fireworks this generated.  Isaac’s wife Rebekah had put Jacob up to the plan.  Isaac could not have been very pleased by that.  Esau became enraged and promised to kill his brother Jacob after his father died.  One can only guess how Isaac felt about Jacob.  The family became a boiling cauldron of fury, disgust, jealousy, distrust and fear.  Out of it jumped Jacob when he realized he had no future there.  His mom told him he needed to leave; he needed to get as far away from his brother and his steaming hatred as he could.  “Move north and move in with your uncle and see if there is someone in the family you can marry”, he was told.  He was after all forty years old.  It was time to stop being a momma’s boy and make a life for himself. 

Not all changes of course are depressing.  Some are exhilarating.  This one could not have been.  It was for Jacob the end of his world.  He had to hike over four hundred miles with the fear of his brother’s wrath nipping at his heels.  The safety of his home, the help of his servants, the doting of his mom…not to mention the wealth his family enjoyed now in his rear view mirror as he trudged along.  What a forlorn sight he must have been.  Perhaps there were tears trickling down his cheeks as he thought gloomily of the mistakes he had made, the fool he had become.  He had hiked somewhere around fifty miles when Jacob came to the outskirts of a village closed for the night.  It was out beneath the open sky housing the stars of the universe that Jacob’s life took a new turn.

When he reached a certain place, he stopped for the night because the sun had set. Taking one of the stones there, he put it under his head and lay down to sleep.  He had a dream in which he saw a stairway resting on the earth, with its top reaching to heaven, and the angels of God were ascending and descending on it.  There above it stood the Lord, and he said: "I am the Lord, the God of your father Abraham and the God of Isaac.  I will give you and your descendants the land on which you are lying.  Your descendants will be like the dust of the earth, and you will spread out to the west and to the east, to the north and to the south.  All peoples on earth will be blessed through you and your offspring.  I am with you and will watch over you wherever you go, and I will bring you back to this land. I will not leave you until I have done what I have promised you." (Genesis 28:11-15 NIV)

If you come to grips with the fact that God is behind every event of your life and that nothing happens to you that He is not turning into your benefit, you can take great comfort in what happened to Jacob.  God let his life explode so that something completely new could be made out of him.  It is clear that was what He was doing with Jacob…blowing up everything that made Jacob who he was and remaking him.  There is such mercy and generosity in God’s words here.  “I am with you”.  “I will watch over you.”  “I will give you…”  “Your descendants will be…”  “All peoples on earth will be blessed through you and your offspring.”  God doesn’t blow up your life to wreck you.  He does it so that something lovely and good can come out of it that wasn’t possible before He did so.  When you are content and pleased with yourself and comfortable it is hard to do anything with you.  You become disengaged from God, you lose your urgency to hear from Him, lack motivation to give Him room to work His way through you and often are resistant to do what He commands.  That is what it is like to have the nature of Adam.  We all are like that.  You aren’t alone in this.

Would Jacob have been able to believe it was really God coming to him in his dream if he was living comfortably at home, pleased with himself in his successful plundering of his brother’s fortune and standing?  It is hard to say but we do know that he was this night, destitute, on the run, shattered.  He was eager to have God come to him and comfort him.  Finally, Jacob was ready for the Lord to truly be a part of His li…the most important part.  It is interesting, the choice of words used to describe how Jacob was the next day.  Certain that God was with him and that the Lord “had his back”, Jacob started off with a new way of seeing this adventure he was entering.  Then Jacob continued on his journey and came to the land of the eastern peoples. (Genesis 29:1 NIV)  Literally the Hebrew of the verse reads, “Then Jacob lifted up his feet…”  There is a joyfulness in this description.  We would use the expression, “He had a bounce to his step.”  For the first time in days, maybe even weeks or months or even years, Jacob was ready to trust God with his life and not make a mess of things.

God almost always blows up things for us before He takes hold of us and makes us new.  It was not going to be easy for Jacob.  He would work like a slave for fourteen years just to get his wife.  He would be cheated and humiliated by his father-in-law and have to bear the blazing sun and the miserable nights sleeping on the ground out in pasture lands just to keep his sheep safe but in it all, he became a man of God with great strength and faith.  It is so frequent that it is almost an axiom of life that before God can build His life in you and give you peace and joy and freedom from lust and worry, He must break you apart and take away every crutch you have propping up your life.   But then, slowly yet surely you will become the sort of person you hoped you would be when you realized you needed Christ to fulfill you.

