The noise of our culture can, if we let it, turn our lives into a barely controlled panic. Life can start to feel like a run down the cattle chute, blindly following the one directly in front of us, never stopping for fear of the cattle prod. No idea where we’re going but too afraid to stop. The freedom of Jesus is the opposite of this blind death march down the cattle chute.

The freedom we have in Jesus actually begins in death, it moves us from death into the freedom of a new and resurrected life. Let’s consider this passage from Colossians today.

Therefore,

Instead of looking forward to death and all around us to pain, we are told to leave death behind and look up to life. We have already died with Christ and our new life is hidden with Him in God. Not only do we need to look up, we need to seek the things we find there.

What do we find in heaven? God and His eternal Son Jesus, life, peace, love, hope, joy, in short eternal things. These things are very unlike the things of earth which are all passing away at best, and at worst, actively destroying us. Most of all we need to stay focused on Christ who is literally our life and our only hope. In Him we have life both now and eternally, so He is and must always be our focus.

So what does a focus like this produce and inspire in us? Let’s read on:

So put to death whatever in your nature belongs to the earth:

The response to the offer of eternal life in Christ is to turn away from those things that are of this earth and are destroying us. The list of vices above is all too familiar and has not changed in any way since the first sin captured our hearts. These are the reasons the earth and all those focused on this present life and selfish desires fall under the wrath of God. This is our common experience, but it does not have to be our common destiny.

We have a new life in Christ but this reality leaves us with a choice to make. Will we continue in our self-serving, idolatrous, and wicked ways? Or, will we embrace the new life that Christ has given us through His death and resurrection? This life is a gift and it is available to all regardless of race or social status. Our new life is created in the image of God. The old labels have become meaningless.

We live in a world that is constantly dividing itself into groups: nations, skin colors, ideologies, political parties, genders, the list is endless and getting longer. But in Christ the real truth is these labels and affiliations are all irrelevant, in Christ we are all recreated and growing into the image of God. We are one because there is only one Christ. There is only one God. There is only one family. Our old ways and our old labels and affiliations are dead.

This week lets once again commit to embrace reality and walk according to our true identity in Christ. Let’s keep our eyes up and focused on the author of life rather than the noise of confusion and death that surrounds us. This week let’s commit to speaking life to each other rather than repeating the fear and despair that this passing world is drowning in. Jesus is the way, the truth, and the life.

Have a great week!

There is a lot of talk and honestly, a lot of confusion around the word “freedom” today. Freedom is a word that the New Testament speaks of fairly often, so it seems like a good place to start this study is with Jesus. The first passage we are going to look at is an excerpt from a longer conversation Jesus had with certain Jewish leaders. They seemed to feel that they were already free, they also had come to believe that they had never been enslaved, largely it seems, because of their heritage. They already considered themselves to be a part of the elect of Israel since they were “sons” of Abraham. But Jesus saw the situation quite differently.

Jesus answered them,

Jesus was unconcerned with politics and physical heritage as he spoke of freedom, the freedom he was talking about was freedom from the tyranny and slavery of sin. Those who sin are slaves - slaves are not sons - but the true Son can set you free. And if the Son sets you free you will be truly free. The freedom Jesus spoke of existed both in this life and eternally. He was discussing a freedom from their own evil desires and the bondage that comes from living as slaves to these desires.

He was also hinting very strongly in this passage that freedom from sin changes a persons status from slave to son, and so makes that person an eternal heir and a true member of God’s family. A slave in that culture was not a member of the family only sons are heirs.

Our freedom then is a freedom from our sinful desires where our actions are not dictated by the relentless desires of our lower nature. True freedom is escaping all of that, and being free to live as “sons” in Christ.

If such frequent use of the word “sons” is jarring to you, relax. The New Testament was not written to sooth modern sensibilities it was written to address the audience of its day. We are all sons in Christ because he is The Son. We all share in His status in the family and we are now all heirs with him. In the ancient world daughters were not the heirs, sons were. Son was a status in the family not just a description of biological sex. We are now all heirs in Christ we are all sons in Christ. And we are all, whether male or female, the “bride of Christ”. So females are sons and males are brides don’t get triggered, but understand why these terms were used.

Therefore, as you received Christ Jesus the Lord,

This passage is from Paul who is reminding his readers not to be, once again, taken captive and enslaved. But here the slavery is a more specific form of slavery than the sin that Jesus broadly described in our first passage. The slavery Paul warns of is submitting to philosophy and lies, serving ideas based on human tradition and the so called “elemental spirits of the world”. These are all things that flow, not from Christ, or His Spirit, but from the world and its “zeitgeist” for lack of a better word.

The question for modern students of Paul’s words must be, what is the current spirit of the age? What philosophies, lies, and human traditions are trying to enslave us now? What ideas are simply not of Christ? This last question is where things get very odd in our current world.

