Light Walker

There is the admonition today to "be yourself", to "believe in yourself", to "trust yourself".   All this sounds like wise counsel and of course it is upbeat in its approach to personality.  But it is sheer folly to put any real confidence in ourselves without taking into account the destructive working of Sin at every level of our personality.  Our dreams hint at the vast unconscious mind we possess.  It is a tangle of lusts, bitter frustrations and crippling fears.  Anger and hatred boil below the surface of our consciousness as does despair and loneliness along with hopes and loves and passions.  Our Lord is the great realist and he refuses to ignore the true condition of our humanity.  For out of the heart come evil thoughts, murder, adultery, sexual immorality, theft, false testimony, slander. (Matthew 15:19-20 NIV)  Many wave this all off as negative thinking but God knows how deeply Sin has worked its way in us and how corrupted the inner parts of our being are.  We don't need an infusion of positive thinking so we can blindly look past our true brokenness; we need a Savior to cleanse the deep parts of us that control our moodsand impulses.  John the Apostle puts perfectly what we must do.  Walk in the light and as the Holy Spirit reveals a matter of doing or stopping, immediately act upon that impulse of God.  As we remain in the light the Lord gives us, the blood of Christ will cleanse and purify the damage caused by Sin, even in the unconscious parts of us.  We will discover that while we walk in the light, the darkness in our dreams will begin to clear also so that we will see, as if on a big screen, the great work of our Lord in the inner parts of our soul!

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

Inner Working

There are times when we are irritated and irritable and nothing satisfies us.  We are unhappy with ourselves and unhappy with everyone  about us.  We want to disappear into a hot tub or slip off into a movie theater but we have responsibilities and we must gut out our frustrations.  Pain and disappointment are like psychological bobs; they bring up to the surface those parts of us we have tried our best to keep hidden.  And yet our anger is really there, our despair is still there, our deep sadness and weeping losses are still there.  Sin has stung us all both within and without and it changes the dynamic of our inner world living with its pain and sorrow.  When through trials and suffering our inner world works its way out of us and splatters the ones God brings our way, we confuse our reaction to hardship with the troubles we have.  The Lord as He hung upon the Cross with His shattered flesh screaming in pain did not stifle His inner world as His outer world hit up against it.  The one thief railed against Jesus and the Lord stayed silent and did not rail back because His inner world was at peace.  The other thief, who we forget also brought a flurry of hatred against Jesus came to his senses and sought our Lord's mercy.  Rather than letting His inner world be corrupted by the sin of the outer world, Jesus loved the second thief and gave Him the kindness that filled His heart to the brim.  It was that inner world that spilled out of Jesus...love untainted by hatred or despair, unhindered by all the humiliation and criticism brought to bear against Him, His inner world of peace and joy unmarred by the rejection and scorn leveled at Him .  That very nature; that continuous confidence in the Father and unwillingness to be corrupted by the pain He suffered is the nature the Lord will give us if we give Him room to do it.  We must trust Him with our inner world; allow the Lord to rework it that it might be born again.  The hatred we feel is real hatred; the bitterness over our losses is real bitterness.  Yet that is no longer our lasting world.  We have a new home, a home built in Christ and it is the most peaceful of sanctuaries.  The sign that we have settled into our new inner world is that what spills out of us when we are rattled by disappointment, trauma or ridicule is the same settled confidence Christ had that nothing came to Him except what the Father in His good and faithful love allowed and approved.  What insult can shake us when we have the nature of Christ within us?  What hardship is there that Christ did not face Himself and peacefully let pass?  What frightening possibility is there that is too much for the loving Father?  We have the mind of Christ and If we think through Him, what will come out of us during the furious storm will  heal the nations the Holy Spirit places along the way of our journey.

Create in me a pure heart, O God, and renew a steadfast spirit within me.  Psalm 51:10 NIV

Free Pass

We have misunderstood grace and made something of it that it has never been.  The idea that grace is a "free pass" is foreign to the scriptures...especially when you read much of Paul.  Grace is not that God lets things go as if they don't matter much to him.  Under that sort of grace, the new birth would be unnecessary...he could just turn away from all the evil we have absorbed and pretend it is not there.  We are born again not so that we can keep on as we were before but to be completely changed and for that to happen, the effect of sin in us must be addressed.  Like a surgeon whose mission it is to explore the torn ligaments and do something about them, the Lord takes on the full effect of sin and cuts at it in every point.  We cry out to God for mercy and wonder why we suffered this or that.  We moan about the trials we face and wish we hadn't lost our temper, stared long at the actress partially dressed, given up on a ministry we started.  The two go together and cannot be extricated from one another.  I argue too much and God works at that, cutting apart my self-assurance through failure.  I am not contented and God cuts at that too, taking even the holy things from me until I see the joy of simple trust in Christ to make my day right and good.  We have been hurt badly by the sins of others but that does not mean the universe is out of control and that the Lord has left us to fend for ourselves.  He is, in it all, building a perfect saint who is cleansed in entirety of sin and whose hatred of all things idolatrous still there within knows no bounds.  The past is not a plague unless we say it is so.  God has taken the worst Satan has thrown your way to strip your soul of all love for the world and to remake you into the perfect bride of Christ.  You cannot love your neighbor completely unless you despise each tie to sin you find in yourself and then you will be able to truly welcome him as your brother.  The circumstances in your life...both what you define as good and bad...are being used each in its own way to break off every bit of evil attached within you and in the end, the grace of God will have done its full work and your joy will be without limits.

Consider it pure joy, my brothers , whenever you face trials of many kinds… James 1: 2