New

A year is full of promise.  Everything is new and fresh about the days coming because "anything can happen" in them and yet we all know that we are full of calcified habits and mummified behavior patterns that we rarely undo.  Extra weight almost always stays on us; trapped in a body of routine.  It is the crisis that awakens us to change.  The crisis comes like a lightning bolt, the new day like a wave of the sea.  Inexplicably we welcome the wave and despise the bolt.   The pink slip and the cancer diagnosis we dread and yet they carry with them a hope we don't have in the new day.  Something must change when the lightning strikes and it does.  We see people from a different angle, think of our habits with critical awareness.  The person we took for granted morphs into a trusted friend; the walk in the park becomes alive with brilliant colors we hadn't noticed.  Not everything turns grey when the lightning strikes, sometimes neon green and strawberry reds explode out from the shadows.  Satan engineers a crisis when he is afraid we have begun to inch our way back to God but he miscalculates.  He thinks he wrecks us with the stormy blast but in fact the drenching rain can awaken us to what we have missed, what we might have if we just turn the boat around.  The old term "backslidden" describes the vast majority of us.  We have fallen back into our old crusty patterns of Godless doing.  We have stopped looking to Him for guidance, given up our electrifying dependence upon God for help and gotten by on mindless habitual religion rather than living faith.  Perhaps today you could cast your habits to the wind and do something wildly new with God.  Scream into the stars your praise.  Throw all the money you have in your wallet into some stranger's hand and invest in love rather than something more reasonable and rational.  Lock yourself in your room and sit with God until you are thoroughly uncomfortable and bored to tears.  Confess your hidden sin and make right your wrong.  Take someone's hand and pray for her.  Finally forgive your father or your coach that despised you.  Read out loud an entire chapter of the Bible and make each sentence pop with the joy of an angelic choir.  This is a fresh new day God has given you!  Make the most of it!

Yet this I call to mind and therefore I have hope: Because of the Lord's great love we are not consumed, for his compassions never fail.  They are new every morning; great is your faithfulness.  I say to myself, "The Lord is my portion; therefore I will wait for him."  Lamentations 3:21-24 NIV

Community in Christ

The Christian Community is much too quick to snip at one another and go after the jugular of faults.  Do we think it was toward the Pharisees only that Jesus aimed his barbed arrow in the Sermon on the Mount?  It pricks us too and more truly stabs us all the way in the heart.  How can we ever hope to progress in joy if we are captivated by the splinters in the eyes of our fellow servants?  Evangelism is simply pious platitudes if we are not loving one another unconditionally.   It is laughable to hope that we can build the Kingdom if internally we are squabbling and mocking one another, critiquing and evaluating each other's works and motives.  The crisis in the Church has never been without but for two millennia within.    Much more damage has come to us at the hands of our fellow believers than any non-Christian has ever caused.  Love does not begin with some lavish pronouncement but with a single determination to overlook an offence or keep to ourselves our criticism.  We can do this with Christ living through us but without Him, we are hopelessly entangled by our grievances and dissatisfactions.  As we look to Christ in the heat of our acrimony, the Lord will grant us His love and kindness to come out of us at the very moment we need it.   Our Lord has a great deal of grace for those who "love too much" or "overlook too much" it seems and if we should err, it would be best to err on the side of mercy and compassion rather than take up with the older brother in his complaints.  Job's friends look all too familiar to us  and we must be careful we don't sit in their camp when Job comes our way.  We might find ourselves begging the Job God has given us for mercy when the Lord "catches up with us."

"Do not judge, or you too will be judged. For in the same way you judge others, you will be judged, and with the measure you use, it will be measured to you."   Matthew 7:1-2 NIV

