Forgetting The Past

Philippians 3:13-14 NIV

Forgetting what is behind and straining toward what is ahead, I press on toward the goal to win the prize for which God has called me heavenward in Christ Jesus. 

When I was in seventh grade, there was a boy named Mark Munschausen who used to make fun of me incessantly.  I was the tallest kid in the school and he was the shortest boy in my class.  He used to try his best to humiliate me in front of my schoolmates for what reason I don’t know.  Of all the other kids at the school, I was his victim.  After perhaps six months of this, I finally exploded.  On the grass field of the school playground while a group of us including Mark were playing football, he said something to me that set me off.  I chased him down and tackled him, began punching him relentlessly and then started choking him.  All the while tears were streaming down my face.  I had never been in a physical fight before…and haven’t since.  Someone must have pulled me off Mark because I don’t remember quitting on my own.  The fight ended, as much as you could call my pummeling him a fight, and as far as I can recall, I was never disciplined for it, never even brought to the principal’s office.  We settled our dispute on the playground and he never made fun of me again.  As I look back upon the “encounter” I must say I never made it my goal to look for other Munschausens in the world to fight them.  I never took out my rage on others of German decent.  I didn’t make it my determination to crush all other short people.  The name Mark has never had a negative connotation for me since the fight.  And freckled kids (Mark was freckled) have not stirred my anger.  All I have since then is a rather indifferent attitude toward the whole business.  I don’t feel guilty for what I did and I am not in any way still disturbed by the teasing I suffered back then.  It might as well have never happened it is so insignificant to my life now.

There is much made of how our past influences who we are today and there certainly is a great deal of truth to that contention.   Children who have been abused are generally scarred for life by it.  Plenty of men and women are afraid to get married after their first marriage failed.  Many people have trust issues because they have never forgotten how someone they loved betrayed them.  Some people won’t eat peas because they got sick at one time eating them.  There are adults who have never gotten over their fear of swimming because someone they knew drowned or of dogs because they were bitten when they were young or of going into dark rooms because they were molested when they were a child.  Perhaps you had a tough time liking someone who reminded you of someone else.  You might flinch when a car comes too close to you as you are driving after having been rear ended.  Plenty of people who came out of the depression continued the rest of their lives saving milk cartons,  old cans and scraps of wood just in case they might someday need them.  Many people try to run from their past by moving as far away from their home town as possible.  Some leave careers because of bad experiences that traumatized them.  The past for many is a terrible prison where they have been trapped; for others the past has kept them from trying new things and making new friends.  The past is not always our friend.

There is a person in the Bible who never escaped his past and it caused his downfall.  The third son of David, King of Israel was haunted by his past.  His sister was raped by his older half-brother and for three long years, Absalom plotted how he might avenge the crime.  As the years went by, Absalom grew increasingly bitter about the lack of action his father took when he heard about the rape and decided he would take justice into his own hands and take vengeance on his sister’s rapist .Absalom never said a word to Amnon, either good or bad; he hated Amnon because he had disgraced his sister Tamar.  (Genesis 13: 22 NIV) Finally, Absalom made his move and murdered Amnon, his half-brother who had committed the rape.  But Absalom’s rage was not stemmed by his revenge.  He then began to plot the overthrow of his father’s government and take the crown from him.  Absalom planned four years the revolt and eventually had enough support within the nation to rebel against his father’s rule.  He was eager in fact to have his own father murdered in the process.  Absalom, for whatever reason, his father’s lack of support when Absalom was young or David’s seeming indifference to the rape of Absalom’s sister Tamar, never forgot how he had been wronged by his dad. In the end, Absalom’s inability to forget his past cost him his life when he was killed in battle trying to destroy his dad.

There are millions around the world like Absalom who do not let go of their past even though it damages them psychologically.  In contrast Joseph was sold into slavery by his brothers and despite winding up in prison for a crime he did not commit was not governed by all the wrong done him.  In fact he faced his brothers fully and rather than condemning them, reminded them of the part God played in his exile to Egypt.  “And now, do not be distressed and do not be angry with yourselves for selling me here, because it was to save lives that God sent me ahead of you.  For two years now there has been famine in the land, and for the next five years there will not be plowing and reaping.  But God sent me ahead of you to preserve for you a remnant on earth and to save your lives by a great deliverance. So then, it was not you who sent me here, but God. He made me father to Pharaoh, lord of his entire household and ruler of all Egypt.” (Genesis 45:5-9 NIV)

Notice in this that Joseph never blocked out his past; he saw it as redeemed by God.  He did not deny the evil that was in the hearts of his brothers, he redefined though their work.  Nothing you or I have endured is too monstrous to be reconstituted into a resurrection of sorts.  Joseph did not forget his past; he was in a sense governed by it and not how the vast majority of us are governed by our past.  Getting sold into slavery was the only way Joseph would have voluntarily left his father to resettle in Egypt.  When Joseph was falsely accused by Potiphar’s wife of trying to rape her, God used her accusation to bring out Joseph’s own true loyalty to God and moral fortitude and establish the two joined together as his determining personality trait.  The idiotic assumption Potiphar made that Joseph was guilty led to Joseph gaining a rock solid trust in God to see him through any trial he might ever face.  It also landed him in the sole place where he could establish for one of Pharaoh’s most important officials the power he possessed as God’s personal servant and prophet.  We must not pass by this too quickly.  Only at the point of great desperation and need could Pharaoh’s cupbearer be ready to ascertain the most important bit of information he would encounter ever.  The Lord was intervening in his life and he might never have known this without meeting Joseph in prison; might never have been able to help Pharaoh see that God was intervening in the king’s own life if he hadn’t met Joseph in prison.

Given the monumental place our past has with regard to our present, we must see it for what it is.  The Apostle Paul had every reason to be consumed by the pain of his past.  After all, each time he made it back to Jerusalem he must have encountered some widow or orphan Paul personally put in that condition.  He came across in cities all over the western world men and women who had ugly scars because of what Paul had done to them.  It is not easy to live with a past such as Paul’s, especially given the insatiable hunger Paul had to love each soul he met.  If anyone had a dreadful past he must have wished to bury, it had to have been the Apostle Paul.  Yet he never seemed emotionally crippled by his past and he certainly never buried his past.  This is why.