Today even Jesus is often re-imagined and re-created to fit whatever odd idea is in vogue at the moment. One of the things that I think describe the current spirit of the world as well as any is the obsession to redefine, re-imagine, and re-identify everything until nothing has any meaning at all. Ironically even the word nothing has been redefined such that scientists can make the claim that everything came from nothing, although by nothing they mean a quantum vacuum which in fact is not - nothing. So here we sit in a world where each person is imprisoned in a jail of their own definitions unable to even talk to our neighbors because they are locked in prisons of their own.

Every person while seeking personal freedom is enslaving themselves in the prison of their own desires and isolating themselves from every other person on earth. The desire for personal “freedom” has in fact created a self-imposed solitary confinement.

These self-centered desires for freedom are the essence of the sin Jesus was describing in the first passage. Ironically, in trying to find a freedom of our own we lose the very thing that we seek. We can’t set ourselves free, when we try all we find is anarchy and violence. The book of Judges ends with the phrase, “and every man did what was right in his own eyes”. The next thing you see in the history of Israel is a nation begging for a king, the anarchy and violence had become too much. When they were told that a human monarchy would lead to oppression they cried, “we don’t care! give us a king!”.

Ever since the garden of Eden the devil has been trying to convince us that what we want and don’t have is more desirable than what God has provided for us. We need to reject this urge and turn back to God. And Jesus is the way that God has provided for our return. The road to freedom is Jesus. He is the way, He is the truth that frees us from the lies of the current spirit of the age. And He is the life we seek to create but so often fail to embrace.

For you were called to freedom, brothers.

This week let’s encourage each other to walk in the freedom that only Jesus can give. It’s also the Lenten season, so instead of giving up sugar or something, let’s give up our selfish desires and take the opportunities God gives us to help and to bless those around us. As we forget about our own self-serving freedoms may we all find true freedom in giving ourselves for each other. Because when we walk that self-sacrificial road of the cross we will find we are not walking alone but with Jesus and with everyone else that follows Him. And we will at last be truly free.

Have a Great Week!

Ever since I was young, I found myself a bit frustrated with the Gospels because I wished Jesus would just teach me what I wanted to know. I often wished that the Gospel writers would have spent more time on the teachings of Jesus and less time on his travels to and fro and the various people and interruptions he met along the way. I mean, here is the greatest teacher of all time, and the gospels don’t really focus on his teaching - or do they?

In the first 10 of my 32 years working in missions, I worked in what could be called the logistics of missions. I have been responsible for the care and maintenance of the 50+ structures on this campus. I have led our accounting department and created the IT department as we moved from the analog world of the ‘80s to the digital world of the ‘90s, led the design team, and acted as General contractor for the administration building and many smaller projects. I wrote software for our accounting department and eventually ended up as operations director. I learned all these things by experience, trial and error, reading, and watching others who knew more than I did.

But after ten years of serving in this way, God led me to take a sabbatical and spend 60+ hours a week immersed in the word of God while completing a School of Biblical Studies. About halfway through the course, God led me to the story of Peter and Jesus in the final chapter of John. Since Peter was a fisherman, he decided to go fishing, yet he caught nothing. Jesus showed up, and he immediately caught more fish than he knew what to do with. After this, Jesus and Peter have a little talk, and Jesus asks him, do you love me more than these? Now, this question is ambiguous enough that it can legitimately be understood in several ways. But at that moment, I knew that Jesus was asking me a very specific question. Do you love me more than you love the things you have known and become skilled at? You see, I took Jesus to be asking Peter if he loved him more than the fish. He was asking Peter, in effect, do you want to go back to being a fisherman, or do you want to get back to your calling and be a fisher of men?

The instructions Jesus gave Peter were simple, “feed my sheep.” It was a moment of truth for Peter, and it was a moment of truth for me. Would I continue to do what I was good at and comfortable with, or would I change my entire focus of life and feed the sheep of Jesus? It was at that point that my entire focus changed from physical and administrative ministry to teaching and pastoral care.

But here is the ironic part: was that a move into “ministry” or away from it? The answer, of course, is neither. Jesus was just introducing me to the next lesson he had for me. You see, when Jesus taught his disciples, it was not simply a cerebral process, though he did challenge their thinking constantly. Neither was it simply “on-the-job training,” though he did a lot of that as well.

The teaching style of Jesus was focused on transforming people into the image of God. To restore the image of God that was lost to sin ever since the garden. And transformation is a holistic process involving mind, body, desire, and will. The teaching of Jesus focused on all those things together to one unified end. He was transforming people sold out to sin into disciples and children of God. Jesus understood that knowledge is not simply the accumulation of information.

In the end, you really only know the things you can do.

Typically, the bible speaks of knowledge as something more akin to “knowing” the piano than “knowing” the multiplication tables. The knowledge that the bible typically describes is gained when information is coupled with experience and becomes a living part of a person. Knowledge involves input, embodiment, and expression. Knowledge is as knowledge does.

The measure of a disciple is not their ability to repeat ideas they have heard, it is the expression of that knowledge by their life. Jesus instructed his disciples to judge teachers by the fruit they produced. We also need to assess our own lives based on the fruit we produce. Consider this familiar line from Galatians.

