What Really Is Before You

At some point you are going to be forced into the decision of your life, to fight against spiritual forces in high places or ignore them and go on as if they don't exist.  The Christian is never inept in this; unless of course he or she completely disregards Who lives within.  It is Christ in you that makes the difference in every temptation and trial you face.  You have the power to change the course of generations by giving Christ complete sway in your battle against the great enemy and all those spirits lined up before you intent to wreck and pillage your heart.  Be icy in your disregard of the insults and injustices you face but fiery hot in your hatred of Satan who is doing his best to make you a blind adversary at the moment you take your eyes off Jesus and gaze into the blinding darkness of some frustration or depressing hardship you have before you.

Prayer As It Comes

Our problem in praying is not that we don't know how to pray.  Even the atheist knows intuitively how to pray.  Our problem is we don't know what to do about our praying.  We misunderstand the interaction.  We never pray because we decided to pray, we do so because God wooed us into prayer.  The point of praying, even if it is for our daughter suffering from leukemia is to eventually hear from God Himself.  It is pointless just jabbering; we are there for God to interact with us at the most critical level.  Being born again is more profound than we guess.  It is transformation and that transformation includes being able to hear God.  Never stop praying because you didn't get what you wanted.  That is the place where you most need to pray; more than any object, you need God soaking every part of you and that will not happen with just a God list checked off and granted.   And as he was praying, heaven was opened... Luke 3:21 NIV

Knowing versus Knowing

We are as far as self goes at the center of the universe.  It is hard to get beyond the notion that everything revolves around me.  It isn't perhaps that we are so selfish...I want everything, but it is that we live within a certain head that is ours and we always grasp the sights from that head's perspective.  The Holy Spirit alone can take us outside that view where with God living within us, we can finally see what before was but a dimness.  The Lord Jesus Christ opens up to us a horizon that was always before lost...the life of God and all He sees living within us.  The vast world you do not know about yourself is visible to God and He will let you peek in and view it as you trust Him to guide your way.  But more importantly, as you listen, the Lord will "show" you others and your capacity to love will grow exponentially.  The man who thinks he knows something does not yet know as he ought to know. 1 Corinthians 8:2-3

Walking in the Light

What does it mean that we are not our own, we were bought at a price except that we are not our own.  (1 Corinthians 6:19)  It is paganism at its core to struggle out of the grip of the Holy Spirit and venture off without a single thought what God who is truly God might want.  We are certainly free to say what we think and do as we wish but if we are in Christ we are not our own and that will become perfectly clear to us in the workings of God in our daily doings.  The things we ask of Him and the gifts we desire will lie neglected until we get this matter straight.  We are not our own.  To walk in the light requires we stay away from the dark places of independence and rely upon the Word to direct our steps.  Of course it isn't easy but it is the One Way that makes the love of Christ fill our hearts with lasting gladness.

The Crisis Point

The crisis point is not at the moment you find some part of your life out of control; it is when you must accept that every part of your life is actually beyond your control.  We try desperately to calibrate this and modulate that but it is in the end not ours to fix or determine.  The Lord does not intend to make you more differentiated from your environment...He is using it (that wild and unpredictable world where you have been placed) to add to the supernatural work of being born again.  The more we try to squirm out of our predicaments and fix our dilemmas, the more sustained the rough edges of our personality.  You cannot love unless God surgically removes the bumps of hate and jealousy, you cannot trust unless he sculpts away the scared ridges of doubt and self-confidence and you cannot hope unless he rubs off the fear and bitterness caked on your too fragile psyche.  You have been placed at your spot so that the Lord can perfect His work in you.  Rest your soul in God who loves you enough to keep you where you are.

You and Clyde

Evil is not the Bonnie and Clydes and Joseph Stalins of any age.  They are aberrations from the common stock.  Evil is the gaze shifted off of Christ and onto something else that seems just as noble and worthy.  It is the Christmas present that makes the want rise above the Will, the fresh start that really isn't a fresh start but just the same oblivious disregard for the Holy Spirit prompts, it is the safe way out when the open door of God stands before you.  Adam and Eve didn't move far from God, they just turned their head slightly and looked past Him to Satan.  Fix your eyes upon Christ and let the peripheries remain the peripheries.  You cannot go astray with your mind determined that Jesus Christ is the way, the truth and the life. 