Everything changes when we take for ourselves Jesus Christ crucified, including our past.  When Jesus, God in flesh died on the cross, He redeemed us.  That means He gained for Himself by dying everything there is about us and immediately transformed it into something completely new including what we have faced before.  The transformation cuts both ways…forward and backward.  We have a future that is different and eventually perfect and we have a past that is different and eventually perfect.  When we are born again, God does not leave us with a fragmented and awful heredity that leaves us psychologically crippled.  He makes our past right and good.  No experience we have had once we have been totally redeemed by the Cross of Christ is a gaping wound…it is God’s own place of strength.  Imagine a separated shoulder that after it is surgically repaired is stronger and more helpful than ever.  Your past, once God has had His way with it through the Cross of Christ is your ally and valuable resource for the enhancement of your life as well as the lives of a multitude of others.  It is only as we defy our Lord to make good of our past by unbelief that we limp about, crippled by our past.

Paul’s rallying cry, of “forgetting what is behind”, was not a spin doctor’s challenge to pretend like nothing happened to us before.  He simply stated how it is when we give our lives to Christ.  The past is just as good to us as our future not because we decide it is but because it really is.  Consider this about the forgetting.  Imagine you have suffered a terrible back injury.  All you think about is that back of yours because it through pain demands your attention.  Day and night, each movement and activity is ruled to some degree by your aching back.  Your back comes up in your daily conversations, is a big part of your praying and constitutes your rapt attention.  But suppose that back of yours begins to heal.  You think about it less, pray about it more infrequently and it comes up in fewer and fewer of your conversations.  You don’t even notice your back when you lift something or sit or take a walk.  It is so completely healed that you forget your back.  That is what Paul is talking about your past.  In Christ, as you in faith put your past into the body of Jesus crucified, your past gets more than healed; it becomes perfected…the perfect past for one as important and beloved of God as you.

The revelation from God that you have sinned is the point at which you start to see your past become your great friend.  The Bible makes it clear what you must do about your past.  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) When you turn from your sin and face God squarely, which is what “repent” means, a miracle happens.  The Holy Spirit comes upon you, and you are not the same person you were before.  Christ enters you and you begin to work in His power and you think with His mind working by means of your mind and you love through Christ and bless through Christ and help through Christ and encourage through Christ and heal through Christ and pray through Christ.  Everything changes when you turn from your sin and face God.  Your mind does not think with a limp and you do not act lamely but capably, effectively as Jesus Christ lives through all you do.  Repent, for you as a Christian, does not mean a groveling, despair over your past; it is a turning to God that Christ may live thoroughly through you. Our road map through our past into our future is Galatians 2: 20.  I have been crucified with Christ.  That is your past.  And I no longer live but Christ lives in me.  That is what you are now. And the life I live in the body I live by faith in the Son of God who loved me and gave Himself for me.  That is your past combined with who you are now determining what you will be from this point forward.  Take a moment to remember some things that you have had happen in your past…good or bad that have shaped you and influenced you now.  Fling those memories of what happened into the crucified body of Christ and miraculously, perfectly, God will transform them and they will be…each one of them, cause for you to be happy.  They are and forever will be your friend and your help as you move forward in Christ.

Heed the Call

The moment you think you have heard from God, act upon it decidedly.  You may be mistaken but the Lord will honor your faith and make even your error work for good.  Our problem generally is not our false interpretation of God's directive but rather our rebellious waffling on the point of action.  We see everything else so clearly...the troubles we face, the insults we endure, the lost opportunity and the baseness of co-workers but do we see the way we react to the Word God gives us?  Do we notice how faithfully He guides us or are we blindly moving forward without a care?  The Lord will show you the way but only as you adapt to His guidance will you see more.  If you haven't heard from the Lord, then return to the last place you strayed from His prod and start over there.  Do the thing He told you to do and renew your commitment to follow God wholeheartedly.  Everything went haywire for Abraham the minute he gave in to Sarah's demand that he produce a child through Hagar her slave.  The harshness of the demand that Abraham send off Hagar and his son Ishmael was the correction Abraham had to make to be certain the Lord was his one and only God.  Is it stunning that Abraham had to act upon Sarah's childish demand for Abraham to get rid of Hagar and Ishmael if he was to get back to where God wanted him before he submitted to her whim the first time?  Give in once to the temptation to follow along a line other than the clear one God has given you and the correction may be brutally painful and seem absurdly unfair...and yet it must be done.  In faith we stay on the narrow path God lays out for us and in faith we return to it when we grasp the immensity of our deviation from it.  Once we have accepted the correction and done so decidedly, the way of God becomes clear and bright.  Never be afraid to follow God wholly; be scared to death though of disregarding His certain command.  You may be kept from disaster by God's grace but there will be a cost in the end, one that did not have to be before you strayed.

The matter distressed Abraham greatly because it concerned his son.  But God said to him, "Do not be so distressed…"  Genesis 21: 11,12a NIV

The Bloody Coup

Until we see the fullness of our depravity, taste  the sludge spewing out from the depths of our heart, we will not grasp the enormity of risk Jesus took to save us.  The humiliation we feel at the sight of our temper spewing poisonous wrath upon some stunned family member or careless co-worker is the edge at which we can get at the real crisis we face.  When a well-shrouded lust takes control of our moral piety, we are at the precipice of the most critical discovery.     We are filthy and corrupt at the core and it is needless trying to make something of our selves.  Our critical need is not self-assessment and adjustment; it is the rush of life Jesus gives us at the Cross.  We are not fixable; but we are destructible.  The sooner we see our true condition, the quicker we will be able to turn away from bandages when we need resurrection.  Jesus did not come to fix us but rather to raise us from the dead.   We are irretrievably ruined by sin and that becomes obvious when we blow up at our four year-old for smearing lipstick on her face just as we are about to leave for the wedding.    The entire town of Sodom may have been self-righteously unaware of the filth it was gathering but Lot knew what was there and although he tried his best to ignore the elephant in the room, he at the point of destruction had to face it squarely.    You are not fixable, but you are redeemable.  The difference in the two is as wide as the grave.  Only the life of Christ can remake the cities leveled in your heart by sin.  Only He can give you life that will turn sinless as He works all through you.  You will never be able to live with the filth inside you; at least not like the lovely woman going into Victoria's Secret hoping to lure her boss away from his wife.  You won't be able to make heads or tails of the tumult you know rages within you until you pursue Christ for your condition.  The woman who grasped after Jesus' garment to stem the flow of blood knew what the rest of the gawking crowd did not but you must decide is so as she did.  Jesus really is the only hope you have and you must choose  to reach after Him yourself and ignore the skeptics who blindly disregard how badly they are bleeding too.