But the fruit of the Spirit is

The healthy, honest disciple of Jesus will increasingly bear the fruit described in this passage. This fruit is the fruit of true knowledge of God.

This challenge was given to me in the heart of the COVID nightmare when I was unable to travel or teach, and our schools were all shut down. Jesus took me back to the gospels to walk with him through his teachings again and to let them transform me. He told me to change my focus from knowing to doing. And he led me to start this Substack, which was to be a series of reflections, “On Walking the Way,” not just knowing about the way.

So this week, join me as I travel back to that road that only Jesus knows. Let’s walk the path instead of talking about the way things ought to be. Let’s encourage each other to trust the Master as we leave our safe and known lives to follow Jesus into the unknown of everlasting life. So, I leave you with this thought to ponder as you return back to your life:

Over time, our actions describe our beliefs better than our words.

Have a great week!

We live in a world where the noise and the pressure of everyday life can be deafening often threatening to drown out the voice of God. I think it is one of the reasons so many in the modern world question if God even exists. We are immersed in our own creations and in a constant hurry. When we are not rushing around, we are too exhausted to think, and in the back of our minds, or maybe in the front of our minds, is an almost constant fear. So we reach for our phone or the remote and mindlessly listen to the world jabber on and on and on hoping to find peace in the very noise that ruthlessly drives us.

Today, we are going to look at Elijah who challenged the political and religious authorities to a literal winner-takes-all contest - and God won, demonstrating once for all that He alone is God. But this was no celebration for Elijah. He immediately learned that winning in a contest like this makes you a whole lot of powerful enemies. So this story picks up with Elijah running for his life from the murderous queen that he just publicly humiliated. When he finally stops running for a moment we find him cowering in a cave in the wilderness.

Then God speaks:

“What are you doing here, Elijah?”

This story can and should be interpreted in its own context and the context of Elijah’s life and as a serious student of the bible you must always start there. But this story has such poetic power that it is hard not to see bigger principles and metaphors at work here.

Elijah was faithful, he acted in obedience, and God did an epic miracle. That part of the story is literally awesome, but Elijah is not some two-dimensional comic book hero he is an actual human being. The evil queen Jezebel sent messengers to tell him he would be dead in a day so he was running for his life. He ran til he was exhausted, and angels fed him. He kept running, and he was running blind until he finally collapsed in a cave. Now God speaks, and what does he say?

“What are you doing here Elijah?”

God’s language does not seem to be happy or sad. It has the tone of a father talking to his son after he has gotten himself into a bit of a mess. What are you doing Elijah? Elijah needed to stop and get a grip, and God like any good father had to slow him down and help him think. Elijah needed to slow down and calm down in order to even hear what God was trying to say to him.

Hearing through the roar

So now Elijah has stopped running, and God has him in the sanctuary so to speak, and he is listening, but the noise and confusion continue. Was God in the wind? Was God in the earthquake or the fire? No, no, and no. But as Elijah continues to listen for the voice of God he hears a whisper. This time it is God, but what does God say? He repeats his earlier question, “What are you doing Elijah?”. The story continues with God answering Elijah’s complaints and, snapping him out of his self-righteousness, self-pity, and fear, gives him some useful direction. God tells Elijah to get walking in the way he is showing him instead of running frantically in blind fear. Elijah had to calm down and listen, really listen, and start acting rather than reacting in fear.

What are we doing?

Are we running blind with fear nipping at our heels? Or are we walking in faith? Are we asking God what he is doing, or is He asking us what we are doing? Are we feeling sorry for ourselves, or are we thankful for God’s miraculous provision every day? Are we scrambling to find a place to hide in safety or are we looking for a quiet place to hear God’s instruction? Elijah was human; he did a lot of very human things in this story, but Elijah was also faithful and he not only listened for God to speak, but he also listened to God when he spoke.

This week, let’s commit together to help each other discern the difference between the noise of the wind and the storm and God’s voice. Let’s help each other find faith when everything in this world wants to drive us with fear. Let’s listen for the quiet voice in the noise that is guiding us in the way that we should go, and let’s walk together with purpose, in peace, while the world rages on and on. Beneath the roaring threats of the world and the constant noise we face even in our sanctuaries, there is a quiet voice asking us what we are doing. I want to listen to that still small voice this week because that voice is the voice of God Almighty maker of the heavens and the earth, and I need to stop running to hear it.

Pray with me this week as I pray for you, as we all seek to hear the voice of God and find the path of God in a noisy and dangerous world.

Have a great week!

Gen 17:1 When Abram was ninety-nine years old

Rev 1:8 “I am the Alpha and the Omega,” says the Lord God,

In a world where references to God are commonly used as profanity or empty expressions of surprise, I guess it follows that the impact of God’s name and, by extension, the very concept of God has been diluted to a triviality in the everyday world. This is I suppose to be expected in the unbelieving world, but the Christian world should really know better. However, Christians are not immune to the influence of these profane and trivializing references to God. The effects of this environment can often be seen in our language and heard in our conversations about God.

