The Word (John 1:1) – Part Two

As we saw previously, there is an emphatic stamp when using “the” before a noun in Scripture.  Consider that Jesus is not “a son of God”, but “the son of God”.  There is a greater specificity when using “the”.  God did not rest on “a seventh day”, He rested on the seventh day”.  Much like the exegetical “law of first mention”, where the first time something is referenced in the Scripture is significant in setting the context by which every mention thereafter can be understood, we can learn a lot about the fine details of the Lord’s craftsmanship by the “filler” words in the Scriptures.

There are certain Scriptures that say things that if we take them for what they say, and realize the implications behind them, our current opinions on how things work would get violently confronted.  John 1:1 is one of the Scriptures which has implications to it that are honestly kind of daunting.  “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.”  This verse first acknowledges that there was a beginning.  That makes sense to us because we think about everything as having a beginning and end, limits where one things starts and another thing ends.  Two objects cannot be in the same place at the same time.  Thirty years ago I did not exist.  Thirty months ago, my brother’s marriage didn’t exist.  Thirty minutes ago, this sentence didn’t exist.  All these things had a beginning.

However, the Word already existed in the beginning.  Let’s say, just for arguments sake, that the Word existed exactly at the beginning of the beginning.  The curious part about this comes when you look at the nature of words.  Words have one purpose, to communicate.  They come from someone and are intended for someone.  So the Word proceeded from a Source that existed prior to the beginning.  This means that the beginning was not really the beginning.  But then, how far back does it go?  The Source had to have a beginning, right?  If you let your mind try to go back and back and back, it can get a little freaky.  Realizing that God has been around for eternity past can trip a breaker in your head.  Think about the wisest person you know.  They are wise because they have either had more birthdays than you or because they have been through more wisdom-giving experiences than you.  It is no wonder, then, that when we read Proverbs 8 about the personification of wisdom it sounds like the description of Jesus.

Out of His nature of Divine Wisdom as the Word, the Communication of God, Jesus was already reaching out to us to tell us Who the Father is and who we are to Him.  He was crucified before the foundations of the World.  His mind was already made up before wood, nails and whips existed.  What do you do with Someone who is in no hurry because a millennium and a day feel the same to Him?  He doesn’t get bored, He doesn’t get surprised or anxious.  And what if this same Person took that eternal nature and stuffed it into us?  What changes when we be content in every circumstance because we have no limitation of time because we have become like God, having His nature and likeness?  I’ll tell you what changes, we become consciously eternal people that have a perspective that produces peace that doesn’t make sense.  We become unoffendable, immoveable, immortal, and confident beyond understanding.  Jesus said we are already clean by the Word He has spoken over us.  Maybe our greatest need is to hear that Word echo out of eternity and into our innermost being.

*Word of God, reverberate within us and shake everything in us that can be shaken so that we can find discover that which will remain and live from there.

The Promise of My Father (Luke 24:49) – Part Two

If the Father was willing to put His Name on the line by promising something, it is probably safe to say that whatever was promised will be fulfilled and that the fulfillment of that promise is worth being a part of.  The First Covenant with Israel was directed towards a specific people group, God’s chosen people – from whom the Messiah would come.  But the New Covenant was open to all people.  Jesus blasted the doors wide open for every son of Adam to become a son of the Last Adam, thus becoming part of the Last human race.  One benefit of the New Covenant is the Indwelling Spirit.  This is not really even a benefit of the New Covenant, it is the New Covenant.

Without the Indwelling Spirit, we are without a transformation agent and therefore can not live free of sin, free in power, empowered by love or superimposed over death.  It is Jesus’ Father who promised us the Spirit.  It is Jesus who made a way for the Spirit to unite with our spirit.  It is the Spirit who is the Seed that supernaturally re-incarnates us.  Before you stop reading because I just said that we are re-incarnated, think about it.  New Age understanding of re-incarnation is that we die and come back with the same spirit and soul, but as a different species.  This is exactly what the Spirit does for us.  We are baptized into His death and we are raised up with Him.  We are resurrected into a new race of men, a race that never existed prior to Jesus.

