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)

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.

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.

New Covenant version of “Turning to the Lord”

In the Old Covenant, the people of God could walk in favor with God and man based on promises that the Lord made through His prophets (example: Deuteronomy 30:9-10).  The problem for the subscribers of the Old Covenant was and is that the favor is linked to behavior.  But that is the problem for everyone, isn’t it?  I know it is for me.  I think things like “oh, I can’t (fill in the blank), because I (fill in another blank).”  Honestly, it isn’t about us.  Steve Thompson said last night at our new Saturday night meeting at MorningStar, something like “Your standing with God has nothing to do with you doing things right, it has to do with the One Man who did things right living inside of you.”  *pause for dramatic effect.

The other day, I was with a group of about 30 first year students at MorningStar University.  I was leading a morning “spiritual fitness” time, basically training people in the program how to connect with the Lord and transform their minds and hearts so that they are more effective in their life.  I woke up that morning having not put any thought into what we were going to do, even though it started in like 12 minutes.  I had a quick idea about worship.

When I say worship, most people’s first thought is something concerning music, singing and maybe dancing if you are from that kind of denominational bent.  But the worship that the Father is looking for, desiring, longing for is from those who will worship Him in “spirit and in truth”.  For me, that indicates that worship is a matter of your spirit over-flowing with honest and real declaration of who God is.  This can be done through songs, or by painting, or by writing, or by weight-lifting, or by golfing.

*Funny side-note:  also last night, JohnMark McMillan said something prfound.  He said “Because Christ is in you, if you don’t go play golf, He doesn’t get to play golf.  If you don’t go pray for the sick, He doesn’t get to go pray for the sick.  Everything you do, He does.”

Anyhow, back to the morning training.  So what I had everyone do was take 20 minutes and write down everything that we can think of individually about the Lord.  After about 8 minutes most of us had run out of Biblical things and had to just go with who He REALLY is to us.  I had things on my list like “sneaky, hysterical, un-offended, invested, aggressive, unreserved, never indifferent”.  So with a long list, (mine was like 7 dozen things) we all at once, in a small room, just told God what we thought of Him.  We “read our lists” but it was more than that, we were talking to Him.  After all, He was more in that room than we were.  I was only in the room once, He was in every single one of us, so He was in their like 40 times.

Needless to say, it was pretty powerful.  But then, in the spirit of Jahovah-Sneaky, I brought up two verses that flipped us upside down.  Second Corinthians 3:18 says that as we are beholding His glory, we are being transformed into His likeness.  This means that as we are considering the truth of who He is, we are changing into that very same thing.  Then I read First John 4:17, which says “we are as He is in this world”.  That means that we are on this earth, walking around just like He is up on His heavenly throne next to the Father.  We are of the same nature, the same authority, the same lineage, the same spirit.  So everything that we had just told God about Himself, He was telling it to us about us.  As Becky Langford saw in a vision the next night, we are throwing praise at Him and He is batting it back in our faces, telling us that we are only talking about ourselves.

Now, here is the real kicker for me.

The same night that Becky shared that vision at our Friday night School of the Spirit meeting, Stephen Alls (the pastoral advisor of our school) talked about turning to the Lord.  When he did, I remembered a verse about something good happening when we turn to the Lord.  But I couldn’t remember where it was.  It turns out that it is only 2 verses befor the Second Corinthians 3 verse about us being transformed into His likeness by Beholding His glory.  It says that whenever someone turns to the Lord, the veil is taken away from our faces and we shine with glory.  But something really hit me when I realized WHERE the Lord is to be turned to.

Whenever we think of turning to the Lord, or looking to the Lord, we tend to think UP.  But Colossians 1:27 says that Christ is IN us.  So when we turn to the Lord, which removes the veil that hides our glory, we are turning IN to the Lord.  then I thought “Holy Smokes!  It isn’t turning inward towards the Lord, it is turning INTO the Lord!”  We become the Lord, we fulfill the truth of being as He is, we are transformed into His likeness and we walk in His power, His grace, His authority.

We run around trying to gain favor when Favor lives in us.  We search and manipulate our way into influence when we have power greater than an Atom Bomb, we have a “Last Adam Bomb” in us.  We have the same Spirit that raised Jesus from the dead RESIDENT inside of us.  One of my friends, Bethany Oiler, is a worship leader here at MorningStar.  She recently wrote a song that has a great line that says something like “I am God’s house and He is always home.”

