Overwhelmed 

What comes to mind when you hear the word “overwhelmed”? We’ve all felt something akin to being overwhelmed; at work, with homework, with fatigue, with anxiety and fear, with financial woes, with spiritual attacks on our minds & hearts

 

Overwhelmed…think of the tsunami in 2004 a 40 foot wall of unstoppable water traveling at over 100 miles per hour hot Southeast Asia. What about an F-5 tornado that is a mile wide and looks like a could on the horizon? One hit Waco, TX in 1953. It overwhelmed the downtown…

I lived through a category 4 hurricane in the early 1960’s. Homes were overwhelmed. One neighborhood was merely a collection of foundation slabs I’ve seen videos of the effects of an atomic bomb and the shock wave it sends out. Houses, wood & brick buildings swept away like straw…overwhelmed. Then there is the diagnosis no one expected…your world is shaken and you feel overwhelmed…you can hardly breath, you can’t see into tomorrow

 On Good Friday, the disciples were overwhelmed. Their hopes & expectation were swept away in the tsunami of religious injustice, wickedness and Roman brutality.  But what was overwhelmed three day after Good Friday over 2,000 years ago? What happened when the angel descended and Jesus Christ walked out of the tomb in a Body never before seen?

 There was an earthquake. A sealed, massive stone was dislodged like a dust mote.  All of time and eternity were shaken.

I read an article years ago in The Village Voice written by scientists who had no religious bone to pick who postulated that the negative image burned on the Shroud of Turin was caused by an omnidirectional energy…unknown to science to date. The scientists stated that had the exercise of this radiant power lasted more than a fraction of a millisecond, all of the region surrounding Jerusalem would have been vaporized…unknown & overwhelming power!

 Read Colossians 2:13-15. Here is a description of absolute, overwhelming victory over death, hell, the grave and all the satanic forces of fallen angels.  Weapons confiscated…all of them. This is a picture of an enemy being overwhelmed, utterly crushed by a Power overwhelmingly greater than itself. Infinite Power crushed finite sin.

What was overwhelmed? Our fear, our complacency, our anger, our prejudice, our jealousy, our greed, our lust, our unforgiveness, our hatred, our self-righteousness.

 

What was overwhelmed? Our pride, our rebellion, our rationalizations, our waste of time, out waste of resources, our emptiness, our sloth, our vanity, our envy…all of our sin.

Jesus had declared, “It is finished!” Which meant “paid in full”. There was not one sin, not one wrongdoing, not one intentional or unintentional act of evil left unpaid for. All that could ever, for all time & eternity separate us from God, His will, His plan, His purpose, His blessing and His love had been overwhelmed. Jesus’ resurrection declares unequivocally that sin and death, hell & the grave have been overwhelmed…swept away. A new way of being human has been initiated.

 The story was not made up. Now one close to Jesus had any expectation that this was going to happen…He had told them, but it didn’t “click”.  Jesus coming to them behind locked doors scared them spitless! They were overwhelmed… not by despair this time…but by the GLORY of Resurrection Life…Jesus was alive again!

Read what St. Paul says: 1 Corinthians 15:1-8. When Paul wrote this there were still enough eyewitnesses to give over whelming evidence of Jesus’ Resurrection.

 Jesus’ Resurrection means something monumental, overwhelming.  It means that ALL He said and ALL He did has been validated. He is the unique, singular and only Savior and Rescuer of humanity. He alone has done for all of humanity what no one else could ever or would ever be able to do. By His death and Resurrection, Jesus Christ had made a way for all who would believe to have their personal sin and death overwhelmed.

New and eternal life…a new creation has been offered to all who will simply believe that Jesus Christ has overwhelmed everything that could separate us from God. Listen…what Jesus Christ has done for us is overwhelming. We can have all our sins overwhelmingly washed away…removed as far as the east is from the west.

God has done this because of His eternal love for all humanity.