Just yesterday I was telling a friend of mine that the difficulty in being a New Creation is that I forget to act out of my new nature.  We don’t change physical form and almost nothing changes externally, the immediate change is internal and even deeper than the cellular level, so at first it is hard to live differently.  When I was in college a friend of mine used to say, “It is not hard to be a New Creation, it is hard to stop acting like an Old Creation.”  This is why it is important to be in community with people who are pursuing supernatural life, because in community we provoke each other even when we are not aware of it.  If you compare two runners that run about the same speed on a mile, individually they will run a good mile when they are trying to get a good time.  But if you put them next to each other and tell them to run a mile, even if you do not tell them to beat the other person or get a good time, they will run faster because they will both be trying to do a little better than the other.  Community is an incubator of excellence.

In Luke 24, Jesus told the disciples to wait for the Promise of His Father.  He told them to wait as a group for the Spirit to come upon them.  If He had told them to individually go back to their homes and wait and then come together to discuss it, it is very likely that most of them would get impatient and distracted.  But because there was 119 other people waiting for the same thing, though I’m sure it got awkward and some had doubts, those 120 people experienced something that changed the world.

It is interesting that Jesus called the Spirit the promise of the Father.  It is as though the Spirit was the ultimate result that the Father had intended for us.  He has promised may things, all of which He will do, but this was “the big one”.  It is one thing to be a president of the United States, it is something altogether different to be the President of the United States.  There is a present-tense nature to “the” that highlights the importance of  what “the” is pointing at.

*Jesus, give us a love for the Presence of the Promise that will stir up a hungry addiction to You that will not be quenched or satisfied by anything but Your fulfillment.  Amen.

The Word (John 1:1)

The purpose of a word is to communicate ideas from one person to another.  Aside from a note that you write to yourself, when you write something you intend on having someone read what you wrote and understand an idea that you are trying to communicate.  Rarely does someone communicate an idea that they do not think is understood by those they are communicating to, most of the time communication is meant to convince someone and bring unity between the communicator and the audience.

John’s gospel begins with “In the beginning was the Word…”  From the very beginning, there was a communicator and an audience.  The Communicator spoke and everything was as He said it was.  This is why His words are spirit and truth.  They have power and reality.  There is power in the words He speaks, to give life (Genesis 2), to clean men (John 13) and to revive humanity (John 20).  And though heaven and earth pass away, His words will continue eternally (Mark 13).

As previously stated, the purpose of communicating an idea is to convince one’s audience.  So, then, the crucial question is: what is God communicating through His Son that we need convincing of?  If we can answer this question, we can embrace His purpose and accelerate our effectiveness in fulfilling the purpose for which He sent His Word.

The Lord spoke through Isaiah the prophet saying that that His Word would not leave His lips without accomplishing the purpose for which it was spoken.  In the previous verse (Isaiah 55:10), He compares the rain to the word He speaks.  The purpose, He says, of rain is to water the earth, cause growth, provide means for a harvest and nutrition for those who would benefit from the harvest.  Likewise, is the purpose of the Word.  He came to bring inject us with living water so that we grow into His likeness again, release a harvest of souls and be fed by His Presence.  We see at the beginning of chapter 55 that the Lord really is trying to convince us of something when He says “Listen carefully to me…listen so that you may live…”  He knows us well enough to realize that unless we are told to pay attention, we might miss it all together.

So what is He communicating that we need to be convinced of?  We know Jesus’ purpose and thus the intended results of this communication, but what is it that His life is  saying?  Simply put, freedom is free.  He implores the poor to come and buy without money.  He says that the terms of His covenant are already set and everything is taken care of.  He declares that He has already glorified His people.  He prophesies that His people will go out with joy and be led forth by peace – with hill-top happiness and arboreal applause, no less.

The problem is that we don’t believe it.  We think that we have to earn blessings.  We believe that His Covenant is still being written, when really His Covenant is a Person who is alive to prove that He wasn’t joking when He set us free – He is guarding our salvation.  We have it in our minds that glorification is a concept of a future event when it is a reality that has already come to pass.  And for some reason we still need to be convinced that joy and peace are truly part of life as a Christian.

The ridiculous decision that we are faced with is whether or not to accept what He has laid in front of us.  The benefits are so great, the alternative is so bleak, and the stipulations are so simple.  The only thing we have to do to receive His mercy is to call it “mine”.  What would happen if we actually believed His Word?

*Lord, I believe, help me with my unbelief in the Word You spoke and are speaking.