The Dawn Is Upon You

At what point do you begin to question the sanity of chasing after Jesus, of wanting to please the Father, of listening for the Holy Spirit to guide you?  Is it after the disastrous decision you made, during the long wait for the hope you had being fulfilled or while you sing dispassionately of the God you once trusted.  Nothing speaks more of your faith than your determination to shake off the conundrums of misplaced affections.  The Lord who saved you will not allow any desire or longing replace Him as King of your hopes and dreams.  You were not called out of darkness to stay in the shadows.  The light of Christ will shine brightly within you but only as you give Him access to the dark places where lurk the aspirations you have for getting your way, your way.  The Lord must put a halt to your self-reliance before you can progress much further in the joy of your salvation.  Rejoice, the dawn is upon you!    The path of the righteous is like the first gleam of dawn...Proverbs 4:18 NIV

Spiritual Leakage

When once we start to question our ability to do a thing or give up a thing, we should always ask if we have let a habit or a behavior sap our strength and diminish our spiritual vitality.  God will never give you a task or a challenge that He has not already empowered you in the matter.  You have all the ability you need and all the creativity necessary for the task.  But if you lack power or will, you need to first go back to the beginning point when you started leaking the Lord's oil and plug the leak.  Renounce the act, stop the habit, get rid of the subtle rebellion and climb back into the arms of Christ with determination to trust Him in the matters that have caused you to turn your back on His help....he should do it with the strength God provides...(1 Peter 4:11 NIV)

Good...

Jesus made a disconcerting comment as he talked with the famous “rich young ruler” of Luke 18.  When the young man approached the Lord, he addressed Jesus as “Good teacher”.  Now this was certainly a respectful form of address but Jesus was not so impressed.  His reply was biting.  "Why do you call me good?" Jesus answered. "No one is good — except God alone. (Luke 18:19-20 NIV)  This is most informative if we can get past the seeming rudeness of the retort.  Jesus made it perfectly clear without any wiggle room that there is no one good…just God.  This is not self-deprecation: it is stating the clear fact.  Nothing good exists except what is in God, from God and with God.   The source of any good is God and without Him there is no good.  Good is not a relative term; good compared to not so good.  Good is determined by its source.  From God and it is good, outside of Him and it is not.  You and I are not the source of good and we do not decide if something is good or not.  Good is not an arbitrary assessment we make; good is determined by how anything at any moment relates to God.  Take the Lord out of a thought, out of an idea, out of a behavior and it is no longer good.  Regardless of how an event may turn, how a circumstance may look, it is good if your eyes are fixed upon God and your heart is determined to follow Him.  The command of Hebrews 12: 2 to fix our eyes upon Jesus is not a symbolic gesture, it is an act of the will to look to Christ for everything from how to think about something to how to act.  Take your eyes off the Lord and what can seem good, like Peter walking on water can become a disaster in a moment as he began to sink with his eyes on the waves.

Have You Been Tempted?

A temptation is never unreasonable.  It is always a sensible alternative to God's clear direction.  The temptation for Adam was not at the point of command, it was later when he had the new option of gaining insight into right and wrong.  You are not tempted by the wallowing pig or the disgusting vulture but rather by the smooth lined gazelle or the regal tiger.  Your temptation will be filled with light and color rather than the drab black and white and gray.  Don't underestimate the power of the temptation nor its crippling effect.  It is never just a matter of the bad decision; it is a poisoned option you face and once you have been struck by its power, you carry the effect within your body until you are raised perfectly by Christ on the last day.  Take a moment to pray the simple prayer God gave you..."and lead (me) not into temptation!"  Let the punctuation remain  there for a moment as you make the great step of faith for your day.

What Do I Do?

The problem with Christianity is not that it is too difficult to practice, it is that Christianity is too easy to believe.  Nothing is simpler than following a GPS turn for turn and the allowance of the Holy Spirit combined with the clarity of the Bible to direct each step is just as effortless. Where we stumble out of the gate is the frozen unwillingness to do what we are told.  "Turn right!"  We turn left.  "stop!" We go.  The grace of God is too astounding to believe, the fact that Christ really died for us is nearly unbearable.  How can that much love be poured into us?  We simply do not in the crunch of time accept it.  Otherwise, how can we explain the knee jerk response to bear outside the lanes of God's clear directions.  Don't complain any more about not knowing what the Lord wants you to do.  Simply do what you know He has said and let Him work out for you the instantaneous flow of your momentary actions.  The one who keeps His eyes fixed upon Christ is the will of God.

The Wandering Reality

The moment you begin to question the reality of your experience with God, question the presence of the Holy Spirit, return to your root.  The Cross of Jesus Christ happened at a specific moment in history among an actual crowd of people just as reliable as you.  No one ever questioned the crucifixion of Christ and the empty tomb was never doubted.  Return to the physical moment when Jesus Christ died for You and let that spot in time steel your resolve to follow Him anywhere.  The Cross is the power of your faith in God and it is your anchor that keeps the stormy day from swamping you.  Let the Cross of Jesus Christ be the source of your strength and hope.  Ponder it rather than your doubts.