The Bible is filled with case studies of those who first had to be wrecked before they could be bright stars in God’s universe:  Daniel, Moses, Job, Peter, James, Paul.  Jesus might not come to you in a dream or with a bright light or a great voice but He will come to you.  You will have to decide if you trust Him to remake you, to start over with you and take all the damage to your personality brought on by sin out of you and make you free to be loving and full of hope and peace.  It takes faith to believe that every experience you face has God in it and that each person who aggravates you is used by the Lord to make you good and holy but through Christ you can have that faith and be ready to be transformed by your Savior in every part of your day.  Take a deep breath and thank God He cares enough for you to save you from you sin and make you completely new.

A Strange Revelation

John 4: 26 NIV

 Then Jesus declared, "I who speak to you am he.”

Are You Ready For A Change?

There is in each of us a strong desire to be right.  We want to be the one with the correct answer…to know how it really is when others are just guessing.  Yet how can we be right when we don’t have an answer, when we just have questions?  When I went away to college, I did not know what I was doing.  I had no idea what to expect, what I would gain from going to college, what sort of career I would have when I finished.  If someone asked me, “What do you plan on doing after you graduate”, I had no idea.  I did not go to a small college to get something out of it or to accomplish something; I went because I knew God was sending me there.  Because I had never before stepped foot on the campus or even been to the state where it was located, I had nothing on which to base my opinion of how it would go or even should go.  I had no answers to give to those who wondered what I thought the future held for me.  You might say that I was “clueless”.  Now that I am an old man and have lots of experience to inform my thinking, I still don’t know what to expect nor do I know why I am here.  I am just as “clueless” as I was back then.  All I have to offer anyone about the state of my affairs is that God makes the plans for my life just as He did when I went away to college.

Perhaps you are wondering what God is doing with you.  You may even question His wisdom, the benefit of letting Him be in charge.  It could be that you do not even really believe that He has anything much to do with you and how things go in your life.  Many think of God as an absent father, a dad who is never there for them.  That might be you.  Or you may have put your trust in Him to take care of your big issues but the small ones might be bothering you.  What should you do about dinner?  How can you get your kids to finish their homework?  What should you do about your retirement funds? Can your career get upgraded?  Is there hope for a happy marriage?  Perhaps those sorts of issues you feel like you must solve on your own if anything is to be done.

When Jesus famously chatted with the Samaritan woman looking for water at the village well where Jesus sat and rested; a fascinating conversation ensued.  This lady who had been married and divorced five times and was living with someone new was not exactly a prime candidate for deep theological discussions.  Yet the things that were said there were some of the most important teachings on God and worship found anywhere in the Gospels.  The Jews, Jesus said, had an edge on the Samaritans when it came to worship and living with God. You Samaritans worship what you do not know; we worship what we do know, for salvation is from the Jews.  Yet a time is coming and has now come when the true worshipers will worship the Father in spirit and truth, for they are the kind of worshipers the Father seeks. (John 4:22-23 NIV)

An important choice of words is used by Jesus that the NIV version captures.  The Samaritans worship “what” they don’t know rather than “who”.  The Jews worship also “what” they know rather than “who” they know.  Worship for both groups was impersonal and not interactive.  It had nothing to do with the actual person God.  It was like a young man falling in love with the idea of a particular woman rather than a woman herself.  We sometimes criticize those who spend lots of time playing on line games with others because they are not hanging out with actual people.  Yet the truth is that they are talking with and listening to real people.  The Jews and Samaritans had quit trying to worship God Himself and had given themselves over to the forms of worship instead.  There no longer was an interaction between two personalities; it was just thousands of ones acting within themselves hoping that God or “luck” would be in their favor if they performed all the right rituals.  It was worship grounded in superstition rather than relationship.  Jesus came to change that.

Jesus insists that that by coming, He established a link between God and all people.  By Spirit you connect with God.  As real as the wind that blows and the breath that passes through the lungs, the Spirit creates the pathway through which you build your life with God.  How many people give up on God because they are not familiar with the way He connects with people!  It seems surreal, even not real like a fairy tale or a Nordic myth when someone who has never met God by Spirit hears of it.  The Samaritan woman expresses this same skeptical hope when she returns to town and tells the villagers, “Come, see a man who told me everything I ever did. Could this be the Christ?" (John 4: 29 NIV)  The Greek text which was the original language used to transcribe this conversation makes it clear that the woman saw little likelihood that it would be so, that the man she met at the well actually was the long awaited Messiah but she hoped He was.  Many, even today hope God exists and that He cares about them, maybe even loves them, but they don’t really think it could be so.  Like this unnamed woman, the promise of a loving and healing and almighty God who can raise them from the dead seems too good to be true yet they want it to be more than a fable.