For if, when we were God's enemies, we were reconciled to him through the death of his Son, how much more, having been reconciled, shall we be saved through his life!   Romans 5:10-11 NIV

No Doubt

How do you get to the point of "no doubts"?  Anyone who has ever tried to curse a fig tree to the withering point or attempted to move a mountain into the sea probably responds, "It is impossible!"  Yet Jesus insists it is not impossible and at several points He makes the same assertion.  With faith in God you can do certain acts that are "impossible".  If this is our benchmark where faith could and should be, then it seems a dereliction to not actively pursue it.  Nothing confounds the Christian quite as much as the powerless and fruitless praying he encounters.  But the height should not be determined by the depth and the child who gives up on trying to ride a bicycle because she fell is pushed on by the more experienced at failing father or sister.  Just because we fail at prayer does not mean it cannot be done.  It all has to do with faith in Christ and some attain faith easily and quickly and others by fits and starts.  It is grace that flashes your faith to life but obedience and persistence in prayer that stimulates it to burst into flame.  All at once you will be as stunned as the Disciples by some happy success in prayer but rather than following through with your new life with God you will be tempted to return to your old attachments that snared you before.  Put those crooked longings to death; attack them viciously.  Someone needs your new sensitivity to the Spirit's indwelling.  You are not a misfit in the kingdom; you have the tools needed to move among fig trees and mountains and entrenched demons with assertive sense.  Don't sit on your hands flabbergasted by your struggles at prayer.  Evaluate your praying by two criteria only.   Am I doing what God has told me to do in the Sermon on the Mount through Him (trusting Him in the hard parts of doing) ; am I persisting in prayer heartily enough that my faith in Christ has room to grow?

 "Have faith in God," Jesus answered.  "I tell you the truth, if anyone says to this mountain, 'Go, throw yourself into the sea,' and does not doubt in his heart but believes that what he says will happen, it will be done for him.  Mark 11:22-23 NIV

Life Now

We are not told in scripture to follow after a principle or value; rather we are directed to a person.  The Bible is not a book of philosophical ideas or even of precepts; it is a signpost that points toward One who saves.  Nothing is more fruitless than the flailing efforts at keeping any of the bits of the Sermon on the Mount and anyone who indicates otherwise is a liar.  Before you murder you have already murdered.  Before you have committed adultery, you have already committed adultery.  Before you have stolen, you have already stolen.  It is all there at the front end of the action...the deed is in your head and you can't get at that with determination.  Nothing establishes your need for One Person more than the corruption of your life before you even act.  You know you have wanted something not yours simply because someone else has it.  You know you have despised someone without saying a word to anyone about it.  You know  you had your way with someone and never even touched that partner.  It is all there for you, the complete inability to live a holy and righteous life because if the truth be known, you don't want to live it.  But within some, and that number may be smaller than we think, there is a great longing to be all out for God, to be clean and pure no matter what.  It is then that the dawn breaks and you see the most important part...you need the Savior.   You don't need a Savior to keep you out of hell, you need a Savior to get you out of hell.  Life and death are not that far apart, they are the space between turning to Jesus Christ and not.  The lust that burns within you in a flash and the bitter hatred that flares in an instant have their kindling in the heart that is not depending upon Christ for all joy and peace.  Eternal life weaves its way through you in a twisted and convoluted way until you look to Jesus Christ to redeem each and every thought you have and then it grows straighter and more sure.  And soon enough one day you will only look to Jesus Christ and your victory will be proven fully in the shadowless realm of God's unending Presence.   The Christ life in not a concept but a reality for the one who turns to the Lord to save her from her thoughts and not just her public actions.  The more of Christ we take within us, the more we live and live and live. 

Now this is eternal life: that they may know you, the only true God, and Jesus Christ, whom you have sent.  John 17:3 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

Reshaped by God

Nothing quite upsets the  Christian like the realization that she is not her own.  The mental assent of it is comfortable and in ways pleasing but the working out of it is discombobulating.  As soon as you give Christ your life it is His and He may not work it out the way you want it.  Like a ball of clay in the hands of a master, you will be reshaped until the Lord is satisfied; not until you are fine with how things are.  Esau was "hated" by God not because he was such a foul person but because he never had God in mind as he went about his business.  He lived for his own today and not any further.  Jacob in his complicated passion, wanted all God had and more.  Jacob could work for Esau if he might have the birthright and lose his father's affection if he could get the blessing. In the perversity of his scheming, always Jacob had at the front the vastness of God and the Lord blessed Him in his madness.  Before we see something in God and Jacob that was never there; it must be reminded that Jacob was clay and the reshaping of him took a lifetime.  While Abraham had the faith to give at God's command his son Isaac freely, the Lord stripped Jacob without warning of each delight he treasured.  First it was his mother, then his sweetheart Rachel and finally his beloved son Joseph.  At each point Jacob could do nothing to take back the lamb on the altar.  His hands were tied and he was left to wait out the terrible reworking of his heart until God was finished with him on it.  Jacob was not his own and this became dreadfully clear to him with each lamb God took from his grip.  You can wallow in self pity over the shape God is pounding into you or you can be satisfied with the mercy God has to not leave you as an Esau "hated" but reworked like Jacob "loved".

...so the potter formed it into another pot, shaping it as seemed best to him.   Jeremiah 18:4 NIV

Nothing Lost, Nothing Gained

The sinfulness of man is not a physical inheritance...in other words the newborn baby is not already built with sin in him.  But sin all about makes him inherit a nature plagued by sin.  We are not launched into this world sin ruined but we are brought into it sin surrounded.  As soon as we begin making our way about morally we give temptation its way and then we are cooked.  Sin has us internally and externally.   Only Jesus resisted sin fully from the moment he first began to act morally.  At no point did He let temptation hold sway over a decision of His.  The average person gives so little thought to sin, let alone temptation that he hardly notices the evil he lets wreck him.  The cross of Christ is more than just a cleanser of sin, it is a redeemer of the sinner.  By faith in the Cross of Christ, we gain the nature of God living throughout us.  We no longer are the slave of sin but the destroyer of both temptation and sin.  We are not weak little children just trying to get by spiritually, we are wunderkind, powerful conquerors who have the capacity to live pure and holy lives.  The question is not will we but when will we let the might of Christ have full sway in the parts of our day.  We don't have to be a slave of lust or anger or greed or deceit or pride; we are because God dwells in us the overcomer in each place we find ourselves.  We cannot choose the temptation but we can submit ourselves to the might of Christ  and be done with that sin at that moment.  Nothing good comes of relying upon yourself...it always turns bitter for you...but when you turn to God to take back your moral place and live again in holiness, the joy of your redeemer will swell within you and you will feel the very goodness of Christ sweeping over you.    The heart has been raped and scourged and pummeled by sin but in Christ you can determine "not this time" because the Holy Spirit will as you turn to Him protect you from that tormenting temptation.  We laugh at sin and make light of it at the bar or at the club or in the gym or as our employer begins to manhandle us but it is even disguised, the beast that takes you apart.  Confess your sins rather than  belittle their magnitude.  God will forgive them immediately and scrub you clean of their poisons.  Just don't pretend they aren't there or don't matter.