The Promise of My Father (Luke 24:49)

Even when you know that someone is trustworthy, waiting for something is a trial.  The disciples had been with Jesus for as long as three years or so.  They had seen Him tell off the Pharisees, ruin funerals, open blind eyes, heal deaf ears, un-cripple people, tell intimate details of people’s lives that He could not have known – not to mention He came back from being dead.  As far as they were concerned, He was worth trusting.  Not only had He done all of these things, but He had done them with conviction, saying what He believed and felt convincingly.  So when He says that His Father has promised something, I’m sure they had great expectations.

He instructed them to go and wait in Jerusalem, the very place that had just been the epicenter of the controversy about Him, for power to wrap itself around them.  The interesting thing about how He gave these instructions was the timing cues.  He said “I am sending the Promise of My Father…” Then He goes on to tell them what to do in response to what He said He was doing at that moment.  This is yet another example of how Jesus was living in two places at once, which is also our inheritance to walk in.

Jesus, from His place with the Father in Heaven, was at the moment He was talking with His friends simultaneously sending the Promise of His Father upon them.  He says that they would be clothed with power from on high, indicating the location of the source of the Promise.  So if He was the Sender of the Promise, then He must be doing it from where it was coming from.  The power of knowing where you are changes your perspective and empowers your words.  We have been removed from the kingdom of darkness and transferred into the Kingdom of Light, seated in the heavenlies with Him.

The incredible reality of the life of one born from above is that we are here and there at the same time.  So when we pray, we are there with Him and we can release things from there, rather than begging Him to send it down to us from where He is.

Some think that the Holy Spirit just “isn’t for them” or that the gifts of the Spirit are not something that is for today.  Jesus identified the Spirit as that which the Father Himself had promised to send.  If the Father was willing to put His trustworthiness on the line for this, I would venture to say that it is a sure thing.  He wants us to have the Spirit and He wants us to trust Him that He will accomplish everything that He has promised.  And He is a good Father who gives good gifts, so there must be something that we really want, really need or both in the Gift of the Spirit that He has promised.  Let us eagerly desire the fulfillment of the Promise of the Father.

*Father, we trust Your goodness and we desire the filling of the promises You have made.  Jesus, thank You for sending Your Spirit from on high and for plucking us up into the very place that You sent Him from.  We love You.

He who was going to redeem Israel (Luke 24:21)

Someone gave me a book a few years ago written by a Jewish man.  His main purpose in the book, whether stated or not, I don’t remember, was to help young Jews not become Christians.  He explained why Jews are not Christians, why Jews should not convert to Christianity and laid out the differences between Christian and Jewish understandings of the Messiah.

He said that the Jewish Messiah was going to come and set the Jewish people free from the oppression they are in politically at the hands of their enemies.  But he said that the mission of the Christian Messiah was “just to set humanity free from its bondage to sin”.  Just.  Option 1: the Messiah sets free God’s chosen people and leaves the rest of the race of men to burn.  Option 2: the Messiah opens the doors of freedom to the entire race of men.  Which would you choose?

Now, before you call me anti-Semitic, you should know that I am Jewish.  Not in a “we are now all part of the Israel of God” way, but in the “my mother was Jewish, her mother was Jewish and her mother was Jewish” kind of way.  And I’m not making fun of this guy who wrote this book.  I think he did a great job of showing that Christianity is a better option, not only in the section I mentioned above, but throughout the book.  His points made Christianity look much more appealing to me, I think I got saved again at least once while reading.

It is true, the Lord committed Himself to redeeming Israel, but He is just one of those guys who does more than is required of Him.  Paul put it well when he wrote that He does “exceedingly, abundantly beyond all we could ever ask or think”.  Call it over-achieving, call it excellence, call it whatever you want, I’m just glad He didn’t just stop with one people group.  It seems to me that it is more like Him in His character as I know Him to search for any way possible to bless whoever He can in whatever way He can.

He has a greater vision than us.  He thinks bigger.  He loves larger.  He believes in us more than we do in ourselves or each other.  He waits longer for the perfect moment to spring up and ambush us with blessings we cannot contain.  He invests more in us than we think we can handle.  He trusts us more than we think we are worthy of.  He knows us deeper.  He understands us better.  He is more creative than we can imagine.  He is more kind.  He is never worried about what is going to happen.  He is your biggest fan.  He does it right but doesn’t freak out when things don’t go the right way.  He can do anything, except remember what you did wrong.  He is not irritable.  He can handle anything you can dish out.  He is very patient.  He is love.