The Defining of Pressing Forward

Have you thought much lately about the extreme agony of God as He stood at the brink of the Cross...taking within His body the terrible sinnings you have been working out moment by moment?  Nothing troubled the Lord in His daily dealings with us.  He was not maddened by the rejection nor was He discouraged by the flip-floppings of the crowd.  He pressed forward with the joy of doing everything within the Father until He came to the Garden and He stopped dead in His tracks and His anguish dripped out of Him.  He was not afraid.  He wasn't disheartened or depressed.  He swelled with sorrow as the sins of us came upon Him, as the agony of our precious independence scored a direct hit within.  Ponder the pain of Christ when you take that left turn off the road, when you screech to a halt as the Holy Spirit calls you forward.  Take the moment here to breathe in the air Jesus exhaled as He bore your sins within His body.  You are not the only sinner for which He died but you are the only one living at your spot and that sort of love cannot be taken lightly.

Real Freedom...Real Thanksgiving

Why is it that so many who turn away from Christ and the salvation He alone offers do so because they want to be free?  There is no freedom outside of the life hidden in Christ.  Don't we see it in the laboratory of daily activities?  The one who drifts away from God is not free of anger, not free of selfishness, not free of jealousy and craven desires!  He is not free of self deception and mistaken longings.  The one enveloped in the love of Christ loses her bitterness and prejudice and mad strivings and wounded ego and is no longer a prisoner of any desire or shattered want.  Jesus Christ and only Jesus Christ can and does take the entire person and make her free to love and free to be at peace.  The turn into Christ is always a turn out of bondage toward unpretentious freedom.

The Curses of Good People

When you lose your sense of comfort in any situation, it usually is because the Cross of Jesus has become too small to you.  Everything that could ever wreck you is crushed by the destruction of sin within the body of Jesus Christ.  Pious worry is still worry and contrary to the state of things for you.  There is a reason why the Lord commands us not to worry.  Worry is the expletive in the conversation, the unnecessary and ridiculous adjective that makes all thinking fuzzy and distorted.  Think a bit more about the terrible suffering of Jesus that you might live with Him forever and then if you can, get back to the absurdity of your worries.

Let Go, Let God?

Have you thought about what it would really be like if you let go and let God?  Would your mind collapse in a rubble of deserted dreams and desires?  Would you feel the need to pick up the pieces after you went with God for a while and saw where it left you?  Could you think clearly if you let your world be God's in every way?  God does not have any interest in working with you.  He only wants to live through you.  Welcome Him into your kingdom!  The Holy Spirit has never been your servant...our confusion is often tied to our hope that He is or might be.  Let Him teach you how to pray and you will gain access to the bounty found only in Christ...a bounty limited only by your resistance to the working of God in your every day life as His child and beloved home.

Nothing settles the Lordship question more firmly than hardship.  It is there that you see the thing most clearly: follow Christ or abandon Him.  Once you know where you stand, everything else falls into place.  Forgive or not.  Complain or not.  Believe or not.  Take the forbidden object or not.  As long as we waver between one or the other, hardship will work its way back into our soul and make the object clear again.  The heart of every situation that startles our sensibilities is the great decision.  Follow Christ or abandon Him.  We rarely settle this absolutely; more often we do so time and again.

The Moment...

The moment of surrender is not just before the big crisis or the courageous endeavor but it is at the breakfast table when your wife scorns your advice or at the school when your son barks at you for being late to come get him or in the evening when everyone walks away from the dinner table and leaves the dishes for you to clean and put away.  The moment of surrender is at the store when the line to check out is ten deep or as you take out the trash and discover your husband threw away your mail without checking with you first.  The moment of surrender is the point at which you decide you have been crucified with Christ and you no longer live but Christ lives in you and you let Him steal your self-righteous indignation and your justified frustration and replace it with real forgiveness and actual rejection of the grievance.  Christ died for those moments when you want to scream in despair but you don't because the Lord Himself has enough joy to see you through it.  Take care to not take care much and let Jesus live fully in you.

The Rise of Obedience

Salvation through Jesus brings us eternal life but the working out of that new life is practical and daily.  It is when we obey God and do what He says in those moments of clarity that more of us (body soul and spirit) becomes free of the chaos and sticky brokenness brought on by sin.  A little act of disobedience, one that seems trivial, can set a chain of events within and without us that can destroy much of the progress we have made toward heavenly joy and peace.  Disobedience is the great drug that intoxicates us and brings hidden destruction.  We grow in grace and freedom and joy as we simply by faith do what the Lord tells us to do.

The Movement Past Conscience

At what point do you suddenly realize you have gone too far, looked too long, reacted too harshly, listened to too much, pushed past where you should have stopped?  Is it when you heard something telling you to stop, when you felt a tug to quit, when your mind began to cloud over with guilt?  When is too much too much? We speak of the conscience as the perpetual nerdy friend who doesn’t like to have a good time.  Or else the conscience is the ultimate arbiter of good and evil, the one sure scale on which to measure right from wrong.  We hear this sort of statement often.  “Well, it may not be right for you but it is for me.”  The implication is that personal conscious is the guide for right living.

