Spiritual Ponderings

Facing Frustration in a New Way

2012-01-17T07:36:00.001-06:00

I had a very hard time waking up this morning. I knew that I had to get to work earlier than usual and yet every time I tried to awaken enough to get out of bed the tiredness just kept pushing me back into dreamland.

Each time I felt nudged to get up by the Spirit I would began talking with God. I usually talk with God extensively every morning before I get up, but this time instead of making me more awake my praises and requests only slipped me back into sleep again. I knew what was happening but seemed incapable of arousing enough will-power to overcome my lethargy.

At one point I was reminded that if I would just exert enough effort to keep my eyes open that more energy would soon become available to make another step toward getting up. Then the truth of this stirred me as I realized that the same is true of my spiritual lethargy. If I can only focus on having my spiritual eyes opened more to both my own true condition but even more so to the real truth about God and His feelings towards me, then everything else will come into perspective in time. It is my spiritual darkness and blindness that prevents most of my growth and keeps me deceived into thinking that I am O.K. the way I am.

After finally getting up and opening the devotional for today in the book Jesus Calling, I was encouraged to see another affirmation that God knows and listens to my thoughts and comments to Him. While I was trying to awaken I had quoted from the Psalms the verse, This is the day the Lord has made; let us be glad and rejoice in it. (Psalm 118:24) Within the message from Jesus for me in this reading was the very same reference. When this kind of thing happens it always serves as a reminder that Jesus knows ahead of time what message I am going to read and at times puts it into my mind earlier just to remind me of His love so that I can be encouraged to trust Him more.

I am currently struggling to relate properly with a right spirit to a current frustrating situation with the electrician that is supposed to finish up his work at the church. I am almost finished with all the other work, but the electrician seems to refuse to communicate with me. It seems that he is deliberately avoiding my calls and when I do get through on rare occasion the promises he makes to show up never materialize as happened again yesterday.

My temptation is to react the 'normal' way – to get frustrated, upset, suspicious and to start scheming as to how I can accomplish this job without him. I pray and I try everything I can think of to get him to cooperate with us but so far nothing has worked.

Yet through all of this frustration and dysfunction I sense that the real issue has far more to do with my own character training than it has to do with finishing up the remodeling project on the church building. Oh yes, have I forgotten? I have been asking God repeatedly to work a remodeling project in my own heart and in the hearts of all of our members even more thoroughly than what has been taking place physically in the church building. So it should come as no surprise at all if Jesus is answering my prayers. But now how am I going to cooperate with Him?

It is time for me to grow up some more, I can see. It is not enough to allow myself to react with the typical responses that rise up out of frustration and irritation with this man. It is not even enough to try to make excuses for him or to figure out which conspiracy theory he might be involved in that would explain his seemingly strange behavior. None of these will help me to mature and strengthen my own character. He is not the problem here not matter how obvious that may seem. I must learn to keep very focused on Jesus and keep reminding myself to seek His perspective rather than on my own as I am so used to relying on to view things.

At times it seems easier to do that. I begin to sense my need to be very patient with him, to demonstrate not only to him but to everyone aware of this situation the way Jesus relates to us. I am reminded of Moses who was reprimanded by God after he struck the rock instead of speaking to it. God did not scold him for disobeying him so much as He rather expressed keen disappointment that Moses had failed to represent the real attitude and patience of God under pressure.

Moses knew God better than nearly any man who has ever lived. He was not like the average person who has dark, distorted ideas about God, for Moses had come to the place in his life where he had begun to consistently reflect the true spirit of God repeatedly under increasingly difficult situations and in dealing with outrageously cantankerous and negative people. Moses had allowed God's influence on his heart to so transform him that God had allowed him to face increasingly hostile situations, trusting Moses to demonstrate in ever-increasing clarity the beauty of God's character and the strength of God's love and patience in contrast to the stubbornness and hostility of those rebellious 'children'.

But when it came to one of the most discouraging and difficult tests that pushed Moses to the breaking point, instead of keeping his focus entirely on what he knew God to be like from personal experience with Him, Moses allowed his human nature to rise up and cause him to react in kind to the angry spirit that the Children of Israel was demonstrating toward him and toward God. Thus, in a moment of frustration and weakness Moses allowed the overwhelming negativity and complaining around him to affect his choices and reactions rather than keeping his perspective grounded in God's presence. As a result he acted rashly and spoke words that he very soon regretted.

Not only did Moses disappoint God's trust in him but he also strengthened the lies of the enemy about how God feels toward rebellious sinners in the minds and hearts of millions of people both then and throughout history ever since. Elijah likewise made an ill-advised move to take things into his own hands just when God could have demonstrated a spectacular display of self-control to reveal one of the most profound truths about God that this world needs to see clearly. Moses' sin had far more to do with the message conveyed by his attitudes and actions under frustrating pressure from others than it had to do with not strictly following instructions or rules.

Being aware of these things, I find myself in a very small way facing a similar test of my own. I sense that God is allowing this situation to drag on to see if I am ready to put into practice what He has been teaching me over the past few months and years about this very issue. Am I ready to brace my heart to keep focused on the goodness of God and His ability to deal with any situation no matter how frustrating? Or like Moses and Elijah, great men of faith as they were, am I going to allow the malfunction of others to arouse my reactive sinful nature to misrepresent God under pressure and miss my own chance to practice what I have been 'preaching' for some time?

Not everyone is trusted with this kind of test by God. It is those who are being advanced to deeper levels of trust that must be tested to see if they are ready to move on to another level of training, just as tests are required in school to determine when a person is ready to move to the next grade. God has been extremely gracious to me by providing me with many insights that many others have not yet seen. Rather than feel pride in my heart for this, I need to view this privilege as a responsibility to deepen the integration between my own mind and heart where my emotions affect my reactions under pressure. Am I willing to let God implant these truths I have been learning in my head deeper into the atmosphere of my heart and spirit where they are intended to operate most effectively?

Father, I perceive – at least as much as I can in the moment – that what I really need is humility, total dependence and trust in Your heart, and peace of mind that passes all understanding in this situation. I need all of these things in order to counteract the natural reactions that I am so used to having and that even sometimes seem reasonable according to the perspective of many around me.

Yet I sense that I must be very wary of taking things into my own hands like You have shown me was the mistake of both Moses and Elijah. And while You can still accomplish Your will even when I do make the wrong choices, Your reputation suffers an unneeded setback whenever I misrepresent You after trying to speak so much in Your favor.

I know that there is a great deal of suspicion and resistance to the truths about You that I try to share with others. These revelations about Your character and Your ways are not welcome in standardized religion and any who promote such teachings are soon viewed as undermining the faith of believers. Yet I am coming to realize that in reality religion has left us indeed poor, blind, naked and wretched while completely oblivious to our condition just as You said. We desperately need eyesalve from You to heal the deep darkness of spiritual blindness so we can see our desperate condition and turn to You for healing.

Yet through all of this increasing revelation of my real problems and similar ones in those around me, You want me to lead by example as well as sharing from my head what I am learning. I must be willing to have You transform my heart, my attitudes, my reactions under pressure or else all my assertions about Your ways loses credibility. You want to grow me to the point where You can begin to trust me more to represent the truth about You in the ways I respond under frustrating circumstances such as what I am facing right now, in order to better demonstrate these truths about You in actions and attitudes even more than through words.

Father, You know my heart far better than I do and You know how weak and vulnerable I am to slipping into old habits of reacting. What I need more than anything is to have a much closer connection with Your heart, to sense moment by moment a keen awareness of Your love for me and the value that You have for me personally. It is a lack of this sense of being valued by You that lies at the root of all sin and I long to live more consistently in Your presence in a secure sense of Your love for me. This is the only real solution to prepare me for the daily tests and trials that You allow to come to strengthen and deepen my character to reflect what I am learning about You.

Father, I desperately need healing for the deeply-seated selfishness that permeates every part of my makeup. I see it everywhere I look inside and I often wonder if You haven't taken on more than is possible when You propose to transform me into Your selfless likeness. But I have to trust that You can do what You say You can do in me because You have infinite resources and the power of Your love is beyond measure. Your power lies in the transformational ability of Your love and Your presence to heal and change the most proud, stubborn, damaged heart and character and to bring such an one to perfectly reflect Your beauty and glory when You are allowed to have Your way.

Have Your way in me God, and demonstrate Your kindness, Your graciousness, Your forgiveness and Your patience through me as I face this day and all that it has in store. Reveal Yourself through me today so that others might catch a clearer glimpse of the real truth about You, not just in my claims but by my allowing You to actualize those claims in my new reactions to problems in my life. Do this for Your reputation's sake, Amen.

Refining Delicacy

2012-01-08T08:20:00.001-06:00

Last night it again was impressed on my mind the idea of delicacy in the realm of the spiritual. I sense more and more that true preparation for living in the presence of God has far more to do with the fine tuning of the sensitivities of the mind and heart to become more delicate so that they can perceive the messages from heaven than it has to do with the amassing of factual knowledge or sin-free performance enhancement. In fact, I am starting to see that doctrines and behavior are really more about supporting this process of shaping the mind and heart to fit into the atmosphere of the society of heaven than they have to do with impressing God or keeping up religious appearances.

I am starting to better understand that the reasons behind pretty much every requirement of God is to further this goal of allowing the mind to become more sensitive to His voice in the heart. The reason it is detrimental for me to eat between meals, to eat late before bedtime, to overeat or to eat foods that are not healthy has far more to do with the effects that doing these things has on my mind rather than because they violations of some rule.

God's true government, His kingdom, is based on the principle of cause and effect. Satan tries to assert that God is arbitrary in order to shift our thinking away from this underlying principle and to inject fear into our relationship, to reinforce the notion that God is waiting to punish offenders and all the other misapprehensions we have about our heavenly Father. When we teach the principles of God's government as only rules to follow rather than principles that align us to better perceive and receive all the blessings that He is eager to share with us, we blaspheme the truth about God and turn away many from wanting to know His goodness and righteousness.

When I act out of a motive of desiring to know God more intimately as the basis for choosing to live more healthfully, to treat people more respectfully, to live a morally upright life rather than from a motive of simply keeping rules, I find that I have access to a power for my choices that is impossible to experience otherwise. I am speaking from very little experience here as I have spent most of my life coming from the other perspective, of obedience out of fear, obligation and all the other improper reasons. I am not suggesting that these alternative motives are completely useless as initial tools to get me moving toward God; but if they remain the main reasons for my obedience I become extremely handicapped and stunted in my ability to grow very far in a saving relationship with God.

Growing up into Christ primarily involves a sensitization of the nervous system which is the only means by which God's Spirit can communicate with humans. The whole body and all of its systems and functions are all designed to support the brain and the spiritual nature. The reason that exercise is important is to create the healthiest conditions in the body and blood so that the mind can become sharper and more sensitive to hearing the voice of God to the soul. The reason that diet is so important is for the very same reason, so that the blood can nourish and enhance my ability to think clearly and more deeply. The reason that rest is important is so that our bodies can rejuvenate and heal and recover from the debilitating effects of sin as much as possible.

When we put harmful substances into our bodies, whether it be drugs, unhealthy food, smoke, alcohol or anything else, these poisons act to destroy the sensitivity and abilities of our thinking and feelings and move us farther away from an ability to listen to God effectively. This is why they are sinful; not because we have broken some arbitrary rules and made God upset but because we are destroying the very supporting systems He gave us for the brain He needs to relate to us through.

When we fill our imaginations with falsehoods, counterfeit concepts about reality and shallow entertainment we likewise dull the fine sensitivities of the mind and heart and clog our imaginations with ideas and feelings and beliefs that prevent us from grasping the delicate truths that are needed to appreciate the society of heaven. When we compromise in these areas of our lives we are damaging our own capacity to grow in knowledge of God and in grace, and the damage we cause ourselves results in the inevitable wages that sin produces. It is not God punishing us when we get sick, rather it is the law of cause and effect punishing us for choices that have been made. Yet God is always at work through overflowing grace to counter the pervasive effects of sin, to reverse as much as possible the curses that we keep bringing on ourselves through selfish choices. But He longs for us to come into an attitude of more willingness to obey His instructions so that our appreciation of His love can take deeper root in our hearts and we can become more stable in our thinking and feelings.

Our imaginations can easily be infected and diseased and thus unfit to be able to be properly activated by the elevated truths found in the Word of God. The world's attractions are designed to hijack our imaginations and calculated to stimulate our passions while largely bypassing the part of our brain that God designed to act as guardian of our morals. It has been shown by scientific research that watching theatrical television, movies and such media of any genre literally damages the human brain and stunts its ability to keep reason and conscience in control over the steering decisions we make in life. Such entertainment stimulates the baser emotional parts of our brain while suppressing the higher creative control circuits thus unfitting us for living in harmony with the social structures of heaven and even being able to function properly on earth. It has been proven that such activity seriously damages the brain of children who are exposed to this during the first seven year of their life and results in all sorts of commonly seen symptoms around us today.

When we begin to grasp the bigger picture, the true nature of the battle we all are caught up in along with the rest of the universe, we will begin to gain better perspective about these things that we have so long misunderstood and have misplaced in our priorities. When we begin to grasp the great truth that God is not out to threaten or hurt us but is doing everything possible to restore us and fit us for life in the rare atmosphere of love, transparency and super-charged joy that fills all of heaven, then we can make more sense out of the many instructions that He has given for our benefit.

It is false ideas about God's attitudes toward us that blind us to the true nature of the battles we are in and how we need to relate to them. Everything that confuses us, causes us to malfunction and brings dysfunction into our relationships with others can be traced back to mistaken ideas and feelings about God. This one issue is the core issue that must be addressed if we are to begin to make real progress in the healing of the soul, mind, body and spirit.

God's commandments can be condensed into a very simple package that Jesus reiterated when He was here on earth.

Then one of them, an expert in the Law of Moses, asked Jesus a question to test him. He said, "Teacher, which command in the law is the most important?" Jesus answered, "'Love the Lord your God with all your heart, all your soul, and all your mind.' This is the first and most important command. And the second command is like the first: 'Love your neighbor the same as you love yourself.' All of the law and the writings of the prophets take their meaning from these two commands." (Mat 22:35-40 ERV)

If love is the very essence of what it looks like to live in harmony with all the law, the writings of the prophets and the Word of God, then we need to learn how to have and experience whatever this thing is that is called love. We need to spend more time focusing on what it is, how to receive and share it and how to condition our minds and hearts to increase our capacity to operate in this way.

When I view God through dark lenses formed by distorted ideas about Him promoted by most any religion on earth, I will not be able to perceive the true nature of this love that is the very life-blood of the universe. When I see God as an arbitrary rule-maker rather than an inviting lover, I stunt my own ability to respond to what He really desires for me to experience. Or if I perceive God as a distant Dad who is permissive or uncaring having little interest in my welfare or safety, I will likely turn to other sources to find comfort, guidance and identity in my life.

Our brains were designed for far more sensitive living than any of us can even imagine. Even the very physical makeup of our brain betrays this fact. Microscopic nerve endings grow billions of potential delicate endings that if used are stimulated to grow stronger and develop whole regions in our brain giving us new capacities to experience new things. On the other hand when these potential nerve endings are not utilized and exercised they are soon disintegrated by caustic acids produce by our bodies to prune away what we have chosen not to exercise and over time our capacities for various aspects of life are completely destroyed and we lose our ability to regain them again.

This is the brain that God designed and has given to every person alive. When we begin to understand and appreciate this brain which is the sole source of our relationship with God we can begin to better appreciate what the Word of God really means to our lives. God gave us our brain with this capacity for encouraging growth in the highest areas of living with the potential for extreme sensitivities for things we do not now appreciate. If we obey His instructions in every area of our lives we will find that we can perceive far greater truths about reality and can more distinctly interact with the quiet voice of God in our souls with amazing results in our lives. This is God's deep desire for each one of us, but He respects the choices we make that either enhance our capacity to know and hear Him more clearly or that destroy our abilities to know and reflect His love.

Our minds, hearts and bodies are designed primarily for love. Our nervous system is designed to thrive on love. The touch of love, the hearing of love, the sights that stimulate feelings of love, the smells of love, the tastes that bring pleasure and the spirit we have that can elevate all of these things and integrate them together to shape an atmosphere of love helps us to know God more intimately who is the only Source of all real love.

Without love it is impossible to thrive and grow. Without love it is impossible to make sense out of our existence. Without receiving and passing on love we can never come to appreciate our original design, purpose or experience true satisfaction. Our whole being was created to find its ultimate fulfillment in focusing on love. And the most highly cultivated way for maximizing this design by our Creator is to live in constant reception of love from Him and in turn passing it on to others in the same spirit as in the One we received it from.

Love by definition is always other-centered, other-focused and intent on enhancing and blessing others more than ourselves. The reason God is three in one is because it is impossible for Him to be love without being more than a single entity. Love literally cannot exist in a single person alone; there always has to be an other upon which to focus attention for love to even exist. This is why denying the existence of the trinity is to deny that God is love, which is precisely the reason behind Satan's attacks on this doctrine.

We are created in the image of God, to live and thrive and be fulfilled only as we imitate our original template who is God – love personified. When we do anything less than this we malfunction and suffer pain, sorrow and ultimately death that results from a lack of love. Love is life-giving, and to be lacking in love is to experience fear and death to some degree or another. Just a casual look at the evidence all around us confirms this fact. People who's lives are filled with unselfish love thrive while people who live selfishly experience loneliness, damage to their bodies, souls, minds and spirit. The more a human is deprived of love the more this damage becomes obvious. We have overwhelming evidence of all of this, yet because of the deceptions and distortions about reality we remain confused as to how all of this relates to our religion.

Love is designed to ever intensify through the sharpening and intensifying of the delicate abilities and sensitivities of our brain, our senses, our feelings and our perceptions. Sin always leads to the dulling and destroying of our abilities to love and causes us to live in confusion about our true purpose, value and identity. Through many subtle or not so subtle lies about God, the one whom we were designed from, Satan causes us to have very distorted ideas about what will bring us satisfaction and fulfillment.

Only through a proper appreciation for the real truth about God can we ever begin to move back toward the refining of the highly delicate abilities needed to interact in true selfless love that marks all relationships in God's family. And only by allowing His Spirit to bring healing and stimulation for recovering our capacities as much as possible in this broken human organism debilitated by the effects of sin can we begin to move toward restoration into the society of heaven.

Now I hear in my heart God reminding me of something He said long ago.

Now that you know this truth, how happy you will be if you put it into practice! (John 13:17 GNB)

Father, cause me to walk in Your ways, to reflect Your truths in my life, to practice what You have been sharing with me for so long. Empower me to make good choices that will enhance my brain's ability to relate to You more intimately. I have a growing desire to enter into a deeper intimacy with You, to know Your heart better, to share Your love more readily with others who are malfunctioning like I am. Father, please make me a more accurate reflection of what You are like. Heal me of this terminal sickness of selfishness that causes me to damage both myself and others so often. Expose and help me to dispel the many lies about You that still remain hidden in my heart. Continue to grow me, to train me, to instruct me, to love me, to heal me, to restore me to the joy of Your salvation – all for Your reputation's sake, Amen.

Cause and Effect

2012-01-01T09:04:00.000-06:00

Insisting that God's laws and punishments are arbitrary necessarily involves a denial of the principle of cause and effect that operates throughout all of creation. To believe that God demands obedience simply because He is powerful, intimidating and threatening rather than because He knows how reality is designed is to blind ourselves to the fact that sin produces its own consequences rather than God imposing punishments on us.

It is a very dangerous path to follow to claim that God must impose punishments for every sin, for it is the very same path that led Lucifer to become the greatest demon in the universe. It was fallen Lucifer that originated this idea to start with, and he is the one Jesus identified as being the father of all lies.

Every sin must meet its punishment, urged Satan; and if God should remit the punishment of sin, He would not be a God of truth and justice. {DA 761}

Viewing God as arbitrary rather than logical and sensible always leads us into a state of fear which in turn precludes our ability to truly love. Only love can induce saving faith in our hearts and as long as we cling to pernicious lies about God's character we cannot experience the transforming power in love that can only come about through a true knowledge of God.

The world's systems of law depend wholly upon the counterfeit logic of arbitrary rules and imposed punishments. This reinforces the lie of Satan that God depends on the same pattern of relating in the way He governs His universe and especially how He treats His rebellious children. We are so affected by the influence of the legal models used by the world that God's ways of relating through natural principles we call laws are almost completely foreign to our thinking. Yet until we come to believe in His ways of doing things and relating to sinners we will not be able to come into sympathy with the work of grace that must take place in our hearts to prepare us to live safely in His presence.

Many conceive of the Christian's God as a being whose attribute is stern justice,--one who is a severe judge, a harsh, exacting creditor. The Creator has been pictured as a being who is watching with jealous eye to discern the errors and mistakes of men, that He may visit judgment upon them. In the minds of thousands, love and sympathy and tenderness are associated with the character of Christ, while God is regarded as the law-giver, inflexible, arbitrary, devoid of sympathy for the beings He has made. Never was there a greater error.{BTS, November 1, 1908}

God does not stand toward the sinner as an executioner of the sentence against transgression; but he leaves the rejectors of his mercy to themselves, to reap that which they have sown. Every ray of light rejected, every warning despised or unheeded, every passion indulged, every transgression of the law of God, is a seed sown, which yields its unfailing harvest. The Spirit of God, persistently resisted, is at last withdrawn from the sinner, and then there is left no power to control the evil passions of the soul, and no protection from the malice and enmity of Satan. {GC88 36}

Our minds were created to think and reason in harmony with the great principles of God's universe. When we remain stuck in the illogic of Satan's false assertions about reality and God we damage our own minds and terribly distort our image of God both to ourselves and for those around us. God's universe operates on cause and effect while the life current of the great circuit that keeps the universe thriving is the life-blood of love itself. When we deny these fundamental principles of reality we live in an artificial reality perpetuated by Satan and confuse ourselves about the true nature of salvation.

All around us we can perceive the truth about the principle of sowing and reaping, cause and effect. Yet when we choose to believe that God does not operate within these principles when it comes to His moral laws, then we bring confusion and darkness into our hearts and are filled with the main element of the false kingdom, the element of fear.

Fear is antagonistic to love and preempts love. Yet love is the very essence of God, so if our hearts are full of fear it will be impossible for us to become a sanctuary where God can dwell. When we refuse to recognize and give up the lies of Satan about God that still infect our thinking, we resist the Holy Spirit who has been sent to dispel and discredit these lies. No matter how many years we may have believed falsehoods or how true they may feel or how many others we know believe them, none of these add a single bit of credibility to any of these false notions. It is time we allow God to introduce Himself to us personally from His Word and to introduce the light of real truth into our minds and hearts that can act as a cleansing agent to heal our fears, dispel our darkness and change our opinions about God.

We must come to realize that it is the filters of our preconceptions about God that cause us to misinterpret His Word. But we can begin to challenge those filters in the light of truth as it is in Jesus. Jesus is the only safe standard by which to evaluate what is true about God – nothing else. Jesus came to reveal the real truth about God and we must be honest enough to allow Him to define what God is like rather than clinging to our traditions of religion. We may be sure we have all the truth and there is nothing more to learn, but this is one of the most dangerous attitudes one can have. The Jews felt that way and it led them to resent the most explicit revelation of God ever offered to humanity. We too will find ourselves resenting, resisting and finally rejecting those who seek to teach us the truth about God if we are more loyal to our preconceptions than we are willing to open our minds to new truths.

Why is it that we are so ready to be suspicious about new truths and yet so unwilling to be suspicious about our deeply entrenched prejudices? Of course we don't view our prejudices as such because we have confidence that we inherited our version of truth from pioneers who hammered out our doctrines directly from the Word of God. And while it may be true that our forefathers did indeed wrestle with the Word to discover new truths unfamiliar to them, how willing are we to wrestle with it like they did? How willing are we to challenge our preconceptions, our presumptions about God and religion and to change our filters when it starts to become clear that we are not in line with what is revealed in Jesus?

When we insist that our problem is a legal issue with God and that what we need is forgiveness in His mind before He will accept us, love us and allow us into His heaven, then our focus will always end up being on changing God's mind more than changing our own condition. Sin has always led us to believe just as it did with Eve, that the problem that needs to be adjusted is in God's mind rather than in ours. The deception of sin causes us to become blind to its inherent dangers and shifts our perceptions to assume that it is God who is dangerous. Fear immediately takes over our thinking, blinds our perceptions of reality and distorts our feelings. Yet these feelings of fear, condemnation and guilt do not emanate from God but are internally created by the dissonance we feel inside caused by sin.

Part of the deception of sin is that while it creates these feelings that torment us, it then leads us to think that the consequences are being imposed on us by God. We struggle to reconcile passages in the Bible that seem to explicitly reinforce old beliefs about God with these new ideas such as in Exodus 34:7 where God says that He will by no means clear the guilty. We assume when we read this that it means God is waiting to punish those who violate His law. But is that what it really says or is He telling us something else that we are failing to grasp because of our preconceived beliefs that filter out light?

God's universe operates on the principle of cause and effect, sowing and reaping. God is declaring here that He will not always intervene to prevent us from experiencing the full effects of our choices if we keep refusing to come into alignment with these natural principles. But He is not implying He will arbitrarily impose punishments on those who break His rules. That notion is inferred by our own minds by the fear generated from our dissonance with God, the same fear Adam and Eve experienced after they believed lies about God and indulged in rebellion against Him.

Did God come to the garden after they sinned to punish them? Or did He come to the garden just as He always had to spend time with them, enjoy their presence, commune with them and share love together only to find Himself this time alone? How we perceive God's attitude in that story directly reflects our opinions about how God feels about us and in turn determines how we will respond to Him when we feel sinful. It was the fear produced by false assumptions about God in Adam's heart that caused him to run and hide from the One who unconditionally loved him. And those same false assumptions about God keep us in confusion and fear still today.

Sin leads us to believe that God ignores the great principles of cause and effect, sowing and reaping, when it comes to the effects of sin in our lives. Maybe we assume that the consequences of sin are not going to be bad enough on their own so God has to artificially add to their impact by adding imposed punishments and threats to deter us from sinning. Thus we reinforce in our minds false beliefs about God originated His accuser. We believe notions that make God appear in contradiction to His own principles. We try to separate laws of science from laws of religion thinking that religious laws somehow have to be imposed while natural laws are strong enough to operate on their own.

Yet if we are willing to revisit the Bible with new eyes and allow the Spirit of God to open to us the greater truths about God, we will begin to see a perfect harmony in all of God's laws and will perceive that everything operates on the basis of cause and effect naturally without artificial impositions on God's part. In fact, the only unnatural interference is when God suspends the law of cause and effect temporarily in His grace that prevents us from experiencing the deadly effects of sin immediately. God artificially infuses life when we have chosen paths resulting in death in order to give us more time to realign ourselves with the principles that keep perfect harmony and peace throughout the rest of the universe. Rather than seeking to punish us, God is constantly seeking to save us from the natural consequences of our continued choices to live out of sync with reality and disconnected from Life.

Indeed, God did not send the Son into the world to condemn the world, but in order that the world might be saved through him. (John 3:17 NRSV)

Who is the one who condemns? Christ Jesus is He who died, yes, rather who was raised, who is at the right hand of God, who also intercedes for us. Who will separate us from the love of Christ? Will tribulation, or distress, or persecution, or famine, or nakedness, or peril, or sword? Just as it is written, "For your sake we are being put to death all day long; we were considered as sheep to be slaughtered." But in all these things we overwhelmingly conquer through Him who loved us. For I am convinced that neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor principalities, nor things present, nor things to come, nor powers, nor height, nor depth, nor any other created thing, will be able to separate us from the love of God, which is in Christ Jesus our Lord. (Romans 8:34-39)

Deceptive Quoting

2011-12-13T08:22:00.002-06:00

Those who passed by derided him, shaking their heads and saying, "You who would destroy (kataluo) the temple and build it (oikodomeo) in three days, save yourself! If you are the Son of God, come down from the cross." (Matthew 27:39-40 NRSV)

As I was thinking about this verse some time ago my curiosity was aroused to investigate the original words to see if there might be a discrepancy between what Jesus was quoted as saying by His enemies and what He actually had said originally. It should come as little surprise that these men did in fact misquote Jesus and twisted His words to insinuate something He had never said.

I have included the Greek words used for the English translation to reveal how these religious people tried to imply that Jesus had threatened their sacred icon, their holy temple rather than His referring to something totally different. Their prejudice was so strong because of their devotion to a building that they had elevated its honor above any real devotion to God. As a result, when God in person showed up and was speaking to them they so resisted His messages of truth about Himself that they accuseed Him of blaspheming the temple which had subtly replaced Him as their current god.

To explain this, first let me share Strong's meanings for the words used in this verse and then compare that with the original statement that Jesus made which they misquoted along with its Greek words.

Kataluo = to loosen down (disintegrate), i.e. (by implication) to demolish (literally or figuratively); specially to halt for the night:--destroy, dissolve, be guest, lodge, come to nought, overthrow, throw down.

Oikodomeo = to be a house-builder, i.e. construct or (figuratively) confirm:--(be in) build(-er, -ing, up), edify, embolden.

Accepting the main definition for both of these words it is clear that these Jews were accusing Jesus of suggesting a demolition of the literal temple building about which they felt fiercely protective. Both of the words they used clearly imply that Jesus supposedly had threatened to attack their primary icon of religion and then somehow would reconstruct it within three days.

These religious leaders often reacted in violent anger whenever anyone even so much as hinted that there might be something imperfect about their rituals, their religion or their temple. Their whole system of worship had become so linked to the temple and its services that their very identity and value had become dependent on the forms and rituals revolving around this temple. Any suggestion of another option for religion, even that of having a deeper relationship with the God of heaven whom they claimed to follow, was viewed as antagonistic to their 'true religion' and clear heresy.

So, what were the actual words Jesus said that were misused as evidence of heresy against Him? Was there enough clarity in His original words to make them plain so those who were not blinded by extreme prejudice would have reasonably known what He was really trying to communicate?

The Jews then said to Him, "What sign do You show us as your authority for doing these things?" Jesus answered them, "Destroy (luo) this temple, and in three days I will raise it (egeiro) up." (John 2:18-19)

Luo = a primary verb; to "loosen" (literally or figuratively):--break (up), destroy, dissolve, (un-)loose, melt, put off.

Egeiro = to waken (transitively or intransitively), i.e. rouse (literally, from sleep, from sitting or lying, from disease, from death; or figuratively, from obscurity, inactivity, ruins, nonexistence):--awake, lift (up), raise (again, up), rear up, (a-)rise (again, up), stand, take up.

Notice that the Greek words translated destroy are not that much different between these two references. In fact, the word Jesus used was actually a part of the word the Jews later used. There may be subtle differences that could be clear to those who are familiar with the Greek, but the second set of words help to make the intended meaning of Jesus even more clear.

It can be seen in these definitions that there is a significant contrast between reconstructing a building as implied by the word used in the Jew's accusation against Jesus on the cross, and the word Jesus actually used in His original statement. Rather than referring to a building, Jesus clearly had said that He intended to awaken whatever temple was destroyed. Waking up a temple after three days is vastly different than setting about to rebuild a demolished building and the Jews had not really missed that point. Rather, in their zeal to discredit Jesus in the minds of the people who were quickly losing trust in the established system of religion they were driven to slander Jesus and twist His words to incriminate Him as one seeking to advance rebellion and promote insurrection. In their minds as in millions of minds today, to make any threat against a holy shrine is to attack the god that is represented by that shrine and all of its followers. Indeed, without realizing it the shrine itself becomes the god.

There is another significant clue that sometimes can be overlooked in comparing these verses. In their accusation directed at Jesus while on the cross, they implied that He had threatened to Himself destroy the temple. But when one reads the words Jesus actually spoke it becomes evident that He had foretold that they would be the ones who would destroy the temple He was referring to. And ironically, while these pious men were scoffing at Jesus and misquoting Him they were in the very process of fulfilling the prophecy embedded in His words. They were actively tearing down His temple, the temple of His human body like the one God uses to dwell in each of us. Very soon the destruction would be finished when He finally died. But true to His statement on the third day He would awaken that temple and there was nothing they could do to prevent it.

I am the good shepherd, and I know My own and My own know Me, even as the Father knows Me and I know the Father; and I lay down My life for the sheep. I have other sheep, which are not of this fold; I must bring them also, and they will hear My voice; and they will become one flock with one shepherd. For this reason the Father loves Me, because I lay down My life so that I may take it again. No one has taken it away from Me, but I lay it down on My own initiative. I have authority to lay it down, and I have authority to take it up again. This commandment I received from My Father. (John 10:14-18)

How often do we find ourselves conveniently twisting someone's words to make it seem they meant something different than what they said to further our own agenda? How often do we jump to conclusions by construing people to be a certain way, to fit in a certain mold by labeling them, stereo-typing them or claiming they believe things only because we have put them in a box without honestly listening to them?