Sure, He was going to redeem Israel, but then He figured “Why stop there?”  Just like in Mark 6, when He walked on water, His intention was to go past the little boat of scared disciples and beat them to the other side.  But He saw that they needed Him, so He stopped by to help out by stopping to contrary winds.  And when He was about to go to the Father as our Great High Priest to sacrifice His Blood to complete the necessary atonement, He stopped to comfort Mary in the garden.  He is still a big proponent of redeeming Israel, setting them free political oppression, but He won’t stop there.  His sights are set slightly higher than that.

*Redeemer, give us Your heart so that we live like You live.

Jesus the Nazarene, who was a prophet mighty in deed and word in the sight of God and all the people (Luke 24:19)

Whoever said it first, I don’t know, but some very insightful person once said that the Lord never asks a question to obtain information, but rather to provoke thought and reveal truth.

Obviously these two guys on the seven mile road to Emmaus had no idea Who they were talking to.  It seems that they have a divine blinder on their eyes to keep them from recognizing Jesus, much like Mary had when she met Jesus in the garden by His empty tomb.  With Mary, Jesus waited for her to pour out her heart and then He spoke directly to her and she recognized Him in His Voice.  With these men, they poured out their distress at hopes deferred, then He spoke to them so that they could feel Him and only allowed them to recognize Him when He gave them broken bread – a symbol of His body broken.

There are two things that mark the life of Jesus, both in His personal earthly ministry and His corporate earthly ministry through the Church, He speaks prophetically through both His deeds and His words.  People believe for one of these two reasons, He does something and they change or His Word breaks through their circumstances and the Truth sets them free.  For Mary, it took a word from Him to clear the blindness, for the two on the road it took a prophetic act.  But in both cases Jesus left them without them getting to touch Him.  This is a divine strategy.  He will bring illumination, then our responsibility is to walk in the Light that He has provided.

As great as it is to be mighty in deed and word in the sight of people, it is better to be mighty in deed and word in the sight of all the people.  But how much greater it is to be mighty in deed and word in the sight of God?  Elijah saw himself as one who did all that he did before the Lord, identifying himself as such to Ahab.  Even more so, Jesus lived before His Father.  This may be why Jesus could say that He only did what He could see the Father doing, because His eyes were focused beyond the veil.

Yet Jesus said that we who simply believe will do even greater things than He did.  He is only in the earth changing and shifting things as much as we, His Body, are making ourselves available to be mighty in deed and word in the sight of all the people.  He has been raised from being dead by the very Spirit that now resides in us who have been born again.  It is our turn to do deeds that will slice through the blindness of the world.  It is in our job description to speak words that will illuminate the spirits of men and women who are destined and made to know God.

With the two men who walked with Jesus, as soon as they recognized Him, He vanished.  This, too, is to be our practice.  As soon as we have done what we intended to do in being the light of the world, we are to disappear so that we do not become the object of worship, but merely a bridge from Heaven to earth.  Our job is to become transparent with Him inside of us so that when we look in the mirror we are no longer visible but are carriers of His image.  This will so mark us that when someone encounters Him at our hands and they look to us they see Jesus alone.

As my friend said today, “The Holy Spirit is in the Jesus-cloning business.”

*Thank You for speaking Your cleansing Word over us and making us like You.

The One who serves (Luke 22:27)

Usually we do not think of God as humble.  Maybe, if we have been around the church world long enough and have really considered the character of Christ enough, then we have a notion of Jesus’ humility.  But the Father is the Source from which we draw all good character, the origin of humility.  We know this, especially, because Jesus is our most perfect picture of the Father.

When the disciples ask Jesus about who will be greatest, He actually tells them the path to greatness – service.  It is part of the divine character to consider others more important than one’s self.  Paul emphasized this to the Philippian church, encouraging them to consider others more important than themselves.  Some translations go as far to have Paul saying others are superior or even more significant than ourselves.  For the self-centered human being, that is a hard pill to swallow.  Ever since the fall of Adam, the epicenter of the human existence has been “self”.  We have been insatiable quicksand when we have been made to be unstoppable geysers.

Digging into the original languages is not always beneficial, but sometimes it uncovers fascinating revelations.  When I was doing youth ministry at Jack Deere’s church, Jack told a few of us in a small group that our problem was not that we didn’t know theology well enough, but rather that we were likely not living most of the theology that we knew.  Jack always had a way of simplifying things.  That all to say that the origin of the word that Jesus uses to describe Himself is interesting.  He says that He is “the One who serves” – ‘diaconon’.