God Almighty - the creator and sustainer of all things

Whether we are looking at the first page of Genesis or the prologue of John’s Gospel, the message is clear and consistent. God is the creator and sustainer of all things, which of course includes us. Every breath I take is another gift from God Almighty, it is another opportunity to walk before Him and be blameless. (like Abram)

Yet we often talk about God like He is little more than a philosophical idea or maybe some kind of cosmic genie that will help us, if we go about it the right way. A genie we can call, but not the Lord God Almighty that can call us. We often treat Him as a god we can use, not the God that can use us, as he wills for His purposes. We have replaced the very sensible realization that life is a rare, fragile, and fleeting gift, with the false hopes the unbelieving world clings to. While we would rarely be silly enough to say it out loud, our actions often betray a deep inner belief that we are autonomous. We all too often act as if we are self-existent and completely self-determining. As if God’s role, if He has one at all, is to serve us(when and if we need it). Think about it, why do we really read books on prayer? To become more obedient or to figure out how to get the results we want?

I have lived far too much of my life absorbed in this kind of delusional view of God, thinking of God as a helper rather than God Almighty. As someone I will see someday when I die, rather than the source of my life every moment of every day. It is God who defines me, I do not define God, I could not define Him if I tried, after all He is God Almighty and I am just a man. I’m a man that He, through his grace has allowed to live for the last 63 years, in spite of my ignorance and self-serving rebellion.

I sometimes think it would be nice if we could physically see his sustaining presence in our lives, like if we were connected to Him by a long extension cord. Then I would remember not to unplug from Him. But then I think, wait a minute, His sustaining power is physically visible, we just misinterpret it or disregard it altogether because we prefer to imagine ourselves as our own sustainer and ultimately our own God. We prefer to think of ourselves as our own final authority.

Sin is and has always been, choosing our will over the will of God Almighty, and he allows this because He does not seem to be interested in forcing anyone to love or obey Him. But our freedom does not make our use of this freedom any less consequential to our lives or the lives of those we influence. The choices are very real and so are the consequences.

God Almighty is above all, He is unchanging, all powerful, and loving and gracious and patient, but he will not be mocked or ignored forever. We must all ultimately give an account to God who is The All-Mighty.

Jesus Almighty - creator and master of life and death

John 1:1 - 5

John 20:28 Thomas answered him[Jesus],

Matt 28:18 And Jesus came and said to them,

Rev 1:17 - 18 When I saw him, I fell at his feet as though dead.

So God is the Almighty but also Jesus is God The Almighty. He was with God, creation was made through Him and He was(and is) God. We now have more things to consider, when Jesus speaks He speaks the words of God, he is The Word of God. So how are we to respond to His word, to The Word? Does having a proper “fear of the Lord” mean living in terror of God’s judgment? Or, do we like so many simply redefine fear to mean something we don’t have to really worry about? How do fear, love, joy, peace, obedience, and confidence play together?

If you were to search the bible for the words fear and Lord you will find a tremendous number of references. In Isaiah 11:1-3 even the coming Messiah is said to have a special anointing of the fear of the Lord. So fear of the Lord is important even for Jesus. From our perspective, grace and forgiveness can’t be properly appreciated or enjoyed without a knowledge of our true guilt, our true need, our true dependence and inescapable mortality.

I have often warned my students that we can only appreciate our salvation to the degree we appreciate our guilt before a righteous and Almighty God. Only when we see God as truly almighty can we begin to understand what a miracle of love and grace our forgiveness really is. The clearer we see our actual situation before God Almighty the clearer we will see His love and grace and the more secure we will feel in His love, because He truly is a loving God who is also - Almighty.

This week let’s help each other remember that God is not an idea or a set of ideas. God is a person who is The Almighty God our creator and sustainer, our judge and our savior. He loves us beyond our comprehension but that is because He is powerful beyond our comprehension. Let’s remind ourselves who it is we are talking to when we pray this week. Let’s remember that His answer may not be the answer we desire but the answer we need. His words may be comfort but they may also just as easily be instruction or even command. Today and every day we live in the presence of God Almighty. He has given His only Son to save us, now we need to ask about the appropriate response to such love and grace and sacrifice. It is by His grace alone that I write this and that you read this. Each breath is another gift and another opportunity to give the love He has given us to the world that so desperately needs it.

Have a great week!

“Blessed are the meek, for they shall inherit the earth.

[Matt 5:5 ESV]

In teaching the bible over the last 20 years or so the same two mistakes keep popping up over and over again. They manifest themselves in various ways depending on the passage but they are the same mistakes.

* Interpreting a figurative passage as literal.

* Interpreting a literal passage as figurative.

To be fair it is not always easy to discern as we will will see today, however that does not mean that the bible can mean whatever we want. The correct interpretation will always be the intended interpretation. In other words, the goal is understanding what the author was saying to the people he was writing to. Our concerns can be addressed only after we understand what was originally being said.