More Than Understanding, Experiencing

Knowledge puffs up, love builds up.

It was pointed out to me recently that one of my biggest problems is that I am an “ametuer theologian”.  This is a problem because I don’t really know enough to explain something fully to someone, I just know how to parrot revelations that I have heard to people and “bottle them”  as if they were my thoughts.  Now, I know that I’m smart.  I know that I can get revelation from the Lord myself – some evidence of that is on this very blog.  But I have learned to rely more on being able to repeat things that I hear than get new stuff for myself.

Because of my time spent at IHOP, I thought I knew the end-times pretty well – I taught it 2 summers in a row for goodness sake.  But then I got confronted about about it and realized that I couldn’t actually tell you where most of the things that I “knew” were in the Bible.  I didn’t get it for myself from the Word, I heard it and trusted someone else’s study-life in the Lord.  And then a doozy of an email was sent out by Mike Bickle in which he said “neither the IHOP leadership nor I are mature enough in our understanding to entertain debates and casual arguments that will arise…”  There are other things that Mike said, but essentially he said that a lot of the end-times “debating” that I relied upon as the basis for my beliefs are “empty” and do not prepare us for whatever is going to happen.

Understand me, I am not down on IHOP.  I appreciate what they bring to the Body.  What I am saying is that when I read Mike’s dream, I felt my internal turmoil subside.  The same person that confronted me on all of this told me that I don’t need another alternate teaching to regurgitate, I need to encounter the Lord.  So I set my compass to get a touch from God.

What I have found since then is that I am enjoying life so much more.  I am like a paranoid kid that thinks his Dad is around every corner just waiting to catch him and tickle him.  I was at a Bobcats game and got ambushed by the Presence of the Lord.  I was at the grocery store and impacted a worker’s life with insight from the Lord into his life.  I was able to just sit on my couch and enjoy the Lord, not reading, not praying, just BEING.

Jack Deere has a great saying, he says “I’m already not living as much of the Bible as I know.”  Meaning that getting more imformation in my head is not going to help me, applying what I know is a big enough task.  This is coming from one of the men in my life that I respect the most and feel like has been transformed into Christ’s likeness, Jack is also probably one of the smartest men I know.  Jack told me once when I asked him what the best translation of the Bible was, “the one that says ‘Love your neighbor’.”

The Pharisees didn’t catch what Jesus was throwin’, because they did not have love.  We, too, become mostly motivated by the religious spirit when we cease to do things out of love.  We cannot give love if we are not first the recipents of love.  I can write you a check for $50, but if you do not take it to the bank and make it part of your account, you cannot give it away.  Likewise, God can throw love at us, but unless we internalize it, we will not benefit from it, nor will we be able to give it out.

As Alyssa Barlow said the other night “all we need to to wrecked by His love again.”

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

Dealing with misunderstanding and disappointment is one of the hardest things to do.  The two men on their way to Emmaus, along with the rest of Jesus’ followers, thought that Jesus was going to be the Jewish Messiah.  They thought that they knew what that would look like.  And indeed, they were right in their understanding of who He is, what they did not have right is what that would look like.  They thought He would rise up militarily and overthrow the unrighteous governmental system over Israel.  But God just doesn’t do it that way.  His plans always involve changing people’s hearts and releasing them to take over by changing the structures from the inside out.
Replacing one overpowering government with another is not a good change.  Infiltrating the systems and mentalities of culture is the only truly effective way of to change a culture, a nation or a planet.  That is exactly what He intends to do now in our culture, our nation and our planet.  Christians will be up in arms until abortion is made illegal, all abortions, all the time.  One problem with that is that people will still get abortions if it is illegal.  This is because the hearts of the people have not changed, just what they are allowed to do without getting in trouble.  I am not saying that abortion is a good thing at all, what I am saying is that ending abortion means transforming how people think about it.  Even if abortion is legal or even encouraged, people will not do it if their hearts desire their seed to be perpetuated.  Abortions don’t happen in groups that want children.  Islam is taking over Europe by having half a dozen babies per family, encouraged by the religious leaders.  In one generation they will be able to vote in whom ever they want into any governmental position, because the current generation is not aborting their babies and is raising them with their values.
When God does something different from the way that we want Him to do it, the problem is not with His ways, but with our understanding.  When we get offended because God is not doing something, and we think that our anger is righteous anger, I believe that it is wiser to step out and change what we don’t like rather than get upset.  Jesus said that He was the light of the world while He was in the world.  But now we are the light of the world, we are the sons into whose hands the earth has been given.  It is our responsibility to change and transform culture through stepping into it and effecting change, not by complaining and hoping that our whining is going to reach the right ears to change something.  There is a place for intercession, but the Lord told His disciples to pray for laborers, people who would do what is needed for a harvest.  We need laborers.
In principle, no one would disagree with how the Lord does things.  No one would say that He is doing something the wrong way, at least not openly.  But in our hearts we question His ways more than most of us would like to admit.  We know that, just as the Scriptures say, “He is righteous in all His ways”, but we don’t know what to do with the government officials He allows to get into office or the injustice of a friend or family member dying when they die.  Even disasters are from the Lord according to Amos chapter three, verse six.  At some point we have to come to a place of humility where we can honestly say “I don’t understand You, but I trust You and I love you.  I’m sticking with You no matter what.”  We will not always get it, nor will we always agree with what or how he does something, but we know that He is good.  And if that is true, then we can rest assured that He does everything from a place of goodness and love.
*Lord, we trust You, help us grow to trust You more and more easily.  Amen.*

