Crucified

You must settle in your mind how the Cross of Christ organizes the universe.  It is the power of God for salvation first to the Jews, then to everyone not Jewish.  This is never violated nor reduced to rhetoric.  The Cross of Christ is not a tool of propagandists to win over converts.  It is how we are taken out of the slavery of sin and made new creations.  All the world is bent by its will to redeem and the stars and the planets will be swept away by its power to remake them free of all Sin.  The Cross of Christ contains everything we need to know about life and death and eternity.  Whatever religion one may hold, it is all a barren tree if the Cross of Christ does not fill it through and through.  "Repent", John the Baptist proclaimed.  Why?  You cannot enter into the work of the Cross of Christ unless you repent.  "Believe" our Savior announced.  Why?  You do not have life unless you believe the work the Cross of Christ has done.   It is the stone over which the entire world stumbles and until we stand upon this great stone of life, we are crushed under the weight of our sins...we are wrecks that are wasting away from sin's wresting power.    In the Cross, our blood becomes mingled with our Lord's so that as we are transformed by the Crucified Son of Man, we have Him as a part of us.  There is no other name under heaven by which we may be saved but the Name of the One whose blood poured down from an old clumsy Cross.  Nothing matters but the salvation of our crucified Lord...all else falls apart under the weight of Sin.    A day like today is the one when the Savior of the World died; a day like today is one upon which He will return and take all those carried out of the slavery of this world and bring them into the Crucified Home.  The Cross is at the Center of the Gospel; it is The Good News!

The angel said to the women, "Do not be afraid, for I know that you are looking for Jesus, who was crucified.     Matthew 28:5 NIV

The Mind Fully Alive

The Mind Fully Aware

Joshua 1:8 NIV

Do not let this Book of the Law depart from your mouth; meditate on it day and night, so that you may be careful to do everything written in it. Then you will be prosperous and successful.

Are You Alert Right Now?

Several years ago my wife gave me a gift certificate for a massage at a local spa.  It is a spacious, clean, popular, legitimate spa with a good reputation so I was happy to go down and get my hour massage.  As I sat in the waiting room with several others, I rehearsed in my mind the determination to have a man give my massage.  After about ten minutes, I was ushered in through the walk-way and into the large central room where there were perhaps twenty cubicles and I was brought to one of them.  A young woman came in and gave me a towel and said that I was to undress and then place the towel over my waist area.  I asked her if a man was going to give me my massage and she said there weren’t any male masseuses available.  With that she left, giving me the opportunity to privately take off my clothes.  Now if this were some dimly lit room with a closed door and no one else around, I would have immediately gotten up and walked away but this was a public setting and a reputable spa.  I sat on the massage bed for what seemed like hours, trying to decide what I would do.  Was I going to take off my pants and underwear and let a young woman give me a massage with just a towel to cover me, would I leave on my pants and just take off my shirt, would I get up and walk away from the spa?  My conscience was working at full speed, evaluating this situation and trying its best to come to the right decision.  Should I as a Christian man and a pastor have a woman give me a full massage with only a towel covering me?

Is it possible that some of us spend too much time fussing over moral and ethical issues?  Are we sometimes overwhelmed by a super stimulated conscience?  When everyone else says something is fine to do and we don’t think it is fine to do it, do we go along with the crowd?  Do others make us feel guilty or are we alone responsible for any guilt we feel?  How much guilt should we let get hold of us?  Is guilt good for the soul or just a trouble maker?  Does your conscience ever crush you?

Sigmund Freud is universally given credit for dramatically developing and energizing the field of psychology.  It is easy to come up with a large list of his significant contributions…some would even speak of them as inventions.  He brought us the concept of carefully listening to patients and encouraging free association as they rambled on about whatever they wished.  He popularized the analysis of dreams, the concept of psycho-sexual forces within the personality, the importance of early childhood experiences and the oedipal complex.  However, by far his most critical and influential impact upon Western society and culture was his dismantling of conscience as a critical component of a healthy personality.  He coined a term, the super-ego, to discredit the conscience and render it ineffectual.  The super-ego was essentially what we call the conscience but over reaching.  He claimed that many if not most people suffer from too much guilt, silly, frivolous guilt that sickens us and makes us neurotic.  The enlarged conscience he treated like an enlarged thyroid or an enlarged heart, as something needing treatment.  Much of western culture became convinced that Freud was right, a functioning conscience was not good for people; we need to have less of a conscience, we don’t need its guilt and the bad feelings it produces.  Many in the Christian community agreed with Freud…even many pastors and so it became almost “anti-godish” to give the conscience credence or encourage feelings of guilt.  We are generally thought to be doing Christendom a disservice to incite guilt and support the functioning of the conscience.