 The work God has done is overwhelming. Will you let His love overwhelm you sweep away the lies & make you whole at last? This Day declares that God knows your need. He has met you at the very point of your need by the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ.

Will you receive what He has done? Will you enter into the overwhelming love of God for you…in every dimension of what it means to live your life…here and now?

You need to know that Christ Jesus is risen from the dead. Salvation has been provided to all people to overwhelm any and every obstacle sin has ever thrown up to separate you from true human flourishing.

 This and this ALONE is why I celebrate Resurrection Day.

 

Well...I just have been reading a not-so-old commentary on Paul's letter to the church at Colossae. It was written in 1982.

It has amazing things to point out here at the end of Lent. Here's an excerpt:

"The subtly of sin is that it always travels incognito. Though clearly identified and labeled in the fourth century as the seven deadly sins--pride, envy,anger, sloth, avarice,gluttony and lust--these now parade in modern garb and are often given status by being cast in psychological company: self expression, self-fulfillment, assertiveness, identity, taking care of my own being, the right to my own space, therapeutic enhancement. All these terms express deep emotional, psychological, even spiritual needs, but unfortunately, they also become the easy snare of sin's entrapment.

With what ease we we justify adultery and other non-Christian uses of sex by talking about self-expression and personal freedom. Without a sense of responsibility, we become available to others because we seek our own space. We callously trample on the being and feelings of others because we want to assert who we are...and on it goes. Sex is reduced to lust; we become gluttons as we move from one effort at satisfaction to another; our neurotic need to belong makes us envy; our accomplishments fill us with pride.

We are our own center of reference, thus we are estranged. The emptiness we know, the feeling that we are driven, our lack of confidence, our fear of relationships and our terror of the future, our hoarding of ourselves and our talents, and our profane extravagance and waste of materiel resources--all these witness to the fact of sin and its tenacious pull on our lives.

Even when that stranglehold is broken, we do well to remember. Colossians 1:21--"and you, who were once alienated and enemies in your mind by wicked works, yet now He has reconciled you."

We need  to remember where we have come from; from what we have been rescued, and by Whom. We must never forget our absolute and utter dependance upon Jesus Christ for living real life now and for however long He gives us breath. We flourish in Him and in Him alone.

Musings Here at the End of Lent

Musings Here at the End of Lent

Dear Ones,

Lent was established to remind all people that there was a reason that God came among us, Incarnate in Jesus Christ.

Lent declares that left to ourselves, we will continue devolving. We forfeited our home, identity and wholeness by our attempt to live life without any reference to God.

1 Peter 2:11 says that we are aliens and strangers in this world. We are in the world, but we are not of the world. We are twice-born in a world of once-born people, and we're going to find ourselves going against the tide most of the time.

It's time to check our lifeline...are we trusting in anything in this world? Are we making friends with the things of this world? I believe that there is a desperate need to bridge the gap between what we say we believe and how we actually live our lives.

For example, can I expect godly fruit and goodness to flow from a “coloring-outside-the-lines” relationship? Can I expect God’s blessing to follow counter-biblical choices?

The truth does not cease to be the truth because it has fallen out of fashion. What is true is not altered by “majority opinion”. Truth does not cease to be the truth even when it becomes uncomfortable or unpopular.

There are absolutes that Jesus Christ does not waver on or wink at. The love of Jesus Christ is first demonstrated when He declared, “Repent, the kingdom of God is at hand.”

He came to destroy the works and lies of the devil. One such lie is that God has recently adapted Himself to culture and has changed His mind on issues of what is right and what is wrong.

Some things are actually immutable. To our culture, compromise is equated with love. Jesus never said we were to compromise what God has said. God knows what makes for life & what hinders human flourishing.

When Jesus called us to live according to His Word, He never said that compromise was the way to show love; just the opposite. Honesty and truth bring about real confession that is inspired by and is grounded in God’s Word. True repentance, turning from sin and turning to God to receive His power to experience a change of heart and a change of life that changes behavior has always been the “Jesus way”.