When dealing with a difficult passage the trick is not to focus our view on the difficulty, but rather to broaden our view by looking at the surrounding texts, in order to increase our context and improve our perspective on the difficult passage. We need to learn more by taking a broader perspective, not focus narrowly on the one passage we don’t understand.

We must always remember this axiom when interpreting the bible:

Use the clear to interpret the obscure

The important things in the bible are not the “hidden” things or the difficult things. God made the important things clear, so we must always start there, and use those clear concepts as our context for the things that are less clear.

Today’s Passage

With that in mind what are we to make of today’s passage? Is this a philosophical ideal? Is this a promise for this age? Is this an idealistic hope for later in this age? Or, is this a promise that will be realized in the age to come?

In the modern world we seem to slam from one ditch to the other on the road to understanding. On the one hand you have people that seem to believe that if it can’t be touched, measured, labeled, and cataloged it is not real. On the other, you have people that want to abstract everything all the way down to basic biology. To those in this camp it seems that either nothing is real or that reality itself is simply a mental construct of some kind. So, you end up with people speaking literal non-sense like “my truth/your truth” or “identifying” as something they clearly and literally are not.

But we all live in this world, and we are all affected by it. So, I guess it follows that this confusion will complicate our reading of the bible as well, whether we wish to admit that or not. So what do we do with a passage like, “Blessed are the meek, for they shall inherit the earth”? Did Jesus mean that those particular people in his audience would literally inherit the world if they were meek? If so, when or how? Or was he speaking in vague platitudes saying essentially, “God will reward you(in some way, someday) if you are meek”. Or is this just empty moralizing by a teacher 2000 years ago as some might cynically declare.

It is difficult to understand many of the teachings of Jesus if you hold that the present world and its material realities are all there is. Those that reject the supernatural (anything beyond the natural physical world) but still like the idea of Jesus will try to imagine a world where the strong do not dominate the week. But since there is no world but this one in their mind, they try imaging ways of changing and “equalizing” everything. Ironically, since the powerful of this world are actually powerful this striving for an equitable world is, by necessity, generally brought about through the means of force of one kind or another.

But Jesus did not come to rule by force, not the first time anyway. He came and sacrificed his life to balance the scales of justice, so that we could all be forgiven for our part in this horror show. But another day is coming, and that is the subtext of so many of the teachings of Jesus. Including this one.

The rewards listed in the beatitudes implicitly demand a new order, a new day, and a truly new creation, one where evil is no more. The meek are victims in this present age and Jesus knew that better than anyone. He was not talking about this age, but the age to come. He was not looking for justice in this age, he was paying the way for the next age, one where God is King not the powerful, violent, and greedy. An age where justice is actual and not an ideal or a happy day dream.

The meek Jesus spoke of, are those whose relationship to this age is the same as his. Jesus was meek, he loved, he served, he healed, he taught, he helped, and ultimately he was murdered for it by the wicked and powerful of this age and the crowd cheered as they killed him. He was calling all of us to follow him as he did real good in this present evil world, knowing that whatever he does in this world will have consequences far into the next world. True justice comes at judgment day, but good can be done now by those who are meek. And though the world does not recognize the value of this sort of meekness, God does.

The meek will literally inherit the actual earth that the powerful have been trying to steal and dominate since the beginning. This is a future promise, but living as sheep among wolves is a present reality.

Matt 10:16 “Behold, I am sending you out as sheep in the midst of wolves, so be wise as serpents and innocent as doves.

So this week let’s remember that following Jesus is the path of the meek. This path runs contrary to way of this world, but it is a path that leads to a permanent inheritance in the next age in the new heavens and earth. We will not inherit this present earth with all of its violence, we will inherit the earth cleansed of evil and death in the age to come. With this in mind we need to encourage each other to seek that kingdom, rather than our slice of the pie in the current kingdoms of this evil age. We need to encourage each other to stay strong and through faith continue to do good until the end.

Jesus by all external appearances was defeated by the evil of this age. Yet we know this was only an apparent defeat. Death could not hold Jesus, he is the author of life, nor can it hold us, if we belong him and follow him. This week let’s encourage each other. Not with some forlorn hope that evil will somehow become good, but with the knowledge that death has been defeated and final judgment is coming on all evil. And beyond that final judgment - awaits our inheritance. The meek will inherit the earth, but it will be a new earth, where evil and death are no more. Until then, we must plant the seeds of God’s kingdom into the hearts of all those that will receive it. So they too can have a hope that is real, a hope of true justice and of peace in Jesus, a new life now and new earth forever.

In just a little while, the wicked will be no more; though you look carefully at his place, he will not be there. But the meek shall inherit the land and delight themselves in abundant peace.

[Ps 37:10-11 ESV]

Have a great week!

The world we live in often leaves us feeling harassed and anxious, it can leave us feeling desperate to take control of our lives and bring them into order. I feel like this a lot. Many times the chaos in my life is my own doing, and I often need to stop and reflect and ask myself about my priorities. But sometimes, maybe more often than I am comfortable with, these interruptions have another source. And I think this is especially true when those interruptions are people. Sometimes these “interruptions” are not interruptions at all they are brought to us by God himself.