Now what happened next is one of the great miracles recorded in the Bible.  It may not seem like much to many who read of it but it really was astounding what took place.  They came out of the town and made their way toward him….Many of the Samaritans from that town believed in him because of the woman’s testimony, “He told me everything I ever did.”  So when the Samaritans came to him, they urged him to stay with them, and he stayed two days.  And because of his words many more became believers.  (John 4: 30, 39-41 NIV) How could a woman, who had been divorced five times, who was living with a man not her husband, who did not go to the well to get water at the time when the other women went and socialized, have pulled a crowd together from her own home town and led them out to meet with Jesus, a hated Jew?

If you just give a little thought to human personality and how people are, it was unreasonable for this crowd of villagers to make their way out to Jesus just at the inspiration of their immoral neighbor.  Why would any of them have interest in a despised Jew?  Yet they did.  The text in the Greek tells us that the people left the town but then kept coming and coming to Jesus in a continual coming.  Some force, some supernatural force pulled them out of their huts and away from their fields and over to where a man they should have hated greeted them.  The woman was in such a hurry to tell her neighbors about Jesus that she completely forgot her water jar and the water she came to get.  She rushed off in a flurry of amazement and wonder.  It is not unusual for someone to make us lose track of time and space being around that person.  A celebrity, someone with great creativity or wit or beauty can do it to us.  Yet the Bible tells us that there was nothing about Jesus that made Him attractive…just the force of his life with the Father.  And that force came to bear on the woman looking for water and the people of the town who came to see Him at her invitation.

There is a strangely wonderful shift in the text that must be noted.  This woman, who was a Samaritan woman and a many times married woman and even an immoral woman was relabeled as the account concluded.   Jesus told the disciples that the fields which He probably pointed to nearby were ready to be harvested.   Do you not say, 'Four months more and then the harvest'? I tell you, open your eyes and look at the fields! They are ripe for harvest.  Even now the reaper draws his wages, even now he harvests the crop for eternal life, so that the sower and the reaper may be glad together.  (John 4:35-36 NIV) He was not talking about corn or wheat or barley though.  He was speaking of the need for all the people around Him to have eternal life.  “Look at them”, He was saying.  “They all need a Savior.  You are the ones I want to welcome them into Salvation.”  Yet it is none of the disciples who are used by God to pull the crowd there in the Samaritan village to eternal life.  It was the most unexpected of all people to be the means by which this little town became a pocket of salvation, a well of eternal life.  Pay careful attention to verse 39.  Many of the Samaritans from that town believed in him because of the woman's testimony, "He told me everything I ever did." (John 4:39 NIV)

We call her the “Samaritan woman”.  Some label her the “sinful woman”.  Many speak of her as the “woman at the well”.  But here as the account comes toward a conclusion, she is literally termed “the witnessing woman”.  That is a strange revelation.  Someone so off base, so spiritually disoriented, so dysfunctional was named by God, “the witnessing woman”.  How can this have been so?  What force or motivation turned her life around so dramatically that she became someone completely new, someone unknown before meeting Jesus?  It is not a force nor a motivation but rather a person.  When God as Spirit becomes a part of you and works His way through you, a transformation occurs which changes who you are and what you do.  The woman did not understand really who Jesus was and she could not explain what to make of Him but she did know that everyone in her town needed to come find out for themselves and so with God working in her, she gave the rallying cry to go to the well and meet Jesus.  Once God got a hold of her and He worked in her Spirit to spirit, she became someone new to God.  She was the “witnessing woman”.

Are you ready for God’s Spirit to transform you?  What do you think He might make of you?  Is there a name God could give you that would be surprising?  The witnessing woman did not make something of herself or try to rehabilitate her lifestyle.  She simply spent time with Jesus and the Spirit of God worked within her to take what was thoroughly broken and dysfunctional and remake her into someone you might say was a superstar in God’s Kingdom.  She had no great message to offer.  She certainly was not straight theologically.  Her reputation in town was not fixed.  What she did have which made all the difference in the world was time spent with Jesus!  In those brief moments alone with Him, the Spirit of God began to rework her mind so that she got to make something of the life she had been given.  I wonder what the witnessing woman would say now, if you asked her, “Was it worth it spending time with Jesus?”  What could be the benefit to you if you gave Jesus some time alone with Him?  What might happen to you?

Deep Cleansing

1 Thessalonians 5:23 NIV

 May God himself, the God of peace, sanctify you through and through. May your whole spirit, soul and body be kept blameless at the coming of our Lord Jesus Christ.

