Living By Faith

Living by faith and not by sight is not a dispensation of risk-taking and adventuring.  It is the clear ground upon which every Christian is to operate his or her life.  When we let Christ become our salvation, we received the Holy Spirit as a part of our personality.  This means that He interacts with us at every level of our thinking, whether conscious or unconscious.  The warping caused by sin makes us incorrigible at points; pouty children who demand our way at the expense of living in the Spirit.  This creates a conflict in our soul and the effect upon our soul is that we develop outbreaks of anger, depression, fear, discontentment, jealousy, frustration, impatience and a loss of gratitude.   When we frustrate the Holy Spirit by our rebellion against Scripture or disregard for how He is leading us, we start to lose contact with Him.  Some Christians are just fine with that.  They are in fact pleased to not have to put up with His pestering but after a while, it becomes clear that we are miserable people when we are not walking in step with the Holy Spirit.   At that point, when we like the prodigal son realize just how badly we have chosen, we in our misery cry out to God for help.  Through our desolation we repent of our sin and the Holy Spirit presents Himself to us once more and our heart becomes soft enough to live in Him, or to put it another way, live by faith.  Faith is not an ephemeral feeling of "everything will somehow come together."  Faith is the practical doing as the Holy Spirit gives direction.   The Holy Spirit might point out a Scripture that tells you how to respond to an argument you are having with your spouse or tell you to stop working for a certain company but always, if you are to remain "Spirit filled", you must not trust your Sin marred "sight" judgment, but rather by faith let the Spirit lead your next step.  The Holy Spirit is not going to fight with you to gain your allegiance.  But if you want the fruit of the Spirit operating within your personality, you must fight with your flesh to make Him your commander and chief!

We live by faith, not by sight.   2 Corinthians 5: 7 NIV

Hunger is the Best Sauce

There is no one Satan is quite as ruthless with as the person who once walked with God and has turned aside.  The enemy shades this person's eyes and takes away his peripheral vision spiritually so that he cannot see how far off the narrow path he has turned.  Everything seems so good and true about what he is doing.  The older brother who despised the mercy his father provided his younger brother felt not the least twinge of guilt for thinking as he did.   Yet he could not have been farther from God if he had shot his father in the head.   The root of the older brother's falling away is that he wanted what his younger brother had...the life of sin and then the easy way out of it.  He was not satisfied with all the good he had done working along-side his father; he had to own the party his father threw for his brother.   Christian people who begin strong are most likely to fall away when they look around and want what God has given another.  The discontent seems holy at first; I deserve better and I am certain God will realize how badly I have been treated.  As soon as God becomes the "unjust judge" or the "inadequate master", Satan has the upper hand in the Christian's life and he is cooked.  There is only one way back for such a believer.  Repent.  Acknowledge your sin and turn to God in humble acceptance of your guilt.  Our Lord does not beg us to return to Him when we drift off and in fact He may become as silent as an Antarctic iceberg.  He did not chase after the younger son who walked away from Him and He let the older brother boycott the party.  We are free to hold our grudges and search for life away from God but it is a glorious day when we realize what we have done and seek out again the Savior who redeems us from Satan's velvet grasp.  What should we do if we have a friend who has fallen away from God?  Rely on the Holy Spirit to make you so alive in God that the person who has made his home in "Balaam's country" will hunger for Christ again.

 "When he came to his senses, he said, 'How many of my father's hired men have food to spare, and here I am starving to death!   Luke 15:17 NIV

Thinking Twice

We are mistaken if we think repentance is feeling badly about what we have done.  The man or woman who wakes up demoralized by the resultant wreckage brought on by a drunken catastrophic act the night before is not repentant.  The teen, who angrily slams a fist into the dashboard after getting a speeding ticket, is not repentant.  The child who cries when punished by a parent for stealing is not repentant.  The New Testament take on repentance is resolute.  If there is repentance, holiness must be its outcome.  Otherwise, it is just wounded pride, disturbed ambition, natural pain response or petulance.  Judas was sorrowful over his betrayal of Jesus but never as far as we can tell repentant.  Korah and his family members may have screamed in panic when the ground began to swallow them but that did not make them repentant.  Repentance by definition requires a shift from an old way of being to operating from a converted will.  It was repentance that determined Zacchaeus’s course of action and Paul’s too.  The former paid his victims back four times what he stole and the later became the chief evangelist of the message he tried to destroy.  There may be a gloominess to the conviction of wrong but that is the shadow of repentance; transformation is the substance.  Biblical repentance requires a Savior and for repentance to take place, the Cross of Christ must work its way into the core of Sin.  Sin is the determination that I do as I see fit; the crucifying work of God kills that resolve and replaces it with the life of resurrected Christ working in and through my new personality.  It must never be the goal to stop doing wrong; rather we are to stop being wrong.  That can only happen as Christ lives in and through us.  When I see the Sin, then I am ready to be transformed by the power of the crucified Christ into a new personality who lives in the God who saves and sanctifies.  Repentance is the full turn into Christ for salvation and then in Him a resulting holiness.  If there is no holiness, there has been no repentance.

Repent, then, and turn to God, so that your sins may be wiped out, that times of refreshing may come from the Lord, and that he may send the Christ, who has been appointed for you — even Jesus.   Acts 3:19-20 NIV

I Am Sorry

Most recognize the words, "I am sorry" as the mark of John the Baptist's ministry. "Repent" But what is mostly forgotten is that "I am sorry" was at the core of Jesus' own preaching. In fact many of His sermons were just "Repent for the Kingdom of God is before you." I realize that many do not acknowledge, "I am sorry" as a legitimate theological step to living for Jesus but it is the most mystical and revelatory of them all. For without the "I am sorry", there is no acknowledgement of personal sin, no realization that I am genuinely wrong. I can never be in God's presence without an assurance of "I am sorry" pressed within me. What more can be said of Isaiah's confession, "Woe is me for I am a man of unclean lips..." if not it is a full-blown "I am sorry." The other day I was reminded again of just how twisted Satan can make our personal theology. I heard an "I am sorry" but there was a caveat attached. "I am sorry you were so..." followed by an "I am sorry they didn't act..." connected to the most unmistakable "You sorry..." The name God is wonderful unless Satan slips next to it a verb of denouncement. We are most Christian when we have an "I am sorry" flowing off our lips but if we connect it to someone else, we fall as far from Jesus as is possible in this life. "I am sorry" is the beginning of all praise and the true start to real fellowship. We cannot live within God if we do not have a few "I am sorry"s spontaneously jumping out of our hearts. We just have to leave everyone else out of our "I am sorry" if we want to get it right.