"Why are you sleeping?" he asked them. "Get up and pray so that you will not fall into temptation."  Luke 22:46 NIV

Tyranny of Doing

When Moses went up Mt. Sinai to the top to meet with God and receive the rest of the law, he firmly ordered Aaron and the other older leaders to wait on the mountain for him to return.  For some reason, they didn't; they went back to the camp to do whatever they thought was more necessary.  One has to wonder if the entire business of the golden calf would have been avoided if Aaron had simply stayed at his post rather than find something "better" to do down below.  There is a time to go down to the camp but also a time to wait for the clear directive of God.   Few things chaff us as severely as the wait God institutes.  We develop a fine constellation of ideas during the wait and are hell-bent on trying them out before the Lord has given us His "go".  We constantly are confusing the going and waiting; all the time wrecking this and that because we are not patient enough to get to know God's voice and faithful enough to heed His call.  We are like little children who must try everything when the great Counselor is patiently waiting for us to turn into Him for Divine Direction.  Not every jar contains arsenic but some do and our Lord is good enough to tell us in advance how to stay away from it.   Not every opportunity is good; some will take us far from the perfect peace God has prepared for us and those we love.  You certainly can do something but it may be the worst of your possible options and reward you with a lifetime of regret.  Perhaps we could wait upon the Lord just this one time; take time to let Him work Himself into us so that we can get it right when He finally gives us something to do.  Has anything been quite so disastrous as the obeisance we give to the adage of striking while the iron is hot?  Can we not pause even for an instant to be with God in whatever matter is before us?  Do we always have to do?

He (Moses) said to the elders, "Wait here…"   Exodus 24:14 NIV

Timed Responses

No part of any day is as big as the present moment.  Unlike the Lord who can live within each moment equally, we can only live perfectly within the present time, the past is a shadow, the future a misty guess.  Faith is never worked out of either the past or the future but just now.  How do fear and bitterness and discouragement and consternations arise...they filter out of the mind going back or moving ahead.  It is within this time only that you can see clearly the loving care of Christ poured out  upon all you hold dear because it is now that you assess through the eyes of faith and see the hand of God working here and there.  Both the past and the future are easily smeared by the wasting of Satan; God will keep your present pristine as you look to Him  and work through Him. You have the thousand regrets of the past and the ten thousand dreams and nightmares of the future but the present is the one spot where you can see everything as it is and give up everything haunting and grasping and hold only to the love of Christ working through you.  Ask, seek and knock are of neither the past nor the future but contained just within the present and it is in the present that you will have joy and peace.  Look to the Lord with the gaze of a sailor scanning the horizon for any sign of land.  You have waited a long time for some things, dread the coming of others.  Dreary memories dismay you, past achievements bind you.  It is in this place and time that the Lord will make you totally free to have joy and contentment.  Go hopefully and serenely to the Lord now and give this and that to Him as it comes before you.  Ask.  Seek. Knock.  That is the stuff you are to be about now.  Ask.  Seek.   Knock.  The Christian is perfectly within Gods will the moment He knocks for God to open,  seeks the Lord to be there,  asks His Savior to save him.   Give way to fear, despair, anger or frustration and you have left the moment and hidden yourself in either the past or the future.    When you realize you are stuck in that closet, get out as soon as you can and in a flash, the Lord will make your day clear and light.

Everyone was amazed and gave praise to God. They were filled with awe and said, "We have seen remarkable things today."   Luke 5:26 NIV

Forgetting Where We Are

We have bought into the proposition that everything is natural and random, originating in the mindlessness of circumstance.  Even as far back as the exodus out of Egypt the presence and activity of God was lost on the exiting Israelites.  When Pharaoh and his army of charioteers barreled down upon the encamped Israelites, the half-crazed Hebrews lost their minds over the perceived danger they faced.  It was as if they had forgotten altogether the plagues upon the livestock and the deadly hailstorm and the deaths of the firstborn; all of which did not touch them but ripped into the Egyptians.  If the Israelites could be oblivious to the hand of God back then given their experience with His work, it is not unreasonable that this same sociological circumstance would be present today.  The mob reacts to every bit and parcel of circumstance as bad luck, good fortune or the natural outcome of hard work and ingenuity.  The Holy Spirit alone brings to light the absolute and constant interplay of God within our world.  If Israel could stare at the photograph of God's intervention and see nothing, how likely is it that we will see it.  We must rely upon Holy Spirit to part the curtain as it were and make it so we  recognize all the ways our Lord is working in and among us.  Only then can we rest peacefully as we do our work and make our plans and evaluate our situation.  Nothing frustrates our joy more than the blackened goggles we stretch across our eyes given us by Satan to block out our discernment of what is really happening.  Satan cannot inhibit our view of God; he can only encourage us to block Him out of our sight.  You must choose to see God right there with you when you drop the dinner on the floor or your stocks tumble off the table.  You can see Him if you will look with Holy Spirit fixing your mind on what it should be noticing.  The worst of your day is never lost in circumstance...it is just as surrounded by angels as the shepherds who watched their sheep at night.  At no point have you been overtaken by your troubles and hardships...you are in just as good a place as Israel standing before the Red Sea.

