LIFE

For this reason also, since the day we heard of it, we have not ceased to pray for you and to ask that you may be filled with the knowledge of His will in all spiritual wisdom and understanding, so that you will walk in a manner worthy of the Lord, to please Him in all respects, bearing fruit in every good work and increasing in the knowledge of God; strengthened with all power, according to His glorious might, for the attaining of all steadfastness and patience; joyously giving thanks to the Father, who has qualified us to share in the inheritance of the saints in Light.

For He rescued us from the domain of darkness, and transferred us to the kingdom of His beloved Son, in whom we have redemption, the forgiveness of sins. Colossians 1:9-14

Paul’s prayer is what he profoundly longed to see in the lives of these he ministered to. This life of which he speaks, is nothing less than the result of inner transformation, spiritual transformation, a life of grace in the One who has been transferred into life in the ‘Kingdom of His Beloved Son’.

All of this is the result of life, in being risen with Christ beyond death.

1 Corinthians 15:17 “If Christ had not been risen you would still be dead in your sins.”What about the cross? The cross must never be presented without the resurrection. You don’t have a cross that means anything without a resurrection. Without resurrection you have a dead salvation that does not relate to the present spiritual life in Christ of the believer. For Jesus, life was the issue.

This is why we must get past a view of atonement in which all that matters is that Jesus has taken the punishment for our sins. The problem with such a reductionist view of the gospel is evident in the lives of many who limit it to such. What about discipleship? It is viewed as not required or even irrelevant to the status of our now ‘saved’ condition. Why? Because ‘saved’ has been reduced in meaning to my sins having been forgiven.

LET ME EMPHASIZE (because it is ever apparent that I now must say what I don’t mean by what I say!): It does indeed mean the glorious truth that my sins are forever forgiven, without which any hope of change, transformation, discipleship, eternal life, heaven would be an unreachable hope. Of course it is forgiveness, it is not just forgiveness.

The theme in the New Testament is life, regeneration, who we are becoming and becoming like Christ. From God’s perspective the basic truth of salvation is the impartation of life. Over and over this truth is proclaimed.

1 Peter 1:3 Blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, who according to His great mercy has caused us to be born again to a living hope through the resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead…

and 1 John 3:1-3 See how great a love the Father has bestowed on us, that we would be called children of God; and such we are. For this reason the world does not know us, because it did not know Him. Beloved, now we are children of God, and it has not appeared as yet what we will be. We know that when He appears, we will be like Him, because we will see Him just as He is. And everyone who has this hope fixed on Him purifies himself, just as He is pure.

Without this truth, inner change (spiritual transformation) is seen as an oddity, irrelevant, perhaps a bit ‘monkish’ or even heretical. But if understood from the perspective of a new life received from above, then it can be seen as a transformation in this life. A progressive transformation because who we are becoming is of primary importance to God the King.

THE LANGUAGE OF THE KINGDOM

Mark 11:22-26
Jesus is giving instructions on asking in faith. Moving mountains and requests being granted. The disciples have been enamored with the death of a fig tree and are asking about this unique event. In this teaching moment Jesus is encouraging His young followers and telling them of the marvelous strength of prayer. He then adds a seemingly extraneous instruction: And when you stand praying, forgive.

Why? Because forgiveness is the language of the Kingdom. You can’t stand in the powerful resources of the Kingdom without practicing forgiveness.

How do I handle the unfair and spiteful attacks from those I neither know nor have contact with? I am aware there are some unmerited criticisms (both verbal and written) being disseminated in our community about me, even condemning me as a heretic and worse. (The authors may not know this but some of them clearly border on libel.)

I was asked today, why I do not defend myself?
The reason is because I forgive them.

I hold no animosity in my heart toward them and I will not build my life around their offense nor will I make them pay for what they have said and done to me. I don’t need to. As I trust Christ, I know what is going to happen to me, He is going to take care of me.

What makes forgiveness possible is His grace at work in our life to accomplish what we cannot do on our own. That is why grace is not just for guilt, it is for life. The sinner needs grace just to forgive sins, the disciple and follower of Christ depends on grace for every step, every action as they move more clearly into the light of the knowledge of the glory of God.

For those who mistreat you, you can ask, ‘who are you?’ as you hold them up next to the One who says, “There is therefore no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus.” (See: Romans 8:1) Besides, they try and condemn me but forget, “I am dead and my life is hidden with Christ in God…” (Colossians 3:1-4).

One of the more unpleasant statements of Jesus is found in Luke 10:3 in His great experiment of sending out the 70: Go, behold, I send you out as lambs in the midst of wolves.

Just examine the evidence yourself and look at the vituperative, unpleasant and mean-spirited language used in the attacks. The sniping and calling me out. The relentless barbs and references in blogs. The snide letters and language.

