His Holy Zeal

There is a violence to God's working into your life Christ's personality.  The perfect picture of this is our Lord chasing the money changers from the Temple with a whip.  If you believe the Christian life is to be a serene holiday, you have not read either Job or Romans.  There is a temptation in Christian circles to kid ourselves about what we should expect from God.  A great deal of teaching makes it seem like a life free of diseases and distress ought to be ours if we just practiced greater holiness but it cannot be so.  In this life we face a tremendous amount of trouble and countless heartaches and that goes for both the "saint" and the "sinner".  When our Lord enters your life, He begins to cut out from you every strand of rebellion and ungodly desire and this does not come with anesthesia.  He gives you the pain of your sorrow over sin that you might die to Sin emotionally and psychologically.   We are being made to be like Christ in how we think about things and what we desire.  Sin has corrupted not just the core of us psychologically but also how we feel about every inch of the world.   Do we realize that our Lord does not laugh about the foibles of sexual sin like we do, that He does not chuckle when we snap at our wife or criticize our parents.  Holiness is going to be built into us and perfect love shall bind our personality together.  Until this is accomplished no amount of "self-realization" grounded in Sin will be tolerated for it is the realization of God that is being worked in us.    His hope, His faith and His love are becoming ours but not without cost.  Sin must go.  Pride must disappear.  Self-determination will be eliminated.  What will be left is a perfect union of Christ and us; our personalities born again at every level of being.  The unconscious and the conscious are being conformed to Christ and nothing will get in the way of our Savior redeeming us into a new creation.   Settle this matter quickly.  God will do whatever it takes to work His perfect love into you that what will come out of you will be joyful holiness that is pure and unconquerable.

His disciples remembered that it is written: "Zeal for your house will consume me.    John 2:17 NIV

Ridiculous or Doable

It is time to think about the possibility that we have hindered the Lord in His efforts to perfect us.  He did not say for us to "be perfect" in the sense that this is something that we should do for ourselves.  Christ more literally said that "You, yourselves shall be perfect ones" or "completed ones" in His Sermon on the Mount.  He makes this tremendous pronouncement after a rather long string of comments on the commandments and how we are to carry out our response to them.  Every time our Lord makes a demand on our personality in the sermon, He contextualizes it with impossible behavior.  No sane man or woman has ever seriously contemplated the possibility that those commands have been followed by him or her.  Only Jesus Christ, the perfect Son of Man carried them out to their end and the rest of us are perfect basket cases when it comes to not lusting, not being angry with our friends or enemies, not holding a stain of hatred toward our real enemies but really loving them, giving to those whose requests are absurd to us.  In fact, the Sermon on the Mount is more like a comedy routine than actual religion before we are born again.  Almost at every point of Matthew 5 and on into 6 and 7, we are presented with a ridiculous lifestyle that no one wants to take seriously.  The moment though we are born again, the Living Lord Jesus becomes a part of us and if we give Him room in our soul to have sway, we begin to feel the absurdity of living the old way of greed, lust, anger, bitterness, selfishness and discontent with what God has given us.  Perfect is not an impossibility in Christ, it is where we are going.  The day shall come when we will be perfect just like our Heavenly Father and as we let our Savior have His way with us rather than fight Him at every turn, we shall pull into perfect places...a kind response to someone who hates us, a nonchalance about what we have, a lack of interest in men and women whose attractiveness once held our thoughts captive.  Perfect is what we will be when Christ is so completely aligned with us that we won't be able to tell the difference between what we are doing and what He is doing.  What we want and what He wants are going to be the same and on the way, we give in to every urge of Christ we have within us.  For so long we have let our sin corrupted flesh pull us here and there.  In Christ however, we are free to live the good life without the gnawing beast of sin tearing at us and making so much we do a misery.  When we let our crucified Savior live through us...our actions and our thoughts, we find "rest for our souls".

Therefore you are to be perfect, as your heavenly Father is perfect.   Matthew 5:48 NASB

Martyr's Hill

One of the most devious tricks of the devil is to get us to say, "I can't" to God.  Is it really that you can't or that you won't?  Every creature, from the snail to the leopard is made perfectly by God for whatever purpose our Lord has planned.  We make much of genetic deformities as if that is sensible.  What we may call a deformity is in fact a way of expressing disbelief in God's handiwork...as if He is a flawed artist.  If at any point God gives you direction and you are clear it is God, you can be certain you are equipped and prepared for the task.  Nothing about you is out of place or lacking.  It must be dumbfounding to the angels that any born-again Christian would question God's call based on skill sets and talents.  Yet even Moses stood at the burning bush arguing with Almighty God over his fitness to lead Israel out of Egypt!  What slander to confuse defamation of God's work in you with humility!  It is not humble to turn down our Lord because we think we are inadequate for the task!  It is rather outright rebellion against His rule.  Nothing amazes the world quite as much as the fisherman who stands the world on its ear with his preaching or the tax collector who composes the very first book of the New Testament or the lunatic who Christ proclaims will be remembered eternally for her holy devotion.  How will heaven remember you?  Will you be compared to all those called by God who turned aside out of fear or indifference or will you be known as the one who scorned the devil's mocking of your readiness for the task and gave God all you had for your Savior's glory?   Will you stand on the hill of your martyrdom and plant the banner of Christ there, declaring the land irrevocably God's and His alone? 