As I was reading the passage for today, this story caused me to stop and reflect a bit on my assumptions about “self-care” and “time management”. It caused me to re-think what “walking the way of Jesus” really looked like for the disciples, and what it might look like today. And by today I really do mean today as in this actual day.

To set up today’s passage, it is important to understand that Jesus has just been informed that his cousin John the Baptist has been beheaded by Herod for the most outrageous reason imaginable. This passage picks up from there:

Now when Jesus heard this, he withdrew from there

Jesus understandably and desperately wants some time alone with his Father to process the loss of his cousin and contemplate the evil that brought about his insane and gruesome death. His instinct to find a quiet place to pray and process is not only correct but important in a time like this. However, it was not to be.

But when the crowds heard it,

In spite of his own feelings and even needs, Jesus had compassion on them and healed their sick. On what was likely the worst day of Jesus’ life to date, a day when he wanted nothing more than to take some time to process the loss of family, he sees the suffering of others and puts their good ahead of his own.

Wait… what?

Everything I have ever been told or taught about grief and suffering is screaming at me right now that Jesus did the wrong thing. But is that right? It was a very costly thing for him to do to be sure, but was he wrong to do it? Here we have to be careful how we judge, the compassion that Jesus showed for the sick is the same love he showed us all at the cross. Instead of spending his remaining energy trying to repair his own wounds he uses it to heal others. That is love.

But this story does not end there, his disciples are with him and they also knew John, they were also grieving and hurt. They were very likely frightened as well by such a vicious attack on a godly man for the most trivial reasons. Look what happens next:

Now when it was evening, the disciples came to him and said,

Everyone was tired, the people were tired, the disciples were tired, and I am sure Jesus was beyond all tired after giving of himself all day for this crowd. But he does not send them away as the disciples ask, but instead he asks the disciples to feed them. Imagine hearing that someone you loved was brutally murdered on a whim, then as you went off to grieve you were accosted by a huge crowd and against everything you were feeling at that moment we asked to serve them all day instead.

Now imagine when this nightmare of a day was finally coming to an end you are told to do the impossible and feed this crowd without the resources you need to do it. The disciples often failed in the gospels, but this is one time that they actually did remarkably well. They obeyed and they served and trusted that somehow or other, Jesus was going to make all this work.

Compassion or Resentment?

We are all interrupted by other people and their needs just as Jesus and his disciples were. In fact this is just one of many examples in the gospels of Jesus doing miracles and healing while he was actually on his way to somewhere else. The question for his disciples and the question to us is always the same. Are we going to choose others welfare in these moments, or are we going to choose our own?

When we are busy it is a short road from interruption to impatience, from impatience to annoyance, and annoyance to resentment. But the Holy Spirit in us is asking us to choose another path. It is the path of Jesus, it is the love of Jesus in us calling us to set aside our needs for the needs of other. To benefit others at our expense.

This week instead of assuming all interruptions are evil incarnate let’s consider if some them are actually opportunities sent by God to give us the chance to labor along with Jesus even on the worst days. Do we have the strength to do this? No, but then neither did the disciples, Jesus more than made up for what they lacked in this story. And he will do the same for us each day as we trust him and keep our eyes open for the interruptions of God.

Have a great week!

This week, we are going to spend a bit of time with one of the oldest stories there is. The story of mankind’s descent into sin. The story of Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden. In this new year, let’s start at the beginning and take a fresh look at what drives us to do the things we do.

Now the serpent was more crafty than any other beast of the field that the Lord God had made.

One thing that always interests me in this story, and I think it speaks to who we are as human beings, is this: there were two special trees in the garden. One was called the Tree of Life, and the other the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil. It seems our natural inclination from the start was to look at the one thing that was out of our reach. We had life and abundance for the taking, but instead, our desires drew us to the one tree whose fruit was forbidden. So it seems, even before we sinned, there was a natural curiosity and a set of desires in place that drew us to dangerous places.

Three primal desires

What were these desires? Were these desires sinful in themselves? Let’s consider these questions one at a time. If we look at this story carefully, I think there are at least three desires that can be identified. Some would sum it all up and say we fell into pride, but to me, pride is a sinful condition of the heart. Proud is what we became because of our mishandling of our core desires. I am looking at what we were before we fell, and it seems to me we had desires, and these desires, though not sinful in themselves, were easily exploited by the serpent to encourage us to choose to satisfy our immediate desires over obeying God’s long term desires for us.

Let me begin by listing the desires I see in this story.

Ascendancy

This is the desire to improve and increase ourselves. It is actually a useful desire considering our commission from God. “Be fruitful and multiply and fill the earth and subdue it, and have dominion over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the heavens and over every living thing that moves on the earth.”  