I know that I have been on both sides of this issue. I have been misrepresented and accused of teaching what some consider to be heresy while not being given a chance to explain what I believe. I have been lied about, slandered and misquoted in order to discredit my reputation. But I am also guilty of stereo-typing others and assuming that because they subscribe to certain ideas that they must also believe other things that people in that category often believe.

But all of this is a form of dishonesty and deception. In indulging in this kind of behavior we do not allow people the freedom to define for themselves what they actually believe. Yes, it is true that there are many who intentionally use double-talk and try to obscure their real motives or change what they say depending on who is listening. But that does not make excuse us to pass judgment on anyone or jump to conclusions and censor them without first making a serious effort with an open mind to discover their real intentions and beliefs.

Father, remind me to keep a check on my mouth and my thoughts, to refrain from misquoting others in order to discredit them. Grow me in grace and make me more gracious like You. Remind me that true freedom, the freedom that heaven values above all else, is the right by each individual to choose. Without this freedom to believe without coercion or outside condemnation, there is no possibility for true love to exist or flourish. Father, I want Your kind of love to grow in my heart so that the atmosphere that surrounded Jesus will begin to be seen in my life. Do this in me for Your glory, for Your name's sake.

Satisfaction or Pleasure

2011-11-29T06:40:00.001-06:00

Learning to know what brings true satisfaction rather than temporary pleasure is one of the main tasks of progressing successfully through childhood maturity. Yet it is what I feel I am just now beginning to learn more completely.

Learning what satisfies in preference to what brings immediate gratification requires being equipped with self-control. Teaching self-control is nearly a lost science in the arena of parenting for many. Because parents live for the present and often have very little maturity or self-control themselves, they are incapable of passing along skills they themselves have never acquired. But without healthy self-control a person seldom can discover what brings long-term satisfaction and they easily become victims to addictions that appeal to the cravings for pleasure.

Pleasure without self-control leaves one empty and even more hungry for satisfaction. We are created to thrive on satisfaction which stimulates true growth and maturity. But pleasure sought outside of self-control that keeps us in line with the principles of health and life in every arena is debilitating and inhibits growth. Many pleasures are derived from self-destructive behaviors and even worse, they often involve exploitation of others. Pleasures that exploit either others or our own well being are rooted in the counterfeit system to God's plan for living a satisfied life of growth and maturity. These pleasures short-circuit our systems and rob us of the very relationships that should bring us life.

Pleasure over satisfaction involves the worshiping of false gods. The concept of gods to start with is rooted in our desire to seek sources from which to derive life for ourselves, which in itself is a legitimate, God-designed longing. But when we turn to any other sources other than what God provides for us to use that fit in His own plans for our lives, then we disconnect from the circuit designed to bring satisfaction and begin to destroy our lives by seeking 'strange fire' sources from which to get life.

The three types of lust listed by John relate to this directly. Lust is actually defined as the deep craving to have something immediately. This is the kind of craving that fuels addictions that look for instant pleasures in preference to long-term satisfaction.

Do not love the world nor the things in the world. If anyone loves the world, the love of the Father is not in him. For all that is in the world, the lust of the flesh and the lust of the eyes and the boastful pride of life, is not from the Father, but is from the world. The world is passing away, and also its lusts; but the one who does the will of God lives forever. (1 John 2:15-17)

Lust is the driving force behind everything that fails to satisfy and is the main motivation for all that the world stands for. Lust fuels the counterfeit system of the world. But lustful pleasure resists depending on God or alignment with His principles of reality and disconnects us from the only Source of life in the universe. The world only recycles life second-hand because it does not have any life within itself to give. This is why the world is passing away because all of the fuel it needs to function is being used up without seeking more from God. People steal life from others in all sorts of ways in attempts to feel more alive themselves for a little longer. But unless we turn to receive new life and real satisfaction from the only Source that can supply fresh life to our souls, we will expire along with the world.

Satan is the author of this counterfeit system that is doomed to extinction. That is why Jesus stated categorically, The thief comes only to steal and kill and destroy; I came that they may have life, and have it abundantly. (John 10:10) When one operates disconnected from the only Source of life, to maintain life one has to rob others of the life in them in order to stay alive and feel half decent a little longer. And even all of this can only happen because of the grace of God that prevents the immediate consequences of sin from wiping us out.

God's grace has given us a period called probation in which we are offered opportunity to cooperate with God's repair process and learn to connect with Him to receive life and experience true satisfaction. If we fail to take advantage of this gift of time and choose to allow the Spirit to rewire our thinking, we will live out the lusts of the world and will die away along with the world sooner or later.

How does one learn to make choices in favor of what satisfies as opposed to what quickly feels good? They must learn this through various experiences and have it modeled to them by others who have more maturity. We all need much more training both intellectually but even more so emotionally, how to perceive what is motivated by lust verses what will bring true satisfaction and growth. The more we indulge our appetites and passions at the expense of growth and maturity the more we will suffer under the curse. On the other hand, the more we choose to bring our appetites and passions under control, to defer pleasures in order to experience true satisfaction through self-discipline, the more we will feel whole and alive and truly happy.

True happiness can only be experienced when one is in alignment with the principles under which we were created and lives in healthy relationship with others. These principles are often distilled into what we call 'laws', but these principle-based laws are very different than the arbitrary kinds of laws that the world imposes on us. God's laws are not vindictive or punishment-based laws or arbitrary expressions of selfish people seeking to control others like earthly laws often are. Rather, heaven's laws are simply expressions of what is sometimes called 'natural law'. They define how we can experience growth and satisfaction and integration into the healthy society of the rest of the universe outside our sinful world.

We are living in a time of history when pleasure-seeking predominates nearly everyone's thinking. Evil is on a sharp increase while maturity becomes less and less evident. Self-control is out of vogue and self-indulgence is promoted as the popular option for everyone. Selfishness is the driving force behind everything that is involved in sin; and the perfection of sin is fast approaching.

Those who want to live a better life, to come under the authority of God and be salvaged from the self-destroying lusts of this world, face daunting obstacles and intense pressure to remain conformed to the false principles around us. Only by submitting completely to God, by surrendering our will in deference to His will and becoming intimately acquainted with Jesus and allowing Him full access to our hearts can any escape the corruption that is in the world through lust.

His divine power has given us everything needed for life and godliness, through the knowledge of him who called us by his own glory and goodness. Thus he has given us, through these things, his precious and very great promises, so that through them you may escape from the corruption that is in the world because of lust, and may become participants of the divine nature. (2 Peter 1:3-4 NRSV)

Father, help each of us to see more clearly our own true condition and our desperate need to discern between what only brings self-destructive pleasure and what brings true, life-giving satisfaction. Open our eyes to the ways in which we are ruining ourselves physically, emotionally, spiritually and socially by allowing lust to blind us to what we truly need to thrive and live. Bring us into closer relationship to You and teach us your principles of life that bring true satisfaction, joy and stimulates real growth.

Finesse With Fire

2011-11-25T19:41:00.001-06:00

The past few days I have been reigniting my skills with keeping a wood stove going. But something else has been going on inside of me that reminds me of the current spiritual situation going on in my church.

When we arrived here in Michigan to stay with friends for a few days to enjoy Thanksgiving with relatives nearby, the wood stove in our room was already pumping out heat. The stock of large pieces of wood behind the nearby door was waiting. This stove heats the whole house by convecting heat up the stairs, and although it is still early in the fall/winter season it is needed to supply heat as it is below freezing at night.

As is common with wood stoves, the room housing the stove is the warmest room in the building. In this case it is the same room we are sleeping in which has made it interesting trying to sleep with it so warm at night. However, having a few years experience with wood fires I knew the first night that likely early in the morning the stove would need some attention or we might have to start a fire all over again from scratch in the morning in a cold room. Sure enough, early in the morning I began to get cold and started looking for an extra blanket. At the same time I decided to get up to see if I could salvage the fire and get it going again from just the coals still glowing in the bottom.

Fortunately I have not lost too many of my skills from years ago when we learned how to finesse a fire to keep warm. Knowing just how much to open the door to allow in fresh air without extinguishing the fire is a skill that has to be developed by practice. If you open the door too wide while the damper is not open enough, you can quickly fill the room with smoke. If you keep the door closed too tightly when there is not enough heat inside, the fire can suffocate completely. How far you leave the air inlets open depends very much on other conditions. The amount of live coals, the size of the stove, the humidity of the wood and the size and type of wood all are important things to factor in as to how the fire will increase or fade away.

I could not help but notice how similar this situation is compared to the current situation in my local church. It seems to have been a practice for a long time to keep the doors rather tight on the church, to only allow in people who look a lot like the ones already there, think like them, have similar traditions that they prefer, etc. But the effect of this has been that the fire of the Spirit of God has not been allowed to permeate hearts and we have generally experienced a lot of coldness as a result. We may have been able to keep up the appearances of having a good 'fireplace' and may even have tried to provide artificial light to make it appear inviting, but there has been very little genuine love, light and warmth that would attract hurting, needy people to come for nourishment, healing and growth.

Each of us involved in this experiment of grace have our own opinions as to what needs to happen to improve our fire. Of course, none of us has a very complete perspective and we all need to seek God for heaven's perspective. God does not give any one person all of the picture but does respond to those who seek His face earnestly with parts of the puzzle so they can put it together with others to make more sense and in order to integrate all of us into an interdependent body.

I notice that if the wood I put into the fire has too much distance from the coals that both suffer as a result. The coals will continue to cool down because of a lack of fuel while the wood remains unaffected enough by the heat from the coals to ignite. On the other hand, if I place the wood so tight to the coals that no air can get in, then similar results are experienced. Only when the proportions are properly appreciated and there is the right mix of hot coals, reasonably dry wood and allowance for oxygen to circulate around them both can I expect an increase of heat and light.

As I stood here this morning experimenting with the door to see how far open it needed to be to get enough air in to make the firewood burn better, I sensed the Spirit of God reminding me of my own great need for far more 'oxygen' for my own spirit than I have ever experienced in the past with God and in my relationship to others in the church. Interestingly I read a statement this morning that really convicted me personally. Prayers, exhortation, and talk are cheap fruits which are frequently tied on, but fruits that are manifested in good works, in caring for the needy, the fatherless and widows are genuine fruits and grow naturally upon a good tree. {TMK 335} For several days I have sensed that my own relationship with true religion is likely far more shallow than I have ever realized. My experience with God may be far too full of talk and theory and too devoid of real fruit working by love.

As I write this I can look over at the wood stove and see the light intensifying as the fire increasingly warms the room. The door is open farther than I originally thought would work but as a plentiful supply of fresh oxygen flows through the chamber there is obvious increase of light and heat being felt. I also feel a deep longing inside of me to become ignited in my own heart, to open the door of my own soul far wider than I have ever done in the past to allow the oxygen of God's love to invade the dark, chilly places of my own heart in order to increase the heat inside. I long to become a more brilliant testimony of what God's grace can produce in the life of an old damaged legalist. I want to be free of the inhibitions and fears about what others might think about me and become a torch of hope for others around me who are also longing to experience the fire of God's passionate love in their own lives.

It is not necessary to resort to putting flammable liquids into a stove to get the fire going. That is dangerous and even reckless. Likewise, God does not resort to such tactics of force to overwhelm us with His grace. He wants us to come to Him willingly through natural attraction, to give Him willing permission to introduce Himself to our hearts and to capture our affections with His beauty, loveliness and charms. Too long I have focused my attention on supposed truths about God that are full of fear, that are tainted by false ideas about Him that keep me at least partially afraid of Him. But He is longing to bless me richly and draw me into close, intimate fellowship with Him and with others.

God is Himself a passionate fire ablaze with love, full of pleasure and everything our hearts crave and need. The problem is that we are starving for want of the oxygen of a true knowledge of His character and His feelings towards us. Some of us are so full of moisture like pride, selfishness and confused ideas about reality that we need a great deal of drying out before we can even begin to burn for God. But the best way to dry out wood is to keep it close to a fire and allow it some time to absorb more heat. Maybe our church is going through a drying out stage while we are letting go of a lot of confused, dark, mistaken ideas about what constitutes religion and needing to absorb a completely new vision of what God has in mind for us.

A good fire needs just the right mix of all the necessary elements for it to grow and be effective. If coals are moved too far away from the main fire they soon fade and lose their heat. If we remove ourselves too far away from the collective fire of God's children connected to His body on earth or try to inflame our hearts with strange fire from another source, we may discover that our hearts are only growing colder and we will not be usable by God to attract others to want to know the wonderful God that He really is.

There is also the problem of at times having too much openness with a fire. There are times when we may need to close the door of the stove to preserve the heat inside in order to make it last longer. There are times when the wood just needs time to soak in the heat protected from the coldness outside. It still needs oxygen to glow but will last far longer through the night while putting out an even, stable heat if it is protected and regulated. God knows when intense heat is needed to bring about revival and when His children need to spend time soaking in His presence protected from outside influences. But always there is the need for the life-giving oxygen of an intimate, experiential knowledge of His heart.

I just now closed the door of the wood stove because the large pieces I had put in this morning were finally burning effectively. The room has warmed up and it is time to slow down the burn for awhile without letting the fire die out. It takes skill, practice and knowledge to effectively manage a wood stove fire and regulate it to produce the right output. In our lives and in our church we must trust God as the expert who knows best when we need to soak in His presence or when we need to burn more openly.

God has much more fuel in waiting nearby that needs to experience the profound effects of His love and grace and healing in their hearts too. But if we are not willing to be ignited ourselves and even consumed with the passion of God it will be unlikely that He will be willing to bring much new wood into our local 'fireplace'. If our own fire is too weak to keep aflame, it would only tend to dampen and inhibit our growing spiritual life if we got too many new pieces placed in our midst. We might become excited that our numbers were growing, but unless we have some solid coals in place that can provide stability and steady heat we might be in danger of losing more than we gain.

We must pray for wisdom, for humility, for more willingness to experience the passion of God in our own hearts irregardless of what others outside might think or say about us if we want to be effective and attractive witnesses for the true God of heaven. I believe we must turn our focus away from an obsession with orthodoxy and infighting about unimportant topics and learn to draw close to God individually through His Word and learn to discern His Spirit in each of our hearts. True children of God are led by the Spirit of God according to Romans 8:14. And the Spirit of God will not lead His children into disputes or antagonism towards each other.

We need more than anything else a fresh infusion of the oxygen of heaven. We also need to experience at the heart level prolonged contact with the fire of God's kind of passion, a divine fire that may likely put us at odds with worldly passions but will draw others to want to know the kind of God who can bring about such amazing transformations as they see taking place in our lives.

There is nothing like a good, warm wood stove on a cold day to draw people around to enjoy its warmth. There is nothing like a flickering, inviting fireplace that can not only accent a holiday but can invite warm friendships to deepen through intimate fellowship with hearts bonding together in its light. God longs to stir up our coals, to bring more wood to our fire and to make our local fellowship a place of healing love for our community. But our individual choices as to how much we will allow Him to invade our hearts and renew our own minds with the fire of His personal presence will determine how much warmth will be produced by our church to attract others to want to join the party.

May God set our hearts and our church ablaze for His glory, Amen.

To Resist or Not to Resist

2011-10-03T09:22:00.002-05:00

I have been thinking lately about the element of resistance and how that figures into our relationships with God and with others including resistance against evil people. In Scripture I find some interesting instructions about resistance, some of which can make us very uncomfortable. I have been learning that it is our internal resistance against love and resisting the truth about who God is that will become the fuel, the internal cause of what is termed “the fires of hell” that destroys the wicked. To my amazement I discovered from the Word that it is not an angry God bent on punishment or revenge that burns the lost but rather their own resistance to His passionate love for them that creates the torture, suffering and finally brings about their own annihilation. Yet at the very same time and in the very same place, those who have been saved, who have allowed God to bring them into full harmony with His character and the principles that govern the universe (God's laws) find themselves glowing intensely with His glory and light as their response to the full revelation of God's glory and character.

This is particularly why I find myself very interested in learning more about this element of resistance in my own heart. Who or what I resist becomes the central issue in determining which group I will find myself among on that final day of full revelation and judgment. If I allow resistance to God and His kindness to remain in my own heart I store up wrath as fuel within myself against the day of judgment as Paul points out in Romans 2:5. I certainly don't want to follow that way so I am keenly interested in learning and practicing the true use of resistance the right way God as designs for me to live.

I used to pray for God to remove all resistance from my heart, but sometimes time I sensed that maybe this was not the right thing to be asking. I was reminded that Scripture sometimes tells me to resist, but the only specific references I can recall usually have to do with resisting the devil. In contrast I remember that Jesus explicitly taught that we should not resist an evil person. Finally I decided that this subject needs some intentional research on this word to see just what the Bible really has to say about it. I want my beliefs and life to be shaped by the reliable Word of God rather than assumptions and opinions either of my own or of those around me that have not been confirmed by the context of the Word.

I find it extremely valuable to allow the Bible to shape the definitions of the words that it uses rather than relying on our common usage and assumptions about what a word means. Dictionaries only provide what is called the 'common usage' whereas many words in the Bible have had their true meaning largely obscured because the common usage has become so distorted from what God wanted to convey. Therefore I have found it very helpful to make much more sense out of what the Bible really means if I take time to allow it to define its own terms while laying aside all preconceived opinions. The only filtering criteria I feel is helpful is to apply the filter of the plain teachings about what God is like that Jesus came to reveal about the Father. If a definition is in conflict with what God seeks to reveal about His consistent character of love, mercy and fairness then I have cause to examine it much more closely to see where the problem may be.

Here are the results of my research in the Word that I have uncovered so far. By examining the context of the verses in which a word is used the true meaning of the word can become more evident. This first list is all the verses that contain the word translated resist from the following Greek word.

Anthistemi - to stand against, i.e. oppose:--resist, withstand. (Strong's)

Matthew 5:39 "But I tell you not to resist an evil person. But whoever slaps you on your right cheek, turn the other to him also.

Luke 21:15 "for I will give you a mouth and wisdom which all your adversaries will not be able to contradict or resist.

Acts 6:10 And they were not able to resist the wisdom and the Spirit by which he spoke.

Acts 13:8 But Elymas the sorcerer (for so his name is translated) withstood them, seeking to turn the proconsul away from the faith.

Romans 9:19 You will say to me then, "Why does He still find fault? For who has resisted His will?"

Romans 13:2 Therefore whoever resists the authority resists the ordinance of God, and those who resist will bring judgment on themselves.

Galations 2:11 Now when Peter had come to Antioch, I withstood him to his face, because he was to be blamed;

Ephesians 6:13 Therefore take up the whole armor of God, that you may be able to withstand in the evil day, and having done all, to stand.

2Tiimothy 3:8 Now as Jannes and Jambres resisted Moses, so do these also resist the truth: men of corrupt minds, disapproved concerning the faith; (Resist the truth contains a double resistance.)

2Timothy 4:15 You also must beware of him, for he has greatly resisted our words. (This one contains a double use of resistance in it.)

James 4:7 Therefore submit to God. Resist the devil and he will flee from you.

1Peter 5:9 Resist him, steadfast in the faith, knowing that the same sufferings are experienced by your brotherhood in the world.

Here are additional verses that use a very similar Greek word.

Antitassomai - to range oneself against, i.e. oppose:--oppose themselves, resist. (Strong's)

Acts 18:6 But when they opposed him and blasphemed, he shook his garments and said to them, "Your blood be upon your own heads; I am clean. From now on I will go to the Gentiles."

Romans 13:2 Therefore whoever resists the authority resists the ordinance of God, and those who resist will bring judgment on themselves.

James 4:6 But He gives more grace. Therefore He says: "God resists the proud, But gives grace to the humble."

James 5:6 You have condemned, you have murdered the just; he does not resist you. (Double use of the word for resist.)

1Peter 5:5 Likewise you younger people, submit yourselves to your elders. Yes, all of you be submissive to one another, and be clothed with humility, for "God resists the proud, but gives grace to the humble."

Here is yet another Greek word with its one usage.

antipipto - to oppose:--resist.

Ac 7:51 "You stiffnecked and uncircumcised in heart and ears! You always resist the Holy Spirit; as your fathers did, so do you. (This verse contains a double use of the word for resistance.)

Another very interesting observation I found in my research are the translations for the word satan. In the last reference below it is translated resist and quite often it is not translated as Satan in the English. Here is a cross-section of examples to see how this word was translated.

satan - to attack, (figuratively) accuse:--(be an) adversary, resist. (from the Hebrew.)

Numbers 22:32 And the Angel of the LORD said to him, "Why have you struck your donkey these three times? Behold, I have come out to stand against you, because your way is perverse before Me.

1Samuel 29:4 But the princes of the Philistines were angry with him; so the princes of the Philistines said to him, "Make this fellow return, that he may go back to the place which you have appointed for him, and do not let him go down with us to battle, lest in the battle he become our adversary. For with what could he reconcile himself to his master, if not with the heads of these men?

1Kings 5:4 But now the LORD my God has given me rest on every side; there is neither adversary nor evil occurrence.

1Chronicles 21:1 Now Satan stood up against Israel, and moved David to number Israel.

Job 1:6-7 Now there was a day when the sons of God came to present themselves before the LORD, and Satan also came among them. And the LORD said to Satan, "From where do you come?" So Satan answered the LORD and said, "From going to and fro on the earth, and from walking back and forth on it."

Psalms 38:20 Those also who render evil for good, They are my adversaries, because I follow what is good.

Psalms 71:13 Let them be confounded and consumed Who are adversaries of my life; Let them be covered with reproach and dishonor Who seek my hurt.

Psalms 109:4 In return for my love they are my accusers, But I give myself to prayer.

Psalms 109:20 Let this be the LORD'S reward to my accusers, And to those who speak evil against my person.

Psalms 109:29 Let my accusers be clothed with shame, And let them cover themselves with their own disgrace as with a mantle.

Zechariah 3:1-2 And he shewed me Joshua the high priest standing before the angel of the LORD, and Satan standing at his right hand to resist him. And the LORD said unto Satan, The LORD rebuke thee, O Satan; even the LORD that hath chosen Jerusalem rebuke thee: is not this a brand plucked out of the fire?

One thing I find very compelling is the reference from 1Chronicles 21:1. Many become very confused by when they read in one place that Satan motivated David to number Israel against God's will while at the same time the story is reported seemingly opposite by Samuel.

2 Samuel 24:1 Again the anger of the Lord was aroused against Israel, and He moved David against them to say, "Go, number Israel and Judah."

I have heard all sorts of convoluted explanations attempting to reconcile these two passages, but what I now see here is a much simpler explanation that the account in Chronicles may be more a problem of translation more than of confused identity. If the same Hebrew word was translated so many times in other places as adversary or opponent, it clearly could have been translated the same way in this verse. Given that interpretation it could easily be understood that David was likely responding to a threat by some enemy that God allowed to threaten him that motivated David to resort to counting up his own military resources rather than turning to God to learn the underlying reason why God was allowing an enemy to threaten him. Viewing it this way it can be seen that David was very possibly avoiding facing some sin, either in his life or among his people. David was choosing this alternative as a way of avoiding facing the real issues God wanted him to deal with in his life.

The reason this makes more sense is that throughout Scripture it can be seen that often when Israel fell into sin or backsliding God would allow outside enemies to come against them in order to get their attention when nothing else seemed to work. Given that background this could both explain and reconcile these two seemingly conflicting passages to reveal that David was choosing to ignore or avoid something God wanted him to face instead of seeking repentance and reconciliation with God. David was choosing to rely on human force of arms in resistance to God's providence. Thus Scripture portrays as God becoming angry with David which is often how God is perceived when we put ourselves at odds with His ways and resist His discipline in our lives.

After viewing all of these verses related to resistance it is becoming clearer to me that there is a legitimate place for resistance in our hearts, just not against God or His discipline. Like a friend pointed out to me recently, a particular type of electrical resistor called a diode only resists current flowing in one direction. If that diode is inserted into the circuit the wrong way serious problems will result. Similarly, God is seeking to rewire the circuits of our minds to resist the right things but not resist Him.

This analogy is profound to me, for is helps me to see that sin has reversed nearly everything from God's original design for my life. When I am out of harmony with God I find myself resisting Him while not resisting the devil. To be salvaged (salvation) through having my circuits repaired, I must allow God to come in and rearrange the 'resistors' inside of me, to align them according to His original design for me as revealed in the Word of God. As I have my resistance reversed and get the 'diodes' of my heart realigned properly I will then resist Satan's temptations to act like him but at the same time will not resist the attacks of evil people against me. Jesus is the greatest demonstration of this principle in how He humbled Himself and allowed evil people to abuse Him without any thought of retaliation or resentment. (1 Peter 2:21-25 and Philippians 2:3-11)

In contrast I see God immediately implanting resistance into the human psyche as part of our salvation process as soon as sin had infected our race. God declared to Satan, I will make you and the woman hostile toward each other. I will make your descendants and her descendant hostile toward each other. He (Jesus) will crush your head, and you will bruise his heel. (Gen 3:15 GW) This divinely infused resistance to Satan and his lies about God is a vital component of our humanity or we would be hopelessly caught in Satan's trap with no way out. This divine internal resistor implanted by God and revealed to Eve and Adam right after their sin was a glistening diamond of hope that they could be restored from their fall and be at last fully reconciled to God. And although sin will tragically take a very long time to be worked out of the universe, this resistance that God implanted is something we need to be aware of and to utilize in our fight against evil, especially the evil within our own hearts. This built-in resistor is one that we can activate for our benefit by choosing to use it whenever we are tempted to assume lies about ourselves or about God from the great sorcerer of all lies.

Father, continue your rewiring activity in my heart and mind. Remove all the resistors that clutter and confuse my circuits to your ways while strengthening your resistor against Satan's temptations, accusations and lies about you. Help me to remember that evil people are not my enemies but that Satan and his lies are the real problem. You are passionately desirous of saving those who presently seem hopelessly evil and you want to use me to demonstrate the truth about your constant love and forgiveness through my reactions to their mistreatment of me. This is why you said not to resist evil people's mistreatment toward me while at the same time positively resisting the devil.

I want to be a much better reflection of the truth about you so that others, whether evil or not, may want to know you better and will become attracted to the charms of your beauty and grace. Fill my life with your unconditional love and forgiveness like Jesus revealed under extreme pressure so that your reputation may be vindicated and the charges against you may be shown to be totally baseless.

Worthy to Suffer

2011-09-26T09:05:00.000-05:00

So they went on their way from the presence of the Council, rejoicing that they had been considered worthy to suffer shame for His name. (Acts 5:41)

Recently this idea of rejoicing because one is considered worthy to suffer for the name of Jesus came to my attention again. I distinctly remember feeling very uncomfortable with this concept many times whenever I read this or heard it discussed and it still is not well resolved in my mind so I feel I need to do some intentional digging into the Word to unpack this for my own peace of mind.

What I think might be disturbing me the most about this is that it seems that whenever people talk about this it seems to often be couched in a subtle assumption that somehow 'suffering for Jesus' in some way creates 'brownie points' with God, creating some sort of merit that may count toward a better position in heaven or some other such desirable result. Yet anything that smacks of earning favor with God or contributing to our own salvation through any deeds of supposed righteousness of our own flies directly in the face of the true gospel of Jesus Christ. I think this may be the core issue that has troubled me for so long about this idea of being counted worthy to suffer.

Of course, in addition to the theological conflict in this concept I also am not a sadist who finds delight in suffering to start with. Not to imply that Jesus was such a person, yet because of my dark pictures of God and very confused beliefs about why Jesus suffered and died in the first place, any 'worth' supposedly generated by my 'suffering for Jesus' just doesn't make much sense at all. Given the typical dark legal model of Jesus having to be punished for my sins in my place by an angry deity venting His wrath on Jesus to save my hide, in that context filling up the sufferings of Christ (Col. 1:24) sounds a little like Jesus' suffering wasn't quite enough to cover all my sins. Of course that is even more blatantly blasphemous and yet such thinking lurks not far beneath the surface in too many of our teachings about the gospel.

Having my picture of God and my understandings of the reasons for the cross radically challenged and altered has given me the ability to revisit all of Scripture with new eyes, to reconsider all of these things that have confused and baffled me for so long through different lenses allowing me to see how they fit together and make sense like never before. I keep realizing how vital it is to establish a correct concept of how God feels about us before launching into attempted explanations of most other doctrines. If our picture of God is faulty then the rest of our theology will be confused at best and destructive at worst.

To discover why anyone would find cause for rejoicing in being persecuted for Christ's sake, I must find a clearer explanation of why Jesus suffered in the first place. If my theology is based on Jesus suffering at the hands of an angry God venting wrath on Him instead of us, then suffering for Jesus makes no sense whatsoever. However, if I begin to see that Jesus came to present a compassionate Father longing for us to change our opinions about Him, to induce us to trust Him so we can be made safe enough to come close into His presence, then everything suddenly takes on a whole different perspective. When the true light of Jesus shines on our interpretations of why Jesus came to suffer and die it begins to help things fit together better to make sense out of why some people might value the opportunity to suffer along with Him.

I did a word study this morning on this word worthy and learned some important things from Scripture. Rather than being along the notion of earning worth like I had too often assumed in the past, worthy has more to do with trust. I now see more clearly that the reason Jesus suffered at the hands of sinners – not at the hands of God – was because sinners resist love and resist truth that exposes their true condition. Whenever sin and goodness come into close proximity to each other there is always friction involved which creates conflict. The more in tune with God a person's character is the more likely they are going to experience the same friction with everyone who are unlike God just as Jesus did when He was here on earth. Given this understanding I can now start to see that whenever this kind of suffering comes into the life of a true Christian, one who is coming to reflect the true nature and goodness of God like Jesus did, they become aware that God is entrusting them with the privilege of allowing that friction and persecution to come into their life for the express purpose of revealing again the truth about Himself to the world just as Jesus revealed it when He suffered. In essence, those who are allowed the privilege of suffering persecution for living like Jesus lived, who represent the truth about God to a world hostile to everything He is during that experience – they realize that God is demonstrating faith in them; God is believing that, like Job, they are mature enough to be trusted to represent Him in how they will react under increased pressure from the hostility of sinners.

Given this context I can now better appreciate how the early believers could view it as an honor to be beaten and abused and slandered for the Name they had come to love and admire and emulate. As their lives became more and more out of sync with the lives and values of sinners who were living in rebellion against God, their living example of what God is really like and how He relates to people inevitably created tension and disturbance wherever they went and sooner or later induced violent resistance. Yet because of their perceptions from knowing Jesus and by keeping their minds in the context of the higher perspective of the intense struggle between good and evil as God sees it, they were able to re-frame their circumstances and depend on the Spirit of Jesus dwelling in them to demonstrate again as Jesus had done what true godliness looks like under fire.

I have come to realize that Jesus suffered and died because He demonstrated total love and forgiveness even though extreme pressure was applied to induce Him to react like sinners react under similar abuse and insult. Jesus came to expose as lies the assertions of Satan that God would become angry and want revenge if He could just be antagonized sufficiently. This is precisely why Jesus came to this earth as a human – so that humans and demons alike could take their best shot at trying to get God to act in any way like them do. If Jesus could be induced to even feel desires for revenge or embrace even fleeting feelings of offense even for a moment, Satan's accusations would find some foothold for validity. This was the real battle taking place between Christ and Satan during Jesus' whole time living on this earth.

Jesus' primary task while living as a human among sinners who were seeking to do everything possible to get Him to act like them in some way, was to demonstrate to the on-looking universe the true heart of the Father. Jesus came to prove explicitly under the most severe pressure of persecution that love really is more effective than fear; that force, shame and condemnation never have to be used to keep order in God's government and that the principles God has set in place to guide and govern our lives are the only safe way to live if we want to live. Far from doing away with the law of God, Jesus came to prove it is the only way to be synchronized with heaven and to thrive in life. Jesus said Himself He did not come to abolish the law but to fulfill it – to show it to be valid and viable and true.

All who allow the grace of God to fill them and have their lives transformed into harmony with heaven's principles of living will find themselves increasingly at odds with the world around them that is living in resistance to those principles. As their life becomes more in tune with heaven the friction of this resistance will cause increasing antagonism and anger and persecution. Rather than producing some sort of merit with God, this friction is simply an indication that the person is actually reflecting the truth about God enough to now make a noticeable difference between them and the world. As they consistently reflect love and forgiveness under pressure, the same message about God that Jesus came to reveal is again conveyed to an astonished world that has so long resisted these truths about God. Once again in the life of His suffering disciples, the true character of a God of compassion and love is clearly manifested to unbelievers who have insisted God cannot really be that good. And unfortunately a vast majority of these resistant unbelievers are in the folds of religion claiming to teach the truth about God while rejecting the true power of His love.

The disciples and the martyrs throughout the ages came to realize that harmony with God will always result in disharmony and tension with the world, even when the opposition is found under the label of Christianity. Harmony with God is not found in perfecting an outward performance of piety and legal compliance; rather, harmony with God must always originate in the heart that has become enamored with overwhelming, transforming truths about God's grace, beauty and fairness. The more a person comes to reflect the goodness of God the more they will be trusted by God to encounter hostility that will highlight these truths they are now experiencing and reflecting.

