Disoriented to be Reoriented

There is a moment when God breaks through into our cluttered minds and it generally is at those times of tremendous tumult.  We have realized just have far blown our sin is and it is crashing upon our heads.  Repentance is one of the great themes of the Bible and something Jesus talked about repeatedly.  We may feel badly about what we have done or more often embarrassed by our public disgraces but that is not the same thing as repentance.  When the Holy Spirit reveals our badness in a matter; it is never to make us throw up our hands in despair, it is always to bring us to radical change.  There are countless numbers of hand wringers in the world; those who wish they had acted differently and it doesn't take the least bit of God for that.  But to prefer holiness over the life of the world requires the supernatural work of the atonement of Christ.  When our Savior gathers Himself in us through His Cross, He begins to live at the edges of our lives.  We forgive, show mercy, are kind, reject all forms of sexual immorality, love sacrificially, walk humbly.  This is impossible if Christ is not blending His life with ours so that we act upon the impulses of God rather than our previous lusts and sin marred concerns.  One look at the Sermon on the Mount and we despair of ever really living the truly Christian lifestyle but with Christ in us, we can do it.  We can accept the insults of those who turn on us and not reply in kind.  We can look away when our eye is intrigued by a forbidden attraction.  We can hold our tongue when we want so badly to defend ourselves.  We can befriend the enemies of God and give sacrificially to those who don't deserve our worst, let alone our best.  Nothing is quite so discombobulating as the realization that God really does live in you and He wants to work His way out of you in your common behaviors.  It is then as you give Him free access that you discover that you actually are supernaturally remade by Christ into a new Creation, one built for holiness in everyday thoughts and activities.

You are to be holy to me because I, the Lord, am holy, and I have set you apart from the nations to be my own.   Leviticus 20:26 NIV

Fix the Mind First

The great moments of testing come without warning.  Suddenly they are upon us with the force of a hurricane.  A financial blow...a rejection...a traumatic injury...a crushing loss...despair...depression...failure...It seems impossible this life of faith.  We sigh deeply.  "What do we do now?"  There are some who it appears never have an unhappy moment but that is not me or you.  The Garden of Gethsemane was not a mythological battle of great forces thumping each other in a Shakespearean play.  Jesus Christ prayed in agony on a plot of ground that was known to real people in Jerusalem and other parts of Israel and He did so during the specific hours of a particular Thursday evening and Friday morning when Saul and Mary and Jonah and others we have not met were doing the same sorts of things you and I do at those times.  In that particular Garden Jesus took in the full force of an unraveling world and traveled the same road we have taken.  He agonized.  What He did not do though was lose His mind.  He did not fix His thoughts on what was coming up against Him.  He did not become a dandelion worrying about what to wear or a woodpecker worrying about what to eat.  He did not let His mind become a godless fury of Google searches for answers.  Jesus Christ fixed His mind on the Father and in that shelter, He found rest; even while agonizing over the Sin of the world.  The way to rest as we enter into the great swirl of life at the office, at the meeting with the principal, at the mechanic's shop, in the hospital room and the funeral home is to keep thinking on Jesus with ferocious determination.  Your mind may swell with anguish and despair, your stomach may swim in anxiety but with your thoughts on Jesus now and on Jesus a minute from now and on Jesus thirty seconds later you will have the power of Heaven working in you to give you the rest you need right then.  Worry is your terrible enemy; not the troubles that are before you.

Therefore, holy brothers, who share in the heavenly calling, fix your thoughts on Jesus, the apostle and high priest whom we confess.      Hebrews 3:1 NIV

History in the Making

If we look back upon the losses we have endured over the years, we might see certain trends...bad breaks, poor timing, lack of attentiveness to crucial details, slovenly habits, dysfunctional relationships, distorted views of self.  It could be that we got sick at the wrong time, were tripped up by our lusts or were mistaken about the character of certain people.    The regretful glance backward that morphs into self-pitying is corrosive to the working of God in you.  The very thing He came to do, redeem your life completely gets hindered by the regret you keep eyeing.  If we take God at His word, that Christ came to save us from our sin, then the obstinate pout must be put away.  But you may wonder how God could do this, how He could make the ugly moments of your past "redeemed".  His answer to you is the same as it was for the withered Elizabeth past child bearing.  "Nothing is impossible with God."  The worst of your circumstances are made new by Christ upon His sin bearing.  They are bought back and rebuilt...remade just as thoroughly as if an old wreck of a car were blown to smithereens and the molecules of it put together into the most spectacular of yachts.  "Nothing is impossible" includes your past and what has been done to you and by you is of no account anymore.  What matters is what God will do with it and that is, "make all things new."    The Lord is not afraid of your past even if you have built it up into a monster.  He has faced it squarely while dying on the Cross and mastered it.  You have nothing to hide anymore...it is out in the open...out in the bright sunlight of God's love for you.   Is it not perfectly reasonable that the bearing of your sin took place as day splintered off into darkness and the redeeming of your life came to pass as the first sparkles of sunlight broke upon the dawn?  You can moan about the missed opportunities and the regrettable decisions you have made but what is the point of that?  It is like weeping over winning the lottery or despairing over the successful surgery that saved you from cancer.  You have been redeemed!  Never look past that.

"Fear not, for I have redeemed you; I have summoned you by name; you are mine.  Isaiah 43:1 NIV