How Clean Do You Want To Be?

When I was in high school I had a pretty severe case of acne.  I used to lay out in the sun for hours trying to dry out my back and face and sometimes was in serious pain from sunburn.  My mom brought me to a dermatologist and I got a prescription for a topical skin lotion as well as pills that were supposed to reduce the oiliness of my skin.  I must say it did work.  If you look at my senior picture, you can see the effect it had on me.  It caused my face to tan and for two or three weeks I had dark brown skin and my pimples faded.  But then, like something from a fairy tale, my skin started peeling, small sections coming off at a time so that part of my face was like the girl from Ipanema and the rest like the Riddler.  Then I was back to my normal blotchy complexion until the combination of the sun and my medication began to interact again.  The pills used to turn my skin so dry that my hands inside the knuckles would split open and I had to put band aids around my fingers to be able to play basketball.  I endured this because  I was desperate to get rid of my acne.  What I needed was some sort of deep cleaning treatment that would clear my pores but I never found anyone who could do that for me.

Have you thought about the possibility that you might need a deep cleansing of your soul?  You may contend that you don’t need any radical work done in you.  Perhaps you just have a few issues that you could use fixing but nothing really critical, nothing very important.  If that is how you see things, then you are like most people who feel like they could use a little tweaking but nothing dramatic like psychological counseling or psychiatric care.  Perhaps there is a gnawing sense of inadequacy in you or a slight throbbing that something is not quite right.  At the risk of sounding melodramatic, most alcoholics never go to an AA meeting and how many commit suicide without ever attending a session with a counselor.  It is the natural tendency for nearly all of us to ignore what is wrong with us for as long as possible  and this may be true of you too.  Perhaps there is something of great value God could do in you, something necessary that you would one day be most grateful for Him to have done.   You would not be the first person to be thankful for God doing something new in you, that He brought changes to you that you did not realize you needed.  Consider the possibility that there is more to having Christ build His life in you than you expected.

Paul, inspired by the Holy Spirit wrote out a most enlightening prayer in 1 Thessalonians 5: 23.  May God himself, the God of peace, sanctify you through and through. May your whole spirit, soul and body be kept blameless at the coming of our Lord Jesus Christ. (NIV)  This prayer stretches across the centuries to you and it is just as valid now as it was in Thessalonica in 55 AD.  He is asking God to sanctify you through and through.  The Greek term translated “sanctify” is a tricky word to translate.  It could be rendered “make holy” which is perfectly fine except many misunderstand what the term holy means.  The second important term is one Greek word that is rendered here “through and through”.  It means to be completely or all the way or the whole of you made something.  A picture of this is a sponge that is so completely saturated that there is no room in it for anything else.  It is what you see in John 2 when Jesus tells the servants at the wedding to fill the water pots all the way to the top so that not another drop could be put in them or they would spill over on the ground.

There is built within the curse of sin in you and me a certain disdain for too much God in us.  It is as if there is a tolerance level fixed by the spiritual and even psychological damage done to us when sin entered our lives that makes it almost painful to have Christ get deeply involved in us.  We see this manifested in common activities.  There is only so much Bible we can read before we need something more entertaining.  There is only so much Christian music we can play before it gets old, only so much preaching we can hear before we are bored, only so far we can go with forgiveness or kindness or generosity or goodness or praying before we grow weary of it.  It is strange but we all seem to have a holiness fill line which if we go past it results in us growing uncomfortable with God and God activities.

There are parts of you, which you aren’t even aware exist, that are wrecked by sin.  Your spirit, which is who you are forever, is in need of a total transformation if you are going to be completely healthy and happy.  The Bible speaks of your spirit needing to be sanctified through and through.  Sanctified, at least when the Bible talks about it, means that God gets worked into every part of you.  You become saturated with Christ.  All of Christ’s personality traits, whether they are His courage, His peace, His loving kindness or His moral purity, become in sanctification your personality traits.  This is much different than trying hard to be like Jesus.  That is impossible anyway if you have nothing in you that Christ has in Him to live like He does!  Imagine a turtle trying to do calculus like a math professor or a walrus trying to make an apple pie like your grandmother.  It is impossible because these creatures have none of the mental tools necessary to undertake the effort.   Without Christ in you, it is impossible to copy His behaviors or imitate His way of dealing with life.