 "Get yourself ready! Stand up and say to them whatever I command you. Do not be terrified by them, or I will terrify you before them.     Jeremiah 1:17-18 NIV

Are You Perfect?

Is it possible that you have completely misunderstood what it means to be Christian?  God has not "raised you from the dead" so that you will be the same person you were before.  He died for you so that you might be completely new and the newness is not in your better attitude, your more motivated outlook or your developed skill set.  Nothing could be done with you if all that was before you were improved Bible studies and higher insights into Christian living.  The Lord died for you that He might live in you and be joined to you.  He blew the top off the lid when He was crucified and made you the Holy of Holies; not a sanctimonious museum filled with God "stuff" but the actual place where the Lord dwells.  We have spent so much wasted time worrying about whether as the temple of the Holy Spirit we should be smoking or looking at pornography.  It is all a wash but this one matter.  By dying on the Cross, Jesus Christ joins into your personality, your will and your discernment and that completely alters the playing field.  Paul said that He had been crucified with Christ and He meant it.  This was not religious noise.  He said that it was no longer him that lived but Christ lived in him and he meant it.  He was not spouting  philosophical gibberish.  Why do we so quickly blow past the most important part of being born again?  We are joined with Christ.  Are we afraid of what has happened?  Are we incredulous?  You, when you believed in the crucifixion of Jesus Christ, attained His life living through you and it is time you gave Him breathing room, made a way for Him to work in and with you.  Every point in the Sermon on the Mount is a place where God can live through you and make you fully functional.  You could not love your enemies before but Christ can through you.  You could not swell with joy at one sinner coming to Christ as the Father does but Christ can through you.  You could not hate the world and bless the very ones who make your life so distressing but Christ can through you.  The biggest error we make as a Christian people is thinking we cannot do the perfect thing the Lord lays out for us because we  completely disregard Christ living through us.

...and I no longer live but Christ lives in me…  Galatians 2: 20

Love Beyond Measure

Nothing diminishes us more than the desire to be someone else--to possess in ourselves a benefit someone else has.  At perfect points in our lives, the Lord gives us something...an insight, a strength, an ability, an accomplishment and it is as magically attached to us as our shadow.  Our problem is we do not trust the Lord enough to be full of love in how He distributes His gifts; specifically how He allots them with regard to ourselves.  If the Lord did not like you, then He would never have made you, never have let you in on His grace, never have called you friend.  Our God is perfectly truthful in all of His dealings; if not then He is a devil and should be despised.  He has told you that He loves you and that love is complete and without room for more so in it He audits what comes your way and does so to guarantee your total joy.  But when you snivel and complain and try to wiggle out from under the dominion of Christ, you make a mess of all you have.  Like a child who breaks his toy because he wants his brother's toy, you smash your own happiness in the discontent you hold in your hand.   The parable of the workers who were all paid the same wage but worked for different lengths of time is not a teaching on the seeming unequal treatment of the Father; it is rather a statement of how childish we all are with regard to the generosity of God.  Our work is in God's strength and His ability, our adherence to the scriptures is by His power and determination, our popularity and success  is through His good fortune.  We are God's in every way and the sway of our lives is His too so it is sheer lunacy to get bent out of shape over the wage He gives you...it is far more than He needs to give and it is perfect in its ultimate good.  What if those workers, instead of moaning about the coin handed them at the end of the day rejoiced instead that it was a coin and it had the blessing of God stamped upon it.  The coin could become a thousand coins in a moment as the Father determined and it could be kept at one because the one was more likely to bring happiness than ten or ten thousand.    Who would in their right mind want van Gogh's great talent at the cost of acquiring at the same time his misery or would beg incessantly for Hitler's power to attract a crowd and have along with it his filthy end.  And on the other hand, how many of us shoot for Stephen's lone convert as the end game to our work...Imagine the child complaining about the terrible drive down to L.A. just as his father pulls into the parking lot at Disneyland.   

But he answered one of them, "Friend, I am not being unfair to you..." Matthew 20: 13a NIV