So, the desire for ascendancy is not sin, but it is what drew them to the tree in the first place. The desire to extend, increase, and subdue became a desire to push the boundaries. But even that was not a sin until it became disobedience. In this story, the desire for ascendancy was the thing that drove our desire for knowledge and wisdom and to be “like God.”

Autonomy

This is the desire for self-rule, and it is also necessary if we are to obey God’s commission to multiply. “Therefore, a man shall leave his father and his mother and hold fast to his wife, and they shall become one flesh.”  But when we embrace this fundamental desire to grow and mature and to become responsible for our own well-being and establish our own family, this desire is easily subverted into the desire to be fully autonomous. Which in practice becomes a desire to be our own final authority.

Left unchecked, this desire will throw off all other sources of authority, including God’s, and turn us into self-serving rebels against our own creator. So we see again in this story that the desire for autonomy drove us to take matters into our own hands and take the things that we were not intended to have. This desire ultimately drove us to usurp God’s authority and place ourselves in the role of being our own god.

Physical satisfaction

The last desire in play here is the ever-present desire for physical satisfaction. The desire for physical satisfaction is so primal and so necessary that we could not live or multiply without it. Yet, as has always been the case, when physical desire overwhelms our love for God and others, when the desire for physical satisfaction becomes primary, a whole host of evils are born. We see this desire raise its ugly head as they looked at the forbidden fruit and thought is was beautiful and good for food.

The temptations never change

And so the story goes, all the way down to today. We still struggle with these primal desires, and we still allow them to lead us into various sins of pride and rebellion against God’s authority. We still feel that if we want it, we need it; if we need it, we take it. Sadly, we do this regardless of what God wants, and often with no regard for its long-term impact on ourselves or others.

These desires, though not evil in themselves, become the core motivations for evil. They are desires for our benefit, not God’s, and not others. When we allow these desires to rule us, we turn love on its head. Remember, love is benefiting others at my expense.

Jesus took a different path

Then he(Jesus) said to them,

As Jesus was contemplating the most difficult decision in human history we see him in the end making a very different choice than the one we continue to make from the beginning. Jesus chose God’s will and our good over his, the short term cost was immeasurable, but so was the long term gain. Jesus, in sacrificing his immediate desires and needs to God’s ultimate plan and wisdom, gained not only eternal glory for himself but eternal life for us all.

This week

This week, let’s commit to being more aware of how these desires affect us. When it comes to these basic nagging desires and the temptations that they bring, we are still faced with the same basic choice. Will we follow the will of God, or will we follow our desires and pursue our own satisfaction? Will we cave in to the pressure of our desires, or will we lean into Jesus, whose Spirit gave Him the strength to say no to his desires and yes to the will of God? Are we saying, like Adam and Eve, not your will, but mine be done? Or will we, like Jesus, trust in God’s strength and say, not my will but yours be done? This week, let’s encourage each other to follow God and not our lower desires and supposed needs, trusting Jesus and the Holy Spirit of God to give us the strength through our new creation to both desire and do God’s will.

Have a great week!

The New year always brings with it a sort of implicit hope. Hope that this year might be better than the last. A hope for relief - a hope for change. I think this is a good thing, even though it may in reality be nothing more that a conditioned cultural response after all without a calendar one day is no different than the next. But in spite of this I think we all agree that every day is a new day, but more importantly each day is an opportunity to change. It is good to consider what we could do today that may make tomorrow just a bit better than today for ourselves and others. This hope for a better tomorrow represents the soul of most Christian worship services. Which are often built around the ideas of self reflection, confession of sin, and repentance(which is a change of direction).

But is Christianity simply a self-improvement exercise? Does self-improvement ultimately achieve what our eternal souls need? Can we really overcome our selfish desires through the efforts of self? Or are we in reality exchanging one form of self-centered living for another? Is there any way out of the “pull yourself up by your own bootstraps” dilemma? I think this passage is my favorite meditation when I am reflecting on my inability to heal myself.

For the love of Christ controls us, because we have concluded this:

From this passage is seems clear that change is not a function of our efforts it is a function of our death and resurrection in Christ. Salvation is not the result of our efforts but of His. What’s more our fallen natures and evil desires are not repaired, they are replaced. They are replaced by a wholly new creation. What we were no longer defines us, for we are not what we were, we are now something completely new in Christ.

What does this mean in day to day life?

For a long time I took a primarily theological approach to this concept of death and new creation. It became more or less an abstraction and something with more eternal significance than day to day usefulness. However, I have learned over the years that for those sins that seem particularly stubborn, this idea is the difference between success and failure.

In practice, faith in Jesus involves faith in several things. When we say we are trusting in the “finished work of Jesus” that work was his substitutionary death and his victorious resurrection. However, this passage tells us that his death was not his alone but when he died, we all died with him. By his death we were therefore set free from the power of sin, because the person I used to be, the person who was a slave to desire and sin died, and is now a new creation in Christ. Faith in Jesus is believing all of that and more.

As we begin to truly accept that the death of Jesus was also our death, we are set free from the power of our old life and given the ability to live a new life. A life that was impossible for us while we were still enslaved to our various desires and sin.