The frightening thing is that we can somehow lose our concern for holy living; we can worship the feelings of our spouses/children/friends so much as to be willing to sacrifice them to culture for fear of losing them. “Everyone is doing it these days. Therefore it can’t still be sin.”

There is a progression in being behaviorally co-opted by our culture. Compromise is the “language of love” to our culture. From compromise you subtly move to tolerance and from tolerance you subtly move to de-facto acceptance. This is the behavioral movement of culture…this is the frog in the slowly heating beaker of water. It is what is devastating the Church is so many places.

"The timid civilized world has found nothing with which to oppose the onslaught of a sudden revival of barefaced barbarity, other than concessions and smiles." -Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

God’s Word is actually counter cultural. It does not equivocate with sin in any of its forms: gossip, unforgiveness, resentment, pride, gluttony, immorality, adultery (sexual intimacy outside the marriage covenant), fornication (sexual intimacy prior to the marriage covenant), homosexual behavior, witchcraft, idolatry, greed, selfish ambition, jealousy, dissensions, divisions, envy, hostility, quarreling, impurity, drunkenness, etc.

Those “works of the flesh” are not normative for any follower of Jesus Christ. Do we battle with them? Yes! Do we fail sometimes? Yes! When we fail, do we confess our sins and repent? Yes! We fall down, but we get up! Do we wish to continue to do them as a matter of life-style? No!

Compromise is not the same thing as laying your life down. You lay your life down to care for; to confront out of mercy and compassion, to rescue, to even lose your life that another one might know the fullness of life in Jesus Christ.

Jesus never compromised with or accommodated sin. He nailed it to the cross so we would no longer be its slaves. He met people where they were, forgave them & told them to stop doing what they had been doing and live a new life. He then gave them power to live new lives…really live them.

“Remember that if you are child of God, you will never be happy in sin.”- C. H. Spurgeon

God is so good to put people in our lives who will walk plainly enough as they follow Jesus so others can pick up the trail and run the race.

Doing the right thing does not guarantee that anyone will notice and applaud. Doing the right things does not guarantee success as culture measures it. Doing the right thing, because it is right, will however, forge character that is more valuable than accolades ever will be.

When one has lived in profound darkness, light is painful rather than a welcome intrusion on the eyes. Don’t take it personally when you are rebuffed for walking in the Light of Christ. The pain in the "eyes" of those still walking in the shadows will produce accusations you of being judgmental. Don't draw back. Keep living and loving in the Truth. Light always exposes things as they are; then, He heals them.

BECAUSE we have been forgiven by the grace of Jesus Christ, we are now in a place where God can show us what He wants to change in us. There is no reason for fear, because we are loved with a Love that no one and no-thing can separate us from.

How easy it is to believe when it doesn’t cost you anything. But what if it cost you your job, your children, your relationships, your life? It’s not about good intentions; it’s about actual obedience to God’s will.

Even followers of Jesus will stand before the Judge for the work of their life to be assayed. Was it lived in reference to and in dependence on Jesus Christ, or something else? Rewards in heaven will be based on faithfulness to and reliance upon Jesus...not personal perfection. How we live our lives matters. Following Jesus has to do with both word and deed, relying on His life and power to do what He commands.

"Attack me, this I do myself, but attack me rather than the path I follow and which I point out to anyone who asks me where I think it lies. If I know the way home and am walking along it drunkenly, is it any less the right way because I am staggering from side to side!" -Leo Tolstoy

Being assimilated by culture will result in wanting a “feel-good” religion. But when it becomes costly and requires actual changes in how one lives life, then people shrink back.

There is no change without pain; most of us do not change until we have to. What did we think Jesus meant when He said to take up our cross daily? Did we think there would be no splinters, no death to anything, no loss of things we’ve deluded ourselves thinking were indispensable?