Who are the wolves?
By their fruits you shall know them.

BETTER THAN ABC's

I strongly suggest that all readers of this blog check out Casey’s recent blog of 5-23 (http://caseysliquidblog.blogspot.com/). Both of you will be enlightened...oh wait, Casey you are one them and Jess is the other!!
OK, I too, digress. Casey, once again you nail it.

In one way or the other-most of our presentations and definitions of the gospel deal solely with the question: what am I going to do about my sin? Is there then any connection to either the message of Jesus or His ‘Great Commission’ of Matthew 28:16-20?

If grace is but for guilt we are led to the inexorable conclusion that had we never sinned we wouldn’t need God, His way of life or His grace.

If grace if just for guilt, then what is to be an interactive, living relationship with God degenerates into a religion of Christianity which is more like a Clichéianity. This leaves us with the strange anomaly today of thinking that one can be a ‘Christian’ and not be a disciple of Christ.

2 events blessed me beyond belief this week. The first was a recovering narcotic addict who told how he found he could have a personal relationship with his ‘Higher Power’ through one who was called Jesus Christ. The second was from a dear sister in Christ who worships God in the Catholic tradition. I had written a letter to her defending her against ones in our community who attacked her form of worship. She wrote me a beautiful note extolling the beauties of entering the Kingdom as a little child and finding the ‘healing love of Christ’.

Neither one of these used the catchwords of the ABC’s of salvation Casey so eloquently exposed in his blog. Neither used the catchy religious slang and by-words that become like secret passwords among the indoctrinated. Yet both spoke of life. Real life Jesus gives as we follow Him.

I’d stand with either one of those on the path of life as we learn together the ‘healing love of Christ’, finding a righteousness beyond that of the Pharisee and learning from the Master how to live life, over any of the other countless religious elite who hold to the party line and clichés of a dead religion.

God bless you Monte and God bless you Shauna for opening my eyes to the purity of following Jesus into real life. And God bless you Mikey and Patti for proving to me once again that life in Jesus is a life no one could genuinely experience and want anything else. And God bless you Casey for challenging my thinking.

MAKING ALL THINGS NEW

One of the embarrassing things about Jesus was His utter lack of concern in who He hung out with, touched or welcomed. Consider the leper in Mark 1:40. Lepers weren’t supposed to be approaching people but with the typical generosity of Jesus He welcomed him, spoke to him, challenged him and touched him. Not a touch like we would have given. The word there means to embrace or adhere to. I imagine Jesus helping the man off of his knees and bear hugging him as He welcomed him into his new life.

Jesus presents to us the opportunity to be joint heirs in nothing less than this new type of humanity-the Kingdom Community of the redeemed. All recovering sinners, all blessed of Him. Not seeing how exclusive we can be in drawing our circles but how inclusive we will be.

A community learning together the great transformation process that can happen through the new life received from above where we aren’t concentrating on doing religious things but learning to actually be loving people, from whom flow the living rivers of water.

This new type of humanity is the complete obliteration of social status-where we gather as Abraham’s seed. We have ‘put on Christ’ and now there are no distinctions, which are to be made (Galatians 3:26-29; Col. 3:10-11).

In this community made up of a new kind of humanity, we learn to discard everything that comes from other than the work and person of Christ in His crucifixion and beyond. (1 Cor. 2:2) Because He is ‘IT’. The Messiah who comes as the solution to the human problem. (2 Cor. 5:16-17)

There are not many who would be put on the world’s list of who’s who.
We are the list of the world’s last and least. But to us the Kingdom is available, forgiveness in abundance, grace without limit and the opportunity to become the kind of people He always intended us to be in spite of what we may have been in the past. This is the New Creation in Christ (2 Cor. 5:17; Gal. 6:15).
And dare I say, ‘The making of all things new’ (Rev. 21:5).

THE FIRST STEP BACK

If one wished to make discipleship to Jesus the most important thing in their life, what should they do? If they wish to leave the constraints of religious performance and external conformance behind, how would one proceed?

I would encourage you to stay away. Really, I encourage you to stay away.
If you can, you probably should.
Genuine disciples simply can’t stay away.
They have nowhere else to go.

If you are comfortable in the garb of religious clichés, Christian morals and church doctrine determined by those with the most authority and influence, you should stay there, for discipleship will be for you a burden and an immense disappointment. See: Matthew 13:44-46 for example.

If you just can’t stay away, then you have made the first step toward genuine, inner transformation where the work must be done. But let’s be clear, you have to do something. Discipleship is not passive, it is active. But the active part is not in the area of trying to obey Him, being righteous or perfect. Leave all hope in that direction behind. We aren’t striving for obedience; we are putting effort into becoming a certain kind of person for whom obedience becomes spontaneous. We do that by doing the things within our power, which will enable Him to do what He has been waiting to do all along; change every aspect of our entire person into one fully functioning human being. While we have a part to play in this transformation process, we will never trust our part. Remember, we are learning to Trust Christ, the essence of the good news of the Kingdom.