Changing our thinking

This concept is a lot to take in and our feelings want to say it ain’t so. But God say’s it’s true so this passage also gives us a bit of instruction about how to get our head wrapped around all of this. Paul tells us, “From now on we know no one according to the flesh…”. This includes ourselves, we do not even know ourselves according to the flesh. Who we were, the way we have always thought about ourselves, are all irrelevant because we have died. That person I knew as me has died. Now I have to get to know that new person who was created in Christ as a son of God. I need to follow that new person as he grows up into that which God intended from the beginning. Consider the following:

But if Christ is in you,

So we can “start over” we can live a different life. But we can’t do this by our own efforts through our own corrupted desires and strength. God in Jesus has already restarted us, we now need to walk in this new life of the Spirit and put no trust in who or what we were. We need to consider that old life dead, and fully embrace the new life we have in Christ through the Spirit.

Giving this grace to others

This week let’s forget about trying to fix ourselves up and simply let that old life go while embracing our new identity in Christ. As we allow the grace of God the freedom to work in our lives we need to remember that this same struggle is going on in our believing brothers and sisters. Paul said, “from now on we know no one according to the flesh” and this includes our brothers and sisters in faith. Let’s refuse to know them according to who they were and instead let’s call out who they are in Christ this week. Let’s refuse to identify them by the labels that used to define them, but see them as new creations in Christ. We can all start over, and we can do it today, if we have the courage to walk away from a life that is already dead and step into a new creation that is destined for far greater things in Christ.

Have a great week!

I woke up the other night thinking about this simple thought, Jesus is with me. Now I know that a thought like that does not exactly break new ground in theology or dazzle anyone with its genius, but maybe it should. As I laid there thinking about that I realized that all I was doing was thinking about that, I was thinking about the idea of Jesus being with me. I was not experiencing the presence of Jesus nor was I really with him in that moment. I was just thinking about him from a distance so to speak, as if that is possible.

I realized that I was thinking about that, I was thinking about the idea of Jesus being with me. I was not experiencing the presence of Jesus, nor was I really with him in that moment.

When I realized this it set off a traffic jam of thoughts in my head and heart about the nature of my relationship with Jesus in everyday life. So today, as we finish this year and prepare for the next, I wanted to meditate on the actual presence of Jesus - the Immanuel of Isaiah, a name which means, “God with us”.

And Jesus came and said to them,

As a missionary for over 30 years this passage is very well known to me, I have studied it and I have preached on it, and I have used it to guide my decisions, but looking at it today, it’s the last line that stands out to me. Jesus is with us, that is a fact. But do we live as if Jesus is with us? Do we talk to Jesus like he is actually with us? Or are our prayers more like postcards we drop in the mail? Do we see the world through his eyes as we stand with him? Or do we see the world through the eyes of the media? These are a few of the thoughts I would like to explore today.

Do we live as if Jesus is with us?

If we believe Jesus is alive and with us how does that change things? If we “practice the presence of God” one of the things we need to do is follow the example of the prophets and righteous people of old. One of King David’s disciplines for example was his persistence in “seeking the face of God”. Consider this passage from Psalm 27.

You have said,

Our mind does not naturally seek God, it naturally seeks its own various desires. So it seems to me that the first step toward developing a richer walk with Jesus is teaching ourselves to seek a richer walk with Jesus, we need to practice seeking the face of Jesus in everyday life. Jesus told us that he is with us always to the end of this age. It is a delusional mind that denies reality, and the presence of Jesus is a reality. So we are in effect all mentally ill, in a manner of speaking. We live in the presence of God every day but we rarely acknowledge it. We must discipline ourselves to live in reality, the reality of God and His Son Jesus. To live in reality we must take David’s lead and seek the face of God everyday, until it becomes a habit of mind. As our perspective changes and expands we will finally understand reality as it actually is. And we will know that we are never alone.

Our conversations all take place in the presence of Jesus. When we speak, we speak to Jesus as well. Our troubles are not ours alone, but Jesus is there to comfort us and give us his strength. Jesus is with us if we will believe, He is there if we are willing to take his hand. He is listening, are we listening to him? If not, we must learn to listen.

The Tyranny of Noise

So why don’t we do this more often? The reason I believe these thoughts came to me at night is that during the day the noise and pressures of everyday life deafen and blind us to the presence of God. The world is filled with the voices of unbelief. We easily forget that Jesus himself is with us as we push through the difficulties and distractions of our daily lives. This is why we must do as David did and “seek the face of God”, we must learn to “practice the presence of God” like Brother Lawrence. We need to discipline our weak and beleaguered minds to live in the reality of God’s love and the presence of Jesus.

So this week, no matter how crazy life can be at times, I plan to intentionally take time to seek the face of God, to personally interact with Jesus, to quiet my soul and listen to the one that loves me, who set aside his glory to become a man, and gave his life for me. I hope you can join me in this kind of working/walking worship this week and I pray that you and yours have a truly blessed week, and a happy New Year!

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