Suppose however the conscience is more like a muscle that needs to be exercised and developed rather than a vestigial organ that sophisticated and healthy people let shrivel until it no longer functions.  Most of us have been raised to believe that what used to be called sin is actually just a minor mistake, a slip-up or maybe something to ignore.  We have given Freud the store so to speak and let him define God for us.  God (although he actually had no theology of god) thinks it is ok if you don’t get things right, struggle with your decisions, don’t live up to other’s expectations.  God is comfortable with whatever choices you make because after all, it’s all fine in the end.  What though if God is not like that?  What if He does expect us to be holy and pure and to live lives of righteousness?  What if it is not ok to sleep with your girlfriend, gossip about your boss or hold grudges?  What if God really does hate sin and it is truly unbearable for Him when we sin?  What if we have been wrong all along about what sin really is?

A typical example of the modern approach to conscience and guilt and sin is found in John 5.  A man who had been crippled thirty-eight years was healed by Jesus but seemingly did not appreciate what had been done for him nor show any loyalty toward the healer.  Later, Jesus found him in the crowd and spoke harshly to him.  "See, you are well again. Stop sinning or something worse may happen to you." (John 5: 14 NIV)  How this man responded to this strong rebuke is fascinating.  He gave it not a moment’s notice.  He instead went to Jesus’ enemies to betray Him.  Surely he knew it was wrong to turn Jesus over to the authorities and we would think his conscience would have warned him against it, especially after he had just been healed of his thirty-eight years of misery by the very Savior he now was rejecting.  The point though is that Jesus defined sinning as something to stop doing or something worse may come your way.  Sin, to Jesus, is not just a mistake or a learning opportunity or a throwing off of the constraints of an over reaching super-ego.  Sin that continues is worse than being crippled thirty-eight years.

We all laud Jesus’ kindness in rescuing the woman caught in adultery from certain death by stoning but rarely do we ponder deeply Jesus’ strict admonishment to her when the crowd of accusers had left.  “Go and leave your life of sin!” (John 8: 11)  To leave a “life of sin” you must realize you have a life of sin and have begun to abhor it.  This means you have thought about it, turned over what you have done in your mind and grown to hate it.  Otherwise you just continue doing what you are doing because it brings you some desired pleasure, some comfort from your difficulties, some relief from your pain.  We sin because it does something for us we want and the only way to break away from sin is when something has converted our thinking about it…our conscience has concentrated on the sin and become its enemy.  It is only then that someone like the woman caught in adultery has the will and determination to leave her “life of sin”.

When Thomas the disciple doubted the reports that Jesus had been raised from the dead and questioned the evidence brought him by eyewitness accounts, he was left with seven days of pondering his reaction.  Of course it was logical at some level that he not believe Jesus actually was alive because He really had been dead.  There was no question Jesus died.  And yet He was wrong to doubt that Christ was alive.  Jesus had already promised He would live again after dying.  For a week Thomas had to process with his conscience his lack of faith in Jesus to actually come alive again after the crucifixion.  When that next Sunday Thomas was in the upper room with the other disciples and Jesus indeed did return and approach Thomas, the disciple was left with the realization that he had been wrong and his wrongness was sinful.  He had doubted not the resurrection but Christ Himself…He had not believed in Him.  The words of Jesus make sense to us then.  “Stop doubting!”  It was not stop doubting resurrection but stop doubting me.  “Believe!”

We want to encourage Thomas.  You had every right to doubt.  The crucifixion of Jesus was brutal.  You were traumatized by it.  Any one of us would have questioned the resurrection accounts.  Doubting is normal.  Not everyone is honest and sometimes people think they see something but are mistaken.  Of course you would have questioned the resurrection.  Jesus did not give Thomas wiggle room on this sin though.  Just as forcefully as He confronted the sin of the woman caught in adultery and the sin of the man who turned on Jesus, so He confronted Thomas.  Stop doubting.

There is a strong urge in us to make excuses for sin and ignore them altogether.  By doing this, we wreck our conscience.   We make it powerless to stop us from the evil at our door.  Before Cain’s anger blew up, he had a conscience that we must guess was warning him against the direction he was going.  God Himself spoke to him.  If you do what is right, will you not be accepted? But if you do not do what is right, sin is crouching at your door; it desires to have you, but you must master it." (Genesis 4:7 NIV)  We mustn’t believe Cain is the only one of us given warning before he sinned.  We are warned moment by moment.  We have the conscience God has given us to send the alarm.

We have a tremendous picture in the Old Testament of the Conscience of God given to man.  When the Law was being presented on Mt. Sinai, a miraculous event occurred.  The Cloud of God descended upon the mountain and rested upon the Law being poured out of the Mind of God.  For forty days the Cloud brooded upon the mountain with the Law word by word coming forth.  This was the original Cloud, before the Silicon Valley invented its own much, much smaller version.   Like our conscience broods over our sins and the decisions we make, the Lord brooded over the giving of the Law to man.  It is normal and wise for us to follow the Scripture that tells us,  “Do not let this Book of the Law depart from your mouth; meditate on it day and night, so that you may be careful to do everything written in it. Then you will be prosperous and successful.” (Joshua 1: 8 NIV) 

If you meditate upon the rights and wrongs of God’s structure of the universe, you will naturally with your conscience think long and hard about the rights and wrongs of you.  It is the most normal part of life…to evaluate your deeds through God’s eyes.  “I drank too much last night.”  “I was judgmental and critical.”  “My gossip was hateful and destructive.”  “I looked at her too long because I was lusting.”  “I trusted myself rather than pray.”  “I am not reading the Bible enough.”  “I gave my wife grief.”  “I did not respect my husband.”  “I was mean to my mom.”  I was bitter and took out my problems on my children.”  “I have not been patient.”  This is not a super-ego gone manic; this is a healthy conscience taking seriously sin and its consequences.