Given a proper view of reality and why suffering comes into the life of a true disciple of Jesus, I can now see why people would consider it an honor and a high privilege to suffer for the name of God. These people are not proud of their status as persecuted Christians because of pride in their own ability to resist evil; on the contrary they are amazed and humbled that God has considered them worthy enough to trust them to be persecuted so as to more fully reveal His character in their responses to such treatment.

Now it makes more sense why Paul could talk about crucifixion as something he experienced every day. As he allowed the presence of Jesus to abide in him each day, just as Jesus invites all of us to do, Paul could honestly confess that suffering for Christ was the highest privilege a person could be entrusted with by God.

I have been crucified with Christ; and it is no longer I who live, but Christ lives in me; and the life which I now live in the flesh I live by faith in the Son of God, who loved me and gave Himself up for me. (Galatians 2:20)

The inevitable question then follows, where do I fit in to this? When I find myself under attack, when someone lashes out at me and humiliates me publicly, how do I react under such pressure? Do I have a strong enough heart connection with Jesus and a good enough picture of God that I can respond with similar reactions as how Jesus responded to similar treatment? I shrink from answering these disturbing questions. Too often, rather than viewing such treatment as an honor I usually run in terror from them or react defensively in a spirit similar to what is directed against me.

I am coming to realize that it is not by trying harder to resist getting upset or to resist feeling insulted that I allow Jesus to demonstrate His true character through me under pressure. Rather, it is only by spending sufficient time meditating on the beauty of Jesus when He was under pressure and constantly updating and improving my perceptions about God that will effectively shape my reactions under such circumstances. The only way I can be prepared to be trusted by God to reveal the truth about Him is if I immerse myself so thoroughly in His presence and soak in the truth about what He is like that my reactions will become spontaneously like His; so that Jesus will be allowed to respond from within me rather than my natural reactions and impulses taking over. Then in amazement I may find myself also rejoicing that God has finally transformed me to the point where He can trust me to also be exposed to increasing opposition and know that I have enough humility to accurately demonstrate the same forbearance, forgiveness and continuous compassion and love that Jesus did when He was attacked.

Father, obviously You have a long way to go in my case. Please keep working inside of me and show me Your face more clearly so what is reflected in my life under trying circumstances will look more like Jesus rather than like me. Cleanse me of everything that is not like You and replace all the lies about You in my heart with fresh revelations of Your beauty and perfection and loveliness. Increase my capacity to know You intimately and dwell in me more fully so the world can once again be privileged to see clear demonstrations of how You feel toward sinners and saints alike. Do this in me for Your reputation's sake, Amen.

Freedom That Disturbs

2011-09-21T07:51:00.000-05:00

Today we face a crisis in regards to freedom. Our country is betraying itself and is stripping away one freedom after another in the name of supposed securit can be extremely quick to be very defensive when it comes to my own rights and freedoms and can even become angry or aggressive about protecting them. What I am referring to is how ready I am to come to the defense of other people's freedoms particularly when they come under threat from me.

Like most people, I want others to love me and I want to form close, healthy bonds with people. Yet in my desires to make attachments to others I far too often slip into habits of subtle coercion or may be tempted to lay guilt trips on people who don't conform to what I want in our relationship. There are so many little ways that we use to try to get our way with people that are out of harmony with God's ways of relating, yet we are so used to using these methods that we seldom realize how much they violate other people's freedom to turn away from a relationship with us.

I am learning that most all of these dysfunctional ways of trying to relate to others are rooted in false ideas about how God relates to me. My heart is still infected with many lies and false assumptions about what God is like and how He feels about me. These deeply embedded internal lies, most of them subconscious, infect all of my other relationships and influence how I try to form new ones and how I react in various situations. The principle of transformation into the image of the God we worship – imaging – always results in acting out like the kind of God our heart believes in, whether that image is accurate or terribly distorted. To put this another way, the way we treat people reveals the way we perceive God treats us and is often an opportunity to catch glimpses into the deeper hidden recesses of our souls.

I cringe when I think of some of the major blunders I have committed that have deeply damaged my relationships with others and wounded people's hearts. Yet when I analyze why I did those things when I knew I didn't have intentions of trying to hurt them, I can always trace it back to mistaken notions about life and about my hidden feelings about how God views me. I have so much yet to learn about the real truth about God and how He relates to sinners, and that lack of understanding keeps showing up in the malfunctioning of my own life that at times reeks havoc in my relationships with others.

This idea of living in complete freedom in the presence of God is somewhat new to me and quite foreign to most religions including the one I grew up within. We sometimes talk about this freedom, but then we can easily turn around and also teach about a God who is controlling us or threatening us if we step out of line with His commands. But the existence of threats of punishment are really incompatible with true freedom, for threats and intimidation banish love from the heart. Only in real freedom, the kind of freedom that allows one to walk away from a relationship without fear of reprisals, can real love and appreciation for the other party begin to develop.

As I am coming to perceive that God is really the kind of God who respects my freedom as one of His highest priorities, it causes me to begin to perceive how much I lack in this area myself. By contrast I am starting to catch a little glimpse of how much I manipulate relationships with others, how much I try to manage my reputation by withholding select information for fear someone will not like me, how much I try to pressure people to like me even through use of devious means at times. I rationalize, I sometimes resort to subtle deceptions that I excuse as legitimate because my intentions are good. But all of this awareness simply exposes more internal lies about how I secretly feel God treats me.

Rather than running away from these revelations or moving into denial of them from feelings of shame, I can alternatively view these exposures as opportunities to go deeper into my own soul, to invite Jesus to bring healing to my own woundedness that causes me to act out in these dysfunctional ways and to show me more of the truth about what He is really like. If the root cause of all my dysfunction is rooted in incorrect concepts of God and how He feels about me, then the only effective solution that can accomplish any long-term repair must come through knowing God for myself much better. I need to see more clearly how much He values my freedom and the freedom of everyone else around me. I need to see how much He respects all of us and allows us to turn away from Him without the slightest hint of taking offense Himself.

Is God grieved when we turn away from Him? Absolutely! But in His grief and pain God does not react the way we often react under similar situations. Jesus demonstrated this clearly in His response when the rich young ruler walked away from His invitation to follow Him. Jesus did not pursue this young man or threaten him with dire consequences if he did not take Jesus' advice for him. He simply absorbed the deep pain that this lost relationship caused His own heart without resorting to any of the common reactions we might easily try to use to get the man to reconsider his choice.

While it is true that God will stop at nothing to convey to us how much He desires an intimate friendship of love with us and wants to save us, that does not translate into crossing the line into violating any of our freedoms at any time. Without complete freedom to reject Him we can never come to the place where we can truly begin to love Him. This is the most powerful attraction about God that most Christians miss. We have become so blinded by insinuations about Him perpetrated by His enemies and even many of His friends that we continue to miss this most important characteristic about Him. Yet God's love can only be truly appreciated and experienced if there is complete freedom to not embrace it.

But some may wonder how this can provide a sufficient deterrent to prevent sin from rising up again after it has been put down in the great Day of Judgment. But this concern itself betrays a lack of understanding about this truth, for our perceptions of how God goes about resolving the sin problem in the end distorts our ideas of how it will be prevented from reoccurring. But when we believe and teach that God must resort to using force, threats of coercion and punishment or any other of Satan's tools to accomplish the final end of rebellion, then we are still deceived by Satan's lies about God and misunderstand the true power of God's respect for complete freedom.

Contrary to public opinion, God is not going to overcome sin by resorting to force in the end to institute fear in the hearts of His subjects so they will never again rebel against Him. Those are methods of His enemy and are completely incompatible with the love that is the very essence of His being. If He had wanted to take that route He could have done that long ago. But true love involves true freedom and the two must always be present for the other to exist. This is a vital truth that has been missing from most of Christianity since soon after the early church experienced explosive growth because of a clearer understanding of this principle. The way Jesus treated people with complete freedom and respect was emulated by those early disciples and was so powerful that it initiated rapid growth in the early church for a time. But it was not long before human ideas and methods began to dilute the clear truth about God that had brought about such power in the early church, and as human elements and traditions took greater prominence the Spirit of God had less influence in the church.

Today we have returned to the kind of religion more in line with the legalism of the Jews during Jesus' day or in some cases the paganism of the Greeks who had all sorts of philosophical ideas about the supernatural and life in general. The pure truth about God and how He feels about sinners has largely been lost and has been replaced with institutionalized religion teaching many things about God but largely lacking in real relationship with Him. I believe this is partly due to our lack of appreciation for this fundamental truth about God's respect for our individual freedom and its vital relationship to love.

Paul, a man who was a loyal institutional policy man if ever there was one, who practiced methods of coercion, threats and force to accomplish God's will as he understood it – this same man after he caught a glimpse of the real truth about God was so totally transformed by it that he later expressed God's viewpoint when he wrote that each person should be fully persuaded in his own mind. (Romans 14:5) Paul went from being a zealot bent on using force to keep people in line with 'the truth' to being ready to lay down his own life for those who disagreed with him. (Romans 9:1-5) This is the effect that the truth about God will always have in the heart of those who take hold of it.

Revelation 18:1 talks about a time when the glory of God is going to fill the whole earth. I have come to believe over the past few years that this glory that will become evident to every heart in this planet is the real truth about how God treats us and feels about us and respects our freedom to respond to Him or reject Him. When the real truth about this God, who never resorts to the tactics of His enemy but always seeks to win our hearts back into a life-receiving relationship with Him – when this truth takes hold in our hearts, the resultant power that will be released will become overwhelming. But at the same time the clarity of this revelation will produce an intensity of animosity that will be aroused in those rejecting this view of God in preference for a more stern deity who relies on threats and coercion to secure compliance to His demands. These will rise up to persecute all who dare to embrace this strange new teaching. The stage will then be set for a final showdown between the real truth about God and the false beliefs about Him that now shape most people's thinking and constitute the fundamentals of all major religions as we know them.

As far as the future security of the universe is concerned, it is God's respect for our freedom that will be the most important element that will keep us in love with God and will prevent us from ever desiring to walk away from Him again. Far from relying on fear to keep us in line throughout eternity, God intends to have a universe completely free of all fear but rather filled with the joy of knowing that God's ways really are the best ways and we have only peace and joy by living in complete submission to His beautiful will for us. When we come to truly appreciate the fierce intensity of God's respect for our freedom to choice Him or reject Him without fear of reprisal, then we will tap into the deepest and most lasting motivation to enter into a saving, loving relationship with Him that will continue to grow and thrive throughout all eternity. This freedom and love will become the guardian of our security for ages to come, but it needs to become the security that we begin to experience now, both with God and in our dealings with each other.

External Internal

2011-09-19T07:47:00.000-05:00

I am thinking about the contrast between the Old Testament model of coming to God and its style of accountability to God and the church, compared to the New Testament method of creating unity in the body of Christ and coming to God.

The Law of Moses is like a shadow of the good things to come. This shadow isn't the good things themselves, because it cannot free people from sin by the sacrifices that are offered year after year.

(Heb 10:1 CEV)

The Law here is reference to the whole system of religion as prescribed by Moses in the Old Testament model. It is an external oriented system based largely on hierarchy, control, obligations and a centralized form and place of worship. It contained within it the shadow of the real spiritual reconciliation that God planned to reveal more clearly later, but that old system in itself could not accomplish full reconciliation because it was only a likeness or shadow of future realities, not the real thing. I am starting to see that this is possibly because it was external in nature and not so much internal. Although people could discern the true way to God within that system by picking up on the cues contained in it to then practice the real thing, it was rather easy for them to rely on the external forms of religion and suppose that they were enough to accomplish what was intended.

The whole book of Hebrews is a treatise on the contrast between these two systems of coming to God and it highlights the inadequacy of external attempts to reconcile with God. Reconciliation is vitally necessary if sin is every to be eradicated from the universe, for sin in its very essence is distrust of God, not simply violations of arbitrary rules and laws. God's laws themselves are only distilled expressions of internal and existential realities, so trying to conform the outward behaviors to comply with outward commands while ignoring inward realities can never accomplish the restoration of heart trust that must be accomplished if we are ever to become safe to live for eternity in a secure universe.

God is never going to rely on fear and intimidation to secure His universe from the recurrence of sin. That is Satan's method of achieving unity through conformity and God knows it could never last, for it lacks the true elements needed for real security. Yet to demonstrate that point He has allowed people to experiment for thousands of years with the external model of religion to make it plain that it can never bring about lasting change. Only a religion that is truly spiritual, internal in nature, initiated and maintained in the heart, an internal religion based on an appreciation of the truth about God and a heart resultantly transformed by that exposure will secure one's future life through true salvation.

If these sacrifices could have made the worshipers perfect, the sacrifices would have stopped long ago. Those who worship would have been cleansed once and for all. Their consciences would have been free from sin. (Hebrews 10:2 GW)

The real meaning of perfection as the word is used in the Bible actually means maturity. Obviously maturity is an inward experience that necessarily requires time and experience to develop. Time and experience alone though, may not produce real maturity as evidenced in the lives of many older people; but maturity can be developed if a person is willing to learn from their experiences and allow the Spirit of God to impart to them wisdom and growth through life experiences. Even if a person is not a Christian it is still the Holy Spirit who develops maturity no matter what background the person may come from. The Spirit works in every person's life and is constantly seeking to help everyone grow in knowledge, experience and maturity toward a restoration to the likeness of God.

This internal work of growth is the real spiritual encounter that is the only true method to prepare us for full restoration and reconciliation with God. All other methods that rely on external forms of religion, that focus more on behaviors, appearances and externals are doomed to failure. The Old Testament experiment with external procedures to bring about internal transformation proved beyond all doubt that something far more effective was needed to accomplish what must take place if real unity and reconciliation with God is ever to become a reality.

The problem that I am starting to see more clearly is that we have reinstated the old model of external based religion in an attempt to assert control over others and return to methods more familiar to us. Our human nature always gravitates toward external control in preference to internal transformation and we have embraced this for so many years that we now assume that our system of institutional hierarchy is designed by God. Yet in reality we have just returned to an old model of externalism; we have embraced principles promoted by the world that rely on force and fear as the foundation upon which to build for achieving unity in the church. But in doing so we obscure the very model that emerged in the New Testament era for a short time that thrived through the enhanced power of the Spirit.

We have now slipped so far back into the darkness of externally based religion that it is nearly impossible to for many to perceive God's original intent. We have returned to the Old Testament model of reliance on control and formalism and we resonate readily with the stories we read there. Instead of each believer being seen as a priest personally accountable to God and led to synchronize with the body by the impulses of the one Spirit that motivates all other believers, we have returned to the artificial unity model that relies more on rules, regulations and external dictates to attempt unity. We have set up denominations to segregate ourselves from others through doctrinal distinctions rather than listening individually to the Spirit and being aware of the condition of other people's spirit. We have again come to rely on lists of doctrines, liturgy and tradition rather than living from our heart and trusting God to bond His children together with love.

In essence I see that we have almost completely lost the reality of the revolution initiated by the early church that showed how to practice a life of salvation based on a personal and direct relationship with God. We have returned to the model of electing representatives to be our proxies to God rather than living as individual priests and relating to each other in true humility and love. We have distorted the real meaning of the New Testament authors and have twisted nearly everything they wrote to fit our preferred model of external religion and have thereby suppressed the truth by our traditions just as much as the Jews did. It is time for another revival of primitive godliness, a godliness based on personal relationship and accountability to God that restores a true appreciation for the priesthood of all believers that God intended as the method for leading us to full restoration.

We enter through a new way that Jesus opened for us. It is a living way that leads through the curtain--Christ's body. And we have a great priest who rules the house of God. Sprinkled with the blood of Christ, our hearts have been made free from a guilty conscience, and our bodies have been washed with pure water. So come near to God with a sincere heart, full of confidence because of our faith in Christ. We must hold on to the hope we have, never hesitating to tell people about it. We can trust God to do what he promised. We should think about each other to see how we can encourage each other to show love and do good works. We must not quit meeting together, as some are doing. No, we need to keep on encouraging each other. This becomes more and more important as you see the Day getting closer. (Heb 10:20-25 ERV)

The Lord Jesus is the living stone. The people of the world decided that they did not want this stone. But he is the one God chose as one of great value. So come to him. You also are like living stones, and God is using you to build a spiritual house. You are to serve God in this house as holy priests, offering him spiritual sacrifices that he will accept because of Jesus Christ.

...People stumble because they don't obey what God says. This is what God planned to happen to those people. But you are his chosen people, the King's priests. You are a holy nation, people who belong to God. He chose you to tell about the wonderful things he has done. He brought you out of the darkness of sin into his wonderful light. In the past you were not a special people, but now you are God's people. Once you had not received mercy, but now God has given you his mercy. (1Peter 2:4-5, 8-10 ERV)

This 'new way' that Jesus opened up in contrast with the old external model is sometimes referred to as the 'priesthood of all believers'. This term sometimes elicits strong reactions from people, especially those with vested interests in the status quo system designed to control people in the name of unity. I'm concerned that we have come to the place where we are too afraid to trust that the Holy Spirit is more than capable of bringing unity to the body of Christ without intervention from people obsessed by corporate agendas. We have come to believe that the authoritarian model of the Old Testament must be carried over into our day to prop up what appears to be weaknesses in this 'new way' opened up by Jesus. But is this really necessary?

Paul and the other apostles struggled to not only understand but to live life in this new way, but sometimes they slipped back into old ways of thinking themselves. Peter still had to deal with his own internal prejudices against gentiles and even had to be publicly rebuked by Paul at one point. Others began thinking that many other requirements of the familiar old ways of religion were necessary to impose on new believers coming into the church, and they carried a great deal of influence causing consternation and discouragement for many who became confused by the mixed signals they were receiving.

In our day we often think those are controversies of the past that no longer haunt us. But in that thinking we fail to perceive the underlying conflict of basic principles in the two systems of thought. We assume that since we don't argue about making animal sacrifices or follow other Old Testament traditions that we are free from the legalism that plagued the Jews. But far from being free we simply have produced our own brand of prejudice that we find perfectly acceptable and sometimes even believe is necessary for salvation. We are still addicted to external forms of religion and insist that external performances and controls are indispensable for achieving unity. At the same time we ignore the central issue that Jesus came to reveal, the essence of this 'new way' that He opened up for all of us to experience.

As I observe the language of much of the New Testament I see that it is focused primarily on changes at the heart level with outward symptoms regarded as just that – symptoms and not the primary issue. Yet living from a growing, transforming heart and giving everyone else complete freedom to live according to their own convictions is too scary for most of us to tolerate. We want to achieve unity and conformity using both methods. We want to use love when it seems to work but keep the option of resorting to other methods based on force, fear, shame and condemnation when we deem it necessary. But in doing so we corrupt the 'new way' that Jesus revealed, this way of living from the heart in personal accountability and dependence on God as individual priests in concert with all other believers who likewise live in personal accountability to God. By relying on a mixture of worldly methods and heavenly principles we misrepresent the gospel and lose the beauty and much of the true attraction of salvation.

No one uses a new piece of cloth to patch old clothes. The patch would shrink and tear a bigger hole. No one pours new wine into old wineskins. The wine would swell and burst the old skins. Then the wine would be lost, and the skins would be ruined. New wine must be put into new wineskins. Both the skins and the wine will then be safe. (Matthew 9:16-17 CEV)

It is true that some have discredited this truth by employing these facts to cover over a spirit of rebellion. This is all too easy to do and I know this from personal experience and frequent temptations. Yet just because it is so easy to slip into counterfeit thinking should not discredit the existence of the authentic. I have observed that the devil tries to push us to one extreme or the other to keep us as far as possible away from experiencing the real truth that both sides miss. Jesus alluded to this when He spoke about worshiping in spirit and truth to the woman of Samaria. Either one of these without the other becomes useless unless the two are practiced in the same heart. Then the resultant outpouring of life and praise and worship will become an irresistible testimony similar to that of the life of Jesus Himself who came to reveal the truth about His Father by personal example.

Know Me

2011-09-16T10:06:00.002-05:00

"Not everyone who says to Me, 'Lord, Lord,' will enter the kingdom of heaven, but he who does the will of My Father who is in heaven will enter. "Many will say to Me on that day, 'Lord, Lord, did we not prophesy in Your name, and in Your name cast out demons, and in Your name perform many miracles?' "And then I will declare to them, 'I never knew you; DEPART FROM ME, YOU WHO PRACTICE LAWLESSNESS.' (Matthew 7:21-23 NAS95)

"Not everyone who keeps saying to me, 'Lord, Lord,' will get into the kingdom of heaven, but only the person who keeps doing the will of my Father in heaven. Many will say to me on that day, 'Lord, Lord, we prophesied in your name, drove out demons in your name, and performed many miracles in your name, didn't we?' Then I will tell them plainly, 'I never knew you. Get away from me, you evildoers!'" (Matthew 7:21-23 ISV)

This passage is one of the most disturbing and persistent messages I have ever come across in the Word of God. It was one of the most effective means of challenging my form of religion and pushing me into realizing that a personal, interactive relationship with God is of utmost importance over a head knowledge of correct religious facts. Jesus' portrayal of obviously religious people who were certain they had been on the right track, had been obeying God for much of their lives and who were sure they had done what was necessary to enter into heaven and then discovering too late that they had missed the most important factor for salvation has been a constant warning to me for a number of years. It is something I think about often and continue to question just what it means for Jesus to know me.

This morning as I was meditating on a devotional thought this issue came to me again accompanied by another verse from the Old Testament that parallels it very closely.

Search me, O God, and know my heart! Try me and know my thoughts! And see if there be any grievous way in me, and lead me in the way everlasting! (Psalms 139:23-24 ESV)

I have wondered how my knowing God and Him knowing me relate to each other. I have learned a great deal about the importance of each one of us getting to know God and have shared this many times with others. However, I have sometimes been puzzled about how to relate to these words where Jesus is saying to surprised people that He didn't know them. After all, doesn't Jesus know everything? How could He say He didn't know them when evidently He knows they are wicked people? And that is another disturbing subject to be unpacked in this passage.

Part of my pursuit of exploring an experimental religion is seeking to learn what it really means to know God and for Him to know me the way He mentions above. I want to understand just what God has in mind when He says He needs to know me before I can safely live in His presence. Just what kind of relationship is He talking about and how can I enter into or encourage that kind of relationship exist, to deepen and strengthen?

I sense that at least part of this coming to allow Jesus to know me is to give Him permission to shine the light of His presence into places deep inside my own heart that are presently full of fear, pain or rage. Of course I technically know that nothing is hidden from God and He is already fully aware of what is inside of me without me ever admitting it. But what He seems to be asking here is for me to give Him special access to discuss these things with me without my resisting these painful conversations. Really it is not about God coming to know things about me He didn't know before but it is about giving Him permission to open up things in my own heart that I have not yet been willing to be honest about before. In reality Jesus is asking permission to come in and make me more transparent and honest, more aware of what is inside of me, to quit hiding or repressing or avoiding any part of my heart and my memories.

I do not understand this very well yet for it is still just opening up to my mind. I am trying to process through it by writing this out as a means of trying to make more sense of it. This is the kind of thing that becomes clearer over time and through various experiences. It is something that develops through my prayer life as I seek to know God's heart better and also learn how to allow Him to know my heart the way it is described in these verses.

Just now I overheard a phone conversation that helped me to perceive better what God is wanting to do in me. A person who feels very intimidated and easily upset about how people perceive them based on their job performance has been an ongoing issue in a group I belong to. While listening to this discussion it suddenly occurred to me that the obstacle that prevents us from having a better relationship with this person is their own intense fears that we will not like them or accept them if they make a mistake. As a result they often become very defensive and even explode in rage whenever a perceived problem occurs that relates to their performance.

In the context of this example I can see more readily that I often have similar feelings toward God. My underlying fears that God will become upset with me if I mess up or if He exposes some area of sin or confusion or guilt in my heart often keeps me trying to hide these things from coming into His light. Yet keeping God at arm's length by avoiding full disclosure on my part only prevents me from experiencing the healing that I so desperately need to become free from these things and to grow. God longs to be allowed to come in to comfort, confront, heal and repair all the pain and damage I have inside. But because He always respects my right to make my own choices as to whom I will trust with my heart, He waits for me to willingly open the doors of those painful places inside and invite Him to do whatever He needs to do inside of me. (John 3:20, 21)

But to even get to that point I have to somehow come to the place where I believe He is not going to cause me more harm, that He really has my best interest at heart and that He is worthy of my trust. If I cannot trust that God really cares about me, especially in the deep places where I hurt the most, where I have hidden shame, fear and pain, then my heart cannot open up to allow Him to do unexpected things. I will be afraid that He is only going to shame me or humiliate me or punish me. Yet I am coming to realize that all of these things are based on lies about Him that my heart has long believed and that they are rooted in my sinful nature. Like this person who does not yet believe that we have no ill feelings towards them and still lives in fear of what we might think about them if they make a mistake, I have to come to view God differently before my heart will be willing to give Him access to my inward parts where He longs to know me.

It is vitally important that I come to allow Him full access to know everything about me on the inside without any continuing resistance on my part if I want to spend eternity in His presence. This is the whole purpose of salvation, for salvation is the process of allowing God to come inside and do whatever it takes to bring us into full sympathy and synchronization with His ways of thinking and His view of what is true and real. As I allow God more and more access to the painful places of my heart, the deep places that I don't even know about myself yet, He can prove that He genuinely cares about me and longs to only restore me to the joy of His salvation. My confidence will build as I experience His healing power in more and more areas of my life and which in turn will make it easier to trust Him with even more garbage inside, for I am learning that He really can be trusted with my heart.

This is a very personal matter. I choose right now to consciously give God permission to access my heart, to expose the places of dread and fear and shame that presently can terrify me. I choose to deliberately give Him permission right now to do whatever it takes to heal me inside and make my life a better reflection of His love and His purposes for my life. I want to have a more dynamic, interactive communication with Him that is in real time each day. I want to have Him know me as well as for me to get to know Him.

Now we see only a blurred reflection in a mirror, but then we will see face to face. Now what I know is incomplete, but then I will know fully, even as I have been fully known. (1Corinthians 13:12 ISV)

Being a Christian

2011-09-11T08:45:00.004-05:00

Yesterday I used this as the basis for a sermon I gave in our local church. There was too much here to finish with so I had to cut it short but I decided to go ahead and publish it here for the record for anyone interested.

Let this mind be in you... (Philippians 2:5-9)

What does it mean to be a Christian?

Am I willing to let go of all my preconceived opinions of what that means and allow God to define and reveal His truth to me?

It may be helpful to note some of our preconceptions. However, it is also very hazardous sometimes because it is so easy to slip into a defensive mode and begin to argue in favor of our traditions and beliefs rather than seeking to listen for whatever God may be wanting to show our hearts.

Do we have a problem hearing the voice of God personally?

I talk with people who say that God just doesn't seem to talk to them. They want to know God and obey Him, yet it seems that He is intermittent at best in answering their prayers. And as far as actually hearing anything that they feel reasonably sure is communication from God, well, they wonder if maybe God is holding a grudge against them or something. I know exactly how that feels for I spent most of my life mulling over questions like that myself.

God has given us a book designed to be the primary source of communication to anyone interested and willing to engage with Him, for those who want to come to know Him personally. Unfortunately far too many have either ignored this book or have turned it into more of a reference library to find reinforcement for what they already have decided to believe. Neither of these options will bring us into wisdom as God intends for each one of us to experience. But even though many people do not relate to the Bible in a way that brings them into a saving relationship with God, it still contains the potential to radically transform everyone who decides to take it seriously and who challenge God to meet them in His Word.

All of the fundamental answers we need in life will be found in the Bible. But we are unlikely to find them if we just jump in and start reading from the beginning while thinking we can figure it out for ourselves and find what we are looking for there. That's not how the Bible was intended to change our lives. The Word of God is only useful and life-changing when it is studied under the direct supervision and instruction of the Author of that Book. To try to figure out life or religion by using the Bible in some other way will only tend to reinforce our prejudices, reinforce our misconceptions and confirm us in deeper darkness and ignorance about the true nature of God.

I want to go back to this issue of struggling to hear God's voice to us personally. This is a vital point where many struggle to make any headway in their attempts to be a Christian. Many like what they see in Christianity and they like what they see in Jesus' life, yet when it comes to imitating Jesus and His attitudes they find it impossible to replicate His perfection in their own lives. As a result many end up settling for a watered-down version of Christianity, one that is practiced by nearly all who take the name. Yet this diluted version of godliness is a counterfeit and is powerless to transform the soul back into the image of God and in the long run it is a fatal choice.

Do we imagine that because we attend what we insist to be the true church and subscribe to its set of beliefs that we are somehow immune or exempt from this problem? If we are willing to take seriously any lessons from the past it would be clear to us that the Jews did exactly this very thing themselves. Knowing all the right answers and having the right Scriptures did not prevent them from being in direct opposition to the very one from heaven who came to reveal God in a radical new light. Knowing all the right doctrines had little effect on restraining them from opposing all that Jesus came to reveal about how heaven sees reality or what it really means to live in harmony with God. The very people who were the most certain they had the truth demonstrated the most resistance and resentment toward the very person who was the personification of truth. Don't think for a moment we may not be just as deceived ourselves.

So, why is it that we have such a difficult time hearing God's voice to us personally? Is He ignoring us or holding out until we get our act together before He will listen to our pleadings for communication?

Truly, the Lord's hand has not become short, so that he is unable to give salvation; and his ear is not shut from hearing: But your sins have come between you and your God, and by your evil doings his face has been veiled from you, so that he will give you no answer. (Isa 59:1-2 BBE)

As many of you know, I have spent a number of years now seeking to gain a better understanding of the real meaning of religious terms, words and phrases. The preconceptions that I acquired from religion I have found to be very inadequate when it comes to finding a personal relationship with Jesus. Of course all those religious concepts and traditions were not actually meant to promote a personal relationship but to enhance a centralized religion based on church authorized beliefs. The idea that it is necessary to personally engage with God apart from what I learned from church or school came as quite a shock to me and challenged me to go back and reconsider everything I had been taught.

My growing conviction has been that living as a good church Christian is not enough and in heaven's eyes is often a lame substitute for personal accountability to God. While religion as commonly known uses language of personal relationship it too often fails to actually encourage it sufficiently. As a result it is easy to come to believe we are Christians when in reality we are just keeping up good appearances and living in the blissful ignorance of Laodacian poverty.

Write this to the angel of the church in Laodicea: Here is a message from the Amen, the faithful and true witness, the ruler of all that God has made. I know what you do. You are not hot or cold. I wish that you were hot or cold! But you are only warm--not hot, not cold. So I am ready to spit you out of my mouth. You say you are rich. You think you have become wealthy and don't need anything. But you don't know that you are really miserable, pitiful, poor, blind, and naked. (Rev 3:14-17 ERV)

Some of us have heard this message for many years and know that it applies to ourselves. Yet we just might believe that because we know it, acknowledge it and repeat it that that somehow makes us right. But if there is no real action, no intentional heart response to this message then we are choosing to live in self-deception and are satisfied to live in blindness when we could be walking in light. If we do not take this personally and seek God with deep heart-felt desire to know what He wants of us personally, we are in serious danger of losing our own souls while assuming that someday we will be in heaven.

What does God say we must do to change this desperate state we find ourselves in?

I advise you: Buy gold purified in fire from me so that you may be rich. Buy white clothes from me. Wear them so that you may keep your shameful, naked body from showing. Buy ointment to put on your eyes so that you may see. I correct and discipline everyone I love. Take this seriously, and change the way you think and act. Look, I'm standing at the door and knocking. If anyone listens to my voice and opens the door, I'll come in and we'll eat together. I will allow everyone who wins the victory to sit with me on my throne, as I have won the victory and have sat down with my Father on his throne. Let the person who has ears listen to what the Spirit says to the churches. (Rev 3:18-22 GW)

If I relate to this simply as another doctrine I am supposed to believe to be part of this church then I have missed the most important point of my life. On the other hand, if I truly want to come into the experience of salvation as God longs to have me experience it, I must be willing to allow the Holy Spirit to take these words and apply them persistently, continuously and effectively to my heart more and more intensely. I will choose to be willing to ask God to open my eyes to my own true condition, to beg God to show me my true miserableness, my real poverty and my shameful nakedness. If I just treat this as religious jargon instead of allowing it to cause me to squirm at the deepest level, then I am not really ready to be a Christian as the Bible describes Christianity.

I am keenly aware that the situation we find ourselves in right now, our surroundings, our formality, our comfortable circumstances and our profession of having the truth as opposed to those 'others' outside who don't believe the same doctrines we do – living and talking inside this atmosphere makes it extremely difficult to quit thinking about distractions like, “I know someone who should hear this!”, or “When is this guy going to quit talking so we can eat?”

Listen, it is not my job to bring conviction to anyone else's heart. There is no vacancy in the godhead as someone wisely pointed out, and I have no business seeking to lay a guilt trip on anyone to make them change. Conviction is solely the responsibility of the Holy Spirit who knows how to relate to each person at the deepest level. But if you do not feel personally convicted by these thoughts it may not be because they only apply to someone else or they come from a poor communicator but because you may not yet be ripe to receive them right now.