If the idea that you have to actually DO something to enable God to do something else in your life appalls you, you have hit a major obstruction to further development. If you want transformation to simply strike you like lightening in the midst of a church service, then retreat silently into your Christianity and religious observances. If that is your idea of discipleship, you will never have a righteousness that exceeds that of the scribes and Pharisees, necessary, as Jesus said to enter the Kingdom of the Heavens. You will have a righteousness that is defined by external performance of religious activities and nailing down the corners of your pristine doctrine.

If you are willing to embark, to move beyond this initial roadblock into making being with Jesus learning to be like Him the most important thing in your life, take a walk. Really, take a long walk. Leave the technology (all of it) behind and settle this issue for at least today. Will I make following Jesus the most important thing in life? It is the most important decision you will make every day of the rest of your existence, which will never end.
Will, I today, choose discipleship to Jesus as the single most crucial aspect of my life?
TO BE CONTINUED…
On your next walk: Learning the language of the Kingdom.

A CONFESSION

A confession. As I live in Christ, following Him, albeit in an imperfect way into discipleship to be the person God has always intended me to be, I become less and less interested in presenting Christianity to people. I don’t want to invest my life into trying to get people to align with or adhere to Christianity. I want people to find what I have found in the person of Christ.

The lovely, winsome, intelligent, intriguing and living person of Jesus Christ.

Since childhood I have always questioned the prevailing assumptions being presented in the church and was regularly thumped (both literally and figuratively). I went underground for years and built walls that almost destroyed my soul. God never gave up, even when Christianity did.

I found new life in Christ. A person. Not a religion, church or sect. And it has been Christ, not Christianity that has begun to heal my hurting soul. Redeemed by His blood and saved by His life.

Christianity was a tag hung on some by the world, then taken over by the church and now argued over as to who is and who isn’t really in. Count me out. In Lebanon it is the name of a political group, in America it is the description of our historical roots and in other places it is the side of bloody protests. Perhaps it is time to give the word back to the world that gave it to us. Like Cassandra in Greek Mythology where Apollo's cursed gift of prophecy became a source of endless pain and frustration, the moniker ‘Christian’ has been an untold source of sorrow and hurt, wars and blood.

Let’s be honest, ‘Christianity’ is now a ‘religion’ and the world isn’t buying what we are selling wrapped in the description they invented. For good reason the world has had a bellyful of our sermonizing and in-fighting. What we are selling is a merchandized, commercialized, consumer driven religion that requires adherents to bow at the shrine of the influential writers and speakers who apparently are the gatekeepers and protestant popes of this religious movement.

Often what we are selling is not consistent with the person of Jesus in whom we are finding a life of such transformative power we have had no trouble considering the cost as the best bargain ever presented in life.

I am too old to speak to a movement or start a trend. I have neither the energy, the patience, the intelligence nor probably the right. I pray for those God is rising up in the midst of our religious culture who will say by their life, no more. No more religion. No more consumerism. No more to ‘Christianity’. Just followers of Christ into the kind of life He intends, becoming all that He intended us to be and by our lives shut the mouths of kings. For it might be His intent that this new breed of Christ followers will be the way by which He will sprinkle many nations with Himself; where the kings shall shut their mouths at him; for that which had not been told them shall they see; and that which they had not heard shall they consider (Is. 52:15)

IRS

OK, some thoughts as I exit the federal building in Boise. Ah, what to say!

I know what I would have said in days gone by. Very practiced and trained in the weapons of this flesh. I know what one living in this world would say. I used to live there. I know how one entrenched in the warfare of this world would act. It was my old battlefield. Frustrated? That's an understatement. Discouraged. Rarely have I felt more. An Imbroglio. Possibly appropriate. Galamatias. There's a word that comes to mind to describe what I may have wanted to express in response to some of the conclusions reached by the 'examiner'.

On the 2+ hour drive home I came to one conclusion. My hope, confidence and rest is in God alone. It is not in finances, it is not in physical events and health and, I wish to LOUDLY proclaim, it sure as heaven and hell is not in government, the IRS, bureaucracies, the UN or the lords of this world. None of those things put a hallelujah on my chorus.

So I recognize God, every so often in a timely fashion, has to challenge the foundations of my hope and confidence to make sure that my house is being built on a rock. On Him. I will always praise Him because He alone is my hope.

Is There Anything Worth Everything?

Some thoughts as I sit in the parking lot of the Federal Building in Boise awaiting my opportunity for God to show Himself strong on my behalf!!