"...It would have been better for us to serve the Egyptians than to die in the desert!"   Exodus 14:12NIV

The Sin Factor

The miracle of the Cross is not sublime at all!  There is a mistaken teaching that has been passed around for hundreds of years that when Jesus Christ was crucified, he magically erased our sins, blotted them out as it were like divine  suds.  That is not the case at all.  He bore our sins; took them into His own body and they putrefied within Him, sucked the life out of Him, and each one added to His misery.  Why is the Church so content to slough off sin as a relic of our past rather than see it as the great monstrosity of our present.  Each sin we commit today adds to the shame and horror of the crucifixion Jesus endured two thousand years ago.  Only God could do this; bear sins committed tomorrow and not just the ones of yesterday.  As we sin and sin unthinkingly, we strike Jesus ourselves with the whip, drive the stake deeper in though his feet, take the rod and break it more ferociously upon his back and sides.  The sins of today are not nothing; they pry out of Christ's body more blood and break His heart even worse.  We may be free of real guilt but that does not mean Christ is.  He bears them all, the sins of yesterday as well as the ones of today and at some point, won't we just stop it?  Won't we just fiercely reject the notion that we can sin freely and easily and it doesn't matter?  John the Apostle says we don't have to keep sinning willy-nilly; we can put an end to it...not because we are getting better at righteousness but because the Holy Spirit lives in us and empowers us and moans too with the agony we cause Jesus every time we throw our fist up to the Heavens and tell the Lord we will do as we wish.  There is no greater evil in this universe than our own sinning...it is the root of every terrible thing we find all about us.  Certainly your "little sin"  did not tear the earth enough to cause the earthquake out in China but it was sin that diseased the universe and continues to scourge earth and sky.  We are such fundamentalists when it comes to getting our garbage sorted among the various recycling options but do we give the same care to the very sin that brought this mess upon us?  We do not have a population crisis in our world, we have a sin crisis and the multiplication of sin is what is "doing us in".    Pray with great emotion and bitter pain that God would keep you from temptation.  The Christian who truly understands sin will begin to loath every point at which sin enters through him...not because of the cost he pays but due to the cost Christ pays and that hurts dearly.

God made him who had no sin to be sin for us, so that in him we might become the righteousness of God. 2 Corinthians 5:21 NIV

Fretting For What?

It is never the crisis that unsettles us but rather the deviation away from Christ.  We are so infatuated by how things will turn that we forget just how perfectly Christ is fitting Himself into us.  When the Lord reminded us not to worry about what we would eat or wear, do we think that was all there was to His point?  Jesus was not unsettled by criticism or temptation, by poverty or that frustrating co-worker.  He simply was not rattled and that is what God wants for us too and has for us.  This is possible not because we become skilled at scaling back our responsibilities or cutting out negative relationships; this is our personality in Christ.  The Lord does not want us to imitate Jesus but rather for Him to live in us.  As we give sway to Christ at every instance, we find the mind and emotions of God coming out of us in all sorts of exciting and surprising ways.  God did not die for us to just take away our punishment for sin; He died that we might have life and have it more abundantly.  That life is not a life of fretting, stewing or striving.  The life God died to give us is one with the Lord Jesus Christ living fully through us.  Each turn we take is an opportunity for the wisdom and love of Christ to manifest itself in what we do and how we think about all we encounter.  Lust, selfishness and pride are the archaic remnants of a dying breed.  The new man is being established as us: Christ joined to me, Christ joined to you in a dynamic synthesis that will be perfect.  As you read the Bible, don't look for ways to make something of your life; look for Christ to live fully and happily in and through you as He works out your day moment by moment.

For you died, and your life is now hidden with Christ in God.  Colossians 3:3 NIV

Absolute Focus

The brevity of a day is just the space God needs to make a planet spin, a sun explode and a soul find refuge.  Perhaps the great oddity of our Lord is that he cares about a moment in time.  Eternal and without end or beginning and yet He contemplates the second and each second with the same attention.  For us as we grow older, the days and years become a wash; a repetitive splash of wave after wave.  But God takes the moments seriously, both past and coming with  equal affection and consideration.  The instant you find your doll in the back of the car and exult, the Lord celebrates mightily with you too.  And when your baby is found dead in your womb, the Lord weeps then just as mournfully as if He had only lived that day and seen just that one sorrow.  The Lord God lives out with you the surprising joys and the devastating losses at the time it happens and He is not looking forward to the end of the saga or backwards to before it began.  He is looking with you at the same thing you are and He sees it with clarity and attention.  Your fever burns now and God is with you in it fully engaged and your all night study session is not lost on Him either even as you fight to stay awake.  You slice your finger and God flinches with you; take your fury out on your son and he weeps in the night too.  Argue with your wife and the Lord is centering in on every part of the fight, take your kids to the zoo and He is having the time of His life with you there.  It is nothing for the Lord to be riveted by what you do and say and hear and think, but it is not inconsequential to Him either.  He bores in on your life as if it were the only one contained within the universe and does not turn His back upon it even for an instant.  You may disregard the depth of your existence but God has never done so.  It is a tangle of distracted complexity to you but simple and all consuming to Him.  The Lord sees you!

O Lord, you have searched me and you know me.  You know when I sit and when I rise...  Psalm 139:1-2 NIV

How Do You Assess Your Day?

If we give in to the corrosive habit of whining, the very point for which we are made is lost.  The image of God is not latent;  in Christ it is front and center.  From every pore seeps Christ and His nature and as you live out the day God has given you, something miraculous happens; God in flesh is realized, or better, discovered.  You are where you are because God has placed you there with no other task than for Jesus Christ to live through you and flow out from you.  You can snap at  your husband or complain about your boss, gripe about your friend or grit your teeth over your salary but what you have really done is dam off the spill of grace from your response line.  What could have been a sparkling ray of light became a shadow and God was kept at bay by your refusal to be crucified with Christ right then.  The greatest saint is not the one drawing the biggest crowd, it is the one so hidden by Christ that all that is seen is God head to toe.  The artistry of Jesus is blighted the moment we cannot see God in our plight and that critical brushstroke is never reworked.  The Lord won't impose His will upon you for then all that will be manifested is the forgery, a charlatan's trickery.   It is you who must choose to believe the Lord has done good with you now and then and only then Christ will spring forth from you like the brightest dawn.  The most important work you have is to believe God is in each spot in your life and trust His judgment and care for you as you go about your business.  Satan is not your greatest foe; your unbelief is and that must be squeezed out of you daily as you look for God at every corner and turn and trust Him to make all things good that come your way.