Jesus told us without reservation and with all His faculties in place that we are to be “perfect”.  This doesn’t mean He expects us to never trip over the clothes in the house or never misspell a word we send out in a text.  But it does mean that God expects us to do what He has told us to do and never make excuses for not doing it and never pretend as if it doesn’t matter.  The person who wants her prayers answered by God and wants His blessings upon His life must do what He says to do.  We gripe and complain that God doesn’t care about us, God isn’t real because our prayers aren’t answered; God is cruel because of the difficulties we face.  God is waiting for us to take seriously our lives and do what He tells us to do.  This means we must listen to our conscience and think about the sins we have committed and hate our sins.  When we look at our sins and hate them with enough hatred to really love God and love the people God has given us, the Lord will unleash His power and give us the desires of our heart.  Because only when we truly hate our own sins will our heart be ready for God to bless it through and through.

Wish or Do

There is a level of Christianity that never reaches farther than a wish.  It likes the thought of praying, it is impressed by sacrificial giving, it believes in loving hurtful people, it knows it ought to look away when tempted but it just will not make the move.   What good is an "amen" if it has no legs under it?  Would we think it reasonable for a fisherman to bait the hook and never cast the line out into the water or a student to prepare for an exam and never take the test or for a bride to stand at the altar with the man she loves and never voice the vows?  Are we Ananias and Sapphira who wished for the reputation of holiness without the sanctification of the gift?  Our born-again spirit longs to run to the horizons of holy living but our body wants to just go so far and no further.  Like the child standing at the edge of the pool who dreads the first chill of the water, we wait and wait to throw our lives fully into God, afraid of what true holiness will mean.    But those who have gone before us...the Apostle Pauls and the Apostle Peters and the Mary Magdalenes and the Ruths urge us onward and outward.  "Forsake the love of the world" , they urge.  "Abandon yourself to Christ."  Trust Him with the sorrow of leaving behind your chair and chase the dream of living within the wild unknown of God's will for you today.  Perhaps He has something risky and preposterous for you to do at this moment but you sit waiting and waiting for the breeze to blow another way so it will be easier for you.  It will never get easier; only more risky and more preposterous as the hesitation extends beyond the limits set by God.  Now cannot be later if you do not want to go away "sorrowfully"  like the poor young man who was too rich to go beyond the wish of Christianity.

How can you believe if you accept praise from one another, yet make no effort to obtain the praise that comes from the only God?   John 5:44 NIV

What Keeps You Back?

 

Matthew 17: 19 NIV

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

Are You Being Held Back From Something?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Self-Determinism In The Dock

Is there not a point at which we must stop making excuses for ignoring God and no longer blame the other person for our behavior?  When Sarah lashed out at her husband Abraham for merely doing what she told him to do, God took the matter out of her hands and put things squarely in Abraham's grip.  The son Ishmael was conceived because Sarah demanded it; then when he was there Sarah hated Abraham for the part he played in the boy's presence.  Why is it that God spoke directly to Abraham and bypassed Sarah altogether in the sacrifice of Isaac?  Why did Abraham not take Sarah with him on the terrible duty up the mountain?  Perhaps it is because Sarah lost her way in not accepting the part she played in the denial of the Lord's providential leadership with regard to the building of her family?  In the end it was Abraham that had to get the job done, who had to wield the knife and raise it in faith.  One might wonder which was the worst, bringing the boy or having to watch him leave.  Yet in the end, each of them, at the previous point of rebellion, had to believe God all the way out to where self-ambition faded into complete faith in God and His way.  Sarah had to trust in Abraham to hear from God clearly and Abraham had to trust what he heard from the Lord and not slide out from under it.  No more passing the buck, no more waffling when God spoke.  It is allegiance to God only that we all must eventually determine for ourselves.         Then Sarai said to Abram, "You are responsible for the wrong I am suffering, I put my servant in your arms, and now that she knows she is pregnant, she despises me.  May the Lord judge between you and me."  Genesis 16: 5

Nothing settles the Lordship question more firmly than hardship.  It is there that you see the thing most clearly: follow Christ or abandon Him.  Once you know where you stand, everything else falls into place.  Forgive or not.  Complain or not.  Believe or not.  Take the forbidden object or not.  As long as we waver between one or the other, hardship will work its way back into our soul and make the object clear again.  The heart of every situation that startles our sensibilities is the great decision.  Follow Christ or abandon Him.  We rarely settle this absolutely; more often we do so time and again.