The problem we face is that we have so much damage to us that we are impossibly separated from real goodness and holiness on a consistent basis.  In spurts we are good or at peace or full of faith but without warning it all falls apart.  The ruin is in hidden places that are buried within us.  Just consider the strange case of Saul, king of Israel.  His best and most successful general drove him crazy…literally crazy.  Although David was crucial to Saul’s success and thoroughly loyal to him, Saul could not bear David’s popularity and tried a number of times to kill him. There was nothing logical about Saul’s jealousy.  It wasn’t David’s fault.  The root of Saul’s bitterness was all within his spirit somewhere.  It may have confused Saul and tormented him, this irrational hatred for David but it could not be denied.  Something was very wrong with Saul and he could not fix it.

The same could be said of David himself.  When he sent his servants to fetch Bathsheba so that he could sleep with her, it was irrational what he did.  There were plenty of beautiful single women that David could have had.  He had numerous lovely wives and concubines; so why did he need Bathsheba, who was married to one of his most loyal and courageous officers?  It isn’t like he did not know wrong when he saw it.  When Nathan the prophet confronted David about his sin of sleeping with Bathsheba and having her husband murdered, he did so by telling David a story about lust.  "There were two men in a certain town, one rich and the other poor.  The rich man had a very large number of sheep and cattle, but the poor man had nothing except one little ewe lamb he had bought. He raised it, and it grew up with him and his children. It shared his food, drank from his cup and even slept in his arms. It was like a daughter to him.  Now a traveler came to the rich man, but the rich man refrained from taking one of his own sheep or cattle to prepare a meal for the traveler who had come to him. Instead, he took the ewe lamb that belonged to the poor man and prepared it for the one who had come to him." (2 Samuel 12:1-4 NIV)

David’s reaction to hearing of this terrible act was appropriate rage.  David burned with anger against the man and said to Nathan, "As surely as the Lord lives, the man who did this deserves to die!  He must pay for that lamb four times over, because he did such a thing and had no pity." (2 Samuel 12:5-6 NIV)  Yet the evil David could see in another, he could not find in himself until that evil bore fruit.  This is a universal trait of sin wrecked humanity.  We easily see as Jesus put it, the splinter in the eye of someone else but do not realize there is a beam of wood in our own eye.  Why is that?  It is because the power of evil in us is hidden in deep places of our spirit.  It surprises us when the ugly ungodliness comes to the surface, confuses us and we react to it with the defense mechanism parents use when they hear about the evil acts of their children: denial and befuddlement.  “How could this happen?  She wouldn’t have done that?  She must have been provoked.”

The absurd pockets of evil in your spirit and in my spirit contradict what we think we are.  We get fooled by the initial positive results of becoming Christian into thinking that everything is right in us when it isn’t.  We need a complete reworking, or to put it another way, a deep cleansing of the spirit.  The Bible insists there is much wrong with us that only Christ can fix.  We must face this squarely if we want to be perfect.   This is the message we have heard from him and declare to you: God is light; in him there is no darkness at all.  If we claim to have fellowship with him yet walk in the darkness, we lie and do not live by the truth. (1 John 1:5-6 NIV)  The difference between the evil we have in us and the absolute goodness found in Christ is a great abyss…an uncrossable chasm.  Yet God Himself can get at those deep places of evil that sin has wrecked in us and cleanse them, or to be precise, purify them.  Consider the immensity of the promise found in1 John 1: 7.

But if we walk in the light, as he is in the light, we have fellowship with one another, and the blood of Jesus, his Son, purifies us from all sin. (1 John 1:7 NIV)  Examine this closely.  The tiny word “if” makes clear that we might not walk in the light.  This is not automatic; it is up to us to do.  Walk is a metaphor that means to live and the verse is saying it is possible for us to continually live in the light, to always do what we do with God in charge showing us the way.  We do not have to abandon God or go on our own, we can at every moment walk hand in hand with Him, guided by Him, enabled by Him to live like Christ lives.  There is a second part to the verse. As we walk in the light, the blood of Jesus purifies us continually from all sin.  The term translated “purifies” means to cleanse constantly, to rework every moment of every day.  It is the Greek word from which we get our English word “cauterize.   It is used to describe what happened when Jesus removed the leprosy from those He healed.  When we are in tune with God and giving Him authority over what and how we do things, a miracle occurs during these times.  The blood of Christ works out of us the damage sin has worked in us. 

If you just stay aligned with Jesus, just keep praying to Him as you go through the day and let Him lead you when you sense His guiding, the damage Sin has caused in your personality, your unconscious thinking and in the way you live your life will be removed and healed bit by bit.  There is no cure for certain broken and wrecked parts of you except what Jesus can do if you let Him get hold of you.  This week make a conscious effort to stay close to Jesus, to make Him the center of your concentration as often as possible…no, as often as you are willing to do so.