This Greek word is where we get the word “deacon” from.  It designates those who would wait on tables and run errands for the one they are serving.  This is exactly what Jesus does.  He serves us the bread of His Body and the wine of His Blood.  He also runs errands for us and for the Father.  An errand is “short journey undertaken in order to deliver or collect something, often on someone else’s behalf.”

For the Father, the errand that Jesus did was to retrieve us.  The Father loved the world so much that He sent Jesus.  We are the object that He was commissioned to retrieve, but not just what Jesus was supposed to go to, He was to bring us back to the Father.  This is what He did, and what Paul is referring to when He speaks of us as being seated in heavenly places.  Not only did He come to us, He returned us to where we belong, where we were made to reside – next to and in Him.

On our behalf, the errand Jesus did was a delivery.  After His resurrection, Jesus had to deliver His own Blood to Heaven, to sprinkle it and cleanse the heavenly places.  Unlike His errand from the Lord, we never asked Jesus to do this errand.  But that is the sign of true service, doing what someone needs before they know that they need it, before they ask for it, and without demanding recognition.  Jesus also delivered something, rather Someone, to us – the Holy Spirit.  Again, we had no idea we needed the Spirit, yet he met our need without waiting for us to ask.  The only barrier to our benefiting from His service is our acceptance of the services that we have been given.

Through His service and sacrifice, Jesus showed us we are more important than Himself.  In His heart, our life is more important than His own.  He values our lives more than His own comfort.  Like a good leader, the Lord practices what He preaches; and like a good servant, He enjoys serving and goes beyond what is asked or expected.

*Thank You for serving us when we act like an enemy, Jesus.  We are very thankful.

Repaving the Romans Road

After a time away from intense and intention Bible study (translation: “I haven’t been reading the Bible much until recently.”), I have been slowly reading through Romans.  It has been refreshing and mind-blowing to see things in there that I hadn’t seen before, and that I haven’t really heard anyone preach out of Paul’s letter to Rome.  Here are a few things that have jumped out at me in the last week or so.  Enjoy.
Romans 1:4 – “[Jesus] who was declared the Son of God with power by the resurrection from the dead, according to the Spirit of Holiness, Jesus Christ our Lord…“
Even in his introduction, Paul is dropping revelations. I never noticed that  the resurrection from the dead was the declaration that He is divine.  And he says that it is “according to the Spirit of Holiness”, which I have touched on before, but will reiterate here.  Jesus was called “holy” by an angel before He ever did anything to merit the attribute of holiness (if indeed holiness has anything to do with actions).  It is because He was already born of the Spirit that He was holy – “holy” being His nature, and our new nature when we are born again.  So Jesus is resurrected, thus proving His divinity, which happened as a result of Him being conceived and born of the Spirit.
Romans 4:25 – “He who was delivered over because of our transgressions, and was raised because of our justification.“
This one is still in theory-mode for me, but it is awesome.  I am about to graduate from MorningStar University.  This will happen because I have spent 2 years here and participated in the program. It is kind of like a cause-effect relationship. Cause: 2 years in the program; Effect: graduation with a certificate of Christian Ministry from UNC-C.  Now, the first part of Romans 4:25 is easy to get the cause and effect understanding.  Cause: our transgressions; Effect: Jesus is delivered over to die.  The first transgression – Adam in Eden – was enough of a cause, the subsequent transgressions are symptoms of that original falling.  So the transgression happens and then the Cross is the necessary result in the heart of God.

But the second half of the verse is what is intriguing.  Cause: our justification; Effect: Jesus is raised from the dead.  The interesting thing is the timing between the two.  If the cause is our justification, then that means that our justification must have happened before Jesus raised from the dead.  I have grown up in the church believing that, basically, our justification was not complete until He was raised from the dead.

Now here is where it gets theoretical.  I believe (or am beginning to believe) that we were justified or “made right with God” in the heart of Jesus before any of this happened.  Jesus, being God, had decided that we were meant to be right with God, thus we were justified already and it was only a matter of proving that justification.  John 3:16 says that God already loved the world and so he sent Jesus.  It doesn’t say He was supremely and understandably ticked off at the world and didn’t want to give the devil something to boast about, so He sent Jesus to satisfy a law that God is held to so that He wouldn’t look bad.  It was the love in God that caused the whole thing to go down.  So, because we were already justified in Jesus’ mind, we therefore had to be shown that and Jesus demonstrated His love for us in the Cross.  The Cross was not about wrath, it was about love, just as us picking up our cross is not a matter of us keeping Him happy, it is a matter of us loving Him.
Romans 7:1-4 – not quoted, pull out your Bible and look at it.
Basically, Paul draws a parallel between a woman who is married to a man who dies and is remarried to another man to our relationship to Christ.  The strange thing here is that the first man that she is married to is connected to Christ, whose body died and therefore she was released from the law of marriage and adultery.  This signifies us being freed from the Law.  But then the analogous woman (mankind) remarries “another man”.  Who is the other man that we marry after the death of Christ?  In verse 4, Paul says that we are joined to “another” to “Him who was raised from the dead”, meaning Jesus.