The Gospel does not threaten sinners. It is glad news, not mad news. Yet Jesus talked more about hell than heaven – not as a THREAT but as a WARNING. There is something I’d call MILITANT MERCY. When a fast moving car approaches a child, we would snatch it from danger. It may be rough, but it is true mercy. That’s what Jesus does! HE SAVES. –R. Bonnke

We have been called to follow Jesus. That means so much more than we know. It actually means things that could well threaten our own personal expectations of what we believe life owes us. Following Jesus will very likely will shake our sensibilities. It is meant to. Transformation means not staying the same.

Because of their idolatry, God judged His people at a high-point in their wealth and influence. It might seem harsh or cruel, but God has always been more concerned with our purity of heart than our prosperity.

"God's wounds cure, sin's kisses kill." William Gurnall

When we think about Jesus, do we think of Him more as a jacket that we can put on, or as our skin? One functions as a religious additive to be utilized or taken off when deemed necessary or convenient. The other has to do with actually living life as an every-moment relationship. Jacket or skin? There is a life of difference.

Sharing the Gospel has to do with the living in the Truth and by the Truth with your whole life. When our words and actions do not match, we actually lose any right to expect people to listen.

To really "live", we're going to have to deal with our essential, deep need to be changed by God. We need courage; courage to live the Truth. We need the courage of grace to follow Jesus. Only because He has dealt with our sins, can we now forsake them and actually begin to live.

God loves us enough to tell us the truth. We can choose either to trust Him with our whole lives, or we can worship something else; trying to draw life, significance, purpose and identity from it. We can either choose life or death. There are no other choices.

To make sense out of life, you actually need to be alive! That means surrendering your will, heart and life...all of it...to Jesus Christ. It’s a personal commitment of your life to Him, acknowledging your need (sin), receiving His forgiveness (grace) and being empowered for life (Holy Spirit). You then begin to find and understand God's will for you.

The problem for most of us is that we want to “change” without having to change! That is the essence of the “magical thinking” that keeps us from living with wisdom & intentionality.  God is not holding back His power to enable us to change. He is holding it out to us for us to lay hold on so we can do the right thing. Folks, Christian, He has made His home in you…you are “on-line!”

“The Christian ideal has not been tried and found wanting; it has been found difficult and left untried.” ― G.K. Chesterton

“Fallacies do not cease to be fallacies because they become fashions.” ― G.K. Chesterton

“Art, like morality, consists of drawing the line somewhere.” ― G.K. Chesterton

“Tolerance is the virtue of the man without convictions.” ― G.K. Chesterton

When Truth is not lived it becomes a proposition not a life-changer. Jesus wants all that we are surrendered to all that He is. He cannot be Savior if He is not Lord.

People hear the word "repentance" and can take offense that anyone should intimate that they have something to turn from. Even if there were a need to turn from something, where do you turn to? There are cases where unacknowledged brokenness and sin have given to unhardened sinners such a horror of themselves that they live near the brink of mental illness. The fear is that God would regard us with the same horror is life-numbing. 

The truth is, He has compassion (the Latin means to suffer with) on us and has already dealt with all that our brokenness and self-willed blindness would accumulate for the whole of our lives and has crushed its power to separate us from His healing and restoring Love. God does not wait for us to turn to Him from our folly so He might mock us for the fools we have been. He waits to receive us through the very Door that He, Himself, has opened for our return...to come Home...to know mercy and grace.

Do people actually want the truth, or merely something to validate their opinion? Millennia of cultural upheaval and social change cannot alter truth. Collective opinion and fashion do not redefine it. It is not subject to change if it is actually the truth. It is a change agent that remains unchanged and offers hope for all humanity change that is otherwise humanly unachievable.

God loved the world so much that He gave us His Son, to the end that all who would believe in Him would have eternal life. God sent the Son to be the Savior of the world. He came to save us from sin and death, not for us to compromise with either.