Please be advised that you are not my problem to fix. In no way do I want anyone to think that it is my job or anyone else's job to make you feel guilty enough to want to change your life and improve your relationship with God. That decision is entirely up to you to make for yourself and no one has any business interfering unduly with that sacred part of your life.

However, if you are feeling conviction right now I would strongly urge you to quickly shut out every distraction the enemy is bound to throw at you and do whatever it takes to let His voice sink in much deeper into your soul. If you have to get up and go to a solitary place and wrestle with God like Jacob until you get real about life, then by all means do that.

If you feel a need to connect with someone who has an obvious connection with God and God is leading you to receive ministry from them, then do that right away and don't procrastinate. Remember the seeds that fell on the pathway in Jesus' parable. If they do not quickly find shelter in prepared ground to begin to take root then dark birds snatch up that seed and it may do you no good.

What does it really mean to be a Christian? I strongly urge all of us individually to never stop seriously asking that question both of ourselves and of God while we keep looking for answers. And if the answers sound too much like platitudes you have heard in the past, then be ready to question them, challenge them, rethink them and keep looking for better ones that make more sense. And if we are not desperate for God it is likely we will not have much desire to break out of the darkness that keeps so many of us ignorant of our true condition.

Think about this. Is it possible that a person might be ignorant of their own nakedness, that they are out of money and have bad eyesight because there is just not enough light around to see their own naked body, their empty pocketbook or they have no mirror that might show them what a mess their eyes are in? It is much easier to feel safe and content to run around naked when it is very dark, for you assume that others can't see you and cause you to feel ashamed. Jesus explicitly says that this is our condition whether we think we have enough light to see it for ourselves or not. The real question is whether we will believe Him enough to ask Him for more light to come into our situation or whether we will trust our naive sensations that we are good enough or assume we can deal with it later.

This is the judgment, that the Light has come into the world, and men loved the darkness rather than the Light, for their deeds were evil. For everyone who does evil hates the Light, and does not come to the Light for fear that his deeds will be exposed. (John 3:19-20)

Let me be very clear about one thing here. In no way do I want to promote a feeling of fear and dread to compel someone to want to be a Christian. Most religions rely on fear to motivate people and that method is certainly familiar to most of us. But fear is an unreliable foundation to build upon and though it may initially seem useful to motivate us to begin moving toward a better relationship with God it is nowhere near sufficient to support us as an effective basis for a healthy, thriving relationship with Him.

The fear of the LORD is the beginning of wisdom. The knowledge of the Holy One is understanding. (Pro 9:10 GW)

While fear may help move us in the right direction, I like the way another translation renders this verse.

To be wise you must first have reverence for the LORD. If you know the Holy One, you have understanding. (Pro 9:10 GNB)

In searching for better definitions to religious terms I have been learning that to reverence something or someone does not mean you have to be very quiet and still like we have often interpreted this word. Reverence actually means to have a high sense of value and appreciation and respect for someone. It involves honoring them in whatever ways may enhance their reputation. This is a far cry from the fearful, intimidating notions of reverence we have often gathered from religion.

To become and live as a Christian is to live in the process of coming to personally know God better and better. That process will inevitably involve letting go of our fears while embracing greater and deeper insights about His incredible character of love, compassion, faithfulness, mercy, kindness and all the other things that He reveals to us about Himself. These are not just abstract terms to memorize but are realities we must experience for ourselves. Without a personal, experimental, spiritual, ongoing encounter with the person of Jesus Christ I cannot assume I am really a Christian. To call myself a Christian without personally knowing the one from which that name comes is hypocritical and deceptive. It matters now how many millions are doing that very thing, if I want to enter into a truly life-changing experience of salvation for myself I have to immerse myself in the Word of God individually, get honest before God in earnest prayer and confession and let the mind of Christ become a reality and take deep root inside my own head.

How can this be done in practical terms? Let me offer a few suggestions that have helped me in my own growing experience.

When you become really hungry for God then you will determine to rearrange priorities in your life to make time to eat spiritual food regularly just as you do for physical nourishment. If you lack motivation for this then ask God to make you very hungry. He is faithful about that, but keep asking Him even after you start feeling hungry for Him. Learn to appreciate the dissatisfaction you begin to feel with other sources you have depended on up to this point and keep turning you attention toward God to satisfy every desire. Remember, repeated choices produce habits and habits form character.

But just sitting down and reading through the Bible from the beginning or some other religious book may not initially feed your soul enough to keep you alive. Like trying to swallow food without chewing it can create problems in your body, you have to learn how to chew spiritual food, mixing it with the saliva of your own experience and learning to choose foods that can provide for specific needs you have in your current health. Just gravitating toward foods that taste sweet all the time may not necessarily bring good health. On the other hand only selecting spiritual food that you don't like can also hinder you from entering into the joy of an abundant life as God wants us to experience.

Choose to be serious enough to give God exclusive time in your life, preferable very early in your day before other things have a chance to shape your attitude for the whole day. Sit down in quietness and calm yourself before God by meditating first on the positive attributes of who He really is. I find it better not to jump right into reading the Word if my mental attitude is too much out of sync with Him.

Singing spiritual songs can be a powerful way to bring your spirit more into alignment with heaven but be careful not to let them become the main focus if you want to really grow. Establishing a positive atmosphere in the heart as much as possible is the best way to prep yourself to perceive His voice more readily.

Be sure to always invite the Holy Spirit to come and teach you personally as you expose yourself to the Word that He has inspired. Remember that He is the author of this book and that He has the authority to apply it in any way He wants to be meaningful for your life. Try to lay aside as much as possible all preconceptions about what you are about to read even if you are sure they are correct. Seek to open your mind and free yourself of all prejudices so that there will be room for new insights, new perspectives and fresh revelations you have never considered before. You can trust God to lead you to truth in this atmosphere. You do not need to be afraid that you might be deceived when something may come to your attention that does not agree with what you have always thought or even what a church teaches. If God cannot be trusted to lead each person to the same destination without interference or control by church authorities or religious teachers then He is not worthy of the name God and we are not really trusting Him very much.

I highly recommend that you ask God to show you where to meditate in the Bible, initially a place that is easier to hear His words to your heart more clearly. I wouldn't recommend starting with prophecies or even necessarily in the Old Testament unless you might get into the stories. The best place I know to get started is in the gospels and especially in the gospel of John. For a person serious about pursuing the heart of God for themselves there is no better place to start than by immersing yourself in the life and teachings of Jesus who came to do that very thing.

Let me take the verse we started with at the beginning as an example of how one might learn to eat spiritual food more effectively and to get more nourishment from it to improve your health.

Carefully read the whole passage in context several times allowing it to begin to sink in deeper. Don't hurry or feel you have to cover so much material in a certain length of time. You are not studying to learn information like you do in school. Rather you are using Scriptures as a means of listening to the voice of God. There is a vast difference between these two methods of reading. Allow every question that comes up from your heart to be expressed; do not repress them. Don't feel afraid to challenge God with tough questions. Learn to be honest with your own soul. This is the most important attitude we must develop if we are to begin to experience the presence of God effectively in our lives.

Practice listening at least as much as you talk to God. At first this is often going to be very difficult for some of us because of our paradigms, fears or religious assumptions. But true meditation in the presence of God and in the context of immersing ourselves in His Word is one of the most effective ways of training our spirit to focus and to sharpen our ability to hear more clearly the voice of God to our soul. It may also be helpful to meet with others at times who share your desire to hear God more clearly and to experiment with this kind of encounter with Him. We can learn a great deal from those who have trained themselves to listen more acutely to the voice of the Father in their hearts. This will also serve to draw us closer to each other and encourage each other in our pursuit of knowing God.

Be aware that Satan is going to assault you in many ways to distract you, to minimize your time with God and seek to get you to elevate other things on your priority list to suck you back into the status quo. Fiercely guard the boundaries of your quiet times with God. These are sacred minutes and are vital for your spiritual survival, even your physical survival. Yet don't become harsh and dogmatic about it.

Don't allow your worship routine to become what you worship but always seek to make God be the central focus of your attention. Allow His gentle Spirit to soften your own attitudes and thoughts.

So, how do you go about hearing the voice of God in your soul through these kinds of activities? Will you hear an audible voice instructing you and telling you what to believe? Highly unlikely. However, if you believe that God exists to start with and you choose to believe that He will meet you in this time where you have invited Him to join you, God is faithful and will in one way or another make this a time of transformation for your life. The more intently you pursue knowing Him intimately and deeply with your own heart the more He is going to open up new thoughts, new feelings, new concepts and perspectives you have never imagined before. This growing trust is what the Bible calls faith.

Without faith no one can please God. Whoever comes to God must believe that he is real and that he rewards those who sincerely try to find him. (Heb 11:6 ERV)

Learn to dialog with God when you come to meet with Him. This means giving ample time for both sides of the conversation. You will never get to know another human being very well if you never allow them to speak for themselves because you have done all the talking. So too with God, you must give Him times of your quiet reflection where you push aside all distracting thoughts from your head and learn to listen with your spirit rather than with your ears. At first this can be very frustrating because this part of our makeup is so under-exercised and sometimes we don't even know we have these capacities. But if you are serious about coming into a saving relationship with God He will honor your persistence and will reveal Himself to you.

The counterfeit thinking of religion has led us to assume that being a Christian means managing our outward behaviors to keep up a good appearance of what we assume a Christian should look like. This is increasingly massaged and manipulated by popular opinions that swirl around us about what a Christian is, depending on what version of religion we happen to subscribe to. But whether we are conservative or liberal or whatever, our perceptions of what it means to be a Christian have all been seriously distorted by our culture, our church and the world. I am convinced that none of us really grasp yet what a real Christian is like and we are in desperate need of a fresh new revelation of God that will expose all the deceptions that currently keep us so much in the dark. Until we are willing to admit we don't really know God very well we will never give Him room to introduce Himself to us for who He really is.

Christian culture, music – whether conservative or contemporary – traditions and denominations all have a great effect on shaping our assumptions about being a Christian. But I am learning that true, saving Christianity is only found in a personal, ongoing encounter with Him, in intimate knowledge of discovering who He really is in contrast to all the teachings and professions of those claiming to represent Him in this world. Depending on our church to teach us the truth about God is never to take the place of personal pursuit of the truth about God in His Word ourselves. If we remain satisfied to leave our salvation in the hands of someone else we are in grave danger of never experiencing it in our own hearts.

Salvation is the really the process of recovering our souls from the ruination that sin has caused in our lives. But here is a most important point we must not miss. We do not have our lives changed from the outside in but always from the inside out. If we try to reverse this direction (which is too often the case in typical religion) we will live a life of frustration and hypocrisy. We will become obsessed with performance or learning the right formula or saying the right words while inside our heart will still be missing what it craves the most – a thriving relationship with another heart that brings life, hope, joy and courage to the deepest places inside where we hurt.

When we choose to put our energies and efforts towards any and all activities that promote an intimate relationship with Jesus rather than just maintaining a 'Christian' exterior, we will find to our amazement that over time our externals will begin to be transformed naturally and spontaneously rather than relying on force, fear and shame.

Jesus touched on this issue when His disciples came to Him one day asking for more faith. Without going into detail about this passage (which I would dearly love to do) I would invite you to take some time, maybe over several days or weeks, to meditate on this passage, listening for what God might show you personally about the real answer to their question. This passage is found in the first part of Luke 17. But be careful not to stop too soon or you will miss the main part of Jesus' response to them. When I listened to what God showed me in this passage I became very excited because I too want more faith. But the answer Jesus gave was radically different than what anyone else had ever told me about how to get faith. But the answer Jesus gave is the true answer and is really the only way to have saving faith.

As a hint, what Jesus said to His disciples was that if they wanted more faith they first would need to alter some of their opinions and adjust their relationship with God. Their confused notions about God was blocking their ability to have greater faith and we have the very same problem. I have been discovering that the greatest hindrance to me coming into a trusting relationship with God are the lies about Him that have lurked deep inside, most of the hidden from me all my life. As I now allow Him to expose these lies and I choose to replace them in my heart with fresh truths about how He feels about me, I find faith spontaneously growing stronger in my own heart. And as my faith increased so too does my peace and assurance and my love for Him.

Joy and Bearing Our Sins

2011-09-09T08:32:00.000-05:00

The message this morning as I was waking up was 'joy'. Joy was what empowered Jesus to endure the cross. Joy is to be the magnetic power that draws all of us to follow His example. As long as the devil can keep us from becoming addicted to joy he knows he can very likely succeed in keeping us from becoming a threat to his kingdom of fear. More on this to come.

Another message that came soon afterward was on my questions about what it really means to bear sins for someone else. If Jesus is to be my example, how about the part where He is supposed to have born my sins on the cross? We are not expected to do that are we? Or maybe this is another case of mistaken definition again where we have little to no clue as to what the terminology we are using actually means.

What does it really mean to bear someone's sins in the context of my new understanding of a God who is not vengeful, does not hold grudges, forgives instantly and never seeks revenge or retaliation? I have been learning that God's definition of justice is radically different than from how most of us view it, so where does bearing sins for others fit into this?

Jesus is the ultimate priest. So it would be helpful for me to go back and review some of the new and improved insights on what it means to be a priest. We were chosen to be a kingdom of priests so it might be instructive to learn just what that really means from the example of Jesus. I know that part of the work of a priest is to bear the sins of the people before God. Then if Jesus did that and we are priests and He is our example, very likely we must also be designed to participate in His role of priestly ministry in some way if we truly desire to come into closer harmony with Him.

Here is some of my initial thoughts on what may be the direction I am being led here. Given my emerging perceptions of what really happened at the cross, does being a priest and bearing someone else's sin mean demonstrating active and instant forgiveness toward offenders as an attraction to draw them toward repentance by exercising joy? Is this where joy and the cross intersect?

Keep in mind that the essence of joy is the powerful attraction of intensely wanting to be together in love, care and esteem. When two or more people created in the image of God (including God as well) come into harmony with care, love and concern for each other, that is where joy will be the strongest, the most evident, the most powerful. Joy is a reaction of love mutually experienced. Full joy is realized most intensely when the ones involved come into the closest proximity possible both physically, emotionally, spiritually and in every other respect.

In contrast to this, the opposite of joy is the anguish experienced by one who loves, who yearns for joy but is robbed of the intimate fellowship they so deeply crave because the object of their desire rejects their love, disbelieves and mistrusts their motives and refuses their overtures and enticements to enter into harmony with their heart. And the worst form of terror that can occur is when the one who rejected joy and spurned that love comes to realize what they have done but also realizes they have destroyed their own ability to enter into that joy. This is the torture all will experience in the final judgment who are lost because of their choice to reject the salvation so long offered to them.

What struck me this morning for the first time was a little more insight into what happened to Jesus when He came into closer proximity to His children here on earth for the purpose of experiencing joy with them only to be turned on viciously and treated with all the ferocity that sin can produce.

He came to the world that was his own. And his own people did not accept him. But some people did accept him. They believed in him, and he gave them the right to become children of God. They became God's children, but not in the way babies are usually born. It was not because of any human desire or plan. They were born from God himself. (John 1:11-13 ERV)

I like some of the subtle insights better exposed in yet another translation of this passage.

He went to his own people, and his own people didn't accept him. However, he gave the right to become God's children to everyone who believed in him. These people didn't become God's children in a physical way-from a human impulse or from a husband's desire to have a child. They were born from God. (John 1:11-13 GW)

I perceive in this last rendering a contrast between being born as a result of the passion of God and being born physically as a result of the sexual passion of a human male. John seems to be wanting to get across that we exist because of someone else's passion; but our spiritual identity as children of God is far more important than our perceived identity resulting from acted out passions by a human father. God's passion is a pure and holy passion that results in producing children in His image who will reflect His characteristics and will respond to His love for them without resistance. Those who embrace their true identity in Jesus will enter into His joy as they respond to Him increasingly.

I have been learning recently of the fact that Jesus actually initiated a whole new race of beings, an advanced and superior race to humans, a race whose initial father and who's representative before heaven is Jesus Himself, the god/man, something of a cross-breed. Jesus initiated a new species in the universe, a race of beings who reflect Himself. Jesus amalgamated Himself by combining the divine and the human into one being and offers to do the same in anyone who allows Him access to their heart. When they give Him permission to have full access to all of their heart He works within them to transform them into the divine image. Those who reject His offer end up being shaped into the demonic image of Satan.

Because of Adam's sin, the earthly Adam became the father of a deformed gene pool that we are so familiar with and are trapped in. But Jesus through an amazing plan formulated in the minds of the Trinity long before any of this mess ever began, pulled off the greatest salvage act in history and recaptured the whole human race by replacing Adam as our father with Himself. Satan thought he had the position of 'Representative of Earth' locked up after he snatched it from Adam by becoming the de facto prince of this world in place of Adam. But Jesus challenged that claim and legitimately wrested the position away from him at the cross. In the eyes of all the universe Jesus fully earned the right to be the authorized and recognized prince of this world, the very world that He had created to reveal Himself originally.

So I come back to what it means to bear sin. What exactly did Jesus do that can be seen as bearing sin, whether it was our sins or that of the ones directly abusing Him when He lived here on earth?

To be honest, I have felt resentment and resistance all my life whenever someone made the statement that it was each one of us that caused the death of Jesus on the cross. Just yesterday I heard this again from a preacher on TV and it caused the same reaction inside of me. Now don't misunderstand me, I am not trying to deny the basic true theology behind this statement. It is just that the implications usually inferred that are not examined, the inferences that rise up in the minds of most people who hear this statement and too often assumed by many who use such statements, are riddled with false ideas about what God is like and how He feels toward us. That is the part that really concerns and bothers me, along with the fact that the statement itself is almost never unpacked but is just left out there to motivate people with guilt.

Using guilt to get people to move toward God is the way of counterfeit religion in contrast to what I have been learning about God's methods. Jesus explicitly stated to Nicodemus that He did not come to condemn the world but to save (salvage) it. If Jesus is not in the condemning business (seeking to induce feelings of guilt and shame in others), then where do we get the idea we need to do it on His behalf? How can we believe we are representing God rightly before the world by using methods He never employed? His ways are certainly not our ways and His thoughts are far higher than ours. We would do well to challenge all of our religious techniques and tricks and phrases to see if they fit with an updated, more accurate picture of God secured from a more honest reading of His testimony.

If I am supposed to be motivated to come to repentance by hearing that somehow I killed Jesus even though everyone knows I was not physically there and could not have done anything of the kind from a human, logical perspective, then there has to be a much better explanation of this idea before it can have any positive motivation to draw me into harmony with heaven. It is true that Jesus bore my sins on the cross as the Bible says, but our spin on this is so often misleading and causes so many to increase their fear of the Father that I have to challenge its underlying assumptions. So many of our religious assertions and practices and words tend to reinforce dark views of God rather than bringing greater light of His glory into our hearts. I am determined to get much deeper into the real meaning of what it means to see Jesus as my sin-bearer in its true perspective so it can have its intended effect on my own life.

I sense that Peter caught sight of a clearer view of this and shared it in his letters. In fact this is the passage where we get the reference about Christ being our example to follow. I'm afraid that too often we have taken that phrase out of context and then hooked it up with our own assumptions about what it is we are supposed to imitate rather than carefully examining what Peter has to say in the rest of his observations about what he saw in the actions and attitudes of Jesus that so transformed his heart. It is also in this very passage where we get the clearest statement about Jesus bearing our sins on the cross.

It was to this that God called you, for Christ himself suffered for you and left you an example, so that you would follow in his steps. He committed no sin, and no one ever heard a lie come from his lips. When he was insulted, he did not answer back with an insult; when he suffered, he did not threaten, but placed his hopes in God, the righteous Judge. Christ himself carried our sins in his body to the cross, so that we might die to sin and live for righteousness. It is by his wounds that you have been healed. (1 Peter 2:21-24 GNB)

If I view this passage from the typical legal perspective I might arrive at the classic assumption that Jesus came to be punished by the Father for my sins so I could get off the hook and go to heaven. I have long ago rejected that line because it is so totally out of harmony with the clear testimony of Jesus Himself about the Father. So if that is now out the window I must find an explanation that makes more sense and fits in with a more consistent concept of God that has been emerging over the past few years.

What is easy to miss is that Peter is stating as clearly as he can what it means to bear our sins right here in this passage. The way Jesus bore sin was to allow anyone and everyone to treat Him as abusively as they could possible do so without ever retaliating in the slightest or giving them any reason to hurt Him. In stark contrast to their animosity, accusations, hatred, abuse, insults and torture, Jesus demonstrated explicitly how God feels about all of us by fully absorbing everything sinners and demons could do to antagonize Him into responding in kind. What Jesus proved at the cross and in everything that happened leading up to that even was that there is no way in hell that we could get God to be mad at us no matter how hard we tried to antagonize Him or hurt Him in every way possible.

This is the stunning revelation about God that the devil is terrified we will discover. This is reality and a truth that most Christians cannot tolerate to be discussed publicly, for most people demand a God more in harmony with their own character, a God who will at some point run out of patience and resort to vengeance and retaliation against those who mistreat Him and spurn His love. This is more along the line of the teachings that many of us have embraced in our pictures of how God feels toward us and especially toward those who reject His offer of salvation. But our representations of how God relates to sinners are riddled with the subtle deceptions and insinuations of His greatest enemy, the great deceiver himself and they must be challenged constantly in the light of truth from the life of Jesus. This is the only hope we have of embracing the glory of God that will soon flood this planet. This is the revelation of the true glory of God that will precipitate the final events that will bring history as we know it to a final close and usher in the fuller manifestation of the kingdom of God.

It is becoming clearer to me now that there is a direct connection between the subject of joy and the concept of bearing our sins on the cross. I see this in Hebrews where it seems to almost be a direct extension of what Peter was trying to convey.

We must focus on Jesus, the source and goal of our faith. He saw the joy ahead of him, so he endured death on the cross and ignored the disgrace it brought him. Then he received the highest position in heaven, the one next to the throne of God. Think about Jesus, who endured opposition from sinners, so that you don't become tired and give up. (Hebrews 12:2-3 GW)

Here it is plain that it was the anticipated joy of gathering together to Himself as many as would believe the truth about God that He had come to show us – it was looking forward to the intense experience of joy He knew He would have when everyone finally would 'get it' that gave Him the strength to endure all the abuse and pain heaped on Him at the cross. That pain was not from His Father punishing Him in our place to satisfy some arbitrary legal requirement; it was to demonstrate that it is impossible to push God far enough to react like we act no matter how much we may abuse Him.

God never changes, so when Jesus comes again He will not be mad at us like many have assumed He will be. Remember, those at His coming who claim that Jesus is an angry lamb are not the people with proper credentials to speak the truth about God. They are the lost who have embraced and perpetuated the lies of Satan about how God feels about us. If we continue to buy into those lies ourselves we will also be found among those who are terrified when Jesus shows up with great passion to embrace with joy all who have learned to think like He does and and have allowed His love to flow through them without resistance.

Joy is a term for the most powerful magnetic force in all the universe.
Joy is what caused Jesus to come to rescue this planet even though He found very little of it initially upon His arrival. The angels showed it at His birth by demonstrating to terrified shepherds what joy looks like and to give all of us a taste of what was to come.
Joy is what Jesus came to offer to stern religious people who deeply resented His disruptive and seemingly disrespectful ways of worshiping God joyfully.
Joy was what Jesus brought into the lives of those who were scorned, shamed and humiliated by the religious and politically elite.
Jesus brought joy to prostitutes. Now that sounds scandalous and it did to people back then as well.
Jesus brought joy to cheats, robbers, patriots craving to kill a Roman and the IRS agents who used their advantage to oppress their victims.
Jesus introduced the radical idea of choosing joy over force, fear or any other false method of motivation as He demonstrated before His disciples how heaven wants us to treat each other. They were totally baffled, amazed, stunned with disbelief and repeatedly startled at how unpredictable this strange man acted in nearly every situation.
Jesus brought joy to those who were hurting, those who were in deep grief, those who were so full of shame, guilt and fear that they could no longer even lift their eyes to look at anyone in the eye.

The last few hours before walking into the mass of hatred that would culminate in His torture and death, Jesus spent precious minutes speaking and acting in every way possible to intensify His consciousness of the joy set before Him so He could be as full as possible with joy to take Him through the last showdown with the enemy. Without as much anticipation of joy as He had capacity to absorb inside of Him Jesus could not have made it through all that He experienced during those last hours of torture, humiliation and pain.

What does this speak to us of how we might prepare for the coming time of trouble such as this world has never seen? Do we appreciate that it is joy and not fear that is the only effective way to prepare us to endure hardship, persecution and even death similar to what Jesus encountered? Or are we still trying to frighten ourselves into a frenzy of trying ever harder to develop 'perfect' characters, relying on fear of being lost as our fuel to run on? Why do we think fear will keep us going when Jesus rejected that method all throughout His life? It is time we realize that our typical notions of what it takes to get ready for Jesus to come and prepare us for the coming time of trouble may instead be setting us up for spectacular failures just when we thought we finally had it all together.

Our paranoia against allowing joy in our churches and in our lives is an ominous symptom of a deep misunderstanding of how to rightly get ready to meet Jesus. It seems that the more religious a person is the more animosity they often exhibit toward anyone who desires to be expressive in worship or to exhibit symptoms of joyfulness. Too many seem to prefer stern, solemn worship services and somehow think they are honoring God by shutting down the children, forcing everyone to sit in long straight rows and performing rites and ceremonies. But all of these things are empty and worthless in the eyes of heaven if they are devoid of the spirit of Jesus who relied on joy as His main fuel to keep Him going all the way to the bitter end. Satan must gloat in sadistic glee as he sees us glare at each other whenever someone begins to loosen up and start to get happy in church.

Of course there is the other extreme of attempting to substitute heaven's joy with charismatic feelings. But artificial excitement generated through stimulating music or great entertainment only masks over the lack of heaven's kind of joy and leaves many feeling more empty and hungry than when they came. Many become addicted to the feelings they experience when they come together to be entertained by great worship leaders. But the joy that God intends for us to know which is the only fuel that will actually provide the power we need when life falls apart and everything is going to hell, is the genuine joy that comes from constant living in the presence of God and allowing Jesus to live within our heart full-time. He is the one who promised He would never leave or abandon us. And that is the signature of real joy.

Joy is the sensation one experiences when someone else values them, enjoys being close to them and deeply cares about them consistently. Joy is felt particularly when you look into the eyes of someone who insists on wanting to be with you through good times, bad times and tragic times. They never stop loving you no matter how ugly you become or how obnoxious you might treat them. That is why Jesus is the only true originator of joy because only He will continue to love everyone even when some have rejected and turned away from Him permanently. The problem with those who are lost is not that God has withdrawn His forgiveness from them but that they have rejected His joy and love for them and have fully embraced the lies about God that Satan has leveled against Him all throughout history.

The only way that Jesus could bear our sins to the cross was by relying on the joy that fueled His heart and kept Him looking forward to the time we would finally realize what He was trying to show us about God all along.

But what about justice?

Didn't Jesus care about things being dealt with properly like we obsess about so much?

How can it be right that so much injustice, unfairness, abuse and sin seems to go unpunished? We recoil with rage when we see innocent people, especially children and women being victimized and helplessly suffering at the hands of those who exploit them just for sadistic pleasure. How can we be attracted to a God who seems so impotent in the face of so much pain and suffering and unfairness? How can He claim to be a God of justice and yet allow all of this mess to continue? And how does the death of His own Son make any difference in all of this?

I reject the typical explanation of Jesus taking on our punishment vicariously as a legal act of substitution with the implications that assumption creates about a vengeful God. I reject it because it reinforces the distortions of God that the enemy wants us to believe about Him that obscures His true nature. But even more it also tends to excuse the injustice that we perpetuate within our own so-called 'justice systems' that sooner or later become so corrupt that they themselves exploit the innocent for the benefit of the powerful and elite. After all, it was an earthly 'justice' system that condemned Jesus to death. So how can the injustices committed against Jesus somehow offset the injustices we experience? That is illogical and even absurd thinking which is exactly how the devil wants us to view the cross.

The only resolution for me in all of this is to step back and look at all this from a much larger view. It is only by seeing everything in the larger context of the war between God and Satan that any of this begins to make sense and fit together properly. When I find explanations for these things that are based on the premise of God being accused and being put on trial over His own motives and character, then the actions of Jesus suddenly snap into much clearer perspective. Rather than sin and salvation revolving around us primarily and everything seeming to hinge on our perfection; when I view all of this from the perspective of what everyone thinks about God and how they choose to relate to Him in His trial, then the sufferings of Jesus take on a completely different dimension.

The example that Jesus gave for me to follow is brought into sharp focus in the observation of Peter who watched it all transpire first hand. While Jesus absorbed all the shame, pain and torture that humanity and demons could invent to induce Him to retaliate or get even, Jesus responded to the greatest acts of injustice this universe has ever witnessed by placing his hopes in God, the righteous Judge. I find these words both compelling and exposing of our misconceptions about what took place at the cross.

Rather than turning toward desire for revenge like we automatically do whenever we experience or witness injustice and unfairness, Jesus demonstrated the correct way to respond. He chose to put all desires for vindication in the hands of His Father, implicitly trusting in the fairness of God even though everything around Him screamed that God was not acting fairly by failing to intervene on behalf of the innocent. By allowing all the animosity of every human being from Adam and Eve to the very last sinner who will ever live on this planet to be experienced inside the heart of Jesus while He hung on the cross, God allowed Jesus to somehow feel all of that. As a result, all of that hatred and sin at last crushed out the life of the Son of God Himself without ever eliciting the slightest reaction of resentment or anger even in His thoughts.

This is the greatest testimony every produced about the real truth about God's wrath that is still largely misunderstood and misrepresented even today. Far from enforcing the lie that God was so angry that He had to extract blood from His Son in revenge for our sins, Jesus' death actually proved that God cannot be abused enough to act that way toward anyone – ever! And because God never changes, He is not going to resort to using retaliation and revenge on the final day of Judgment any more than He did when His Son died to reveal the truth about Him on the cross.

I am coming to see more clearly that to 'bear' our sins actually means to absorb all of our animosity, hatred and cruelty without resistance. Sin always produces these hostile attitudes in hearts that misunderstand what God is really like. But far from responding in kind to those who abuse Him, God only responds with kindness, patience, love, compassion, and forgiveness to all of our insults, false accusations and attacks. And in the end, it is only the kindness of God that really leads anyone to true repentance as they come to believe in the real truth about God. (Romans 2:4)

This must be what it means to bear our sins. And this is what is likely involved in the role of priestly ministry as we follow the example of our High Priest. And this is what we need joy for to accomplish.

Therefore the Lord longs to be gracious to you, And therefore He waits on high to have compassion on you. For the Lord is a God of justice; How blessed are all those who long for Him. (Isaiah 30:18)

Rethinking Evangelism

2011-09-08T08:38:00.000-05:00

I have been thinking about the subject of what is termed 'evangelism' lately and have come to realize more of my misconceptions that have kept me in fear and crippled me from being more effective. As with nearly every other issue in religion, the more I learn of the true meaning of words and the higher purpose that heaven has for everything we are told about in the Christian walk, the more sense it makes. Yet at the same time these new insights usually contradict accepted assumptions.

Some time ago I learned from a wise minister some very important things about this idea of evangelism that really startled me and that I need to bring into focus again. I say that I consider him a wise man because he was years ahead of most of us in realizing that the really important thing, the primarily vital part of living as a Christian is to put at the very top of our priorities cultivating an intimate relationship with Jesus Christ and getting to know His heart in our own heart. Any other direction will only lead to weakness, confusion, pride, hypocrisy or some other distraction designed to keep us from discovering the only Source of life for ourselves.

This minister spoke on the issue of evangelism from a radically different perspective than I had ever heard before, yet the more I pondered his ideas the more sense they made in context with everything else I had been learning about the truth. He stated that the real purpose of evangelism is not so much to win others to join the church or be converted or even come to know Jesus for themselves as important as that is; the real purpose for evangelism from heaven's perspective is for our own benefit. He stated bluntly that the soul that needs saving and that will benefit the most is our own when we engage in the privilege of introducing other people into a saving relationship with Jesus.

Furthermore, this wise man said that if we ignore the opportunities that heaven sends us to introduce others to Jesus, the great danger is not that they will be lost because of our indifference but that our own hearts will become hardened and our own eyes will become more and more dim to seeing the glory of God. It is primarily for our own sake that God invites and urges us to get involved in sharing the good news about Himself with others, not for their sake.

At first this concept seems absolutely backwards to everything I have been taught in church and violates nearly all my presuppositions and challenges my motives. I know that even yet when this idea is discussed, even right now as I again revisit it, my own memories instantly begin bringing up quotes that seem to support the guilt-based motivation to compel me to go out and win souls for Jesus lest they be lost for eternity because of my negligence. This guilt-based approach to living was integrated into nearly every doctrine I was taught in religion growing up and became the driving force of the legalism that has plagued me for so many years and still does to some extent even today. I am ready to admit that legalism is a dead horse that we need to quit trying to ride into the kingdom, yet there are still some elements of that belief that cling to my conscience and continue to haunt me when triggered by discussions such as this.