...but the Lord rises upon you and his glory appears over you. Nations will come to your light, and kings to the brightness of your dawn.  Isaiah 60:2-3 NIV

Life Upside Down

If there is one thing we are never quite ready to do, it is laying down our lives  for anyone we haven't got the utmost respect and affection.  Give that person a nasty side, a ridiculous bit of arrogance, a slanderous disdain for anyone or anything we like and all bets are off.  The deal is done and whatever Christ may have to say about the romance of love, we see right through it.  We are better than that.  We have the sophistication of our pride to barricade us from laying down our lives for such frivolous purposes.  Jesus told us to lay down our lives for our friends in the same way He did and that is where this spins on the dime.  He put His life on the ground of the cross for the snarling world that despised Him and that is the very point at which His children do so also.  We have mistaken nearly altogether what it means to lay down the life.  It is not dying for some cause ; it is letting ourselves go that the Holy Spirit might work Himself through us.  It is a surrender at the moment of discernment that God wants to do something through me just now: help a rude customer, defend a selfish co-worker, encourage a lazy friend, pick up an insolent child, give way to a pretentious prig.  We have no way of knowing what God is going to do with us as we lay down our lives but we can be certain of this.  He must do something He insists matters and do it right then.  An eternal array of circumstances and shifts are about to begin as we lay down our lives and to stop them all because we insist on our right to do as we wish is profound arrogance.  A serial killer can give up his life for a philandering prostitute; only one with the Spirit of God working through him or her will lay down  life at the moment of the Holy prompt, an unwelcome prompt perhaps but a certain prompt.   The opportunity to be the pipeline through which God's work in humanity flows is most astounding if you think about it.  You, dirty and contentious as you are with God are His chosen beloved partner in the transformation of a world all about you.

 Greater love has no one than this, that he lay down his life for his friends. You are my friends if you do what I command.   John 15:13-14 NIV

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

Personhood

An individual has no accountability to anyone.  He does as he pleases when he wants.  The person has merged with the personhood of God and lives within the personality of God.  There is no other way to know God than to live within Him; for His nature to come into your nature and transform yours.  Otherwise you merely know about God as rumors and individualized ideas.  We are more likely to fight for our individualization than give way to the transformation of Christ in us.  Sarah could never have gone with Abraham up the mountain to take her son Isaac onto the altar.  She had not yet shown any sign that God's will was becoming hers.  She was happy to receive His gift but not so prepared to take His nature.  We sigh at the prospect of being transformed by the Spirit of God not because we don't like the idea of it but because we dread the actuality of it.  In real life as you stand before the stove and while you pull out your notes to study or as you meet with your supervisor, the Spirit of God will rise up and make His will certain to you and it is then that you decide for your individuality or your personality.  There is no room for God in your individuality but all the space you need in your personality.  Knowing God comes the moment you bend your will into God's and give Him full sway over your circumstance at the moment.  Something will need to be placed on the altar...a desire, a grudge, a discontentment, an achievement, a visionary attainment...but it must be given up on the spot or you will stumble off on your own and gain nothing but the delusion of self-hood.  Hell is not the cadre of the like-minded; it is the stuffing together of individuals who can never be together at any level any longer.  Both Abraham and Isaac found at the same moment their union with God.  Just imagine the love that swept over them as they made their way back home together.  An individual, caught up in what he will and will not do can never know this wild and consumptive love; he is left only to talk about it. 
I consider everything a loss compared to the surpassing greatness of knowing Christ Jesus my Lord, for whose sake I have lost all things.  Philippians 3:8 NIV

The Hidden Life

One of the most elegant descriptions of how God wants his people to be is the little aside found in John telling us of the boy who gave his bread and fish to the disciples to do with as they wished.  Matthew, Mark and Luke don't even mention him; he was so forgotten to them yet John's Gospel proves his hidden act of faith was not lost on the Holy Spirit.  Where we stumble badly is the thought that the flash and bangles of Christianity is what God really likes.  We turn the page altogether and hardly give it a glance where Christ said to make no show of your giving or praying.  If this is so for the person, why would it not be also for the church?  We are to hide ourselves in Christ and let God lift us up at the proper time.  Nothing insults the Spirit more than the propagandist view of Christian living.  We are most bound up in our Lord and His life when in Christ we quietly wash the dishes and unobtrusively ignore the rough edge of a grumpy neighbor.   God has not called us to make something of ourselves; He has taken us under His wing so that everywhere we go, Jesus is noticed.  We have a task before us, to become so acquainted with Christ working all about us that we hardly notice what we are doing.

For you died, and your life is now hidden with Christ in God. Colossians 3:3 NIV

Personal or Individual

An individual has no accountability to anyone.  He does as he pleases when he wants.  The person has merged with the personhood of God and lives within the personality of God.  There is no other way to know God than to live within Him; for His nature to come into your nature and transform yours.  Otherwise you merely know about God as rumors and individualized ideas.  We are more likely to fight for our individualization than give way to the transformation of Christ in us.  Sarah could never have gone with Abraham up the mountain to take her son Isaac onto the altar.  She had not yet shown any sign that God's will was becoming hers.  She was happy to receive His gift but not so prepared to take His nature.  We sigh at the prospect of being transformed by the Spirit of God not because we don't like the idea of it but because we dread the actuality of it.  In real life as you stand before the stove and while you pull out your notes to study or as you meet with your supervisor, the Spirit of God will rise up and make His will certain to you and it is then that you decide for your individuality or your personality.  There is no room for God in your individuality but all the space you need in your personality.  Knowing God comes the moment you bend your will into God's and give Him full sway over your circumstance at the moment.  Something will need to be placed on the altar...a desire, a grudge, a discontentment, an achievement, a visionary attainment...but it must be given up on the spot or you will stumble off on your own and gain nothing but the delusion of self-hood.  Hell is not the cadre of the like-minded; it is the stuffing together of individuals who can never be together at any level any longer.  Both Abraham and Isaac found at the same moment their union with God.  Just imagine the love that swept over them as they made their way back home together.  An individual, caught up in what he will and will not do can never know this wild and consumptive love; he is left only to talk about it. 
I consider everything a loss compared to the surpassing greatness of knowing Christ Jesus my Lord, for whose sake I have lost all things.  Philippians 3:8 NIV

Blindsided by Grace

We shuffle back and forth between believing God, questioning His goodness and forgetting His existence.  There is something God wants to do with you but it requires your perfect acceptance of His love for you in a matter and the moment you try to fix things yourself without Him working through you, the work crumbles.  Christ cannot and will not fill you if you slight God's love by complaining about your circumstance or by questioning His goodness.  Job was blindsided by the miracle of grace being worked out in Him and the Lord could not finish His work until Job threw up His hands in faith and accepted his place as creature rather than creator.  Job's friends proved to be of no help to him in this as they kept distracting him from the real development.  They pushed the discussion outside the realm of actuality by questioning Job's morality and integrity when those parts of him were never the issue.  Grace doesn't contend at the point of one's personal goodness  but rather at the spot of the Lord Himself working His own character into you.  Christ did not suffer the cross so that you could make a go at getting yourself straight or gaining some flury of accomplished gilding but rather to completely reconfigure your personality into the dynamic of God worked thoroughly through you.  Like yeast in dough, Christ risen in your heart will recreate all the promise he planted in you at the beginning through the difficulties and trials and mundane tasks of your everyday activities.  Be careless about what you're making of yourself but obsessed by the hand of God everywhere around you.