Jesus constantly encouraged His followers with this challenge of discipleship: Is it the most important thing in your life? If it isn’t, you won’t be successful in the endeavor. Not because He won’t let us, but because it can’t be done any other way. But, how do we know what is important to us and what is not. What is most important to us and what is of little importance to us?

What would you give your life for? What would you give your life up to? Would you give your life for pleasure? Would you give your life up to fulfilling your desires? Would that be a noble endeavor?

Would you give your life for truth? Would you give your life for freedom?

Is there anything in your life that is worth giving your life for?

Would you give your life for the pursuit of happiness? Even the best moralists know that we need to find something in life more important to us than being happy.

Would I give my life to learning how to be a fully formed human being if it was the path by which my ultimate purpose is fulfilled: To glorify God and serve Him forever? Would that be a noble endeavor? Would I give the rest of this life (whatever is left) to this one task of learning how to be the fully formed human being my creator intended in order that He might trust me with His power in living a life that will never end?

What did He find worth giving His life for?

What would you give your life for?

The Veritas Forum

At the Veritas Forum at Columbia University in 2006, Alistair McGrath discussed with atheist David Helfand the issue of the meaning of life and the topic of Dawkin’s book: Is God a Delusion? Alistair McGrath, a writer whose must read book, ‘In the Beginning’ about the development of the King James Bible is positing the position that science points more arguably to the truth of God than to God as a delusion.

In the argument Mr. McGrath makes an interesting observation about the position of the reformation. “The reformation corresponds very well to what Thomas Kuhn would describe as a radical paradigm shift. And the key thing about Protestantism is it proposes not simply one such reforming event in the past, but an ongoing process of constant reevaluation and revision to try to ascertain that we have the best possible handle on our knowledge of God, and we want a sort of biblical anchor for that.” (emphasis mine)

If Mr. McGrath who is a brilliant intellectual follower of Christ is right in his characterization of the reformation movement then we must embrace and encourage those who challenge, question and present a new perspective that cause us to think, ponder, study and pray. I, for one, do want the best possible handle on my knowledge of God with a biblical anchor.

Let’s not be afraid to think new thoughts and challenge old ones, holding up everything to the ‘light of the knowledge of the Glory of God as seen in the face of Christ’.

Note: This quote by McGrath comes from a book entitled: A Place for Truth, Leading Thinkers Explore Life’s Hardest Questions, published by InterVarsity. It is a compilation of talks at the Veritas Forum. Since it’s founding at Harvard in 1992, this forum has provided a place for leading thinkers to explore life’s most challenging and deepest questions of truth and life. A place to consider a serious dialogue without fear of reproach. I have personally followed the discussions for years and recommend them to anyone who is up for a challenge.

RICHER THAN RIGHT

What rail did we take bringing us off track in discipleship? Our dialogue has become splitting hairs over issues of Christianity rather than a discussion and presentation of a person, Jesus Christ. Our ‘Christianity’ has become our doctrines and thus it is more important to swear allegiance to our doctrines than to our King. Jesus has become just another Buddha who said on his death bed to his disciples who were concerned on how best to remember him; don’t remember me, it is not my person but my teachings that matter.

What matters in Christianity today is apparently having the right answers to the right questions. Whether you even believe them isn’t the issue, you just have to profess to believe them or worse, commit to things you don’t even profess to believe.

Get enough of the right answers you are in, too many wrong answers you are off to the bad place. Which ones do you have to answer correctly? Do you have to even believe your answers are true or just have them? Can you just profess them, even if you don’t believe them? Can you just commit to them even if you don’t profess to believe them? How many wrong answers can you have? Which ones are worth more points? Will they be multiple choice, fill in the blank or T or F? To which did the ‘thief’ profess?

Ask yourself, what is the importance of believing that Jesus is Divine?
Is it to just to have the right answer? Is it to get points to add to the score to make the cut? Is it to have superior knowledge from which to manufacture bullets to hurt others badly in lively debates?

Surely you are thinking, no, it isn’t anything like that at all. It isn’t to have the right answer. If I believe Him to be Divine, to have come here and established a beachhead of divine life in this little far away place we call earth, then I am going to relate to my world differently. More importantly, I will relate to Him differently. I will make following Him into life the most important thing as I learn how to become the kind of person who lives the life He described.

I will evaluate the world in which I live and the situations I go through from a different perspective and will come to see this life I live as one lived in a completely different world than the one described by the lords of knowledge.

Maybe, in this world then, it is safe to tell the truth. A world where His advice not to worry can be taken seriously. Maybe I really do live in a world where He reigns and rules and will see to my care. Perhaps I can forgive those who mistreat and abuse me. A world where He can spread before me a table right in the presence of my enemies and I might even say to them, 'Why don't you sit down with me for a bite to eat'.