The One who serves (Luke 22:27)

True leadership, as it is meant to be exercised, is a role of service.  The selflessness of our King is astounding, not merely in His sacrificial death on the Cross, but that His whole purpose, focus and goal was to make those in His own Kingdom greater than Himself.  He gave up His Spirit so that we could do greater works and on emphatically showed that He values our lives more than His own by dying in our place.  He is constantly looking for ways to exalt others, promoting them to a place where they can demonstrate the greatness inside of them.  When the disciples came back from doing great exploits in His Name, He does not rebuke them for their excitement at what they did.

When someone sits in meditation, it is said that they are “waiting” on the Lord.  They are serving Him, focusing on Him and directing their attentions and energies upon Him.  Here, in Luke 22, Jesus says that He is the One who “serves”.  The word there means to “wait upon as a waiter or servant”.  He is turning His attention toward us, serving us and waiting on us.  He is not waiting impatiently and irritated, hoping that some day we will get it together, He is waiting for our hearts to turn to Him just a little so that He can meet us there.

Imagine it this way, He is like a spouse who is waiting for His mate to come home from a trip.  At the very moment that we step into the door, He is there, waiting, excited to see how things went, how we are feeling, what we are thinking, or even just excited to share the air with us.  It is easy to look at elderly couples at restaurants that eat a whole meal without speaking nearly at all and think that their love has grown cold.  I know couples that don’t need words to express their love.  They can just sit and be with each other, not communicating anything, even doing separate things in their home, but they are happy because they are doing their separate things together.  The Lord is a lot like that, He just likes our company.  He wants our presence with Him even more than we want His Presence with us.  What we think, feel and say is valuable, but sometimes those things get in the way of just simple enjoyment of the One who is Love.

Moses knew the ways of the Lord, while the rest of the nation of Israel merely knew His works.  As we draw closer to Him we become more interested in the WAY that He does things than what He actually does.  The apostle Paul prayed for the Colossian church to grow in the knowledge of His will, but as you keep reading Colossians 1 you see that the reason we want to grow in the knowledge of His will is so that eventually we will grow in the knowledge of God Himself.  The ultimate goal is always to apprehend God.  His ways lead us to Him.  The woman of the Song of Songs is told to follow the path made by the flock of the Lover to find Him.  If we go in His ways, we will find Him.

Psalm 37:34 urges us to wait on the Lord and keep to His way.  The end result is us being exalted.  Here we see, yet again, that doing things His way results in us being exalted.  So Jesus says, “I come to you as One who serves”, showing us the way that He does things.  The wise believer then waits on Him, keeping to His way of doing things, following His lead and not only does he get exalted, he inherits the Land.  As the Lord is already waiting for us, all we must do is turn to Him and we receive honor and our inheritance.  As kings we receive the inheritance of kings, which is land; as priests we receive the inheritance of priests, which is the Lord Himself.  Seek and you will find.

*Jesus, make us more aware of Your constant, loving watchfulness over us.  Amen.*