But rather than rushing to line up texts and quotations to avoid facing this issue objectively, and considering that previous assumptions may be questionable, I believe it is time to challenge every belief, every doctrine, every assumption I have lived under in the clearer light of the emerging truth about God that He is so graciously bringing to my awareness today. I believe strongly that we are quickly coming into the time of the angel of Revelation 18 when the glory of God is beginning to fill the whole earth with the real truth about what God is like.

On one side, those who continue to cling to and promote dark and conflicting pictures of God will find themselves defensive about their traditions and opinions and will resist this glory. But those whose hearts are aching under a weight of guilt and fear that has burdened too many of us for so long will respond with joy as the truth about God's love and grace takes on fresh new dimensions and brings new life surging into our own hearts changing our lives from the inside out.

If I rely on old motivations to compel me to evangelize for the church, these motives of guilt and fear will sooner or later destroy the love and peace and joy that have slowly been taking root in my heart from new revelations about God that He has been giving me over the past 20 years. It is impossible to reconcile opposing ideas about God into an amalgamation of religion and still embrace the real truths about the gospel as I have been learning them recently. For God has not given us a spirit of fear, but of power and of love and of a sound mind. (2 Timothy 1:7 NKJV) If I allow fear to remain as part of my portfolio as a Christian then I am attempting to live a compromise between Satan's kingdom and God's kingdom and it will never succeed.

This is the fundamental problem with the way I have seen much evangelism carried out in my lifetime. I am not saying people have never done it from right motives. There are many wonderful Christians who have selflessly given themselves as channels of God's love to others in evangelism. But what I am saying is that far too much evangelism training and many of our usual approaches to how we promote traditional evangelism is based on faulty and questionable motivations relying on avoidance of guilt, use of fear and trying to avoid having God get upset with us.

Growing up I came to resent appeals for evangelism precisely because of this issue of others using fear to motivate me to do whatever activity the leaders wanted to get us to do. Whether it was handing out religious tracts or Ingathering activities or witnessing (now there's a highly charged and misunderstood word), everything was usually connected with the use of fear. All sorts of techniques were employed and often included potential punishment or shame if we were not willing to 'stand up for Jesus'. But if you had any idea of how much fear, guilt and shame my heart already was enduring from growing up steeped in legalism, you might begin to understand that I simply couldn't take on any more of these debilitating feelings without withdrawing or reacting with rebellion. And that is exactly what my heart did even when it was not publicly seen.

Because of this I have spent most of my life skirting this issue of evangelism. After all, I could never make much sense out of calls for us to go out and 'witness' for Jesus, bring people to Jesus, twist people's arms and minds to force them to join my church (the real underlying but unspoken message I was getting from my instructors).

Such thinking and activities didn't make much sense because the mixed messages about God we were supposed to offer to others were so confusing that I couldn't see how they would improve their lives while they were making me so miserable myself. Why would I want to urge others to join my church and become as sad and fearful as I felt under a heavy load of guilt and shame, constantly feeling that God was looking to find any fault in my life so He could accuse me and keep me out of heaven? Why would I want to ask others to serve a God that claimed to be kind and good and loving while at the same time threatening to torture them in hell if they didn't decide to agree with Him in every detail? (Oh, I forgot – we weren't supposed to talk about that too soon.)

You might react by reminding me that our version of hell is abbreviated from the Baptist or Catholic versions. But that was small consolation for me. Whether I burned for eternity or for a shorter time was not the main issue. Trying to love a God who threatened me in such a way if I was not willing to love Him with my whole heart, who I felt was constantly looking for the smallest sin in me that I had overlooked or had failed to confess as an excuse for Him to burn me in hell even a little bit prevented me from feeling attracted to Him much at all. I must note that these thoughts were not consciously processed in my mind but as I look back now I realize they were had real influence at my subconscious level.

So to ask me to go out and 'witness' to others about this 'wonderful' God and expect me to compel others to join my church (or suffer similar consequences I was facing if I didn't participate in evangelism) just didn't make a lot of sense or appeal to my heart at all. This legacy of mixed motivations for evangelism has seriously affected my feelings associated with it and has kept me on the margins. In reality my heart has been waiting for better news to come along before I was willing to share it with others – news that would be so good it would be worth sharing spontaneously.

And speaking of better news, the great thing is that God has not left me in that darkness of confusion about how He feels about me and His plans for my life. I have been learning that nearly everything I assumed about God acquired from the religion I grew up in was confused at best and downright false in some cases. My religion along with my perceptions of God was riddled with false ideas from Satan to keep me in fear and rebellion against God even though the people who taught me all this likely never intended it that way. Looking back I see that evangelism itself has become something of a barometer in my life that I can note to see how just much my picture of God has been improving.

As I mentioned previously, it simply didn't make much sense at all to go out and share a God with others who only kept me intimidated myself and repressed my own heart. Most of the words we were supposed to use made little sense to me anyway so why should I string them together like I was taught in order to get others to join my group and join my misery with me? For instance, I was taught that the word gospel means 'good news', yet I could see little about what I was taught that sounded like good news to me. I also noticed that we used 'deceptive advertising' when we talked about evangelism itself. We said we were leading people to Jesus which sounded plausible enough. But then when I watched people claiming to do this I noticed that while they were baptizing people into the church these new converts to the church had little or no clue about what it means to know Jesus personally. They were carefully taught to know the right answers to pre-prepared questions so they could get in the door, but 'coming to know Jesus' simply meant being able to give the proper answers to predetermined questions while in their personal lives they really had only taken on a relationship with an institution.

All of these issues still are here today. Many of the same sentiments about God are still cherished in the teachings and implications of many within the church and with many in leadership positions. Our church sends out mixed signals when it comes to the gospel though I am happy to see that more and more people are challenging that status quo vigorously. But I still see hypocrisy in saying we want to bring people to Jesus when the bottom line is that we really want to increase our tithe base or enhance our membership numbers to look good with the conference. We are reluctant to admit this openly but the reality still remains. Bringing people into personal accountability and intimate relationship with Jesus Christ above their relationship with any church stills seems to be something we are reluctant to encourage and this remains a real concern for me.

On the other side, as God has been bringing more light into my own life He has been exposing and expelling hundreds of lies embedded in my mind and my perceptions about religion over the past 20-30 years. He has been drawing me closer to His heart with cords of love (Hosea 11:3,4) and I am beginning to catch a better glimpse of what I can believe is actually good news. The fresh revelations of love, compassion, mercy, goodness and kindness that I am discovering in the Word of God in contrast with the religion of my past is truly worthy of being called good news, even good enough to want to share with others without being compelled through guilt trips or threats or intimidation.

Now I find myself voted in as the chairman of evangelism in my local church (ironically the same church where I first acquired most of my religious baggage to start with). I still find myself facing many of the issues noted above and I have to grapple with old feelings coming to the surface again. It is now that I need to sort out even more clearly the right and wrong motives for what we have typically called evangelism. Doubtless at times I will find myself at odds with others who cling to more traditional beliefs about this word, yet I also find an emerging environment more sympathetic with my concerns and more open to challenging old assumptions.

I also sense that God may well be arranging circumstances to open up new opportunities for us to experiment and to discover the 'old paths' once again (Jer. 6:16), to rediscover the original meaning and intent of many of these words when they are viewed in their original context. I have believed for some time that we have little clue about the true nature of the gospel that the early church embraced, for if we really saw the gospel in its original form with our hearts we could not restrain ourselves from bursting with enthusiasm and passion for God just as the early believers did even in the face of intense opposition and persecution. It is because we don't have a clear perception of the true gospel that we find ourselves trying to work up motivation by other means.

I believe that rather than trying to achieve outward momentum by forcing ourselves to evangelize or allowing selfish corporate motives to stay in place, the only way we will experience true revival and genuine growth is to individually search for the truth about God with all our hearts and encounter His power and passion infused into our souls personally. When we allow the truly good news about God to light His fire on the inside we will see more clearly the futility of trying to produce artificial results on the outside using any other means.

This is why true evangelism is more about saving our own soul rather than thinking it is our job to save other souls. How arrogant of us to think we can save anyone in the first place. Do we really believe that God is dependent on us to bring someone to Him or they will be lost without our intervention? Do we think God is so hampered that the lost will have no other opportunity to learn the truth about Him other than through us? That is blasphemy! God has infinite resources to make sure every soul has a fair chance to come to know Him and be saved. He intends for us to be involved in that process for our benefit and is not stymied by our failures in assignments He gives for us to cooperate with Him.

The souls that need saving the most – the only souls we are totally responsible for is our own soul. Seeking to save 'the lost' out there is just part of the growth process designed to save our own souls. God is ultimately the one responsible for saving every soul. But He knows that if we do not cooperate in His work for others that our own growth and our own destiny will be affected more than theirs.

If we are disturbed about the idea of saving ourselves, I am not speaking here of self-generated salvation. The word salvation actually means the salvaging of our lives, minds and hearts to be restored into a perfect reflection of God's character that we were designed to look like. Of course we can't do this ourselves, but if we don't cooperate in God's process of restoration by the internal work of the Holy Spirit in our hearts it cannot be finished. True salvation is not an outward work to force us to look good; it happens through a transformation of our heart motives, feelings, beliefs and our perceptions of reality. The Holy Spirit is in charge of this job but we have the vital part of needing to choose continuously to cooperate with Him in opposition to our sinful desires and natural selfishness.

One more thing I want to note in regards to evangelism. We too often mistakenly assume in our efforts to evangelize that we need to persuade everyone to adopt our opinions and views about God and to subscribe to our interpretation and list of doctrines. But I have come to realize that not even Jesus conducted His effort in this manner. This notion actually violates the law of liberty and freedom that is most highly valued in heaven. We are never to coerce others to change their minds in order to align them with our opinions; rather we are to cooperate with God in ministering to those whom He knows are waiting and ready for greater light, who are ripe for real truth and new life. It is not our job to make sure every interest we receive becomes one of our denomination. We should disabuse ourselves of the notion that we are in charge of evangelism but rather position ourselves as supporting personnel in God's work who is gathering together His children He has in waiting. This attitude can remove a tremendous burden of guilt and fear that has too often contaminated the work of evangelism for so long. This approach will infuse it with a new sense of freedom, joy and excitement as we realize that we can simply work alongside God to watch the miracles He is ready to do both in other's hearts and even more importantly in our own.

The Holy Spirit knows precisely the hearts of every person and knows when each individual is ripe for harvest, ready to connect with the body of Christ whatever that looks like. When we mistakenly think it is our job to convince people who are not ripe, who's hearts have not been readied for what we have to offer, then we will often find ourselves frustrated and will feel guilty we have not done enough or we may get discouraged that our efforts are not producing results we think are supposed to happen.

I know that I still need more clarification about this in my own mind. But I am increasingly convinced that, as Jesus demonstrated, our job is not to evangelize everyone but is to be so in tune with the guidance of the Spirit that we will be led by Him to connect with the individuals He has ready for what we uniquely have to share with them. Of course we need to be sure that what we have to offer is a true gospel that is alive and burning in our own souls and is actually good news. This is why I feel it is so important that before we attempt to engage in evangelism for others that we make sure our own hearts have come under intense conviction by God's Spirit ourselves and that the message we offer others animates our own heart and is awakening more love than fear.

We can only share with others authentically what we know and are experiencing ourselves. If we are not passionately and growing in love with God so much that it permeates every part of our own lives and all of our relationships, then likely the message we are offering to others is lacking in power and authenticity. We will then continue the old game of trying to convince people to join our church while failing to connect them effectively with the real and only Source of life.

I feel it vitally important that we examine our own hearts in the light of the Word of God to see if we are actually in the faith of Jesus (2 Cor. 13:5) or are just part of an institutional belief system, a church that we call 'the faith' but is really just a collection of people who have been able to answer enough questions in an examination to join a club. Unfortunately most of us joined this club through this method even though we may have been sincere. But now it is time to repent and discover God for ourselves for real.

Every method we consider as a means of attracting others to join our fellowship must be examined in the light of the real truth about what it means to be a actual follower of Jesus, not how they fit into our requirements for joining our denomination. We must resist the temptation to assume that the two are one and the same thing. Most of us know how to keep up religious appearances but far too many have little experience in knowing God intimately. It is vital that we give God full access to our own prejudices, our feelings, our fears and our hidden pain and to recognize His authority in our lives above that of any other. As this begins to have its effect in our own heart, then evangelism will take on new dimensions and we will begin to see results far beyond anything we can ever imagine presently.

If we do not first become filled with the Spirit of God and empowered by the passionate love of God, then whatever we do in the name of evangelism for God will have little lasting effect. Personally I want to enter into the joy of my Lord by entering into His work using His methods. I feel very inadequate but am reminded that God does not call the trained but empowers and trains those who respond to His calls. I tremble when I sense how clumsy I am in social skills, how easily I can offend people and turn them off. I feel God is taking a huge risk if He thinks I can be an effective partner in this work with Him. Yet at the same time I am reminded that all of us are works in progress and God has chosen to utilize us to work with Him as part of our own salvaging process if we are willing, otherwise known as 'working out our own salvation with fear and trembling' (Philippians 2:13). I am willing to move forward but I have to trust that God will direct where my foot lands each time it comes down.

Core Trust

2011-09-06T09:41:00.002-05:00

I am currently going slowly through the book of John to grasp what it really means to believe. It is starting to make more sense all the time and this morning many of the pieces began coming together even more clearly as I was reading the devotional for today.

At first the language used in the devotional seemed like legalese that triggers a strong reaction in me given my upbringing. But I have been seeking for some time to reconcile the legal language of religious talk with a greater view of truth that I have been discovering over the past few years. Because of this it is becoming easier to discern the deeper meaning of legal references and translate them into language that makes more sense in the higher view of the universal controversy taking place and the background of a proper view of God's character.

This reading referred to Adam and Eve's sin in eating the fruit as a terrible consequence. This already is in stark contrast to the assumption by many that death was a punishment rather than a natural consequence. But this sin was in the context of violating the immutable law of God. At first this seems to be locked in the legal interpretation exclusively until one brings all the correct definitions to bear on each term. When enough definitions have been corrected and their deeper meanings are applied to the sentences, suddenly new insights can be seen and a whole different set of understandings can be exposed. The truth starts to become much simpler and clear rather than being a large and complex set of theories as is too often presented.

I am also starting to perceive that many words are simply slight nuances on the same concept. I have been studying what real belief is and how to experience it. In the Greek language words were simpler than in English, and in the Hebrew language they were simpler yet. The English words faith, trust and belief all are translated from the same word in Greek. Therefore, it would actually be accurate to replace the word faith with trust which many times would remove confusion in some places. Likewise, exchanging the word unbelief or little faith with distrust might also help to make more sense.

Today it started to become clearer that this simplification could go much farther. The real issue that caused the terrible consequences from Adam and Eve's choice was not rooted so much in an action they took but was in the attitude they chose that resulted in the outward action. This is always where the real problem of sin lies rather than with the issue of behavior. Our external actions are results of what we have chosen to believe and think about God internally. As a result, sin can be defined quite simply as distrusting God in any way and obedience can be defined as implicitly trusting God with our heart.

From this perspective it is now easier for me to link many other things into this concept more readily. Sin is the same as distrust or unbelief. Thus sin naturally results in pain and death. On the other hand eternal life is always experienced through a trust of God's heart and can be entered into presently, not sometime off in the distant future. Jesus stated plainly that eternal life is knowing God and the Son that He sent to us in order to reveal Himself. It is impossible to know God in the way described here without trusting Him. But to not trust Him is to choose to live in sin apart from God. Sin is simply not trusting God which keeps me experiencing eternal life. Obedience is trusting God implicitly while growing in my awareness of why that is important and what He is really like. Obedience/ trust allows God to grow me up in maturity while unbelief/ distrust makes me more shallow, irrational, confused and immature.

How does the law fit into all of this? The law is simply a term or description of an abstract description of who God is. The law is rather like studying a shadow to discern what the person looks like that is outlined by the shadow. It may give one a vague impression of what the original could look like to some extent, but only by looking at the source that is creating the shadow can one begin to appreciate the far greater revelation of the essence of that person in more dimensions than a shadow can ever convey.

As this all begins to coalesce for me I find it compelling to react by seeking to know God better as the only effective solution for sinful behavior and attitudes in my life. Rather than trying to work on symptoms or becoming obsessed with focusing more on the shadows of what God is like in vague outlines, I find that if I spend more time investing in various ways of coming to know God better my faith (trust) naturally begins to deepen and my desires to act sinfully dissipate and fade away. This is because sin always originates in the heart so the heart is what has to change. It is in the heart also that faith or trust take place which is why true religion has to start deep in the heart before it can make a genuine difference in the life.

No amount of religious exercises or pious activity has any effect on impressing God to save me. Salvation means the salvaging of my life in being restored back to its original intent and design. God has already saved the whole world in the sense of revealing that everyone is already forgiven as far as God's heart is concerned. However, everyone who resists believing this fact cannot experience the transformation of forgiveness and will find themselves living in the confusion and darkness of unbelief. Because they resist His internal work in their hearts they cannot benefit from the power of the gospel to dispel their misconceptions about God and benefit from His salvation.

As long as we cling to any lies about God and how He feels about us in our hearts we are going to continue to have distorted ideas about Him, about salvation, about religion and about reality in general. All of this confusion reinforces distrust of Him, for our hearts cannot trust a God like the typical views taught about Him for much of our lives. Not until we are willing to seriously challenge our present perceptions of who God is and what He is really like and how He feels about us will we come into a position where He can begin to introduce us to the real truth about Himself in Scripture. It is extremely dangerous to assume that we or our church have it figured out and all we have to do is convince other people that we have it all together. The Jews made this same assumption yet they ended up hating and finally killing the very God they claimed to love and obey. We are no different than they were and are just as blind as they unless we are willing to humble ourselves and let Him reintroduce Himself to us personally and become willing to question everything we have assumed we knew about God.

Joy or Wrath

2011-09-05T08:59:00.000-05:00

It has just occurred to me more clearly than ever the relationship between true joy and the essence of what the Bible calls God's 'wrath'.

Joy, as I have been coming to learn, is the description of what we experience inside whenever someone is glad to be with us, one who cares deeply about us and wants to be close to us in every way possible – spiritually, physically, emotionally – no matter what we are experiencing or feeling. Our deep cravings to experience companionship, bonds of caring and love and intimacy lie at the very foundation of the human psyche. Scientists have observed this in their recent studies of how the brain is designed to function and have even decided that one of the best words to describe this fundamental need of our makeup is the word joy.

I don't know why I have not thought of it this clearly before (or maybe I have and have just forgotten), but it suddenly struck me this morning that the exact opposite of joy is what the Bible describes as wrath. But before anyone jumps to incorrect assumptions about what I mean, the word wrath must be carefully examined to unpack how the Bible defines it rather than perceived from all the connotations that have been improperly assumed about it.

In my personal examination of Scriptures over the past few years I have come to see that God's anger and wrath are radically different than what we think of when we experience anger and wrath. This is one reason God explains that His ways are not our ways and His thoughts are not like our thoughts. When we attempt to define God's attitudes based on how we feel and react we immediately fall into deception and confusion. It is vital that we first try to release our minds from the deeply entrenched assumptions we have and then allow God to reveal Himself and the truth about His feelings to us directly from the Word and interpreted by His Spirit.

Romans 1 is one of the clearest places in the Bible where God's wrath is explicitly defined. Here Paul spells out rather plainly three times that God's wrath is His act of releasing or finally letting go those who have persistently chosen to separate from His will, to suffer the natural consequences of their own decisions. Religion usually presents a God waiting to punish and condemn, yet the true God of the Bible is very different from that model. God is always full of love, mercy, forgiveness and compassion and is always fair. Yet our ideas about fairness and justice are also contaminated by our desires for revenge which never enters into the mind of God. Justice from heaven's perspective is far different than what we call justice in our fallen world.

When God talks about His wrath in Scripture it is always consistent with the concept of 'giving over' rather than arbitrary imposition of punishments meant to harm or destroy or get even. Wrath biblically speaking is a demonstration of the final respect that God shows to everyone who so totally resists and rejects the drawing of His loving Spirit that they destroy all of their capacity to even want to be in harmony with His love anymore. When it becomes clear there is nothing more God can do to salvage them, God respects their final choice by withdrawing His protection of mercy from around them that they have spurned and allows forces of evil to do what evil has always desired to do – steal, kill and destroy (John 10:10).

What became so clear to me this morning in the light of these true definitions for both of these words, joy and wrath, is that they are perfect opposites. Because joy is the experience of God always being with us no matter how we react inappropriately, what feelings we may be experiencing or how much we live immaturely, as long as we are willing to accept His love and guidance and correction in our life we will find new strength in the joy of the Lord. (Nehemiah 8:10)

On the other hand, wrath is what we experience when there is an absence of the joy of God due to our choices to not believe the truth about Him. When we cling to lies about how God feels about us, when we refuse to let Him love us, to transform us, to salvage us from our sinful condition and we reject the convictions of the Holy Spirit meant to bring us into harmony with His reality, then the absence of His life-giving and protecting presence in our lives exposes us to all the horrors of loneliness, vulnerability to satanic attacks, fear, shame and all the evil that can happen to a person when God is no longer their shield and protector, redeemer and friend.

Those who continue to insist that it is God who is angrily initiating punishment against those who disobey Him rather than sadly abandoning them in the end to the natural consequences of sin actually set themselves up to experience those tragic consequences by their own rejection of this truth about Him. I have observed that we can experience a reality that we create by what we choose to believe whether it is actually true or not. The view of reality we embrace becomes a strong filter through which all facts and evidence are twisted to reinforce our own preconceived opinions.

It is only when we become willing to lay down our filters, immerse ourselves in the true Word of God personally and allow the Spirit of God to instruct us with new perspectives from that Word to introduce us to the true God of heaven do we have hope of being conformed to the image of the Son of God and be prepared to live in the presence of His consuming fire. (Isaiah 33:13-17) For those who enter into the joy of the Lord, the consuming fire of God is life-giving and causes them to thrive. But for those who insist that God is double-minded, that He intends to arbitrarily punish and torture all who reject His offers of love and mercy, they come to the place where they will interpret even the most benign evidences of His love as threats and will live in fearful foreboding of destruction from His hand.

It is becoming ever more clear to me that my picture of God is the most important thing I must pay attention to. Properly understanding this truth lies at the foundation of my future destiny and influences everything I think, do and say as well as how I relate to everyone around me. To the extent that my concept of God is still messed up and out of harmony with the reality of who He really is, I will malfunction both internally and in my relationships with others. Conversely, as my picture of God clarifies and I see more and more of His beauty and loveliness, goodness and charms, like Moses I will become enamored with Him and will long to see His glory more explicitly with a growing passion that cannot be quenched or turned away. I will then really begin to know far better than ever before what it means to enter into the joy of the Lord and experience the strength that comes with that joy.

There is a choice for each person to make. Will I live a life moving toward God and entering deeper and deeper into the joy that is inevitably found when in harmony with Him in His presence? Or will I refuse to embrace the truths about Him that His Spirit seeks to impress on my heart and steel myself against His efforts to bring me into conformity to His will and His character? If I choose repeatedly to live independent from God, to cling to traditions and lies about Him, to make myself or someone else the source of my existence and the authority that defines my value and identity (the true definition of worship), then someday God will finally respect my determined choices to reject Him as my lover and Source of life and will release me to the terrible effects of my choices. He will turn me over with great grief to the results of living apart from the only Source of life that exists anywhere to suffer the only alternative there is, the wages of sin which is death.

Joy or wrath? Intimacy or abandonment? Which will I choose to embrace in my relation to God?

He gives me complete freedom to decide for myself, but the consequences of either decision are enormous while His grace and mercy continue to presently shield me from many of the immediate effects of making wrong choices while I make up my mind. We all live in a time of probation where we have a chance to sort out which direction we will decide to move. But there is coming a time when everyone will have shaped their characters so fully through the choices they have made and the picture of God they have settled in their hearts that nothing more can be done to change them. Then God will respect everyone's choice and will bring this time of probation to a close (Revelation 22:11) so He can finish the war and settle the dispute in favor of those who long to live in perfect joy with Him forever.

Divine Traffic Controller

2011-09-05T08:44:00.000-05:00

In my dreams as I was awakening this morning my mind was trying to sort out some kind of formula or something to do with how people functioned very early in the history of this world before becoming deeply masked by the darkness of pervasive deception. I don't know why my brain was working on this idea but it was. I was analyzing how intuition works and how intelligence might operate in its simplest yet most efficient form. Of course I can't remember most of the details of the dream now but I remember pondering the difficulty of trying to transfer musical information from one person to another. When the need for musical notation came up I immediately realized that this was the introduction of the concept of a code that would inevitably be foreign to anyone who was not initiated into that language. I sensed that there must have been a much more effective way of conveying this information that likely may now be largely lost to us at this point in history.

I also began to sense that it is quite likely that part of the original human makeup, embedded in our very psyche, are some sort of receptors designed to receive continuous information from the Spirit of God, not only in spiritual matters but affecting every area of our existence. I am coming to believe that the world as God originally intended it was coordinated by these promptings of the Holy Spirit in every person's life even down to such mundane practicalities as how they could avoid collisions when traveling or other everyday problems. In it place we now manufacture untold numbers of laws in our attempts to regulate daily life. In the absence of people's awareness of the communications of the Spirit we now have become totally dependent on artificial rules, regulations, legal enactments and the whole gamut of counterfeit external controls that we assume is the way heaven operates.

It is true that there are underlying principles that govern all creation that we label as 'natural laws', but these principles are of a very different nature than the arbitrary rules that we try to impose artificially to keep our society functioning somewhat smoothly. God's laws are simply descriptions of reality and of God's nature and how we were designed to live in harmony with those realities. To violate natural law is to go against the very design of the makeup of creation. One of the roles of the Holy Spirit as I am beginning to see it, is to communicate to each individual alerts in every detail of life when they are in danger of being out of harmony with natural law in order to guide them in the right ways so as to live in harmony with their surroundings.

Your ears will hear a word behind you, "This is the way, walk in it," whenever you turn to the right or to the left. (Isaiah 30:21) We have usually interpreted this in a spiritual sense only, but I suspect that the Spirit is interested in being involved in every area of our life. God wants to grow us in maturity, to train us to use our brains to think clearly and make good judgments. But He also wants to be involved and integrated into our thinking so thoroughly that there is almost no difference between our thoughts and God's thoughts when we have come to know Him as it is our privilege to know Him.

For the true Christian there really is little difference between what we often call the 'spiritual' aspect of our lives and the 'secular' part. We have far too long made artificial distinctions about this that I believe prevents us from giving God access to many areas of our daily experience and and that keeps us from knowing Him more intimately.

So why do so many find it difficult to perceive the voice of the Spirit in their life? Why does it seem so often that He is slacking on the job, that He is not speaking to many people to keep them out of harm or dysfunction?

I believe the answer is one that many don't want to hear but is true nonetheless. The Spirit of God has never quit doing His job anymore than God has changed in any other arena. The problem has never been on God's side of the issue but is on our end. God has not quit trying to lead people, even those who live in open rebellion and sin; the problem is that sin blinds us and dulls the internal receptors through which we are designed to perceive the constant stream of communication coming from heaven through the Spirit. As long as the enemy can keep us distracted with diversions that confuse our minds and excite our emotions and dull our senses we will not be able to discern accurately if at all, the nuanced messages always available to each one and meant to guide those who are the children of God.

The work of salvation is meant to retrain us to listen and discern ever more clearly the ever-present messages from God's Spirit and to learn again how to have our daily life coordinated to be in harmony with the principles of heaven and reality. We have religious terms for this process but unfortunately these words have accumulated so much baggage that obscures their original meaning that it is often easier to describe these things from a different perspective. Reality is actually more straightforward and simple in many respects than what we have made it out to be. The problem originates in our own confusion because of the deceptions that still cloud our thinking and confuse our picture of reality.

I have noticed that there are people from all walks of life and from all parts of the world that are seeking to be more aware of the voice of the Spirit of God who is ever communicating to anyone willing to listen. I had a dear friend who hated Jesus because of severe past abuses committed against her during childhood in the name of Jesus, but who was very attuned to the true Spirit of God and had no problem loving God. Many Christians would condemn such a person on the technicality that they did not align with the doctrine that 'only through Jesus' can anyone be saved. Yet the spirit demonstrated in the life of this person who had been turned off to Jesus by fanatical parents was far more in harmony with heaven' spirit than the spirit I perceive in many Christians I know including my own. I have little doubt that God, who looks at the heart rather than outward appearances, will bring this dear friend up in the first resurrection with the righteous, and when they meet Jesus personally they will instantly recognize the Spirit of the one they had already been listening and responding to all along. While they may have lived in confusion about the identity of the Spirit they were obeying, God will save all who listen to the guidance and drawing of His Spirit no matter what their external life may appear like to others.

The question sometimes is raised about how traffic might be controlled in the New Jerusalem after the saints arrive in heaven. For instance, when people travel down the streets of gold and come to an intersection, what will regulate who gets to have the right of way? It may sound like a silly subject, but it speaks directly to the issue of whether God governs His creation through artificial, external laws like we attempt to do here on earth or whether there is a much more efficient system of practical conflict avoidance. I believe the answer lies in the extent of our willingness to attune our hearts to God and to learn to respond instantly to the promptings of the Spirit in our minds. Ultimately only those who are willing to humble themselves enough to listen continuously to the 'traffic controller' from that heavenly Director will be safe to live in perfect harmony with everyone else in the kingdom of heaven.

God values nothing more than our complete freedom and the love that can only exist in this rarified atmosphere. Imposing external controls to manipulate and threaten people destroys this delicate atmosphere and ruins the beauty of perfect love. This is why it is so vital for each one desiring to live in the perfect kingdom of God to learn now how to tune in more acutely to the ever-present Communicator from heaven who's job is to coordinate all of God's creation to function in perfect harmony with itself and with God's nature. I believe this communication extends even down to such mundane activities as collision avoidance and other events in our lives that we so often tend to think of as coincidences.

From this perspective the following familiar passage suddenly takes on more significance.

In the same way the Spirit also helps our weakness; for we do not know how to pray as we should, but the Spirit Himself intercedes for us with groanings too deep for words; and He who searches the hearts knows what the mind of the Spirit is, because He intercedes for the saints according to the will of God. And we know that God causes all things to work together for good to those who love God, to those who are called according to His purpose. (Romans 8:26-28)

Valid Testimony

2011-09-04T08:03:00.002-05:00

Our testimony is invalidated if what we say is not totally based on personal experience. Hearsay is invalid in a trial; only personal testimony based on personal knowledge from personal experience is acceptable to hold weight in favor or against the person on trial.

This is why it is so vital that for God's sake we come to know Him personally and have a personal transformative experience of His grace in our life. Knowing facts about God or trying to keep up good religious appearances or 'live a good life' does not qualify as effective testimony in favor of God that will help vindicate His case. Jesus spoke about these kinds of attempts in His analogy of the judgment in His story of those surprised that their religious activities did not admit them into the kingdom. Significantly, the reason He gave for their disqualification was a lack of a personal relationship with Himself.

As a result, religious knowledge is only truly useful as it contributes to the enhancement of a personal relationship with God, not for a means of passing some mythical test to gain entrance into heaven. The Bible is not given simply to fill our heads with correct facts but to introduce and connect us with the God who created and redeemed us.

God is the one on trial, not us. In God's trial we all are witnesses. The effect of our witness in His favor is totally dependent on our willingness to allow God to do what He says He can do in our lives and to obey His instructions. His claims are being challenged by the world as being ineffective and spurious because most Christians fail to give Him full access to the center of their lives, to transform them into the image of God and look like Jesus. Who is really willing to let Jesus make them an experiment of grace to prove that God's claims are truthful? Who is willing to lay aside their own agenda, religious or otherwise, and allow God full access to every part of their life so He can demonstrate openly the power of His love and grace in a world unbelieving of His ability to save?

The lives that convey the most powerful witness in favor of the truth about God are often those who are viewed as least in importance from many people's perspective. Jesus stated very clearly that anyone who wanted to be great in heaven's eyes would need to be the most humble, the most caring for others and the least interested in looking out for their own desires. This concept is taught over and over throughout the New Testament particularly, yet as Christians we still overlook this most of the time. I suspect it is because this part of being a Christian makes us so uncomfortable that we want to move on to more appealing parts of our beliefs and try to ignore the hard instructions of Jesus.

But instead of seeing this as a hardship because it requires self-denial and dying to our own desires and plans, we could have a completely different attitude if we lived in the perspective of being witnesses in God's trial and valued the honor of contributing to His vindication. If we could get our minds off our narrow views of reality, our self-centered ideas of what life is about and be more cognizant of the far bigger context in which we are living, it would allow us to have totally different feelings about our circumstances and many of the things Jesus talked about as necessary to living as a Christian.