Isn’t that richer than being right?

THE PARADIGM SHIFT

One of the most important steps one can take into genuine, meaningful, life-changing discipleship to Jesus is to make the paradigm switch from Jesus being merely a nice religious figure to one who actually knew what He was talking about. The need is there to begin to view Jesus as an intelligent person who has the most important information on the most important subjects of life.

If we would view Him as encompassing truth outside the religious realm, like His first followers understood Him, we would see one in whom dwells all the treasures of wisdom and knowledge. If He does have that capacity for wisdom and knowledge, then you can begin to understand why He said if you learn to put into practice the things that I have taught, you will know the truth about life and the truth about life will set you free.

Who else can you turn to, realistically, in order to learn how to become a fully formed human being living in this world? To be free to be the kind of person we are meant to be? Who else would be your teacher? Really, the list is very, very, short.

Take any of them and ask if this would be true: If you put my teachings into practice, then you will be my students and I will be your teacher. You will come to know the truth about life and this world and in knowing that truth, you will never again be ruled by unsatisfied desires and will find fulfillment in becoming the fully formed human being you were designed to be.

That’s really the test isn’t it? Putting the things into practice. Who is it that offers life to the fullest extent? Jesus could say as an intelligent human being who knew a thing or two about life, ‘If you learn to put into practice the things that I teach you, your life will be like a house built upon solid rock. Even the most devastating of life’s challenges won’t be able to tear it down’.

LEARNING LOVE

My brief stay in the hospital for a rather minor surgical repair of failing body parts and my current recuperation at home has forced me to consider in silence much of where I have come since I last visited a hospital on an extended retreat some 11 years ago.

I have learned that I am not my body and as a primarily spiritual being who will never stop existing I have realized that inner transformation is paramount. This can only happen in discipleship to Jesus.
Matthew 7:17, the good tree cannot bear bad fruit.
Proverbs 4:23 Watch over your heart with all diligence for from it flow the springs of life.

I am redeemed in order to be continually transformed in the way of Christ. This transformation happens in the inner person where the Great Command of Luke 10:27 is realized (to love the Lord your God with all of your heart, all of your soul, all of your strength and all of your mind and your neighbor as yourself). But, I am not to act as if I love God and my neighbor; I am to have a character totally saturated with His kind of love. If not, even loving God and by extension my neighbor will be an impossible burden leading to frustration and failure.

Trying to love without actually learning His kind of love produces angry, bitter and contemptuous Christians who find discipleship a hopelessly burdensome task.

However, being permeated with His kind of love will produce a life adequate for every occasion, a well of water spring up to eternal life that Jesus spoke of (John 4:14) and rivers of living water to those around us in desperate need. This is God’s conspiracy and one we are called to take part in as co-conspirators. This is why He is more interested in the character we are building than the doctrine we are amassing.

Knowledge of and intimacy with the doctrinal tenants of the church will not produce Christlike character. You can look around and see this for yourself. It is not that it is unimportant; it just will not create inner transformation.

The future He has planned for us will be based on the character being forged right now in the crucible of life by His grace. This happens in discipleship to Christ as we learn a life that will never become obsolete.

REIGN AGAIN KING JESUS

Thankfully, Casey keeps me up on some of the great controversies in the church today. Apparently there are those out there being pilloried for actually encouraging people to become Disciples of Jesus. To follow Jesus and learn how to become the kind of people who treat others the way Jesus did. In confidence and quietness encouraging others to live the ‘Jesus Life’. Hmmm?

My own analysis of what has happened down through the centuries to the Disciples of Christ is that every few hundred years they must peal away from the authoritarian rule of the church. Like everything man gets their hands on, they want to take control and exercise dominion. It is how we were created and a good thing, until we think our dominion is paramount. The tension always leans towards the mighty exercising power over the masses. The church has constantly done this and is doing this today.

The genuine disciples see this and find the need to Trust Jesus only. They fearlessly stand in His Kingdom professing allegiance to Jesus and following Him and learning His kind of life (eternal). And with each new stand the religious elite object and stammer, heresy. Consider if the term ‘reformed theology’ had not already become part of the hierarchies accepted religious language and someone started a ‘reform’ movement in the church today.

It doesn’t take much imagination to realize what the lords of religious knowledge would scream. Reform? We don’t need to reform what the bible teaches, what the church believes, what we sing and do. Heresy. Heresy and death at the stake to all those who wish to reform what the church has believed for 1500 years (or 100, 500 or 2000 years).

Of course, we are too ‘reformed’ to burn people at the stake today. We write books about them, magazine articles and the authoritarian church hierarchy with all their seminarian influence, publicly brand these true Disciples in the kind of life Jesus actually lived, heretics. Swinging a sword of vile vengeance and reproachful hate in the name of accepted, staid doctrine.