It looks to me, at this point, that Jesus is a different person before and after His death and resurrection.  It is as if His baptism into death, of which we partake in our own baptism in water, changed Him fully into a new man, just like we bury our old man in baptism and are raised up new creations, supernatural beings with all the power of the Creator resident inside of us.  Just the other night I baptized a guy who got saved that night at one of our services at church, he came in an agnostic and left a different person.  We took him back to my house, and while we were filling up the tub to baptize him, I told him about how some times people get baptized and lose all their addictions at the bottom of the tub, coming up free.  He told us “I’m not going to change myself, I’m still going to smoke pot and party.”  I said to him, “That’s cool.  You will begin to find out what helps and hurts your life and relationship with Jesus and you will not want to do those things that hurt your life and relationship.”

So how come we don’t come up in full glory after being baptized like Jesus came up a new man?  I think it is because we still have to workout our salvation, realizing who and what we are.  We are new creations, but we just aren’t acting like it.  That’s why Christians are still able to do sinful things, even though we are sinless.  We are simply acting like our old nature because we have not matured into fullness.  Jesus was matured and filled with understanding of who He is, we are being transformed into His image and likeness.

So take heart, press through and don’t hold onto the pressure that compels you to do things to be right with God or become a better person.  Act like the person you are becoming, which is Jesus, not out of pressure, but out of your new, divine nature that we call “holiness”.

“Wings, Wind and Wine” – a poem with explanation

So I took Steve Witt to the airport yesterday morning.  Steve Witt is a pastor from Ohio that taught a week-long seminar at MorningStar University on finding your passions, living with them in mind and focusing your life on your personal aspirations in light of the Lord.  The very beginning of the week was a class where Steve Thompson, the director of the school, gave a teaching illustration using the movie “Dead Poets Society”.  That night we rented the movie and got stirred up for being poetic.  So since I was already up at 4:44am and was done being a chauffeur by 6am, I went to breakfast alone and wrote a poem.  This is the poem that I wrote:

The Center billows pump tirelessly
Endurance is their market and Egypt their competition
Though the ash-bird rises from where she was razed
Her cage does not open up for he was raised in shame
With holy sails up, patches and all
The Scarlet Thread holds strong
But the hides don’t rock the same tunes
And the strong drink never weakens
Ever stretching the limits of lovingkindness
Ever staggering are His friends
Ever sprinting are the intoxicated
While the sober play the wall of observation
Frowns for the sober, crowns for the drunk
“Tipsy kings,” the phoenix sings, “recover the hidden things.”

For those who do not think like I do and would like to understand this poem, I will explain it line-by-line.  Just a note, I’m not one who believes that art has as many interpretations as it has observers.  I know exactly what I meant when writing this, and though someone may find something else in it that strikes them, I did not mean that in my original intent.  So I guess it could mean that “for them”, but that is not what the poem means.  Anyhow, that is my personal rebellion against postmodern thinking.  On to the explanation.

Lines 1 and 2:
Steve Witt talks about the internal passions in our spirits from the Lord being the winds that blow the sails of the boat of our lives.  There are, however, other winds that blow.  Egypt is a symbol of the world in Scripture.  So the Center billows are the Source of our passions, the Lord, and the world is the competition.  He never stops blowing upon us from within us and His market, or His job is endurance – a job that the world cannot beat Him at.

Lines 3 and 4:
The ash-bird is a phoenix, a mythical bird that is a symbol of resurrection life and the spirit of a believer.  “Razed” in line 3 is not a typo, it means “from the place she died or was brought down”.  The phoenix will die and be burned up and then be resurrected from that same place.  But the cage is the skin that our resurrected spirits live in, our flesh.  And sometimes we don’t open up and let our spirits free because of shame that we grew up in.