I have found it very helpful to remind myself of this larger context in which I live when in difficult situations. It helps me to put things into better perspective, to realize that life does not revolve about me but is a public courtroom in which all the universe is watching intently to observe what I am testifying about what God is like. Not only does my witness for or against God affect the interest of others making up their minds about whether to trust Him or not, but my testimony has a strong impact on the direction of my own life and impacts my own perceptions and relationship with Him.

Confusing Priorities

2011-09-04T05:46:00.002-05:00

One of the teachers of the law came to Jesus. He heard Jesus arguing with the Sadducees and the Pharisees. He saw that Jesus gave good answers to their questions. So he asked him, "Which of the commands is the most important?" Jesus answered, "The most important command is this: 'People of Israel, listen! The Lord our God is the only Lord. Love the Lord your God with all your heart, all your soul, all your mind, and all your strength.' The second most important command is this: 'Love your neighbor the same as you love yourself.' These two commands are the most important." (Mar 12:28-31 ERV)

Why are these two commands listed in this priority?

One way to flush out an answer to this question would be to invert them and observe the effect. Another is to take into account the essence of what love itself is and how we are designed to participate in love. If we bring confused ideas about love to these passages then we are likely to get faulty answers to our questions that can be misleading.

One thing I have been learning over the past few years is my inability to generate genuine, selfless love within myself. Humans were created to be reflectors of God, not independent gods. Genesis clearly says that God created us in His image and an image is a reflection, not an original. God is love and for us to have love we must come to function in the way we were originally designed to live, as reflectors of God's very essence which is love. Conversely if we are having difficulty experiencing and giving love the core problem can always be traced back to a bad connection with the One we are supposed to be reflecting.

So if I am designed to love by reflecting God but very little love is seen in my life and in my relations to others, what is likely going on in my life? I am still a reflector so maybe it has something to do with the direction of my focus. The answer might be observed when the priority of these two commandments is reversed. The effects of this switch would come as no surprise since pretty much everything in Satan's kingdom is a reversal of the order originally designed by God. Almost everything I have observed over the years related to Satan's methods and God's principles is that Satan has caused us to live upside down and backwards to how God designed for us to live. But since this is almost all we have known most of our life it seems to be normal to most of us, but that doesn't mean it is valid.

Jesus came to reveal what life should look like when humans come back into harmony with the original template they were designed to reflect. In fact, Jesus' life was lived out among us to give us a clearer example of what our lives will look like when we finally learn to reflect what we were intended to reflect. So what is the problem? I strongly suspect that much of the issue lies in our choices to focus on the wrong sources which in turn produce faulty reflections. If I find myself reversing the priority of these two commands from how Jesus (and Moses) presented them I will unavoidably end up reflecting whoever it is I look to as a god for me rather than the Source of true love.

As I thought about this more carefully I realized that my ability to love others is totally contingent on the effectiveness of my picture of God in transforming me back into His likeness. If I am ever to have more love toward others than the fickle 'love' I currently have, my only hope is to become a better reflection of God's love by first experiencing it in my own heart. If my heart is not warmed and transformed by the activity of heaven in my life and through communion between my heart and the heart of God, then it will remain impossible for me to really love anyone else the way God loves; it will be impossible for me to be a reflection similar to how Jesus reflected Him.

This sheds more light on something I noticed a few years ago. As I meditated on one of the Ten Commandments it hit me one day that the first commandment talks about this very same priority. The more I thought about it the more I became intrigued with what it was really saying. But I don't want to go too far into that exploration at this point since I have already explored that elsewhere. But briefly explained, I see potential in this commandment and from other passages that God may be referring more to our priorities in where we turn to receive life and our sense of value and identity more than He is forbidding us from treating any other source of provision as a god. And one reason this can be so confusing is because we have confused notions of what the term god means.

Notice what the command really says.

You shall have no other gods before Me. (Exodus 20:3)

If God was forbidding other gods in the correct understanding of that concept, then there would have been no reason to add the last two words in this verse. I now am beginning to see more clearly a parallel between these passages as an issue of priorities rather than exclusion. And the reason for that is based on how we were designed to live and to relate to others.

What helps me to see this more clearly is what I mentioned above about our being reflectors. God designed us to live our lives dependent primarily on Him as our highest priority and our supreme authority. Yet He has also put in place many other sources and channels through which He intends to provide for various needs in our lives. Embedded in the very concept of a 'god' is the idea of receiving various things we need for us to live and thrive and for protection against all that threatens our well-being. Ancient people invented many gods to fill this void in their lives and a careful analysis of the reasons many of these gods were invented reveals the nature of why humans feel desire for gods in the first place.

The reason God is so insistent about making Him the highest priority as our highest God is because whatever we turn to as a god becomes the source of what will be reflected as well as molded into our own characters. We inevitably become like the gods we turn to for identity and provision. Humans innately crave an outside source to define who we are and why we exist. This is the function of a god and this fact is inescapable. Every human being is going to worship something or someone as a god in their life and in turn what we worship will shape what we become. The gods we choose to define us will also be reflected in all of our relationships with everyone else.

As long as I keep my focus on God as my primary source of life, identity and input for my life, the one I rely on to satisfy my needs and fill the emptiness of my heart and soul, I will then be empowered to love others in the same way I am experiencing being loved. If the God I choose to focus on, to commune with, to emulate, to value, to hold as most important and most authoritative in my life is the God who is able and eager to transform me into an person of grace and beauty and truth like Himself, then the reflection of my relationship with that God will result in my ability to selflessly love others, serve without desire for credit or repayment, lay down my life for others and consider others better than myself without fear of losing my own value. As my life is filled with the value and peace that God gives me through my reliance and close proximity to His presence my ability to bless others as He blesses me will become ever more expansive and effective.

On the other hand, if I get these priorities backwards and my heart looks to other sources to fill the void in my life, to define my value, to determine my future, to mold my picture of what God is like, then life suddenly becomes very complicated, confusing and even disastrous. This makes sense when we understand the principle of reflection coupled with the fact that we always treat others based on our internal picture of how we perceive God is treating us.

If the god I am relying on is any other than the true God of pure, unconditional love that created me, then the picture I have of God is defined by the various sources/gods that have taken higher priority in my heart. If I allow other people, churches, religions, tradition, supernatural manifestations or a multitude of other counterfeit sources, to take precedence over my relationship with the true God of heaven, then my ability to love others will be inhibited by the ideas about God I receive from these other sources. It can now be seen that with so many confusing and even conflicting notions about what God is like swirling around in my mind and heart, my ability to relate to others with selfless love will be pretty much impossible and my own heart will be filled with dissatisfaction and disturbance. I cannot enjoy the complete peace of Christ in my soul as long as my picture of God is tainted with mistaken ideas about Him received from lesser gods.

This is why the first commandment warns us against allowing any other source to define our picture of God. I now see that this commandment is not so much about not having other gods – other sources for provision, encouragement, affirmation or other things they legitimately may be intended to provide for me – as it is about not allowing our 'neighbors' to take precedence or priority over the only true God who is totally consistent – one God. This first commandment along with the summary of the commandments by Jesus quoted from Moses together reveal the importance of priorities far more than the issue of what we view as a god. We need to correctly understand the real meaning of the word 'god'.

I am learning that a core issue that must be addressed in my own life above other problems is my internal concept of what God is like. My perceptions of God, how He feels about me, how He treats me and how He relates to all of His creation is the main issue that must be addressed if my external life is ever to be transformed from the malfunctioning life I now experience. I have learned long ago that attempting to change my behavior from the outside is nothing more than an exercise in futility except to keep me out of unnecessary trouble with society around me. I am seeing more and more clearly from Scripture that the only hope I have of being transformed where it really counts – at the heart level – is for my picture of God to be transformed. As my view of what God is like becomes more accurate, then the corresponding effects will be seen in my treatment of everyone else around me. This is the only method possible that works for my salvation. All other attempts at righteousness are doomed to miserable failure no matter how promising they may appear for a period of time.

If I allow other people, even good, religious people to shape my internal picture of God and my beliefs about Him instead of allowing God to directly form those views in my heart Himself, then I am reversing the priorities of these passages and in effect I am allowing other people to become gods ahead of the one true God. It is not necessarily that they are not intended by God to act in the role of lessor gods in my life, for I have come to realize that may be a legitimate role for some to play. However, if I allow any other source to become higher in my mind than the authority that I give to God then I am violating the first commandment and will find myself in resulting confusion and distress.

This is a far more important issue than many realize. There is constant pressure for all of us to allow other gods to assume higher priority in our hearts than pursuing a true relationship with the God of heaven directly. Particular is the threat of allowing religious leaders to fill the role of too much authority in our lives instead of learning to practice direct, personal accountability to Him and communicating with Him continuously. The religion I find in the Bible is very different from the religion promoted by churches and religions of the world. What I see nearly everywhere are religious authorities who seek to be the source of belief for their followers rather than leading people to rely directly on God and a personal investigation of His Word as their highest authority. It is very easy and appealing for people to allow others to do their thinking and digging in the Word for them rather than to invest the effort and discipline needed to discover truth for themselves, but that can be a fatal mistake. Likewise, it is very tempting for religious teachers and leaders to attract people to listen to them and rely on them as their primary source of truth while failing to appreciate their own role as lessor gods representing the one true God and teaching their followers to think and believe in God for themselves.

As long as we allow any other source to trump God as the sole definer of who He is and what He is like we will be unable to experience the power of transforming salvation as God intends for us to experience. And only by coming into personal connection with the God of heaven will true unity ever be realized in the body of Christ on this earth. If we seek unity by trying to control what others believe rather than leading them to connect directly to God more closely, we only serve to insinuate ourselves into a place that belongs to God alone and we become sources of confusion about God rather than an encouragement for other people's lives.

I sense that many too many of us are fearful that the Holy Spirit cannot be fully trusted to lead each of God's children into a unified family of believers. As long as we keep meddling in the Holy Spirit's work in people's lives instead of giving Him freedom to transform each child into becoming reflectors of His image, we are actually inducing others to make us a god ahead of the one true God. I don't think this is a place too many want to be found in come the day of judgment.

We need to be extremely cautious about how we participate in assisting God in drawing people to Him. We do have a role to play and that role according to the Bible might possibly be labeled as a 'god' at times. But as reflectors of the one true God our function as channels for Him in the role of little gods is to pass along His truth and blessing to others and then to encourage them to make Him their primary source of life and truth and love for themselves instead of continuing to rely on us. We may be temporary intermediaries for God for a time but like parents who by default act initially as gods to their children while they are little, we need to train people to grow up into Christ. This means we train them to become spiritual adults who are directly connected to their true God and Father in heaven.

Tampered Evidence

2011-06-20T08:36:00.002-05:00

God created a universe full of evidence reflective of the perfection and fairness of His character. He created intelligent beings with minds and hearts similar to His own in many respects, designed to live and thrive on love, to accept blessings in order that they could pass them on to all around them. Living in harmony with the great design that reflected the very essence of God Himself, everything in creation functioned perfectly, harmoniously and with great joy until one of the created beings, one with the greatest intelligence and capacity of all, chose to begin tampering with the evidence.

Lucifer, the light-bearer, the one created being commissioned to be the most trusted representative of God to all other created beings, began to entertain ideas foreign to what God had created him to use. He began to harbor pride and desires to be the recipient and focus of worship that only God deserved. The longer he allowed these false ideas to linger in his heart the more he found himself experimentally rearranging the meanings of everything that God had designed in creation to draw out His children's affections and praise back to their only Source of life.

Much later now we find ourselves totally immersed in a world filled with tampered evidence. This world was originally created perfect where nature and even our own thought processes and impulses had originally been designed to draw our hearts out to return praise, gratitude and worship to the Source of life while spreading to others the blessings of life we received from Him. Originally nature functioned in much the same way as we were supposed to function acting as a great circulating system, receiving blessings from God either directly or through the means of other elements designed to provide for them and then passing it along.

But the evidence contained in the great book of nature that was provided for us to know Him better has been seriously tampered with and it now gives us confusing and conflicting messages about its Designer. Even more damaged is our own internal psychological processes which have been so distorted that they are now unreliable as a means of recognizing the original template created in God's image.

Consequently we now find ourselves struggling to believe in the goodness and fairness of God in many situations. When a young child is molested, tortured and brutally murdered, or when 'natural' disasters create enormous pain and suffering or any number of other things that arouse questions in our minds, the root of all our questions and doubts can always be traced back to what we think about God and our feelings about how He is running things. Sometimes we say it openly when we cry out in our pain demanding to know why such tragedies come into our lives or that happen to those around us. Other times we smother our questions under layers of religious rhetoric, tradition or false piety. But I am starting to be more and more convinced that at the deepest level of all of our questions is to be found the fundamental issue of God's fairness and justice.

This is the primary intent of the enemy of God who has spent millennia tampering with all the evidence in every way he can imagine to cause us to question the goodness of God, the integrity of God and the Word of God given to testify about the truth of Himself. Even the Bible, the greatest objective written testimony that is designed to help us perceive the real truth about God has been tampered by the biases of many who translated that document from one language to another. I am not suggesting that all translators have intentionally altered the meaning of the Word in their efforts. But one must be aware that it is unavoidable that inherent biases, traditions and assumptions about God within each person involved in converting ideas from one language to another unavoidably become woven into the text subtly or openly and passed on to subsequent readers.

So when we wonder why it seems so hard to believe what God says about Himself and we even struggle with the testimony of Jesus who came to represent the truth about God to us, we must keep in mind that the evidence we rely on has been potentially altered to include false ideas about God in ways sometimes intended to keep us afraid of Him.

But God has not left us to the deceptions of the enemy without provisions to overcome the negative effects of the tampered evidence. While it would be so much easier to perceive clearly the real truth about God's love and goodness and grace and compassion from living in a perfect environment rather than in all the confusion we now find ourselves, the Spirit of God has been given as heaven's gift to supply our needs and to give us insight and interpretations of our surroundings that can counter the false messages the enemy wants us to believe. The deceptions may be compelling and even overwhelmingly convincing at times, but the truth is always greater than the false and sooner or later the truth about God will emerge clearer and more beautiful than ever. All those who choose to cling to the revelations of God and His declarations about Himself in the face of opposite assumptions suggested through tampered evidence will find themselves on the winning side when it is all over.

Even within the evidence that has been tampered with and distorted to support false claims about what God is like, we can still perceive, with the aid of the Spirit of God, the underlying outlines of the original truths that God built into the very fabric of all creation. Whether in nature or in human interactions, the original face of God has not been totally obliterated and we can discern it if we are willing to turn away from counterfeit interpretations and choose to base our beliefs on what God says about Himself. If we will learn to measure everything in the light of the truth Jesus came to provide to this world we will begin to see more clearly the truth about God everywhere we look in spite of all the tampering of evidence the enemy has done to confuse us.

The most important issue in the universe and the conflict between good and evil is God's reputation. To rule effectively the way He wants to govern God must solicit freely the obedience and allegiance of all His created beings without ever resorting to force, intimidation or threats to win their affections. He desires only the service of love which is based on complete mutual respect and belief in His goodness. As long as anyone has reservations about the consistent goodness and fairness of God, He cannot govern free of resistance as He originally created His universe to be operated. So He has chosen to put Himself and His methods on trial to allow His subjects to decide for themselves whether the charges against Him are provable or whether everything anyone has said against Him is a fabrication.

Of course, His enemy Satan, the accuser, is doing everything possible in a desperate attempt to keep as many as possible in deception and blindness as to the real truth about God so that his own existence can be extended. He knows that because of God's goodness and the way in which He has chosen to resolve the whole sin problem is to let it continue until it self-destructs, Satan's very existence is secured as long as he can keep any one person trapped in doubts about the fairness of God. God will never force anyone to acknowledge Him or worship Him, but He is wise and skillful enough that at some point in time circumstances will coalesce to cause every created being to see clearly the truth about Him in the evidence and will also see how the evidence has been tampered with and how that came about.

What is the fundamental purpose behind someone tampering with evidence in a trial? It is for the purpose of causing the evidence to convince people of something opposite from what it was originally intended to imply. Tampering with evidence is an act of deliberate deception and is evil. And while not all people who have perverted evidence did so intentionally, behind all tampering is a very intentional purpose of the enemy of God who is intent on deceiving the whole world and keeping us afraid of God. He wants us to continue believing his lies about God and continue to distrust God. For as many as he can keep in distrust of God he knows he can keep them out of God's plan to reconcile to Himself and prevent them from enjoying the initiate, close fellowship of love and trust with Him. Jesus said that the enemy only comes to steal, kill and destroy and one of the ways he does this most successfully is by deceiving us about what God is like.

When all the evidence becomes plain and everyone is given full opportunity to examine it freely, at that point everyone will acknowledge without coercion that God never used deception or force or intimidation to get His way like He has been charged of doing. It will become clear that He has been more than fair in every situation and that our doubts about Him were not based on reality but on our choosing to believe the lies circulated by His enemies. If we are lost in the end it will be because we have refused to love the truth about God.

Each of us must choose what we are going to believe about God in the face of often confusing evidence. Some evidence has been tampered with seriously and we must be aware of that. But if we allow God's Spirit to alert us to the tampering and enlighten us as to the true implications of the original evidence we will have enough evidence about God and the truth about His integrity that we can choose to trust Him even if some evidence seems to indicate differently. Jesus urges us to believe in Him and believe in His Father in spite of all the charges leveled against Him. And for those who choose to believe the truth about God and reject the false claims made against Him – even those that come from inside our own hearts – He will reward our choice to trust Him by dwelling inside us and transforming us to become like the One we are choosing to trust.

By beholding we become changed and transformed. If we continue to believe lies of the enemy about God or cling to dark pictures of God we may have received from religious sources, we will become like the kind of God we have chosen to believe. Whatever we choose to focus on and give credence to, whether it is true or false, we will be transformed into thinking and acting and relating to others as a result of the ideas and feelings about God that we cherish.

I want God to keep unmasking the lies of the enemy, many which are still buried deep in my own heart and thinking. I want to continue to move closer to the light of the real truth about God that I have been starting to glimpse in His Word and from revelations from His Spirit to my own heart. I want to be more free of the lies of the enemy that have kept me afraid of coming closer to God and to trust Him fully for all of my life. I want to let go of my resistance to believing the truth about Him and to have Him totally make me over and restore me to His original design for me of perfectly reflecting His likeness that He intends for me to enjoy.

Good Resistance

2011-06-14T09:22:00.001-05:00

You have not yet resisted to the point of shedding blood in your striving against sin. (Hebrews 12:4)

Resistance.

That is an issue that I have thought about a lot. It is an element that is central to understanding the real truth about hell as well as our relationship with God.

But this verse that came to my mind this morning speaks of a resistance that is different than the resistance that keeps me from maturing and advancing in my relationship with Jesus. It speaks of striving against sin to the point of shedding blood. But I sense that the typical assumptions about what resisting sin means keeps most people trapped in confused attempts about how to do that. If we don't have correct definitions of sin then the kind of resistance we are likely to put up may all be efforts in a completely wrong direction and ironically may even strengthen sin rather than eliminate it. We too often are fighting a battle where the real battle is not taking place.

I decided that the best way to explore what this verse is talking about would be to look at its context and find clues as to just what it is that I am supposed to resist rather than relying on assumptions or conclusions based on traditional ideas about sin and righteousness.

This chapter is an extension of what is normally called the 'faith' chapter where people who learned to live by faith are listed along with some of their experiences. Then the author moves on to point to Jesus as the supreme example of how to live by faith. This passage is vital for coming to a correct understanding of sin and how to overcome it. If we take these words more seriously and allow the Spirit to bring conviction to our hearts through them we will see radically different relationships within the body of Christ and more real spiritual maturity.

So what can be found within this passage that will tell me what it is that I should resist which in turn will tell me what the author considers to be sin? Let me take a look.

Verse one says that we should lay aside every encumbrance and the sin which so easily entangles us... Does that tell me definitively what sin is? Not enough for my understanding, but it does tell me that whatever it is it is likely to be something that it is very easy to get tangled up in. Like getting caught in a sticky spider web, sin is going to keep wrapping around me in some way when I get too close to it. But I still need to have a clearer idea of what sin looks like so I can be aware of what to watch out for.

This phrase also speaks of encumbrances using the analogy of a race. An encumbrance is something that adds extra weight that can slow a person down significantly when they want to move faster. So I need to take that into account as I meditate and search this passage for what it is I may need to resist.

Verse two speaks of fixing our eyes on Jesus, the author and perfecter of faith. I sense that I am getting closer to the core definition of sin in this verse. Choosing to keep my mind attuned to and paying attention to Jesus more than other things will have the effect of causing me to become more and more like Him. I have learned that this is the only effective way to deal with sin in my life, for trying to get rid of sin by trying hard to stop bad behavior or faulty thinking has proven to be a long exercise in futility for those who have tried it including myself. Likewise, trying to have enough faith in order to be saved has also proven to be very frustrating until I began to see that it is the faith of Jesus that is most important, not my ability to generate faith. In fact, it is impossible to work up faith like I always thought I had to do which has come as a real relief when I finally figured that out. But on the other hand, the more I fix my attention on knowing Jesus personally and learning to appreciate how good God is through the things I experience and learn with Jesus, the more I find genuine faith springing up spontaneously within my heart. I can encourage it, nurture it, cultivate it and reinvest it, but I cannot produce it any more than I can produce the righteousness that comes by faith.

It states clearly here that Jesus is the author – the originator – as well as the completer of my faith. That is incredibly good news for a person who has tried hard and failed repeatedly to produce enough faith to please God. Rather than working hard to work up more faith, I am learning to spend my efforts seeking any way possible to get to know Jesus intimately more so that the effects of that growing relationship will produce saving faith spontaneously.

But that still does not clearly help me know what it is I am supposed to resist. Let me continue looking here.

I notice that the word endurance keeps coming up in this passage. And according to Jesus' example, it is choosing and cherishing joy that was the secret for giving Jesus the needed endurance to go through all that He suffered at the hands of hostile men who resisted what He stood for and who He was. All the shame that they used to try to intimidate Him into sinning (whatever that might look like) He chose to despise. I have long found that to be a very curious phrase which I have been unpacking for some time. It requires a deeper understanding of the real meaning of shame as well as what it means to despise which has been a very fruitful and interesting study for me. But it also brings me closer to learning what real sin might be and how I need to strive against it.

Verse three, the verse immediately preceding the one I am unpacking, makes the most relevant statements that begin to really unlock what I am looking for. It says that I am to consider Him who has endured such hostility by sinners against Himself, so that you will not grow weary and lose heart.

What did the example of Jesus and what He faced reveal to me about exactly what it was that He resisted? If I can get an understanding of what it was that Jesus needed to resist, then I can better perceive what sin really is and what it is that I need to watch out for and resist.

This verse says that it was hostility that likely brought Jesus temptation to sin. It appears that it is also hostility that likely is the cause of growing weary and losing heart. Putting those things together I strongly suspect that from heaven's standpoint, allowing myself to grow weary and losing heart are methods that Satan likely uses most effectively to get me into sin. And given this verse it would appear rather clear to me that sin somehow involves my reaction to the hostility I may experience from others.

The endurance that keeps showing up in this passage appears to be focused most sharply in this one event where Jesus needed all the endurance He could get to resist becoming infected with hostility in His own heart. Jesus experienced the worst treatment a human being has ever experienced in history. I am not saying that Jesus experienced the most torture that anyone has ever had, though some Christians try to make that claim. Many have experienced far greater physical torture for much longer periods of time than did Jesus at the hands of the Jews and Romans. But the vast majority of the pain and suffering that Jesus experienced during those last hours of His life on earth was produced not by the physical anguish that was imposed on Him as awful as that was; the great suffering that came upon the Son of God was the mental anguish that came from experiencing the full weight of guilt, shame, condemnation and all the natural consequences of sin induced by the sins of every sinner who has ever or who ever will live.

Yet the way that Jesus related to the external provocations, abuse, mistreatment, torture and injustice heaped on Him by nearly everyone around Him as He was led to the cross is key to revealing to us how it is that we are to effectively resist sin. In my study and thinking about Jesus life and death I have come to realize that Jesus did not work hard to suppress feelings of anger, resentment or desires for revenge. He was not repressing inner rage aroused by all the maltreatment He was receiving or savor the idea that His revenge was simply going to be deferred to the day of Judgment when He could really get even with all His enemies by unleashing His power in wrathful vengeance upon them. To think this is what motivated Jesus as some Christians believe is to completely miss the truth about God that Jesus came to reveal.

In fact, it is at this very point that the real nature of sin becomes most evident and how resistance fits into the picture, both in the life of Jesus and in my own life. Rather than viewing sin as breaking rules or bad behavior, looking at the example of Jesus reveals to me that sin is allowing my natural desires for revenge, my natural desires for self-protection to become the driving force in my relationship with others rather than resting in confiding trust in my heavenly Father.

Did Jesus have natural desires to stay alive? Did His humanity want to avoid suffering pain? Yes, Jesus was fully human while also being fully divine. But His example under the extreme pressure of sinners to elicit even a single response that would justify their own actions under the control of sin acting out during those hours, His example of choosing to forgive rather than desire revenge is the most compelling exposure of the real nature of sin ever given to the universe. Rather than allow even the slightest spark of desire for retaliation to take root in His heart, Jesus clung to His connection with His Father which He had depended on all of His life and chose to reflect the Father's love toward those who had such extreme hostility against Him rather than becoming infected with the spirit that was driving His enemies to so viciously attack Him.

So how does that reveal to me what it is that I need to resist and how to go about resisting it? I believe the comments of Peter on this very subject can shed even more light.

...If you endure suffering for doing something good, God is pleased with you. God called you to endure suffering because Christ suffered for you. He left you an example so that you could follow in his footsteps. Christ never committed any sin. He never spoke deceitfully. Christ never verbally abused those who verbally abused him. When he suffered, he didn't make any threats but left everything to the one who judges fairly. Christ carried our sins in his body on the cross so that freed from our sins, we could live a life that has God's approval. His wounds have healed you. (1Pe 2:20-24 GW)

I used to think that Jesus simply succeeded in suppressing the natural desires similar to what I feel when abused, threatened or mistreated. But now I realize that His real success came from keeping tuned to the influence and leading of the Spirit from God, Jesus never allowed any evil feelings to ever even begin inside. As strange as it may seem to those of us who find it impossible to suffer without desires for revenge, Jesus gave an example of what is possible when a person embraces the offer of sharing in the divine nature as God has arranged for all those who are willing to experience the kind of salvation and victory He has provided in Christ.

I now see that the resistance that I need to exercise is not a gritting of my teeth to suppress feelings of anger and hostility against those who take delight in mistreating me while attempting to act like a good Christian. What I need is to become so filled with the Spirit of Jesus, the mind of Christ who humbled Himself to the point of death (Philippians 4:4-8), that what I resist is the urge to allow my natural human cravings to take control of my mind and heart. The resistance that results in acting like Christ under provocation is a resistance to taking my eyes off of Jesus and taking things into my own hands. The resistance that produces the kind of enduring character that will prove most essential under duress is to resist living a life of keeping up appearances while allowing selfishness to remain the deciding factor in my heart.

What I can choose to resist is allowing the normal effects of shame to cause me to feel worthless inside as is its intention. Jesus despised shame which means He refused to allow it to deliver false messages to His heart that He was not valuable. He based His sense of worth and value exclusively on what His Father thought about Him and never on what anyone else thought. Because of this He gained that stability and endurance to live free of all desires for retaliation, resentment or any other similar feeling so familiar to us under such circumstances, because He kept His connection with God as His sole source of identity and value. He resisted every effort of the enemy to redefine who He was and how He should relate to sinners.

I must also remember that joy was the fuel that Jesus depended on to give Him the needed endurance to get past all that pain and be able to face death. As I have learned, the very essence of joy is not happiness but is the heart-bond connections formed with others who are genuinely glad to be with us. Jesus not only relied on His joy-connection with His Father to give Him endurance and perspective but He filled His mind with anticipation of the enormous rewards of joy He would experience in the future as millions of people would someday be deliriously glad to be with Him for eternity.

That joy-strength was vital in giving Him the needed endurance and perspective He had to have to resist the viral attacks of hostility and animosity that immersed Him during those hours. Rather than resisting in the sense of suppressing evil desires as we too often attempt to do, Jesus resisted taking His eyes off His Father and the truth about His Father that had sustained Him all of His earthly life. Jesus resisted allowing the ugliness of sin and the pain He was suffering from every direction to eclipse the truth that God was fair and trustworthy no matter what circumstances might seem to indicate. He came to the point where in sheer faith in God and against all evidence He could perceive at the moment, He choose to leave everything in God's hands rather than try to sort things out using His own logic or feelings. He resisted the idea that God was not always fair.

And this takes me right to the very core of what sin is really all about and how it came about in the first place. Sin originated when Lucifer began to entertain doubts about the goodness and fairness of God. Over time these doubts deepened and strengthened and grew exponentially until they have now become the myriads of lies that cloud our thinking and cause us to distrust God. Jesus came to this earth to reveal the real truth about God's goodness and fairness in many ways. But the most compelling way was by allowing sinners and even demons to mistreat and abuse Him to the fullest extent possible while demonstrating in response how God feels about them.

And how does God feel about those who hate Him, who mistreat Him, who are filled with hostility towards Him? He loves them unconditionally just as He taught in the sermon on the mount. He forgives them without reservation. He has nothing but compassion in His heart toward them and desires nothing more than full reconciliation with them as He seeks to unmask and replace all the false ideas about Him that drives their hatred against Him. This is why Peter mentions that there was never any deceit found in Jesus' mouth. Because Jesus never allowed false ideas about God to infect His thinking and in turn corrupt His heart. He resisted all the lies about His Father and about Himself that were constantly pressed on Him as temptations but maintained a sense of reality based on heaven's perspective rather than the counterfeit reality that permeates this world.

His example allows me to better see what it is that I need to resist in my striving against sin. Since sin is rooted in the lies and mistrust of God and His goodness that Satan has infected our minds and hearts with, I need to resist believing any of those lies any longer and allow Jesus to become the only valid definition of what God is like. That revelation will transform me from the inside. The book of Revelation (14:5) speaks of a people in the end times of this earth's history who have no deceit in their mouths. This is the same thing Peter said about Jesus which indicates that these people have become just like Jesus. They have come to completely resist the lies about God purported by Satan, the great accuser, and instead have embraced the complete truth about God as represented in Jesus.

This is the kind of resistance that will be successful in striving against sin. As I allow the truth about God to continue to transform my thoughts and feelings, my life and my relationships will all begin to be more and more free from the effects of sin. As my endurance increases I will likely find the attacks increase as well. But I only have two choices: I will either be conformed to this world's view of reality and be squeezed into its mold of lies about God, or I will allow Jesus full access to my heart and affections and thinking and will be transformed internally and then externally by His love and grace and peace to fully reflect God just as Jesus did. I will either resist God's spirit and the truth about Him that Jesus came to reveal or I will resist the devil and all His lies about God, submit to God and be led by His Spirit as a child of the King.

Deny Him or Deny Himself

2011-06-12T08:45:00.001-05:00

And He was saying to them all, "If anyone wishes to come after Me, he must deny himself, and take up his cross daily and follow Me. (Luke 9:23)

And He said, "I say to you, Peter, the rooster will not crow today until you have denied three times that you know Me." (Luke 22:34)

In these verses the Greek word translated 'deny' is defined by Strong's this way.

aparneomai; to deny utterly, i.e. disown, abstain:--deny.

What motivated Peter to deny that he knew Jesus, that he was a disciple of Jesus?

It was fear: fear of what others would think about him, fear of what might happen to himself if he were too closely associated with Jesus when He was extremely unpopular and nearly everyone was intent on hurting Him.

In a sense Peter was actually telling the truth. He didn't really know Jesus very well at this point in his life. But to deny that he was even a disciple of Jesus was an outright lie and an act of cowardice motivated by natural desire for self-preservation. But this event was also the means whereby God was able to finally expose to Peter and to everyone else how shallow Peter's acquaintance was with the real truth about Jesus. Peter finally came to see his own weakness that had been hidden from him in his dullness of heart. His self-confidence, assertiveness and pride rooted in comparing himself to others rather than to Jesus set him up for this moment and kept him in the dark about his true condition.

What does it mean to deny one's self and take up a cross daily or to die daily as Paul puts it?

It would be to do the very same thing that Peter did only in the opposite direction.

Peter denied that he knew Jesus or was even his follower when fear of what others might think or do to him overwhelmed his loyalty to Jesus. He was looking out for his own skin when it was clear that Jesus was losing His. Fear is always about how we are going to feel.

The opposite of this would be to deny that we know ourselves for fear that God's reputation might be harmed because of our profession of knowing Him. This is the true fear of the Lord; fear that we will damage His reputation in attempts to protect our own.

This is all about our choices as to what we are going to believe about our identity.