I pray to God on behalf of these new, bold, reformers of the current perverted christian tradition to succeed and bring us back to the life Jesus actually made available to us to live today. A life that finds following Him into discipleship the most important thing in life. To once again emerge as salt and light, not in the four walls of our buildings but within the borders of our community, out into our Valley to the uttermost parts of the earth.

Disciples who draw on the rich resources of the Kingdom Among Us, where out of our innermost beings flow the rivers of living water Jesus spoke of.

Let the rivers flow again and bring the Life of Jesus to this hurting world.

Look around for yourself and draw your own conclusions. The evidence is in and the verdict needs to be read. The protectors of the purity of doctrine have failed to lead people into a life of transformation, overflowing with the goodness of a Majestic God. Let us become co-conspirators again in HIS great plan of overcoming the kingdoms of this world with the Kingdom of our God and of His Christ. Please Lord Jesus, put the Hallelujah back into the Hallelujah chorus.

Reign again King Jesus and let us seek first Your Kingdom.

Break us away from the religious hierarchy of a tyrannical church.

LIVING LIFE AS A CO-CONSPIRATOR

As a disciple, learning how to live life is for the benefit of the world.

Each of you as followers of Christ, have a prophetic responsibility in the community in which you live. That is the salt and the light stuff we talk of.

You will only find that as a reality when you learn your place in the heavenlies right now. This is why we want to go to heaven right now.

Heaven is here. God is in action. Now is your time.

Of course this doesn’t preclude the grand future we have in His presence where we will know as we are known. I don’t want to diminish our hope in any way. But heaven will take care of itself and while we look forward to what the ancients called our ‘long-home’ our life is lived here and the life lived here has a meaning and a purpose that stretches far beyond the borders of time.

This invitation God extends is to enter the Trinitarian community and live as a co-conspirator. To become a vital part of what God is about in this very short time of human history (very short from a cosmological standpoint and very, very unlikely). To become a part of a community of loving people who are redeemed and everything He had hoped the created human being to be.

So that the whole universe can become conscious of the presence and goodness of God. We become a lesson to all of the powers in the universe of the goodness and greatness of God. You will be an exhibit. Get a new understanding of who you are; Ask yourself what would it be like to be on eternal exhibit? To be that valuable.

That is what God wants and He makes it available to everyone. It is available because God is right here. And the Kingdom draws nigh unto others in the form of those who have this new life, this new life received from above now immersed in the reality of the Trinitarian presence of God. This is the bottom line of why it is not difficult to make discipleship the most important thing in your life.

STAYING IN THE GAME

When I have an unpleasant experience while trying to minister to people.

When I am the object of unfair, unjust and unfounded criticism.

When my best efforts to reach out to someone in need is met with rebuke.

What keeps me in the game?

The God who fills the entire universe-wants to be intimate with me. He planned for me from the beginning-has a plan for my ongoing existence. A pretty good trade.

I view the Gospel of Jesus as an invitation to greatness.

It is not an invitation to debase, hate or demean myself.

It is an invitation to be, as a disciple, a co-conspirator with an eternal God, as I accept and respond to His loving invitation to Trust Christ.

As I become more intimate with Him, in this interactive relationship, my desire to sin diminishes as sin itself becomes less and less interesting.

Living a life where readiness to holiness is more appealing.

Seeing my relationship with Him as one that goes beyond the borders of, but certainly includes, forgiveness of sins. Yet, if all I know of Jesus is He has died for my sins, I don’t know Him.

If all I know of God is that He has forgiven me, I don’t know God.

He forgave me to introduce me into the richness of His purposes for me.

His purpose now in a life that will never end.

This is the With-God life.

This universe we live in is itself a manifestation of the greatness of the Word and Voice of God. In it’s vastness and wonders we hear God speaking and see His handiwork and ongoing creativity. If we are to believe what His first followers thought of Him, He is the One holding it all together even now.

Colossians 1:13-20 and Hebrews 1:1-4. They understood Him to be the One in whom all wisdom and all the treasures of knowledge resides.

The Trinity, holding everything together and conspiratorial in their intent.
The ultimate reality about this universe you live in is the Trinity.

Want to know what is at the center of this universe?

God and this lovely community of Divine Persons.

Enjoying and sharing together the goodness they have.

The members of the Trinity have been there forever and will be there forever enjoying themselves and granting us the privilege of sharing their kind of life and the power to be a co-conspirator of His, overcoming the kingdoms of this world…the evil in this world. You are very much part of this. Then together, as a community of loving persons immersed in His ongoing goodness, we are prepared to march into the evil armed with His goodness.