Lent was established to remind all people that there was a reason that God came among us, Incarnate in Jesus Christ. God bless this to us all.

Dear Ones,

 

I have been deeply comforted by something I see throughout the pages of God's Word. It is a comfort that, given all the ridiculously bad choices we have made in life, God has never utterly abandoned or forsaken us. 

 

On the contrary, God has been pursuing us right from the start of our folly.

 

Knowing what Adam had done, God called out to Adam, "Where are you?" God was giving Adam an opportunity to come clean, be honest, to humble himself in repentance and admit...confess that he had utterly blown it. He had done exactly what God had warned him against lest in dying he surely die.

 

(Death is not the cessation of human activity, it is separation...separation from God. The world is filled with the living dead. The fascination with zombies is not far off. We consume one another thinking we can draw life from another human being. In Adam...we all died.)

 

Even when humanity's trajectory was taking it from raw evil into deeper and deeper depravity, God called Noah. God then called a polytheistic pagan named Abram to trust Him, to follow where God led and to believe God. God called and Abram answered. A promise of rescue for humanity was revealed in God's conversation with Abram.

 

God called and Joseph answered, believing what the Lord revealed to him in dreams. Moses answered God as God called from a burning bush, from a smoking mountain, and in the Tent of Meeting. David heard and answered. So did Isaiah, Jeremiah, Ezekiel, Daniel, Mary and Joseph, the Apostles.

 

And oh, by the way...God has called you. When was the last time you checked your messages?

 

Nicodemus (John 3:1-21) was another man who had been straining to hear from God. When he heard Jesus and saw what Jesus was doing, he recognized the same Voice that had called out to Adam in the cool of the evening. "Nicodemus, where are you?" He came because he had heard the call and answered in the only way he could. he asked questions.

 

He was a Rabbi & they always talked to one another by asking questions. In their questions was some truth, some insight, something to link another question to.

 

Jesus spoke to Nicodemus in a way Nicodemus could understand. He told him that he had to be "born again" in order to see the kingdom of God. The Jews of Nicodemus' day understood what "born again/anew" was all about. It was not an odd term. A Bar-Mitzvah or Bat Mitzvah was an event where a child was "born again" from childhood to adulthood. Marriage was an experience of being "born again" where tow people became a brand new creation made up of two inseparable parts. Becoming a Rabbi was a "born anew" experience and to become a "teacher of teachers" was the pinnacle...the ulultimate and last "born again" experience available to a Jew.

 

Now Jesus says human effort doesn't work. It has to be a new birth coming from God...what God does; not what we do. It has all changed...from achieving to believing and finding God doing in us, to us what we could never, ever accomplish!

 

God speaks to us in ways we can understand. Sometimes it's so clear that we run as hard as we can because we KNOW what is being said. We still have the stain of an ancient lie that affects us. We have been told that God is holding out on us, that His heart is not good and we MUST find meaning on our own; not in reference to Him. Problem is, there is no destiny or ultimate meaning to be found apart from God. We fear that if we believe Him, somehow life will be constricted, diluted and minimized. We fear that life in relation to God means being unkind and punitive to those who don't believe.

 

Turns out, before anyone believed, before anyone became aware of their desperate need...God loved the world so much that He sent His only Son. He sent Him, to the end that, if anyone would believe Him, believe in Him, God would restore that person into Life, eternal life...beginning now and everlasting. God did not send His Son into the world to condemn it, but to rescue it.

 

God has pursued us to the point of becoming one of us to reveal His heart and life to us. Jesus didn't come to judge the world but to receive God's just judgment for the sake of all mankind.

 

"On the mount of crucifixion, fountains opened deep and wide. From the floodgates of God's mercy flowed a vast and endless tide. Grace and love like mighty rivers flowed incessant from above. And Heaven's peace and perfect justice kissed a guilty world in Love."