Our natural heart and the world around us insist that our true identity is revealed by and based upon our mistakes or achievements, our weaknesses or strengths, our failures and sins or our sterling reputation. The world is keen to make sure that we don't become too much different than everyone else, that we don't make others uncomfortable like Jesus did, that we maintain our pride and selfishness so we fit the world's mold. There is constant pressure both within and without to believe in our identity as sinners that are always trapped in the slavery of sin in our lives to at least some degree. Or we are pressured in some circles to believe we have to work very hard and perfecting our behavior and conform to the laws of God in order to become righteous enough to be accepted in His sight.

On the other hand, God declares that He views us as friends. He says that His word and thoughts about us are only good and that from His perspective we are His special children. And while He is totally aware of our sinful condition, rebellion and helplessness apart from Him, we are forgiven, are loved, are valued and cherished by the greatest and most powerful Being in the universe. But it is up to us as to whether we will believe His thoughts about us and embrace the relationship of mutual 'knowing' that He desires for us to experience with Him.

Peter had lived his whole life from the perspective of religion and the world's concepts about identity. He saw improvements in his life from hanging around Jesus for several years and he was quite confident that his loyalty to Jesus was strong – stronger than anyone else's in fact. He was even willing to go to battle with anyone challenging that assumption. But at the same time he was unwilling to humble himself with Jesus and listen carefully and seriously to what Jesus had been trying to point out to him during those years about his own self-dependence and pride.

Yet despite all of Peter's weaknesses Jesus still maintained that His own view and opinion of Peter was more reliable than Peter's view of himself. This is why He told Peter even before his denial of Jesus that after this experience they would in essence still be good friends. Jesus had no less affection or belief in Peter after his public disgrace than before and He made sure Peter heard that ahead of time. He wanted Peter to have something to remember from Jesus, that Jesus was a more reliable evaluator of his identity that Peter was about himself. When Peter would be converted by renouncing his dependence on his own opinions about himself and turn to rely wholly on Jesus' opinions about him, then he would be fitted to nurture and strengthen others who would struggle with similar problems.

To deny myself is to renounce my own opinion about my identity and embrace God's opinion about my true identity. This includes renouncing my own preconceived assumptions and feelings about God's identity in favor of His own declarations about His true identity and feelings towards me. In short, it is allowing God to be the source of defining reality, value and identity on both sides rather than depending on my perspective and my deeply ingrained opinions, emotions and beliefs. I must die to my ideas about reality, religion, God and myself and come alive by allowing His Spirit to dwell in me.

This is a true saying: If we undergo death with him, then will we be living with him: If we go on to the end, then we will be ruling with him: if we say we have no knowledge of him, then he will say he has no knowledge of us: If we are without faith, still he keeps faith, for he will never be untrue to himself. (2 Timothy 2:11-13 BBE)

In this verse the original word translated 'deny' is a little different than in the previous verses quoted.

arneomai; to contradict, i.e. disavow, reject, abnegate:--deny, refuse.

I affirm, brethren, by the boasting in you which I have in Christ Jesus our Lord, I die daily.... Do not be deceived: "Bad company corrupts good morals." Become sober-minded as you ought, and stop sinning; for some have no knowledge of God. I speak this to your shame. (1 Corinthians 15:31, 33-34)

Not everyone who says to Me, 'Lord, Lord,' shall enter the kingdom of heaven, but he who does the will of My Father in heaven. Many will say to Me in that day, 'Lord, Lord, have we not prophesied in Your name, cast out demons in Your name, and done many wonders in Your name?' And then I will declare to them, 'I never knew you; depart from Me, you who practice lawlessness!' (Matthew 7:21-23 NKJV)

Later the other virgins also came, saying, 'Lord, lord, open up for us.' But he answered, 'Truly I say to you, I do not know you.' (Matthew 25:11-12)

This is much deeper than simply a profession of faith in God. Peter tried that for years and discovered in a crunch that it was far too weak to stand up to outside pressures. The kind of 'knowing' that is needed to transform us into powerful witnesses and intimate friends of Jesus who will be safe to live with Him for eternity is one that requires deep humility, transparent honesty, vulnerability in His presence and trusting in His words about us and about Him rather than our own perceptions. But this intimacy and trust in Him also embraces His declarations about our true identity 'in Christ' that is emerging into the open as we spend more and more time listening to His beliefs about us.

Knowing God and Him knowing me shifts my priority from self-preservation to preservation of His reputation above mine. “Your will be done, not mine.” I come to the place where I would rather be persecuted and even die rather than have God's reputation damaged or ruined because of my words, spirit or actions.

But at the same time I become keenly aware that in myself it is impossible to maintain my loyalty to him just as Peter found out the hard way. Only by humbling myself, listening to the warnings of Jesus who knows me far better than I will ever know myself, and allowing His Spirit to dwell in me and live His life from inside of me will I be empowered to represent Him effectively and vindicate His reputation before unbelievers all around me.

To deny myself is to renounce my depairing feelings about the possibility of me changing and becoming like Jesus.

To deny myself is to defer to what Jesus says and thinks about me in every respect rather than allowing my history, my failures or even my achievements to define my identity and value.

To deny myself is to embrace Him and His opinions about my true identity, value and place in creation.

To deny Him is to give preference to what feels normal inside, to continue to believe that I am a product of my past and that even God cannot change me enough to make me perfect and complete in character and lifestyle. Or on the other hand it may be to think that with help from God I can someday achieve perfection if I just work at it hard enough. Both of these options are in reality a denial of what God says about the reality of my life.

Denying myself and dying to my ideas, perceptions and feelings is only the beginning though. I must also follow Him and become intimately acquainted with Him so that we both can come to say that we truly know each other. This 'knowing' is a transformative experience that will restore me from the inside to my original design as a child of God, a prince in the family of the King of the universe, an ambassador for heaven to a world desperate for a fresh revelation of the true God who is ready and eager to save all who will respond to His invitation. Jesus, do this in my life today!

Think About...

2011-06-11T06:39:00.001-05:00

Always be filled with joy in the Lord.

I will say it again.

Be filled with joy.

Let everyone see that you are gentle and kind.

The Lord is coming soon.

Never worry about anything.

But in every situation let God know what you need

in prayers and requests while giving thanks.

Then, because you belong to Christ Jesus,

God will bless you with peace that no one can completely understand.

And this peace will control the way you think and feel (CEV)

and will keep your hearts and minds safe in union with Christ Jesus. (GNB)

Brothers and sisters, continue to

think about what is good and worthy of praise.

Think about what is true and honorable

and right and pure

and beautiful and respected.

(Philippians 4:4-8 ERV, GW)

A couple weeks ago I put together this passage to leave open on my computer screen so I could revisit it easily. Over the past few months God has been increasingly convicting me about my need to turn away from the dark things of life and fill my mind and heart with more awareness of His goodness, His blessings, His benefits so graciously poured into my life but that too often go unnoticed and unappreciated.

This morning I woke up very early with a sense that my heart is again becoming dulled and too insensitive toward the love and goodness of God. Exposure to other's negative comments and attitudes, conflict with people opposed to the work of God in our lives, dark pictures of God that permeate nearly everything in the world around me and even my own resistance to promptings of the Holy Spirit in various ways – all of these things over time tend to reduce my ability to listen with an open spirit to the promptings of His Spirit and dampen my praise.

I realized that I was again hearing an invitation from the Spirit to spend a bit more time in His presence to just let Him mold me back into someone more reflective of what God intends for me, to receive more intentional exposure to the glory of God. If I desire my life to be reflective of the glory of God, it can only happen if I make sure my heart connects with the Source of that glory enough to have it transform my own soul. The effects of the opposite of God's glory have had too much effect on my heart lately and it is vital that I take steps to have my heart more saturated with His true presence that only can give me proper perspective and enable me to react to negative situations in the Spirit of Jesus.

One thing I have noticed recently is the lack of positive spiritual music playing in my head. I am a musician at heart and there is pretty much always some song running in the background inside my head. Sometimes it is caused by whatever I have heard recently including cell phone ring-tones which usually are not all that inspiring, but my ear picks them up and replays them applying different arrangements along the way. I know this may sound bizarre to some but it is just how my brain works. At other times I suddenly notice hearing some spiritual song circulating in my mind that I have not heard for many years and sense that very likely God planted it there for me. In those times I thank Him for putting it there and choose to enjoy the inspiration that He intends for that song to bring me.

But lately it seems that many of the songs I hear internally are ones from the practices I attend with the Barbershop chorus or other music that is not necessarily that uplifting. Since I spend very little if any time playing music at home compared to years ago when we often had music on in the house, my heart has little opportunity to resonate with music that could be used to alter the direction of my spirit. This morning I felt prompted to put on some headphones and turn on a playlist of worship songs I assembled years ago on my computer to fill my mind while I meditate and write. Even now I am listening to inspiring renditions of worship songs filling my mind and heart with new thoughts, new feelings and memories of how God has used this music in the past to deliver me from fear, from discouragement and to lift me into His light and presence.

Even the morning devotional today was prearranged by God just for this moment in my life. The last two paragraphs were a reminder to me of the vital importance of intentionally keeping my heart tuned to the atmosphere of heaven and to guard it from the effects of the ever-present influences of the darkness of the world around me.

The contemplation of the love of God manifested in the gift of His Son for the salvation of fallen men will stir the heart and arouse the powers of the soul as nothing else will. The work of redemption is a marvelous work; it is a mystery in the universe of God. But how indifferent are the objects of such matchless grace! . . .

If our senses had not been blunted by sin and by contemplation of the dark pictures that Satan is constantly presenting before us, a fervent and continuous flow of gratitude would go out from our hearts toward Him who daily loads us with benefits of which we are wholly undeserving. The everlasting song of the redeemed will be praise to Him who hath loved us and washed us from our sins in His own blood; and if we ever sing that song before the throne of God we must learn it here. {TMK 168}

There is so much in the passage above from Philippians that has been impressing me recently. Each time I ponder on this passage I am impressed with how much is contained in these few words that my heart needs to absorb and practice.

One thing that really jumped out at me recently was the significance of the phrase, the Lord is coming soon. I have usually been confused when reading this passage as to why this seemed to be dropped into the middle of this section because it seemed so out of context with the surrounding verses. Then when I read it in this translation it suddenly occurred to me what Paul was really saying. The effective way to prepare for the coming of Jesus is to allow Him to make me a gentle and kind person, especially toward those who normally elicit the opposite response from me. This is the preparation I need for His coming because this is how His character will be revealed to a world living in ignorance about the truth about Him. Religion too often presents such confused notions of God that the world has little interest in Him. The only way God can get out the truth about Himself effectively is to find individuals willing to let Him transform them from the inside to respond with the same gentleness and kindness that marked the life of Jesus when He was here on earth.

Another insight that exploded in my mind just a day or two ago was the phrase, peace that passes all understanding. It is worded differently in this version, but I have often puzzled over that phrase and wondered just what it really means. This week as we listened to a sermon at home the speaker explained what this meant and it really clicked for me for the first time.

I now can see that it particularly applies to situations that we struggle to reconcile what we profess to know about God in times when we are forced to cry out “why God, why is this happening to me?” Our heart longs for understanding and our head can make no sense out of our circumstances, yet God says that He can give us peace even when nothing around us seems to make sense. This peace of God seems to be in spite of what we understand and comes before we have any understanding of what is happening to us or others.

This is a very important breakthrough in my thinking for I now see how important it is to accept God's peace before I understand the reasons for things. Yes, God often allows me sooner or later to see why things happen the way they do, but whether or not I ever know this side of heaven why bad things happen in my life, God wants me to accept that deep peace that can give me stability and faith and hope in spite of my inability to make sense out of what is happening. This kind of peace is aligned with faith that cannot yet see the evidence but anchors itself in a belief that God is good no matter what surrounding circumstances may imply. And this peace in spite of circumstances is a powerful testimony to attract others to want to know this God who can bring such peace in the life when all they have known in such circumstances is frustration, anger, fear or despair.

My heart naturally wants to know why things happen, to make sense out of circumstances because I think that is necessary in order to experience peace. But God says that I need the peace first which means that this peace is based on faith in Him and is rooted in a firm conviction of the goodness and kindness of God separate from explanations that make sense to me. Furthermore this passage tells me that when I choose to accept this peace from God that it will in turn regulate my thoughts and feelings instead of the negative circumstances of my life controlling my emotions. Now that is a real miracle and one that I want to experience in my life all the time.

The last part of this passage clarifies what I can do to help this take place. It is my part to make choices about what thoughts are allowed to circulate in my mind. When I find myself reacting in a spirit of fault-finding and criticism toward others, I need to listen to the check of the Holy Spirit and dispense with that thought and then ask for God's perspective and attitude. When I am exposed to influences that encourage wrong ideas about God from the world around me I need to actively resist and to limit the input of such influences. And they are very pervasive from more sources around us than most of us even consider. The music in stores, the chatter of people nearby, the billboards, television, advertisements and any number of other things are all influences that can distort our view of reality and confuse us about how God feels about us in one way or another.

It is my responsibility to take time, particularly at the beginning of each day, to fortify my mind with more accurate pictures of God and to allow Him time to fill me with His attitudes, His disposition, His mind and Spirit so that I can be protected against all the inevitable exposures to opposing messages I will encounter the rest of the day. I need to pick and choose, based on these verses, the kind of mental food my mind will dwell on if I want to become the kind of person whom Jesus will say that He knows and is safe to live with Him for eternity.

The last song on my playlist really caught my attention with conviction. It is my prayer for God's intervention today, to speak into the places of my heart that often reacts in a wrong spirit toward others.

Speak Into the Moments

Love arrives when kind words are spoken

Kindness is the doorway to the heart

The way we speak can keep our love unbroken

And the way we speak

can demand that love depart.

So when harsh tones find a welcome

In my heart, in my home, in my head

When I throw stones in place of arms around you

I will pray to God to speak for me instead.

Speak into the moments of my day

Speak into the corners of my night.

Open my ears to listen, my heart to hear

Speak into the moments of my life.

Some say hate is all about our anger

Others say it's all about control

I, for one, am guilty of both charges

It happens when I don't take time alone.

So when I can't find the quiet

When still is the place that I can't be

I will pray for just a little silence

And for the tender words of God to be in me.

Your words give me light

so that I can find my way

To the place where I speak tenderly

Your voice makes the difference

in the way my voice is heard

So speak to me, speak through me.

Speak into the moments of my day

Speak into the corners of my night

Open my ears to listen, my heart to hear

Speak into the moments of my life.

(by David Kauffman)

Offense and the Rule of Law

2011-06-08T11:29:00.002-05:00

The legal and justice systems that we know here on earth are designed around the foundation of offense. Written right into the legal codes and implicit in the methods of law enforcers is the practice of assuming offense both large and small. Policemen, military personnel, judges, lawyers – all are trained to look for the slightest infractions of the multiple layers of rules and policies and legislations, all designed to create opportunities and excuses to unleash punishments for supposed or real offenses.

Given the all-pervasive atmosphere of expecting offense and even soliciting and inducing offenses, a climate is created for opponents to reflect a similar spirit and take offense themselves. Thus the basis is laid for offenses to multiply which is all calculated for the benefit of the state which is ever seeking for excuses to increase their power and strip their subjects of more and more of their rightful freedoms.

To be offended by this state of affairs is itself to become a victim that the system is designed to produce. By taking offense at the injustice of so-called justice systems is to play right into their hands. The attitude of the spirit within a person determines the direction of their life and their relationships with others, whether benign or hostile. The spirit produced by allowing an offense to take hold in the heart is the bigger problem, not just the circumstances that created the offense originally. Offense itself is the real enemy, but since it is diabolical in nature it seems to feel just and right. Sooner or later though, the systems of government gravitate toward exploitation and domination of everyone. But the real slavery comes on those who allow offenses to remain in their heart.

This is the stark contrast between living life by creating, imposing and enforcing rules versus living life from a heart being transformed into the image of God and based on selfless love. Living from the heart is the only healthy solution to all of life's problems, for only living from the heart while being synchronized with the Spirit of God can bring satisfaction, peace and harmony in society. But the world denies that this is possible or even feasible and instead insists that the only viable solution for all problems is the rule of arbitrary law. Living under arbitrary laws is presented as the greatest god to be esteemed in all the world and is considered superior to God's ways of love. Yet no matter how hard they try, the rulers of this world have not been able to succeed in getting people to live together effectively in peace and harmony for very long. The selfishness of the human heart and the greed and lust of those in power always corrupts and derails every attempt to create the perfect society and each one in turn sinks into dysfunction, antagonism and hostility sooner or later because of the insurmountable selfishness of the human heart.

God's ways are the only longterm solution for this quandary of offense and law. While God has at times had to resort to utilizing methods similar to human methods of law in order to get our attention in ways we could understand, His real goal is to restore us to living in a society free of fear, coercion and selfishness where the principles of healthy living (laws) are embedded in the heart. Only by allowing His Spirit to transform us from the inside so that we no longer want to exploit or offend or hurt others can peace in society be realized. Only by allowing the Spirit of God to change our hearts and give us new thoughts and motives and perceptions will we ever be able to escape the damaging and strangling effects of offense.

Offense itself is one of the strongest symptoms of selfishness. If a person were not selfish they would not take offense. That is why Jesus was never offended even for a moment. Satan's kingdom sought in every way possible to induce a reaction of offense in Jesus but failed in every attempt. This was the real issue in many of Jesus' temptations, not urges to commit the kind of sins we generally label as sin. Jesus had no desire to commit adultery or to steal for all of these things were very repulsive to Him. His temptations were along the line of succumbing to the subtle inducements of selfishness, of allowing a spirit of self-preservation at the expense of others to determine any choice in His life. If one examines carefully many of the recorded temptations that Jesus experienced it can be seen that they often involved seeking to induce Him to use His advantages to prefer His own needs ahead of other's. All of His temptations were centered on getting Him to take things into His own hands rather than rest in His Father's care and plans for Him. When we feel God is not handling our circumstances well we tend to want to take charge ourselves and then we are ripe for an offense when things don't go as we want.

When the way someone mistreats us or their needs conflict with our own comfort, it is at that point that we are most tempted to become offended. If our motivational roots are self-preservation more than living to bless others, then we will be very liable to experiencing a reaction of offense. To be offended means that I become irritated that someone is infringing on my rights, my freedoms, my independence and happiness. But as soon as I take offense I am absorbing the spirit of Satan and have lost control of my own heart and situation. To entertain offense means I am blaming someone else for my feelings and difficulties, making them responsible for me rather than myself. Blame is a result of offense and all the other faulty methods of this world are chain-linked to this entering wedge into our heart.

To be offended is to fall into a trap of Satan who keeps us imprisoned and locked away from knowing peace. To cling to offense is to stay under the control of Satan's evil spirit until we choose to take back responsibility and let go of our offenses completely. This is the path of forgiveness – to let go of any cherished or even potential offenses. Even though Jesus never held onto an offense He still forgave freely which meant He would never allow a spirit of offense to take root in His mind. Through humility He was able to stay free of all offense and instead entrusted Himself to the only One who is always fair and just. (see 1 Peter 2:21-23)

Intentional Worship

2011-05-29T08:55:00.004-05:00

I have some observations about how the mind works from both experience and based on many things I have learned from others over the years. This directly affects my daily relationship with others and largely shapes how my intimate relationship with God progresses and deepens.

At night when we are sleeping, the brain goes through a sorting and editing process. This idea is generally accepted by many experts and has been observed through laboratory experiments. Certain chemicals go through the brain and trim away nerve endings that were started the previous day but are considered unnecessary for long-term use. Additionally, memories created or awakened during recent experiences are stored away with other more long-term memories, all while we are sleeping. All these are stored primarily in groupings based on the type of emotional content of the memories. One of the main reasons and uses for dreams is the linking together of new and old memories during this sorting and filing process.

After all of this has been accomplished to the degree that it can be by the time we finish sleeping, the early morning period of each person's day immediately upon waking up is often the most critical and influential time determining the direction the life will take that day and possibly for much longer. There is an extreme sensitivity of the mind and heart in the first few moments of the morning, but many do not realize they could use this time to leverage real change in their lives if they only knew how vital the first inputs of the day effect the direction their life will take the rest of the day. Depending on how rushed one becomes upon getting up or how intentional one is about carving out personal time during this period, the thoughts and inputs and surrounding influences of the early morning have a dramatic shaping effect on the whole life.

When outside distractions fill the first moments of the day, those factors will largely determine the mood, the attitudes and the pace that will be reflected in one's spirit throughout that day. But the same is true if one chooses to make their time in the morning more planned and intentional and purposeful for what they want to see happen in their life. Particularly if a person is seeking to cultivate a deeper relationship with God and come to reflect Him more intentionally, it is vital to capture and protect the early morning moments and invest them in filling the mind, the imagination and the heart with communications and fresh revelations about the truth of who God really is and how He wants to transform us to be more like Him.

I have become more aware of how much these moments can be leveraged or lost many times over the years. As a result I have become much more sensitive to paying attention to the inner voice of the Spirit when it sometimes awakens me with some thought, some conviction, some delight or often simply an invitation to join with Him to meditate and become better acquainted. But I am always free to indulge in the ever-present craving to sleep a little longer (or even just to lay in bed thinking I won't fall asleep but will have the conversation laying there in comfort rather than getting up). But usually when I choose that option I miss out on a wonderful opportunity to be led to some place in my heart that God wants to explore with me in order to bring new insight or healing or understanding.

Even when I take the time to protect and guard these moments in the Word, listening with my heart and seeking to maintain an open spirit to whatever the Spirit of God may bring to my attention which is always rewarding and profitable for me, I still find temptations ever present to abbreviate this time or to jump in and take over the time by chasing after some idea or maybe doing all the talking rather than waiting a little longer in silence of soul to give God opportunity to share something new or important with me. Like an unhurried, wise old sage who will cannot be pushed to share wisdom with the rushed, I find that there is very often far more wisdom and insight and truth available that is more profound than what first appears for those who are willing to keep the channels of the senses and heart unobstructed from either outside interferences or internal gabbling that prevents one from listening to God and allowing Him to grow us.

Clearly there must come a time when one decides to move on with the day and bring some closure to the time set aside to communicate intensely with God. But I have learned that if I allow Him more time, either by choosing to get up earlier (which may necessarily involve going to bed earlier) or by refusing to allow pressures of the day to dictate my priorities and values and push God into the margins, these times of spiritual and intentional communion with Jesus become the most vital source for infusions to nurture the very existence of my relationship with Him. Without these intentional, protected quiet moments listening for the voice of God to my soul both in the Word of God and from any other sources that He may choose to get my attention, my spiritual life would become a sham, a pretentious charade that might look good to others but would bring me no real life to transform the internal shape of my soul.

There certainly are necessary physical things that must be attended to when one first wakes up in the morning that usually cannot be neglected. But I have observed that many times it is easy even to allow these mundane things to consume more time than necessary which in turn steals from the time my heart needs to marinate in the presence of God. My own fears, anxieties or plans for the day may also become competition for my heart's attention and if not carefully herded into an internal holding pen and brought under the authority of Jesus Christ they can easily dominate my imagination and usurp my attention rather than focusing on the divine input that will give me totally different perspectives.

What I am looking for each morning is to remind myself through divine encounters with God how heaven views things rather than how I normally view things. If I allow my heart sufficient time to dwell in the presence of Jesus, not just going through a routine or a religious performance but intentionally opening my heart and mind and soul to allow God to surprise or convict or inspire me as He chooses each morning, I find that my mindset for the rest of the day can be very different and it is far easier to maintain an open connection with heaven all throughout the day. I find that during the day it is not unusual for God to unexpectedly bring back to my attention some word, some insight, some meditation from that morning and to revisit that idea to connect it to something else that He may bring to my attention at that moment.

The main point I wanted to convey here is that the way our brains and bodies were created by God, it appears that whomever is given access to our hearts in the first moments of the day will have the greatest influence in determining the direction our life will move for the rest of the day and much longer. If I wake up to the blaring of a radio station and fill my senses with stimulating surroundings and chemicals, the likelihood that I am going to nurture an intimate and life-changing relationship with God and have His peace in my life is going to be far less likely. If I think that all I need is a couple minutes each day reading a bit of religious material and saying a quick prayer, I am fooling myself into thinking that will somehow make me 'good enough' for God; I am indeed living in an illusion.

Eternal life, according to Jesus, is not defined by how long I live in time but is an intimate relationship of knowing Him and His Father. Just as we cannot cultivate an intimate soul-bonding love and appreciation for another person if we fail to spend intentional quality time getting to know them personally through interactive communication with them, neither will we ever come to experience the life transformation and heart connection necessary to allow God to bring us to His home to live with Him for eternity. If we neglect to spend intentional quality time getting to know Him and His Word we will not know His voice and be willing to follow wherever He goes. And in a world totally filled with myriads of misleading ideas about what God is like and how He thinks about us, this is even more vitally important in order to escape the miasma of confusion about His true feelings towards us.

I don't want to convey the idea that there is any inherent virtue in spending a certain length of time with God or practicing particular religious routines. God is not looking to be impressed but to interact with our hearts and minds. I believe it is helpful to regularly challenge our habits that are formed even in our seeking of God and to change them up when they start to become more important than allowing God the freedom and access He needs to keep drawing us closer to Him. When our perceptions of God become too predictable that is when it may be time to question the methods and routines that shape how we think about and relate to Him. Whether it be corporate religious services or personal times of devotion, I believe it is all too easy to allow the forms and routines to become so familiar and cherished that we are in danger of making them the object of our attention and worship more than the true transcendent God Himself.

Curses in Disguise

2011-05-26T08:11:00.001-05:00

I caught a glimpse this morning of the truth about what we often think are blessings. Comforts and pleasures that we enjoy can often be the greatest hindrances in our lives to seeking intimacy with God. Pleasures and comforts many times fill in the emptiness that is supposed to be filled with God thereby preventing our hunger for God from motivating us to seek Him with an intensity enough to find Him. Lack of spiritual hunger and low levels of desire for God leave us satisfied with such tiny encounters with His glory that we never realize how dangerous our condition is until it may be too late.

Our very gratitude for what we consider to be blessings that are in fact the very things that are keeping us from seeking God seriously, may be a mistake. It may be discovered that we are praising God for curses in our lives rather than things that are truly beneficial to us.

The early Christians experienced such a deep level of intense fellowship with God under persecution that it was little problem for them to face torture and death rather than abandon their loyalty to God who was such a powerful source of life and joy to their souls. But when the emerging apostate church and the state switched tactics and suddenly offered them relief, comfort, ease, recognition and pleasure in place of threats and intimidation and torture, they saw far more clearly than we ever do the immense danger to their souls and their relationship with God in the temptations these things presented. They saw clearly that these things would dampen their passion for God, would dilute their pure faith and would be like an insidious infection that would quickly sap away their strength and would spread poison and death all through their ranks.

We have lived all of our life in this atmosphere of poison and malaise and spiritual weakness, so much so that we have no clue why comforts and pleasures might be considered dangerous. Our prayers are often filled with pleas and petitions begging God for the very things which the early Christians feared the most. We long for comfort and pleasure and status and financial prosperity more than we long for purity, for maturity and for noble character. Some of us with our heads may begin to grasp this truth and make attempts to discipline ourselves, but then Satan moves in to push our experience into legalistic and obnoxious practices so much so that others turn away in disgust from the bigotry and prejudice that too often becomes integrated into such an austere lifestyle.

It is a classic case of two extremes, both of which are equally selfish and full of darkness and misapprehensions about God. One focuses on our desires to feel good, to avoid pain at all costs and to remain in the status quo. The other lives in the opposite extreme out of stern reaction to these selfish motivations rather than living in harmony with the principles found in the Word of God. By living life reactively to the other extreme from either side rather than proactively by seeking to know and do the true will of God and live in love and harmony with Him, Satan manages to keep both extremes away from the real truth that would set them free from selfishness and error.

Recently the practice of fasting has come up several times in my discussions with others. I have been blessed to have learned some vitally important concepts about this that are little talked about. James Wilder in one of his Munchies teachings unpacks the mystery about this practice in such a way that makes total sense in relation to how our brains were designed. Now having learned the true reason and purpose for fasting I can see why many times this practice has not resulted in the desired results. Because most people fail to understand the dynamics involved and what needs to be present during such an exercise, they only end up making themselves miserable and induce a deeper resentment against fasting and maybe even against God rather than experiencing the joy of connecting much closer to the heart of God.

At this point I am sensing that God is turning the screws, amping up the pressure a little bit on my own heart and challenging me to practice what I am learning and sharing with others. He has been noting here and there how much certain things in my life are interfering with my own desire to know Him better, to be more consistent, to raise my priorities for Him much higher in my own internal list of what is important to me. He is exposing some of what is confusing and dulling my own heart from having my prayers answered to come into much closer fellowship with Him and to be used in His service.

Fasting of itself is nothing but a tool, a technique by which my mind and heart become more disciplined and strengthened to reorient my inverted priorities that keep me in slavery and dullness. Fasting has no virtue in itself; it earns no merits with God and does nothing to advance me in holiness. Unless I include into the experience a determined effort to focus my heart and mind on God, humble my heart and seek His face intentionally with increasing passion, it can turn out to just be another futile attempt to impress God or others around me. Fasting like the Pharisees ended up doing it, became an end in itself and Jesus pointed that out. Fasting has far more to do with many other things besides food which is another notion that has kept many people from experiencing good results from it.

True fasting is a deliberate, intentional period of time where I refuse myself or severely restrict something from which I receive pleasure or comfort in order to refocus my heart's awareness and reattach it to the better Source that can give me the only real satisfaction that I crave. It is not enough to just attempt to break attachments or addictions that block me from coming closer to God; I must also move past that and deliberately seek to form new and stronger attachments to the One who only can give me the abundant life that my heart truly craves but is seeking from other things in His place. The main purpose of fasting is to open up the vacancies in my heart, to lance open the wounds, to release the original pain and longings that have been suppressed, misunderstood, ignored or placated with other things for so long and to use those released motivations of pain and longings to redirect and reorient my heart's choices about where it chooses to get its satisfaction for those feelings.

There are actually many dangers in fasting in that I can mistakenly form attachments to other false sources if I am not cognizant of what is taking place or of the true nature of what my heart is seeking to attach to during that time. But at its core, choosing to fast from whatever has been distracting my heart and then purposefully choosing to direct those released, intense cravings into a new channel directed at linking up to God's heart directly is what fasting is supposed to be about and why it can be so effective. It is a powerful tool to strengthen moral muscles, to bond my affections at a far deeper level with another heart and to bring about a far deeper level of self-control and self-discipline that will produce more beneficial results in the life than many other spiritual practices.

Father, keep me aware of what You are leading me to and what You have in mind for me. Draw me closer to Your heart, to Your will for me and remind me constantly of my true identity in Christ. Help me to focus my gratitude to You more on who You are rather than comforts and 'blessings' that may in reality be acting as curses in my life keeping me from having the close bonds with You that I so desperately need. Train me to live for Your glory in everything I do, think and say. Cleanse me of selfishness and fill me with the passionate love that flows from Your heart eternally.

Affection Caution

2011-05-22T08:58:00.001-05:00

If I attract someone's affections to myself but fail to at the right time seek to use that bond to introduce them and encourage them to attach their affections on Jesus, then I am betraying them and cheating them of knowing the only source that can provide them with the very essence of what they need and crave deep in their heart. If they enjoy what they are receiving from me, it is only honest that I need to relay to them at an opportune time the truth about how I am able to share that love with them at all.

I cannot produce unconditional love in my own heart; I can only reflect it as I receive it and appreciate it coming from God. Yet unconditional love is the fuel which all of our hearts were designed to rely on for us to function properly. Anything else, any other kind of love or affection or pleasure or feeling is a substitute at best and does not contain the essential ingredients for life. Other feelings and fuels may keep me going for a time, may make me feel good and even energized for a period; but like a drug that gives a temporary rush of pleasure or energy but leaves one worse off than before, counterfeit heart fuels only tend to excite the nervous system without providing the essential nutrition needed for a healthy heart and soul and life.

Yet it is so easy in my selfishness to mistake the good feelings I receive from someone's affections that I may arouse as confirmation that I am providing them what their heart needs. Indeed, God often uses all sorts of imperfect relationships involving attractions and affections to lead us toward the purer more complete experience of life-giving love that originates from His own heart. But we must disabuse ourselves of the notion that the feelings of thrill we get from human affections constitute the fullness of life-giving love that God intends for us to share with others.

Selfishness is the spoiler in every relationship. Selfishness is a diabolical poison that is so familiar to all of us that we fail to realize its malignity. Even as a practicing Christian, whenever I engage in words and acts designed to elicit positive responses from others, if those bonds thus formed are not viewed as opportunities to introduce them deeper into a personal connection with the heart of God to experience the original thing, then I am both betraying my loyalty to God from which I received the capacity to love and I am failing to be honest with that person about the real source of the love they are experiencing from me.

I am starting to learn that true positive Christianity is the excited sharing of a passionate love that comes into our hearts as we connect with a God overflowing with life and joy. We in turn are to use that love and joy to draw close to others who are too afraid of God to trust Him directly due to the many lies they believe about Him in their heart. In channeling His love to them through a human contact we can allow them to begin to experience a little of what we enjoy. We earn their trust by our kindness to them, especially if they mistreat us in the process. As their defenses are dismantled by our gentleness, humility and kindness that we receive from Jesus, we can slowly begin to let them know that we are not really the source at all of the good things they are experiencing from us.