That’s what keeps me going, keeps me in the game as I know He has been given say over everything and is going to be with me every step of the way until the job is done.

Tsunami

2:30 AM and the Tsunami sirens begin to sound. “Evacuate, this is not a drill”, it keeps blaring. From a stupor of restful sleep, having drifted off listening to the sounds of the ocean waves through an open window, I try to make sense of what I am hearing. First I think the cops are calling someone to come out with their hands up. No, too much TV still in the brain.

When I realize what is being blared into my skull I realize, something serious is happening. We check the computer and discover the facts of Japan’s earthquake and understand that size of earthquake could really cause what they are warning us of. The first waves aren’t going to hit for 4 hours but we decide to go ahead and get in the car and drive to ‘Higher Ground’. Besides, it is raining, cold and windy. I really don’t want to be reduced to hiking up the mountain at the last opportunity of escape. I have a survival kit in the car so we have food, water and a stove for cooking, so off we go.

It is then it strikes me, how very much we are like what God uses as a metaphor: Sheep. A herd mentality. When we come to the first realistic parking area, it is absolutely jammed pack full of cars. Probably 150-200 cars taking up every available area to park in. I remember that next to this area is another pull off with another parking lot. I literally go 15 feet further down Highway 26 and turn into another parking lot that even has a bathroom!! Not one car in the whole lot. All the sheep are herded together. I back into a spot in the dark at 3:30 in the AM and thank the Lord that He is not allowed us to stray so far that He could not find us. We didn’t make it back to our cabin until noon and it was all for naught, or was it? I wonder of His creation, of what is happening in it, to it and because of it. I realize how important I am to Him, how grateful I am for His goodness and care. And to realize we are perfectly safe no matter what happens.

For us it turned out, but it doesn’t always turn out that way in the human situation, it surely didn’t for hundreds in Japan for whom I mourn.

How can God allow all of this to happen if He is good? The answer has to be: Because He is good. He will redeem all of the human suffering in His time and in His way. Because He is good. If He isn’t good, a Tsunami is the least of my worries.

The Kingdom as the Basis for Death to Self

I have the privilege of bringing my natural life into His life by giving up my right to run my natural life on its own, without God. You were made to fit into, submit and live in this vast Kingdom of God and operate under the Divine Power of the Trinity. You can’t do that as long as you are holding onto your life. You just can’t do it.

Why from the human point of view we are guilty of such hubris.

We have a readiness to run the whole universe and we would if we could get away with it. Just show me the control panel?

Yet, we cannot even run our own lives.

We think we can but human history stands as undeniable proof that we can’t.

The human being was designed to fit into His kingdom.

That is the basis for death to self. That is the basis for finding our life.

It means that this is a good place to be. It means I never have to do anything wrong because I am not trying to protect my life,

I don’t have to manage my life, and I don’t even have to be happy.

What a load off. I found it to such a great relief to people to discover they don’t have to be happy.

My goal in life is not to be happy in this visible world.

Why would I put my energies into that? Why would I?

Even the best moralists in our world tell us not to strive to be happy but rather to be worthy of happiness.

Try to find something to do in life bigger then being happy.

Leave it to God to arrange for whatever happiness is to come your way. Wouldn’t that be refreshing? Just to leave your happiness up to God-and what He’ll give you in return is joyfulness. A settled sense of wellbeing.

The only way this can be done is to learn to live in His presence right now through confidence in Jesus and in the grace abundantly available to us.

One Lord, One Faith, One Baptism...

Of all the phone calls, conversations and visits I had this week, the one that caused profound sadness was one from a church in our area. They have decided to not partner with the rest of the churches in our annual breakfast for High School seniors because of our ‘differences’.

The churches in our Valley have been hosting a breakfast for graduating seniors for 30 years. We all join together and share the responsibilities each June, taking turns providing music, prayer and a short presentation of the Gospel of Jesus Christ.

I acknowledge that we approach Christ from different directions but we all hold Him up and exalt Jesus Christ as the Messiah, the answer to the human problem that has no human solution. We are light and salt to a community who desperately needs the healing touch of the Gentle Carpenter from Nazareth. The One who came, lived a real life, died a horrible death and rose again to provide life eternal to those who would but place their confidence in Jesus and make following Him into life the most important thing for them. Learning from Him how to live this new life from above that will never end.

But, one church in our valley is right and the rest are wrong. Rather than present our unity in Christ they prefer to magnify the differences.

You don’t find that exclusionary approach in the scriptures.

Galatians 3:26-29 and Ephesians 4:5 is instructive.

Thank God, we are not saved by being right. If anything we are right because we are saved. Perhaps we should focus on being Christlike and whatever we need to be right about we should trust Him for that as well.