The God Twitch

The God twitch is a spontaneous turning of one’s spasmodic concentration to God.  It is the sudden, spontaneous reaction to the Holy Spirit poking at your hot nerve.  Some are more reactive than others; quicker to flinch in God's direction.  If we don't realize what is happening we may mistake the poke as a crisis, as a terrible occurrence, as a heartbreak.  It is not.  It is the Lord making Himself unmistakably visible.  David felt it when Saul came after him in the wilderness.  Stephen felt it as he faced his martyrdom.  Jonah faced it as he sat in the belly of the great fish and Peter came upon it as he wept uncontrollably in the dark closet of Jerusalem Good Friday.  We may question many matters in our life but when Job like you was hit in the head by the lightning flash of God he became silent as a door knob.  There is nothing to do when God comes upon you with the force of heaven itself.  You must silently wait upon Him as He works Himself through every cell and corpuscle you possess.  Why should we think God would always deal with us peacefully and comfortably when the greatest people in the Bible were struck dumb by the weight of His awful Presence?  As Christians, we must stop making excuses for God; quit sugarcoating the ways He moves within us.  Did Ruth lose her husband or not?  Did Elijah face the terror of Jezebel or not?  Did Paul get beaten with rods or not?  It is anathema to make God out as some kind of silly puppy who bounces about mindlessly whenever we meet Him.  He is stern in His determination to make us face Him.  Should we think His glory is casual and light?  It is not!  It is as heavy as the weight of the firestorm that fell upon Sodom.  Nothing stops the force of our God's entrance when He decides to make Himself known to us with finality.  Just look at the picture we have of Jesus in Daniel 7 and try to wiggle out of this one simple attribute of God.  He is holy...terribly holy and it is a grave error to mistake Him as Santa Claus.  Sin is not a bad move on our part; it is the terrifying rebellion of a fool who dares come up against the Almighty God.  We must never mistake God as a doting father who overlooks every offence of his child.  He is not.  That is why the cross of Jesus Christ is such a roiling cauldron of chaos for Satan and the demon world.  Jesus Christ crucified is the lightning bolt of the Father that makes the entire world twitch in horror or in wonder.    The sins of the billions embedded within the dying body of the crucified King of Kings makes stones shatter in wonder and the universe come unglued in the end.   Are we so silly as to think God will only deal lightly with us when He comes upon us?

"As I looked, "thrones were set in place, and the Ancient of Days took his seat.  His clothing was as white as snow; the hair of his head was white like wool.  His throne was flaming with fire, and its wheels were all ablaze.  A river of fire was flowing, coming out from before him.     Daniel 7:9-10 NIV

Something More

It is presumption to make it out that we can convince anyone of the reasonableness of Christianity .  We can point out that Christianity is reasonable to the believer but that is as far as we can go.  The facts are the facts.  The universe is before us to explore and examine and any atheist or pagan is just as free to look at it closely as the most holy of Christians.  Our task is not to talk people into following Christ.  Jesus never went out of His way to convince anyone of anything.  He showed the disciples his hands and side, gave the congregation on the hillside food to eat but he didn't talk a single unbeliever into going after Him.  Herod and Pilate were classic examples of the bait Satan puts out there.  Neither of the splendid trophies of "churchianity" were offered a solitary nibble of rational evidence.  Christ left both crawling in the dust of their unbelief because each remained in rebellion against the clear facts of his sinfulness.  We must do two things if we want to be evangelists.  We must present the Gospel clearly and simply and we must let Christ rule over us as we walk about.  We are not to "do something" to get the world to believe; we are to be witnesses.  Yet our overriding call as a witness is not to be witnesses of the rationale behind our faith, we are to be witnesses of the faith itself.  You sow the seed of the Gospel at a point where humanity is alerted and it may very well lie there dormant for an unbearable length of time.  At once however, in a blink, that seed may come alive and sprout but we cannot initiate the work of it.  God Himself does it.  He brings a crisis, a despair, a spotlight upon the ugliness of sins and when He does, like lightning, the Gospel will awaken where it was buried and that one soul will choose to give the Cross a go in him and come alive or walk away from it and wither.  What makes baptism such an amazing event is that we witness the power of the Cross worked out in the physicality of faith.  Nothing should so vivify our joy as the sight of one soul socked up in sin released from her bonds and free to be completely given over to Christ.  Let the Lord live through you and when He gives you the word, say the Gospel clearly and without reticence.  God did not fill you up with the fullness of Christ so that you might be a useless bump on a log.  He has given you the opportunity to be a fisher of men.  Get after it!

"Come, follow me," Jesus said, "and I will make you fishers of men."   Matthew  4:19-20 NIV

The Crisis Point

The crisis point is not at the moment you find some part of your life out of control; it is when you must accept that every part of your life is actually beyond your control.  We try desperately to calibrate this and modulate that but it is in the end not ours to fix or determine.  The Lord does not intend to make you more differentiated from your environment...He is using it (that wild and unpredictable world where you have been placed) to add to the supernatural work of being born again.  The more we try to squirm out of our predicaments and fix our dilemmas, the more sustained the rough edges of our personality.  You cannot love unless God surgically removes the bumps of hate and jealousy, you cannot trust unless he sculpts away the scared ridges of doubt and self-confidence and you cannot hope unless he rubs off the fear and bitterness caked on your too fragile psyche.  You have been placed at your spot so that the Lord can perfect His work in you.  Rest your soul in God who loves you enough to keep you where you are.