As their hearts slowly begin to warm to the life-giving experiences that we offer them in grace, it is only honest that we begin to introduce them to where we got all the good things so they can begin to get it directly themselves as they choose. We need not push them too fast for that may frighten them or reinforce their old fears and lies about God; but we also must be careful not to indulge in allowing their affections to grow too dependent on us without knowing that we really cannot produce this kind of love in our own hearts. We can only be channels of love from another Source that is so full of good things waiting for others to enjoy directly that they really should check it out for themselves.

It seems to me that we have to learn the art of balancing these feelings as we learn how to gauge how far to go before it is safe to introduce those we are drawing to the Source of life. Some are ready immediately to be introduced to Jesus and will latch onto Him tenaciously which is always wonderful. But many others are so damaged by false ideas about God – many of which are produced by religious abuses they may have experienced – that the idea that God is the source of these positive feelings would at first be reprehensible. We must always be tuned to the inner voice of the Spirit guiding us as to the best way to represent the truth about Jesus' love to them vicariously until their level of trust is induced in their heart to a point where they can begin to believe that God is not as bad as their heart was sure He was.

Inevitably, the process of treating others with kindness and love and compassion that we receive from Jesus is going to form attachments between their hearts and our own. This is not wrong if we remain honest about what is really happening and cognizant of the fact that we are never the real source of what we are giving them. If we remain inwardly honest that all of our true affections and our ability to show kindness to others originates from outside of ourselves, then when the time is right (which may often be sooner than later) we must begin to gently let the other person know where all these good things are coming from – and it is not us.

If I fall into the trap of relishing the affections produced in other hearts by my relationship with them and consuming those feelings for my own pleasure without confessing the real Source from which my love originates, then my relationship with that person will quickly turn into something very different than redemptive. I misrepresent the selfless nature of God by introducing selfishness into my relationship with others and confuse them even more about the motives of God. I reinforce the lies about God in their hearts by my exploitation of their affections instead of connecting them with the only Source of healing grace and love available to them, and I insert myself between their heart and the heart of God – not a good idea at all.

Is it wrong to enjoy the affections and bonds formed in attracting others in my direction as I allow God's love to flow through me? That enjoyment is not wrong as long as I keep totally honest about what is really going on and where the true source of origination lies. God intends for these bonds of affection to exist and deepen and strengthen – it is the adhesive that holds His body together tightly. But every part of the body of Christ must be eventually be intimately reliant upon Christ, the head of the body, as the direct source for their healing and life and joy, not on the ones who introduced them to Him.

Connecting

2011-05-11T06:42:00.000-05:00

Some share similar struggles as I do in seeking to shed old, distorted feelings about God and want to link up with others on the same journey. If you come across this blog and would like to share your thoughts beyond just commenting, feel free to leave a comment with your contact info in it for me to get back in touch with you. I can return contact with you that way but will simply not publish the comment to protect you (and me) from spam. I have made some good friends by linking up with others who resonate with my own journey and want to become closer in the family of Christ.

How Did Jesus Obey?

2011-05-06T18:05:00.000-05:00

He humbled Himself by becoming obedient to the point of death... (Philippians 2:8)

Why would obedience lead to death?

What is obedience really? It must mean something different than the external, behavior-centered, appearance-maintaining kind of obedience that I grew up familiar with.

Death in our thinking is very often viewed in the religious perspective as a punishment. Because we think so pervasively in legal terms we assume that death is the punishment for disobedience. But this verse doesn't bear that out since Jesus never sinned. And I reject the notion that Jesus performed legal fiction by His death to appease an angry Father. That simply is part of the great lies and accusations of the deceiver. Yes, Jesus took the consequences of our sins upon Himself in His death. But consequences of sin are not imposed but rather are natural results of violations of natural principles of reality. The only arbitrary thing about Jesus' death was that it was unnatural – in other words, grace.

But I still query, what was it that Jesus obeyed that led Him to the point of death? There must be some clues that will reveal to me the dynamics of what really is going on here and how that might affect my own existence as I follow His example.

If I view this from a basis of assuming that God is a loving God rather than an appeasement demanding tyrant, then Christ's death takes on radically different implications. Rather than God punishing Jesus on the cross for our sins, the cross becomes a stunning revelation of the true character and nature of sin and sinners in contrast to a loving, perfect, compassionate God.

Peter provides some important insights as to what really was going on around the cross and the kind of obedience that caused Jesus to die.

He committed no sin, neither was deceit found in his mouth. Although he was abused, he never tried to get even. And when he suffered, he made no threats. Instead, he had faith in God, who judges fairly. (1 Peter 2:22-23)

The first sentence is a disclaimer of sorts emphatically stating that Jesus in no way was involved with sin that might cause Him induce upon Himself the wages of sin. In fact, this verse reveals something vitally important to remember about the nature of sin; that sin in essence is based on a false view of reality which is deception. We are born into a world and raised in it trained in many forms of deception. But Jesus never took upon Himself the deceived nature of humanity. He took upon Himself the weakened condition of humanity after 4,000 years of depreciation, but He never became contaminated with any of the deception that filled the world around Him.

If I apply this verse to the previous one above it may reveal to me that the obedience exposed in the life of Jesus had something to do with His attitudes toward those who disagreed with Him, those who hated and abused Him. Rather than defining obedience as believing certain doctrines or following some set of religious practices methodically, Jesus demonstrated obedience as a disposition that determined how He reacted under intense pressure.

When He was abused He did not try to get even. In other words, He didn't subscribe to the deceptive and counterfeit ideas about justice that infects all of our thinking here on earth. Jesus and the God He represents are not into settling scores, balancing imaginary scales, or getting even with those who offend them. All of the false notions and teachings about hell and even the blame God receives for many of the bad things happening in our lives now are based on unchallenged assumptions about what constitutes fairness, what composes real justice. But Jesus did not subscribe to these human assumptions about justice but instead put His trust fully in God to define fairness from His perspective.

In addition, Jesus was not intimidated or controlled by fear of pain. He did not enjoy pain any more than any of us do, but He did not allow fear of pain to change His attitudes or dictate His reactions toward others. He knew from the get-go that demonstrating the true character of God among sinners was going to involve far more pain and sorrow than any of us will ever be able to comprehend. But rather than allow fear of pain to sway Him, He rather set His focus on the joy that was ahead of Him and despised the shame rather than let it control Him.

So, what was the kind of obedience that caused the death of the Son of God?

It certainly was not a submission to the punishment of an angry deity venting His rage in order to release sinners from suffering in hell for eternity. That is a monstrous and demonic view of God that drives people away from Him rather than attracting them to Him with real love. Jesus did not come to appease God but to reveal God. And the ultimate revelation of God that Jesus came to expose was that God loves unconditionally with a love that cannot ever be suppressed or intimidated. It can be rejected and God will respect our free will in doing so, but we cannot do anything to change God's feelings and opinions about us through any amount of ill-treatment or malfunction on our part.

When an immovable object is confronted by an irresistible force, something cataclysmic will occur. Sin is an immovable mindset that controls all who are infected with it. Our sinful natures are incurable and unredeemable. The only solution for our sinful, selfish, fallen nature is for it to die and for us to receive a new divine nature from Jesus. But there is never really any possibility of converting a sinful heart; we really must have a new one. Therefore our fallen sinful nature is best represented as an immovable object and this was demonstrated in the actions and attitudes of those who abused Jesus and tortured Him as He was dying.

But God's love and grace is far greater than the sin which has deceived so many in this universe. God's passionate love is the irresistible force that will never be stopped even though for centuries it has been veiled and greatly obscured, partly to protect us from its lethal potential. For when love and resistance to love come into close proximity to each other there is always going to be death involved on one side or the other. Either the love will die or the resistance to love will have to die. This is a far more plausible explanation of what took place at the cross of Calvary.

Jesus was obedient in the sense that He remained true to His divine nature of perfect love and total trust in the goodness and fairness of His Father without the slightest wavering or deviation. Sinners and demons did everything possible to intimidate Jesus in His weakened humanity to react in self-defense, to display some attitude reflective of the counterfeit principles of false justice based on revenge. But no one could succeed in getting Jesus to flinch even for a moment, to blink or to cry 'uncle'. Love was the irresistible force that shattered the illusion of the immovable object of resistance and the universe was finally convinced that God's ways are right and Satan's assertions are without the slightest credibility. Now we have to grapple with the same evidence and experience the same transformation if we are to be made safe to live in the passionate presence of the Almighty.

Jesus was obedient in maintaining allegiance to the principles of truth as embodied in the character of God. This is often stated as keeping the Law. Jesus kept His focus entirely on His Father's love and fairness even when circumstances around Him insisted that it was not real. When all of His senses failed to vindicate His internal belief in the fairness of God and it felt intensely real that God must have forsaken Him, Jesus still clung to the truth about His Father and thus broke through the spell of Satan by exposing him as the greatest fraud ever.

How can I participate in this kind of obedience? I am keenly aware that with my fallen nature and my propensities to evil that I can never demonstrate the kind of selfless love and consistency that Jesus lived out. My only hope for this kind of obedience, an obedience of fierce loyalty to the innocence, fairness and trustworthiness of God, an obedience that is a perfect reflection of His true nature of love – my only hope to have such a transformation is for Jesus to implant His own divine nature within me and help me to die to my fallen, sinful nature each day.

Only Jesus can live the perfect life of a loving God because He was Himself part of that loving Godhead. As such He had an inside track on the Source of all love. Only Jesus could endure the intensity of the hatred, the intimidations, the threats of pain and all the other abuse designed to get Him to indulge in our kind of revenge. And only Jesus can accomplish bringing me around to becoming a similar reflection of God just as He reflected His Father's love while living here on earth as a man. Only by His abiding in me and I in Him can I ever hope to see the transformation needed to prepare me to live both in the fire of hatred and hostility from evil and also in the fiery presence of the passionate love of His Father.

When Peter says that there was no guile found in His mouth, he was referring to the fact that Jesus was totally free of all lies, both in His mind and in His heart. That is the only reason He was able to cling to and be sustained by His relationship with His Father to the very point of death. The death of Jesus was not so much a punishment as it was the natural result of living so close to antagonistic sinners while seeking to love them unconditionally. Sin is totally anti-love and God is totally anti-sin. Sin has deceived us into believing myriads of lies about God, but Jesus is in the business of exposing and replacing these lies both in our minds and in our hearts as we are willing. This is the process of salvation, of restoring us to our original design and function in order to live in heaven with Him.

If I want to participate in the kind of obedience that Jesus demonstrated, I have to become willing, by the transforming power of experiencing His grace and love in my own heart, to allow Him to live out the same kind of love through me in the face of similar resistance. As I allow God's kind of love and passion to rule in my own heart my life will elicit the same antagonism that Jesus encountered and the same pressure to live in the realm of deception. The truth alone can set me free from the tyranny of the lies of sin in my heart and life. And only the Godhead can accomplish this freedom in me as I choose to cooperate with Their plan to transform me back into their image and reflect Their glory.

True obedience is an attitude, a mindset, a loyalty and belief in the true goodness and fairness of God. The outward manifestations of obedience in words and behavior are merely symptoms of the internal beliefs cherished in the heart about what God is really like. This verse tells me that the secret of Jesus' obedience was His unshakable belief that God was just and fair even though all the evidence around Him seemed to deny that fact. And because He refused to change His opinion about His Father or be deceived by all the threats and intimidations to believe otherwise, His life was able to reveal the results of true obedience.

What was the fruit revealed in Jesus by His clinging to the truth about God in His heart? The outward manifestations of true heart obedience was the ability of Jesus to demonstrate the character of a God of perfect love under the most extreme circumstances calculated to produced the opposite effect in Him. And the only true obedience that will empower me to ever be able to live similarly under pressure from others is that same unshakable belief that God is good, fair and worthy of my trust no matter what others insist or how bad circumstances become. That can only happen as Jesus Himself lives within me by His Spirit and empowers me to live out the same love, following Jesus' example who allowed His Father to live in Him by the power of that same Spirit.

Filthy Garments

2011-04-16T07:38:00.001-05:00

Then he showed me Joshua the high priest standing before the angel of the LORD, and Satan standing at his right hand to accuse him.... Now Joshua was clothed with filthy garments and standing before the angel. (Zechariah 3:1, 3)

Satan relies on our faults of character as his excuse to demand the withdrawal of Christ's protection from our life.

Satan is the one who has clothed us with filthy rags.

Those filthy rags are called sin and shame and are identified as an attitude of dis-allegiance to God.

Satan's accusations center around the fairness of God.

Christ is the one who causes our iniquity to pass from us and transfers them to Himself.

He puts on us His own robe woven in the loom of heaven.

To be 'in Christ' must be synonymous with being covered with the identity and filled in character with the disposition of Jesus Christ. The robe has Jesus Christ clearly woven into the fabric as its identity; it totally and clearly belongs to Him and not to us, yet He declares that we are to wear His clothes and be filled with His Spirit.

The logic that Satan is relying on in his arguments about us and the type of justice in heaven he is trying to manipulate is rather different than what we are used to seeing here. Evidently his logic must have had compelling force at some point or he would not be still trying to use it. He must be exploiting what appears to be a weakness in the system of heaven, in God's way of dealing with His beings or he would not even try to use such an argument in the first place.

Strongly implied here is the idea that everyone must get what they deserve. That is the basis upon which he demands that we not remain under God's protection from our enemy. Never mind that it was Satan's temptations that lured us into distrusting God; Satan is relying on a principle of reality that heaven respects and uses continuously. What is that underlying principle?

I suspect his arguments have something to do with the very issue of Satan's own lost condition. He became outraged when he learned long ago that he had gone too far to return into the favor of God. At that point he determined to expose God as a fraud, to prove that God's justice was unfair because God seemed to be imposing evil punishment on Satan and his fallen angels arbitrarily. After that Satan determined that no one else should ever get grace from God if he too couldn't be allowed to participate in it. Evidently his accusations and animosity seems to be over the existence of grace and what it really means.

From Satan's viewpoint grace is arbitrary unfairness, a loophole in the justice of God, a fault in the very character of God that Satan is determined in every way possible to expose by hook or crook and by the use of any deception. He contests every single case that comes up for question and especially those who are choosing to embrace God's grace and who are being transformed by it. Evidently, at least at some time in history, Satan's logic and arguments must have carried considerable influence in the minds of thoughtful beings throughout the universe or he would not continue trying to use the same arguments. Evidently Satan has been able to make his accusations stick enough in some minds that God still has to counteract his insinuations with methods and means that will expose the accuser.

Satan is always trying to bring doubt into minds about the integrity of God's character and government. God in response never indulges in accusing Satan, but through the means of the death of Jesus He has created a way by which He can expose the falsity of Satan's claims by having him expose his own true character. Paul notes that the real issue at stake in the universe is the fairness and justice of God and he states that through Christ God is able to be seen as just while at the same time justifying repentant sinners.

A garment seems to be the sign of identity that is seen on a person by those in the know, those operating in the supernatural realms. That identity emanates from the heart and mind and becomes the character that begins to take shape inside. It is somehow important that our own perception of our true identity and value aligns with what God declares about us for this latter process to become effective; otherwise, we are in danger of absorbing Satan's assertions about our identity and will end up absorbing and remaining infected with his claims about our character. This is where the issue of belief becomes so vitally important. What we believe about what Satan or God says about us ends up becoming the reality that shapes and defines us and ultimately shapes our character and destiny.

What about this word iniquity? I have heard it taught that iniquity is the inherited tendencies toward certain sins we receive generationally. If that is true, it is interesting what implications that has on the statement that Jesus transfers our iniquities onto Himself. He not only takes the consequences of our choices to rebel against God, our acts of treason and the pain we have caused in other hearts, but He also somehow absorbs within Himself the effects of the generational curses that we have received.

How does this relate to Satan's accusing us in heaven's justice system in his attempts to steal away the protection of Christ?

Maybe this gives God permission to expose the diabolical nature of Satan himself by simply pointing to what Satan did to Jesus at the cross. Since God will never accuse anyone, not even the great accuser himself, by allowing Jesus, the very Son of God who was totally perfect and never did anything to deserve any sort of punishment, to receive to Himself all the abuse, rage and malice that boils in the heart of Satan, God has created a way to expose Satan's true nature without accusing him directly. Before the onlooking, evaluating, discerning universe of extremely intelligent, free moral beings, God can vindicate His own character and fairness in each case committed to Him on earth, those who choose His salvation, by both reminding onlookers of what Satan did at the cross and the fact that Jesus absorbed Himself all the consequences of the sins of those He is now shielding as His own.

I am becoming convinced that the bulk of God's justice system is based what goes on in the minds of unfallen beings who are so delicately discerning and free of all fear or coercion that even God Himself allows them to question every action and decision He makes. God's method of vindicating Himself has always been and will always be to appeal to the sense of fairness of His created beings while never defending Himself directly. In this way, and only in this way, can He ultimately secure a universe devoid of all sin, all disloyalty and yet totally free without the slightest trace of intimidation, coercion or fear anywhere. Pure love requires pure freedom to love or turn away from it, otherwise it cannot exist in its pure form. That is the kind of heaven that God intends to have for all of us for eternity.

This piece was written as a meditation on the April 12 reading from the devotional book That I May Know Him.

Another Look at Legalism

2011-04-13T07:38:00.000-05:00

There are two kinds of law – prescriptive and descriptive.

Prescriptive law involves arbitrary rules made up to control people and are invented by people. They are easily changed and often contradict each other. They require that someone be in control and they also need arbitrary punishments to be associated with them and artificially enforced by someone in power. This system supposes that by punishing people for violations of such laws that enough fear of punishment and associated pain will be produced that they and others will not want to break those laws again.

Descriptive law is a totally different situation. Descriptive law is simply describing natural principles of cause and effect. Principles are not arbitrary or made up; they are fundamentals of how reality works and are unavoidable. Most are familiar with what we call the laws of nature, the principles of physics, chemistry, etc. We have little problem believing in these laws and understanding that if we violate them the consequences are not imposed but are simply a natural result. If one jumps off a high building one will fall to their death, or at least bring on themselves a great deal of pain. No one is imposing a penalty on them, waiting at the bottom to inflict artificial punishment for breaking the law of gravity. What we call the law of gravity is really just a description of the principle of a natural attraction by any object of mass that draws other objects toward itself.

Man's laws and the justice systems associated with them are prescriptive in nature. God's laws are descriptive of the natural principles of reality. This is a huge distinction that must be understood in order to become free of guilt, condemnation and fear and to begin to appreciate the real truth about God and how He relates to His created children, especially those trapped in sin on this planet.

One of our biggest problems is that because of our fallen nature we have assumed that God's laws are prescriptive just like our laws. This is a major mistaken assumption but is promoted widely and goes unchallenged by most people. But believing this lie about God's form of government causes our hearts to live in constant fear of God and blocks us from desiring to draw closer to His heart. It also seriously distorts our ideas about obedience and confuses our ability to have a healthy relationship with Him. When we assume that God is the one in control of everything and is waiting to dispense rewards and punishments to those who obey or disobey His arbitrary laws, we are in essence basing our concept of God on our own concepts of law and justice rather than grasping the way He intends for us to live in harmony with reality.

For a long time I have assumed that legalism was simply an attempt to impress God with my obedience to His laws, to produce righteousness that could help me get into heaven. But lately I have been realizing that legalism is actually the whole system of prescriptive law, not just my attempts to keep the law on my own steam. Legalism is believing and trusting in the system of prescriptive law, insisting that God uses the same methods and has the same attitudes that we have in the way we relate to laws. Legalism is thinking that God demands obedience to arbitrary rules and is waiting to punish violators similar to who we treat each other. Legalism is not just trying to obey God's laws in order to impress Him or earn salvation, but it is assuming that God's laws are arbitrary, that the consequences of violating His laws will produce imposed punishments inflicted by Him as retribution for disobedience.

This confusion between two totally separate systems of law often causes us to think that violating human laws puts us in moral jeopardy with heaven. It tends to sometimes elevate human laws to the level of divine principles in our minds when in fact they are totally inferior and on a different plane altogether. This confusion has fed into tragic consequences such as during times of war when people try to use Scriptures to compel others to obey human laws that are really designed to force people into ways of living that are in conflict with God's principles.

While it is true that some human laws seem to reflect principles of morality like God's laws do, the very fact that they are humanly invented and attach artificial punishments to them firmly places them in the category of prescriptive law. And just because a child of God obeys human laws in obedience to God's will does not imply that human laws are somehow given greater importance. God's children obey social laws, not to appease God or satisfy some demand of His but because they are in relationship with Him and they are following the desires of His heart for them. When human laws are not in conflict with God's principles of reality and the guidelines of God's Word, then Christians have no problem submitting to these artificial rules in order to keep peace with all men. But they do not do so from the same motivation that others often have for keeping these same laws.

The world's system of prescriptive law and the justice systems designed around it in no way produce morality in a person, contrary to what most people think. This is because true morality can only exist in freedom, not under duress. And because the whole system of human law is designed using the elements of prescriptive law, with control and punishments enforcing them, it is impossible for them to be moral. They may restrain people from externally doing immoral things for a time but they never have the effect of changing the internal motives of the heart to effect significant moral improvement. They rely on fear as their primary element of motivation, and fear is incompatible with true morality.

Morality involves moral integrity, which is an inward attitude and state of being where a person chooses in total freedom to live in selfless relationship with others because it is right and it is best, not because they feel obliged to dutifully obey some rule or law. As soon as a sense of obligation comes in there is introduced an element of fear, and fear is not compatible with true love. True morality exists in the atmosphere of love and perfect love casts out all fear. Therefore, the system of prescriptive law can never produce true morality which is a condition of integrity at the heart level, not a measurement of behavior. Anything less than choosing right because it is right and because we are motivated by selfless love is contaminated with legalism.

But doesn't the Bible speak of being free from the law, not being under the law? Paul writes about this in his writings, but this does not mean that we are free to violate natural principles of reality as described by God's laws. And just because we do not fully understand all those underlying principles that God's law describes does not exempt us from suffering the natural consequences of violating them. God's grace may prevent them from being fulfilled for a time, but in reality His grace is the only arbitrary thing about salvation. Judgment is not arbitrary but natural; grace is arbitrary interference with the natural course of principles of reality, of cause and immediate effect.

Being free from the law the way Paul describes it a description of living from an inner peace that is produced from our hearts being in harmony with God which aligns us with His creation's principles of reality. Not being under the law is simply another way of saying we no longer depend on the fear produced by prescriptive law as our motivation for doing right but rather are choosing to live in harmony with descriptive law which is how we were originally created to live and thrive.

Legalism is the notion that God's laws are based on the principle of prescriptive law. Legalism also involves an obsession with our legal standing, either in human systems or in heaven's eyes. Many Christians who insist they are not legalists are actually extreme legalists as evidenced when they claim that Jesus died to pay the punishment for their sins which somehow frees them from obligation to obey the laws of God. They become obsessed with formulas in religion whereby they think they can escape burning in hell forever (another lie of the enemy) by saying a few key phrases and claiming Jesus as their Savior. They believe that getting the right formula in place for themselves will legally spring the trap for them and they no longer need to concern themselves with the laws of heaven, particularly the Ten Commandments. But these beliefs are riddled with false premises that are not in harmony with a true reading of the Word of God or the principles of reality.

Sadly this is a pervasive deception that actually entombs many in darkness, holding them deeply in the very legalism they claim to reject. Furthermore, by their teachings they assume that God is a legalist, that His laws are arbitrary demands with artificially imposed punishments with God as the controller and enforcer of His prescriptive laws. They teach that Jesus somehow paid our punishment to appease God and that all who properly identify themselves technically with His appeasement death on the cross, through some sort of legal fiction are made free to ignore the laws of heaven. But nothing could be further from the truth.

The life and death of Jesus was not meant to free us from living in harmony with the principles of reality as revealed in the laws of God. Jesus came to address the real problem of sin and to save us from it, not in it. He came to change our minds and hearts about how God feels about us and to unmask the deceptions and lies of the enemy that have blinded us to the truth about God. He came to show us His true character and the danger of living in violation of natural law. Every commandment of God is based on a principle of reality and whether we fully understand it or not, it is dangerous to believe we can ignore them. Properly understood, each guideline, law and statute given by God is designed to bring us into alignment with reality where we can live in harmony with each other and with the environment around us. These are not artificial rules intended to oppress or restrict our freedoms, rather they are descriptions of how to live free of the suffering produced from violating natural principles of cause and effect.

Does that mean that we should just try harder to keep all of God's laws? Unfortunately that is not possible, at least not realistically. No amount of trying harder will every produce one iota of righteousness necessary for us to live in God's presence in heaven. True righteousness is not an outward correctness of action but is being in right relationship, of having mutual trust and love – being right with God. What is needed more than anything else is for us to come into a total trust relationship with Him so thoroughly that we will instantly and naturally respond positively to every desire of His heart because we trust that He knows what is best.

Yet trust and faith can only come from personally knowing the One who alone is truly trustworthy, so coming to know Jesus as God's representative to humanity is the first and most important step before our lives can be transformed back into His image. As we allow Jesus more and more access to our hearts, our lives, our pain and everything inside of us, He promises to accomplish the work necessary to prepare our hearts to live safely in the intense presence of God in heaven. And during that transformation process we will also be brought into fuller sympathy and fellowship with those who are likewise being drawn closer to God. All of these people will be learning the truth about responding to and living within God's system of descriptive law as they grow in harmony with true reality as heaven lives it.

Effects of Spirit

2011-04-12T07:31:00.001-05:00

What do people have in mind when they think about being filled with the Spirit of God? How do they think that Spirit will make them feel, cause them to act, empower them to do or be?

Why would the Spirit of God cause a person to be or act any differently that it caused Jesus to act and live, the attitude of Jesus as best described in Philippians 2? If our notion of the effects of God's Spirit pouring into our lives looks anything different than the effects on Jesus' life as described there, then we are likely deceived about the whole idea of being filled with His Spirit. We are really longing to be filled with some other spirit, which is a rather frightening revelation I would think.

Why are our assumptions about the outpouring of the Holy Spirit in the last days so different from the descriptions of the fruit of the Spirit and the character and attitude of Jesus mentioned above? Why do we have ideas related to the outpouring of the Spirit connected with suddenly having lots of authority, power to work miracles, compelling thousands of people to join our denomination or all the other subtle self-serving scenarios that run around in our imaginations when we think of receiving the Holy Spirit? It seems to me that many, if not most of our assumptions about what our lives might look like under the influence of the Spirit are tainted with selfishness which is the exact opposite of what described the life of Jesus. What goes here?

When people go to churches to be 'filled with the Spirit', what are they really seeking? Most often it seems they are looking to feel good, to experience excitement to liven up a boring, dull or depressing life outside of church. Many look to church as an escape from the terrible things they are experiencing in their home life, work life or social life. Yet in heaven's perspective there is no difference between church life and all the other lives we are involved in. The Spirit of God will not come to just make us feel good for a few minutes when we insist He show up for us on demand in church. Jesus stated clearly that when the Spirit comes He will convict us of sin and judgment and righteousness. He also will not contain His presence to just our religious times but will invade every area of our existence and challenge us to face the inner confusion we have been hiding from much of our lives. If this is not our experience in our encounters with the Spirit, then very likely we are interacting with a counterfeit spirit and are in danger of deep deception.

Light Tubes

2011-04-02T07:24:00.002-05:00

Light tubes.

That's what God is looking for, people who are willing to become light tubes.

A light tube has no means of generating light of itself. However, unlike a normal pipe or other less useful channel or conduit in relation to light, a light tube is specially designed to convey light through some obstruction that normally blocks light from entering a dark place, usually a roof.

A good light tube consists of an inlet, normally a transparent cover on a roof allowing light to enter the tube, an outlet on the bottom side consisting of another cover, often a diffuser that softens and spreads out the light, and in between a highly reflective tube that has a surface that absorbs almost no light at all. Its surface is like a mirror and bounces the light around in the tube that allows an intensity to be passed through it that rivals a bright, powered source of light yet requires no power to operate it. The only thing a light tube needs is access to the light from outside.

Our world has been shrouded with what might be called a mantle of darkness ever since sin entered through Adam's sin. God's glory and light has been largely blocked, obscured from entering our lives because of the myriads of lies about Him that infect our atmosphere. This mantle of darkness has increased over the centuries as falsehoods and traditions become more institutionalized and are woven into every culture and system.

Such was the case at the time Jesus was born. This earth had become so intensely dark from misapprehension of God that heavenly beings had begun to expect God might scrap the whole planet in severe judgments on it similar to what apparently had happened at the flood. But to everyone's amazement God instead sent His personal envoy, His only Son, on a mission to this planet to pierce through the heavy mantle of ignorance and fear and lies for the purpose of bringing the light of truth about God back into close proximity to humanity.

Jesus is the ultimate light tube for God. But interestingly, even though Jesus was Himself God and could have acted as an original, powered Source of light, He chose to live as only a reflector while here as a human in order to demonstrate how we can emulate His example of how we too can become light tubes for heaven. Jesus came to perfectly reflect the glory and beauty of God as the clearest reflection of how God feels towards sinners. He came to show us that God is not one to be afraid of but is one to be a friend of. He demonstrated that God is not out to harm His children, not trying to uncover their faults to bring more shame on them, rather He desires to repair their horrible pictures and conceptions of Him that have kept them firmly locked in darkness and fear behind the veil of misapprehensions about Him for so long.

But Jesus is not the only light tube needed for this world. Jesus wants everyone who is coming to glimpse the light of truth about God to also be formed into light tubes. This forming is sometimes referred to as re-forming or reformation. That word has taken on dark meanings of its own as Satan has linked it with fanatics who claim to be reformers while failing to reflect the beauty of God through their lives. But true reformation is simply the restoration of the light and beauty and joy that humans were originally intended to reflect at creation. Reformation is the process of being re-formed into the image of God. An image is a reflection just as what you see in a mirror is an image of what is real in front of that mirror.

A light tube works in the same way. Its highly polished reflective surface reflects light in such as way as to pass it through obstacles that tend to keep areas in darkness. The purpose of a good light tube is not to absorb light but to reflect it and bring brightness and cheer to others living in darkness and gloom. A genuine Christian is a person who is being polished by the providences of God to more and more reflect His glory, His loveliness, His kindness, His grace to a world that doesn't believe God is that way.

I see this world like a great round planet with a dark mantle wrapped tightly around it composed of lies, fears, shame, violence, force and all the other counterfeit elements of Satan's kingdom that distort our concepts of God and keep us afraid of Him. God is seeking to invite all those who choose to cooperate with Him to be transformed into light tubes that punch through this dark covering and connect with the brilliant light on the other side. As such a person continues to press through the darkness to connect and connect again each day with the glory outside this world, they become sources of a light that passes through their lives to the diffusers on this side of the dark covering. With more and more people willing to be made little channels of light the sky begins to glow with points of light, little holes through the obstructions, that allows the world to realize that darkness is not the norm.

Have you ever taken a piece of paper and punched a very small hole in it and then tried to see how much you could make out looking through that hole of what was on the other side? You can't see much at all, but if you move your head around and allow you mind to collect the tiny glimpses of what you see and compile them you might get a little better idea of what may be over there.

Then you go to the next step and punch a few more holes in the paper or cardboard. Now it becomes a little easier to make out what might be on the other side. Its sort of like the keyhole syndrome. You can't really get a good idea of what is in a room by only looking through a tiny keyhole. But if you have more holes nearby it becomes easier to grasp a bigger picture, especially if you try to move your head around a bit to collect even more information.

Interestingly, as God attracts more and more people to reflect His glory and become light tubes for Him, others will begin to catch a clearer picture from the collective light from various tubes and begin to realize how much greater life is in the other reality. People begin to realize that life as we have learned it on this planet is not at all what it is intended to be and everything we have assumed about reality is riddled with falsehoods. As more and more people allow their lives to become points of light in the heavy darkness surrounding God's reputation, His light become irrepressible and all those who are honest in heart will respond and join in the revolution of light and love.

The apostle John grasped this concept and became himself a very effective light tube for God. He talked a great deal about the light of God and how Jesus referred to Himself as the light of the world. He also described how each of us can become channels of light if we will become connected with heaven and be transformed into highly reflective mediums to dispel the darkness of misapprehensions about God. All of the apostles and believers in the early days of the Christian church really understood this much better than most do today, and they lived lives that were so brilliantly reflective of God's grace, goodness and love that the world became flooded with the light of God's glory.

Satan reacted violently to repress the light and succeeded in plunging the world and religion into hundreds of years of deep darkness and misapprehension again. But God is still raising up an army of hole punchers that refuse to dwell in the shadowlands but determine to bring the light of God once again onto this planet. Each of us are offered the privilege of becoming light tubes through which God's true glory and grace can be channeled to those living in great darkness. What is our choice?