Every one of us has some sort of conscience; it is along with language the mark of being human.  Shades of right and wrong do not slip into the thinking of the beasts; it is we who sink into that abyss, or would it be better to say who climb those heights.  Because the conscience is natural and organic, it is also arbitrary.  There is not a “uniform” conscience; one that defines us all.  Your conscience will not be the same as your friend’s or even your brother’s. Joseph Stalin had one conscience, your uncle another.  It is impossible to say conclusively that Adolph Hitler did not follow his conscience in what he did nor that Mother Teresa always followed hers.  My “too far” probably is not yours and will not be Mick Jagger’s.

Is there though a real “too far”, just as there is a real mile or a real pound?  How do we measure right and wrong, good and bad in actual time and space?  Does it exist…such a true measure? Jesus was asked by the rich young ruler what good thing he had to do to inherit eternal life.  This was not a simpleton’s question.  It was asked by a true thinker who recognized the human condition.  At some point we cannot just rely on our conscience; we need to look into what is always right and what is always wrong because it does matter.

There is something most casual readers of the New Testament fail to realize and that is how Jesus analyzed his own behavior and approach to situations.  He let the scripture and the guidance of the Father determine each step He took.  At the time of temptation in the wilderness, Jesus used the Bible to arbitrate for Him how He should act.  That was almost an unconscious guide because He used His mind to know it so well.  Clearly Jesus studied the Bible enough to know at each space in life what it might have to say about a matter.

But there was another hedge He had in deciding right and wrong.  He constantly communicated with the Father on what He was doing and thinking and facing. 

This statement of Jesus in John is most informative.  “For I did not speak of my own accord, but the Father who sent me commanded me what to say and how to say it.”  (John 12:49 NIV)  Somehow, and we are not told how, Jesus heard from the Father even in the details of His behavior what He was to do.  At the point of what specific things to say at any given moment and in what tone of voice to use, Jesus had direction from the Father on good and bad, right and wrong.  This is different from the prodding of conscience; this is a direct line to what is really right and what is really wrong.  If we could get past our individualistic and arbitrary conscience to the actual measure of right and wrong, we would know where to start in living.

How was Jesus so perfectly in tune with the guiding of the Father?  He was, like the first Adam free of sin and so had the same ability the first Adam had.  He could and did walk with the Father as He went about His business.  Like the two disciples who went with Jesus on the road to Emmaus and heard the real accounting of how the crucifixion and resurrection fit into the plan of God, we too can “walk with God” and hear from Him as Jesus heard from the Father.  We have the promise of Jesus that the Holy Spirit, God too just as the Father and Son are God, would by faith in Christ be with us.  And Jesus also has promised to be with us always.  What do we make of this?

We have at our finger tips, or even closer always the right and wrong there to know and understand.  It is not a matter of my right and wrong or your right and wrong; it is right and wrong as it really is.  We are within reach at any moment when Christ is ours by faith the knowing of good and bad.  Not just knowing by a swing and perhaps a miss but a knowing that is certain.

How do we get to this point where we know exactly what to say and how to say it, what to do and how to do it?  The caveat is simple.  You must have decided that is what you want to know.  If you do not really want to know, Jesus will let you walk away from it just as easily as the rich young ruler did.  But if you want to know, you must be determined to know the scriptures.  You must be able to tell the difference between what is a really right or wrong and what is merely a tangle of your conscience.  There are miles of issues we can discuss that have a level of right and wrong to them but if we do not know the scripture…really know the scripture, we cannot be certain we are not just sifting them through our conscience rather than the actual right and actual wrong of a matter.  That is why it is so difficult discussing the big moral issues of our age: abortion, homosexuality, integrity, war, globalization, pornography.  The scripture is either ignored or not known well enough to arbitrate between consciences.

There is a bigger issue though before us and that is how to get at the details of right and wrong as arbitrated directly by God.  It is easy to just lay out three bullet points or six directives but if that were the case, we would have far more Christians acting upon right and wrong.  The hearing from God is much more organic and familial.  You must become familiar with the way God speaks to you directly. It is an experiment in holiness.  As God prods you in a right or a wrong, whether by the remembrance of a scripture or some very personal way He guides you, then you act upon it and even if you feel guilty from your conscience or disappointed because of your lusts, you fight through it and do the thing or don’t do it.  The next time you sense the prod of God, you act upon it then and there.  The more you do this, them more familiar you will be with the actual God behind you way of seeing and thinking.  You will become more comfortable with the real presence of God; more alert to Him too.  Every child has a conscience; only the child of God has the true right and wrong within.  You must though like Jesus give God room in your heart to guide you and holiness will not just be something you consider, it will be yours as a real possession.