Lines 5-7:
Our personalities are like the sails of the boat of our lives, according to Steve Witt (and I agree).  Though we have patches and things that the Lord has fixed in our personality, we are by nature “Holy”, not “holey” or “hole-filled”.  It is the Scarlet Thread of His Blood that holds our once tattered souls together.  However, the patches made of hide/skins/cloth do not always match the generation they are effecting.  Just like the wine and the wine skins must match in age and usage, so patches must be equally aged.  So the reference to “rock the same tunes” is an allusion to not listening to the same music just as my parents’ generation and my generation do not listen to the same music.

Line 8:
The “strong drink” is the new wine that requires a new wine skin.  It only gets more potent with time.

Lines 9-11:
The new wine is the Lord.  He told Israel that He is the one who “exercises lovingkindness” in Jeremiah 9.  When I lift weights, my goal is to stretch the limits of my muscles, when the Lord exercises lovingkindness, He is stretching its limits to show how far it will go.  In this same passage in Jeremiah, the Lord says that no one is to boast except in two things, that they know and understand Him.  It is those who are in true friendship with the Lord that are many times found “drunk in the Spirit” as Paul exhorted the Ephesian church to be.  They continue in their intoxicated state as they know Him more and more.  But they are not like worldly drunks, who stagger and get no where, they sprint after the Lord and His upward call on their lives.

Lines 12 and 13:
The most offended people at Jesus were not the ones who were morally in opposition to Him, but those who were religiously minded.  The Pharisees hated Jesus unto killing Him.  Today, we still have and are pharisees when we see what the Lord is doing and rather than jump in and enjoy, we sit back and watch.  Jesus said that the Kingdom does not come through observation, but this is what we religious people do, we “righteously judge” what is happening from an outside perspective, never getting our feet wet.  But in reality we are being help back by that same spirit the pharisees had from entering into the Joy of the Lord.  The reward of religion is a frown on your face, the reward of those who jump in with what the Spirit is doing is a crown on their heads.

Line 14:
Proverbs 25:2 says that it is the glory of kings to search out what the Lord has hidden for them in His glory.  It is the phoenix, a symbol of a resurrection spirit, who sings her song that those who walk in the Spirit (the “tipsy kings”) are truly walking in royal authority and will recover the things hidden for them by the Lord from ages past.  And they will enjoy those revelations for all eternity.

Love is the Answer

Recently I have been seeing the power of Love.

When someone is being harsh, the best way to disarm them is to not react out of offense but respond out of love.  When we react to something, we are defensive and it is this reactionary stance that gets us in trouble.  Bad theology is birthed in reactions to extreme situations.  But responding to a situation is steady, slow to anger, patient, un-offended and more rational.  This is not to say that love is not direct or sharp.

God is not like other gods, He is happy.  He is undisturbed.  He is Love.  He’s doing alright.  And He most certainly is not “pissed off” (pardon my language if you don’t like that term).  God loved the WORLD so much that He sent Jesus to destroy the effects of sin, how much more must He love those who are His children?  It would be easy for us to find two-thousand and nine things that the Lord must be upset about with the church in 2009 and write a book called “2,009 Reason God Might Hate the Church in 2009″.

But that is not our job.  Rebuking the Church, convicting people of sin and fault-finding are not in our job description.  It says in John 16 that it is the HELPER who has it in His job description to convict of sin…and wait, He only convicts the world of that.  The Lord, the One who has absolutely every right to rebuke anyone He wants, does not rebuke us.  Rather, He loves us.  And when He actually did rebuke the 7 churches of Revelation 2, He did it differently for each church.  We cannot fall into the religous pride trap that would have us rebuking the whole Church for one thing.  The two churches in Revelation 2 who were farthest apart were only 120 miles from each other, if these two churches could not be put under a blanket Word from the Lord, than neither can the Church in America – much less the Global Church.

Love is not being harsh when everyone else is applauding unrighteousness.

Love is not exposing someone when they mess up, knowing that people may blame you for their actions.

Love keeps waiting when it was “too long” about three hours ago.

Love speaks a soft word to comfort the shamed and a loud one to confront the shaming.

Love doesn’t need its actions to be requited in order to accomplish what it intended with those actions.

Love talks about how great “they” are, while still being aware of its own contribution to the accomplishment.

Love uses “I”, “me” and “my” much less than “you” and “your”.

Love acts like you would expect love to act like.

Love can take hits, be unoffended and break you down without offending you.

I’m growing in Love.