I so desperately long and fervently pray for each of the churches in our little valley to thrive because each will reach people the other churches are not positioned to reach. I desire the dissenting church to thrive and I pray for her pastor that he would become the kind of person who can show his community how Jesus Christ would live his live. But the church must not draw its boundaries smaller than God draws the boundaries. This is a sad day for the entire Community of the Redeemed in Long Valley.

WHAT TO REMEMBER WHEN YOU CAN’T FORGET

It is important for us to learn to trust Him but we are also learning that He can be trusted. You aren’t going to trust Him if you doubt He can be trusted.

What do I remember when I can’t forget…He can be trusted,

And I am cared for in this loving community of Divine persons, the Trinity.

Of course, I come to a different conclusion if I think I am running the world.

From that perspective I must evaluate everything on the basis of how it affects me.

Whether I am getting my way or not. Whether I am right.

We should realize there is really no good reason in the universe why we should get our way and as for being right…being right isn’t everything.

When I take my life into His life I learn to trust Him fully because He is fully trustworthy. He is looking out for me. Do you believe that?

Do you believe out of His abundant mercy and love, He is looking out for you?

The basis of our lack of trust in large part is the way we have viewed the essence (the indispensable quality) of Christianity. A God who is pretty angry we screwed up His plan, a fairly mean and angry person who is going to let you off the hook because somebody took your beating. Namely Jesus.

And we miss that it was the heart of love that sent Jesus.

The death of Jesus on the cross does not make God happy when He was unhappy. The death of Jesus is God’s effort to reach human beings with His love. And because of what one member of that Divine Community did He is able to say to the human being, the war is over, you don’t need to carry on the battle any longer, you don’t need to keep fighting because peace comes by accepting the God of Jesus Christ as real, you can go home now.

You can go home.

God is good and it is the goodness of God that leads men to repentance, NOT His meanness. Romans 2:4

Spiritual Vertigo

Often, even in the midst of discipleship our lives just don’t make sense.

We hear the preacher talking about the abundant life of Jesus as we live drawing on the flow of His riches in the Kingdom Amongst us, and we have the tendency to say, wake up and smell the thorns.

A rather severe case of spiritual vertigo.

It is in those times I find whether I really trust, or I just really talk about it.

But it is not whether we experience the bitterness of life that defines our discipleship, it is our response. 3 things to remember during these times.

1. God is here - even when life turns sour.

God is not far away, He is here. That was the gospel Jesus Christ preached.

Our Father in Heaven not far away in space and time…He is right here.

The answer is not going to heaven when we die, the answer is to live in His presence right now.

2.  Nothing too hard for God.

Because God holds everything together anyway. Nothing too hard for Him.

Col. 1:17 In Him all things hold together. See: Luke 1:37

Not to hard for Him to redeem even your sufferings if submitted to Him.

3. God is good.

1 John 1:5 This is the message of Jesus Christ…God is light and in Him there is no darkness at all. NONE. Don’t believe anything bad about God.

Nahum 1:7 (You can’t have the God of Nahum 1 without verse 7)

   The LORD is good, A stronghold in the day of trouble,

   And He knows those who take refuge in Him.

I would paraphrase Nahum 1 like this:

Give up, the battle is over, He won, quit fighting because you can go home now. You can go home because God is good and you can take refuge in Him. We sing at Christmas the great lines from the prophet Daniel:
The Kingdoms of this world have become those of our God and of His Christ and He shall reign forever and ever and ever…

What is the next word? hallelujah.

- Pastor Brian

Thinking bigger...

The life God has for us here as we learn to trust Him is much richer than we have been led to believe.

God has called us to and will empower us to live a life of actual moral goodness that flows from inside the life of One committed to trusting Him and desirous of living in the conscious reality of the very presence of God.

We are today living the consequences of not thinking big enough regarding our life with Christ. It is not that we do not acknowledge our sinfulness, it is our failure to acknowledge our place in His life. We so easily forget that the plans He has for us are something so grand we can hardly begin to fathom. We are so busy bemoaning our lot in life we forget the position we hold in His life as we live eternity right now.

The reason for learning to trust Him is not just that it is good for us, though it is and not just that it will see us through the hurts of life as it will, but because we are involved in a world, indeed universe wide conspiracy where God is undermining the very evil structures that have dominated and existed in human history with the perpetual good of His people.

Overcoming evil is not just a personal effort we engage in, it will actually come about. That is God’s plan and the resurrection of Jesus is proof He will bring it about---and He has made us indispensable participants in this.

God is about making us into the kind of person who will be able to stand up to the rigors of an eternity that stretches before us in an endless life.

That takes training in this phase as we ‘reign in life through One Jesus Christ’-Romans 5:17

You can learn to live in the conscious reality of the presence of God. Don't let them tell you otherwise.

- Pastor Brian