But he said to me, "My grace is sufficient for you, for my power is made perfect in weakness." 2 Corinthians 12:9 NIV

I Know What I Am Doing

How often do we trick ourselves into thinking we've got it but those around us don't.  Far too soon in our Christian journey we come up against the oldest of Satan's tricks; the implication that we know what we are doing.  Eve convinced Adam that she knew what she was doing and Peter tried to convince Jesus too that he had the right idea when he lost his mind over three shelters.  It is a fallacy to believe that we can make it on our own just this one time because we have figured out other things so well.  What do we make of the Cross then?  Did Jesus endure it because we were only a few marks off in our thinking or because we were thoroughly wrecked by sin?  The notion that once we become Christian we somehow need Jesus a bit less if we play it sharp is an insult to the blood He poured out upon the ground of our lostness.  We need Christ at every moment of every day and the Holy Spirit must be heeded far more than ever now.    You do not need to read the Bible less as you move along because you have gotten familiar with it;  you need to read the Bible with greater fervor than ever because you should realize even more just how wicked you really are without the Word of God filling you head to toe.  Your point of comparison is not some poor soul next to you whom you barely know; it is the filth of the tar pit that stands within you waiting to suck you in at just one bumbling stumble over a cock-sure determination.  The love and mercy of Christ is not poured out for your independent strut but to galvanize your total  dependence upon God to take you through each day.
You save the humble but bring low those whose eyes are haughty. Psalm 18:27 NIV

Distancing Yourself From Sodom

Don't think it is so odd that Lot hesitated before leaving

Sodom.  It is the most human of all tendencies; to flinch at the moment God starts to move in a life.  He reveals a sin, directs a move, makes a determination and we pause in our acceptance of it.  The nature of man must be conquered in this spot; our wincing doubt.  Nothing gets done in us without faith in God.  We can believe a billion things about ourselves and others but until we have grown to trust God in the smallest part, we have gotten nowhere.  Abraham believed God which is why he never had a Sodom to abandon.  He waited for the Lord to guide him where to go and believed God would.  There is nothing complex about living in Christ.  Faith in Him is at the heart of the relationship...not personal holiness, not sacrificial giving, not even generous love and affection.  Everything else comes around as we take faith in God at the tiniest point and move forward from there.  Faith the size of a mustard seed moves mountains!  Imagine what might come of faith a bit larger than that?  Christ cannot be followed until He is trusted.

In you our fathers put their trust; they trusted and you delivered them. Psalm 22:4 NIV

Pushing Forward

Why do we think we have developed a heightened level of spirituality when we give up on praying and stifle our love of Christ in a muffling "your will be done"?  Nothing so marks the carnal mind like the indifference to praying and "keeping on" praying.  It is passive aggressive bitterness that stops at the point of impassioned interceding for all the needs that come to our mind.  The great purpose of intercessory prayer is simple; to bring each and every one of those things that disturb us to the mind of Christ and there with the Holy Spirit working in our heart  learn to love God with the type of love Mary had not many minutes after she  wondered aloud why Jesus had waited too long to save Lazarus.  The pagan determination to pray for the dead is not so far off the mark as we think.  In Christ, who is the Alpha and Omega all at once, who is to say our praying cannot reach back before us and alter even what has happened in the past.  Where is the justification for giving up on everything that seems hopeless to us if God can pull the dead from the grave on the last day?  The praying of one believing Christian can change the course of events miraculously and in stunning fashion, not because she is worthy of it but because the love of God is poured out in the interceding and that love is a healing fire.  Nothing in the spiritual realm is quite so intoxicating as the determination to quit on a matter because it seems hopeless.  It is the morphine of Satan, this resolve to let go of the thing when the Holy Spirit is pressing us forward in prayer.  Who among us has not quit on a matter just as arrogantly as the mourners who laughed when Jesus informed them that the little girl was not dead but merely sleeping?  The opportunity to pray at any given moment for each part of a day is a privilege won for us at the Cross and we should not quit on it so carelessly.  

Therefore I tell you, whatever you ask for in prayer, believe that you have received it, and it will be yours. Mark 11:24 NIV

Faith Claims

Be careful about declaring what God will do before He says it Himself.  The pretentious trend in Christian circles of deciding what God must do has wrecked the faith of too many childish believers.  The assumption that if God loves me he will do this or that is a psychological landmine.  God will do what He actually says He will do.  When He told Sarah in her old age that He would give her a child He did.  When He told Jehoshaphat that He would give Judah a resounding victory over the Moabites and Amonites, He did.  When He told Moses that He would give Israel freedom from Egyptian rule, He did.  He did not say He would give James a long life and He did not tell Peter He would keep him from a painful end.  What if James claimed a long life for himself and Peter knew his ministry would not close out on a cross?  Would they not have sounded like so many who post a claim and then assume the claim is vouched for by God with Him agreeing to the claim?  It is blasphemy to speak for God when He has said nothing about a matter.  Take your troubles and painful trials to the Lord and leave them with Him.  Faith is worked out in us not by assuming something will happen or won't but when we confidently trust the Lord to make everything in time work out for our good and for the good of those we love.  Habakkuk waited on the ramparts not because he demanded everything go well with Jerusalem but because He knew an eternal Kingdom was being established and he would be a part...the Lord had said this was so.  He never named the miracle and then like a puffed out child waited for it to happen.  His hope was in God alone, not in an outcome He demanded.  
But the just shall live by his faith...  Habakkuk 2:4 NIV

Wanting More

The difference between wanting and demanding is quite clear when you are dealing with your children but seems nebulous when it is found in your praying.  How can you be certain you have not run off the tracks as you make your way through your requests?  Hezekiah saw nothing wrong with begging God for added years when told he was about to die and Hannah is renowned for her spiritual fortitude in frantically crying out to God for a baby.  How can we know a desire is godly and not just a self-centered lust?  Hezekiah took his added fifteen years and fathered a son who became the most wicked of all the kings of Judah and Hannah took her boy Samuel and turned him back over to God to raise and mold into arguably the greatest of all priests not named Jesus.  We can pray for anything and feel quite justified in our praying.  After all, Christ Himself told us to ask and keep on asking.  God may grant our demands just as freely as our wants but as Israel regretted the longing she had for a king, we too may wish we never got what our fevered prayers demanded.  Our drive must always move in this one direction, that we become so close to God that our wants become His.  Then what we ask for in prayer will truly bless all it touches. Give the Holy Spirit space to reshape your wants into God given desires.

People who want to get rich fall into temptation and a trap...  1 Timothy 6:9 NIV

Self-Determinism In The Dock

Is there not a point at which we must stop making excuses for ignoring God and no longer blame the other person for our behavior?  When Sarah lashed out at her husband Abraham for merely doing what she told him to do, God took the matter out of her hands and put things squarely in Abraham's grip.  The son Ishmael was conceived because Sarah demanded it; then when he was there Sarah hated Abraham for the part he played in the boy's presence.  Why is it that God spoke directly to Abraham and bypassed Sarah altogether in the sacrifice of Isaac?  Why did Abraham not take Sarah with him on the terrible duty up the mountain?  Perhaps it is because Sarah lost her way in not accepting the part she played in the denial of the Lord's providential leadership with regard to the building of her family?  In the end it was Abraham that had to get the job done, who had to wield the knife and raise it in faith.  One might wonder which was the worst, bringing the boy or having to watch him leave.  Yet in the end, each of them, at the previous point of rebellion, had to believe God all the way out to where self-ambition faded into complete faith in God and His way.  Sarah had to trust in Abraham to hear from God clearly and Abraham had to trust what he heard from the Lord and not slide out from under it.  No more passing the buck, no more waffling when God spoke.  It is allegiance to God only that we all must eventually determine for ourselves.         Then Sarai said to Abram, "You are responsible for the wrong I am suffering, I put my servant in your arms, and now that she knows she is pregnant, she despises me.  May the Lord judge between you and me."  Genesis 16: 5

Untested Gifts

Be careful of the gift that seems so timely and needed.  Hagar probably was given to Sarai during her sojourn in Egypt and that gift became a terrible snare for Sarai and Abram.  Hagar eventually was the out for each of them as they frantically searched for a way to make God's promise of a child come true.  Rather than trusting solidly in the Lord Himself, they took the gift of Pharaoh as the solution to the difficulty they faced.  Later Abram proved his growing awareness that not every gift should be accepted willy-nilly by rejecting the offer of wealth from the king of Sodom.  But in Egypt, with his mind clouded by the affluence surrounding him, Abram saw nothing wrong with gathering everything offered him there including the lovely maiden Hagar.  It can seem like such a minor issue, taking this, accepting that and yet there may never have been a more haunting image for Abram all his days than the moment he turned his back on Sarai (albeit at her demand) and fathered the son Ishmael with Hagar.  We must be suspicious of what we mark as a blessing and what we decide is a curse.  The wounds of God are sweeter and more lovely than the poisoned presents of Satan and it takes discernment to know what you have in your hand at any given moment. A job offer, an open door, an opportunity for change may not come from who you think.  Be careful about the gifts you accept and the difficulties you reject.     Do not be afraid, Abram.  I am your shield, your very great reward.  Genesis 15: 1 NIV

Discrimination

We have lost the service of the word discrimination because of the evil Satan has spawned from it.  The Christian is to discriminate and do so constantly.  The task of recognizing the difference between good and best is a flip of the coin for most.  But the Holy Spirit is our guardian against indiscriminate wandering and short-sighted living.  We can make the right decision every time if we would just pause long enough to let the Holy Spirit direct our way.  The impatience of our age has wrecked far too many of us.  The Lord has promised to guide our steps even in something so seemingly insignificant as what to prepare for dinner or the length of time we should give a conversation.   Determine today to heed the guidance the Lord wants to give you and let Him make the most of each of your opportunities and crucial split-second reactions to what seems in your unknowing trivial and inconsequential.  For this God is our God for ever and ever; he will be our guide even to the end. Psalm 48:14 NIV 

The Egyptian Temptation

When Abraham brought his little family down to Egypt along with all his slaves and employees, he did far more than put them all at risk, he cut at the tight cord of faith each of them had.  The last word the Lord gave Abraham before the famine was that the land where he was living was his land and the land of his progeny.  Nothing in the promise included a disclaimer about moving away if things got rough.  The test of faith is aimed at our spot of confidence, not our weak point.  The clear word of God became murky for Abraham when the shortage of food struck him personally.  And yet courage and trust were the defining character traits of Abraham up to this moment.  The confidence Abraham had in his strategic response to the famine made him a prime target for Satan and as soon as he crossed the line between faith in God and self-assurance, he found out just how wickedly cunning Satan can be.  The son Isaac was to be Abraham's, not Pharaoh's and if it weren't for the rough intervention of God, Abraham might have lost his wife to the King of Egypt along with the lineage leading to Christ.  Doubt is contagious and Isaac later made the same terrible error a hundred years later.   Beware of your own insight into the problem you face.  It could shatter many years of faith not just for you but also those who look to you for direction.  Go to the Holy Spirit in every instance and you will find yourself secure within the hand of God.     Now there was a famine in the land, and Abram went down to Egypt to live there for a while because the famine was severe. Genesis 12:10-11 NIV

The New Year Resolution...Biblical?

Try as you may, you will be hard-pressed to find a single man or woman of God in Scripture making New Year's Resolutions or goal setting.  They attempted the impossible but not as some long term plan.  Perhaps Solomon alone would be classified as a goal setter but this flowed more out of his love of the world order than any developed affinity for God.  Jesus had one goal in mind and it began before birth--go to the Cross and die there.  This is a far cry from the goals and resolutions we hear bandied about in Christian circles and meetings.  Ask a Christian worker or church attender what his or her goals may be and they will never sound like what Jesus settled upon as His clear direction.  If anything, the normal way of Christ was simple day-by-day dependence upon the Father to guide you in what He had where He was.  Jesus  stayed in a town until the Father directed Him away from it, healed those the Father brought Him and taught whoever He was given at the moment.  He didn't set goals for attendance at His Sermon on the Mount and made no resolution to quit drinking or cut down on His calories.  He remained so close to the Father that He just did as He was directed and trusted in the process of Life working within Him.  Nothing frustrates the will of God more than the determination of a Christian to accomplish his set goals without regard for the still small voice entering His world in real time.    Therefore do not worry about tomorrow, for tomorrow will worry about itself. Each day has enough trouble of its own. Matthew 6:34 NIV