The knowledge and apprehension of God's love for us is beyond the capacity our minds and hearts to measure. It is, as St. Paul wrote, peace that passes understanding...a wisdom that is unfathomable. God's forgiveness is in some real way "an offense" to the iron-forged pride of the human heart. It is an offense to our torqued sense of justice.

 

It is shocking...some call a scandal...that God has done for humanity what it could never deserve nor ever ever achieve.

 

In talking to a young woman about this grace Tim Keller writes, “I was intrigued. I asked her what was so scary about unmerited free grace? She replied something like this: “If I was saved by my good works—then there would be a limit to what God could ask of me or put me through. I would be like a taxpayer with rights. I would have done my duty and now I would deserve a certain quality of life. But if it is really true that I am a sinner saved by sheer grace—at God’s infinite cost—then there’s nothing he cannot ask of me.”

 

Keller states, “Properly understood, Christianity is by no means the opiate of the people. It’s more like the smelling salts.”

 

From God's point of view, there is nothing hindering all humanity from returning "Home" to His heart. What holds people back is the fact that they must turn from going their own way and return to God by means of receiving what He has done for us in Jesus Christ. He has provided the grace and even empowers the faith to receive what is a singular and unique Gift of forgiveness, a whole new heart and a new life for the moralist and the immoralist. Both need salvation by grace!

 

Last Sunday morning in the adult study time, Tim Keller spoke about the two sons in the story we know as "The Parable of the Prodigal Son". One son was into "self-discovery" throwing off all restrains, diving headlong into hedonism and the other was a "moral conformist"doing everything right. Neither son had a relationship with their father. They both wanted what their father could provide, but didn't want him.

 

He writes in The Prodigal God, “Our Western society is so deeply divided between these two approaches to life (moralism, self-discovery) that hardly anyone can conceive of any other way to live. If you criticize or distance yourself from one, everyone assumes you have chosen to follow the other, because each of these approaches tends to divide the whole world into two basic groups. The moral conformists say: "the immoral people -- the people who 'do their own thing' -- are the problem with the world, and moral people are the solution." The advocates of self-discovery say: "The bigoted people -- the people who say, 'We have the Truth' -- are the problem with the world, and progressive people are the solution.”

 

Neither way brings one into a relationship with God. Both methods of laying hold on "life" fail. There must be someone who does for us what we could never do. Tim Keller states, “Mercy and forgiveness must be free and unmerited to the wrongdoer. If the wrongdoer has to do something to merit it, then it isn't mercy, but forgiveness always comes at a cost to the one granting the forgiveness.”

 

God has forgiven us of ALL our sin...not in "part" but the "whole" of it...from our first breath till our last...for all time and human history. The Cross of Jesus Christ has, by death, destroyed death. The veil of the Temple was torn in two from top to bottom. The way to approach God has been opened through the torn Body of Jesus Christ of Nazareth as He hung on that Roman cross as the Lamb of God. He has taken away the sin of the world.

 

That is why in his second letter to the Corinthian church St. Pauls calls followers of Jesus Christ "ambassadors for Christ"...God making His appeal through us for people to be reconciled to Him. The forgiveness of God came at infinite cost paid for by an infinite love demonstrated through the Eternal, Infinite, God the Son, the Word Who became flesh, taking on our humanity to rescue us.

 

In Psalm 103, King David sings, "He has removed our sins as far from us as the east is from the west." You know that you can only travel so far north before you begin to travel south again. However once you start traveling east, you will always travel east. Then, if you turn around and travel west and keep traveling, you will always be going west. God has thoroughly removed our sin by His singular act of redemption in Jesus Christ!

 

Think about how God has forgiven you. There is no ground left for us to refuse to forgive as we have been forgiven. The one who "merits forgiveness" doesn't NEED it. 

 

One more thought from Tim Keller relating to forgiveness and grace: “Jesus' teaching consistently attracted the irreligious while offending the Bible-believing, religious people of his day. However, in the main, our churches today do not have this effect. The kind of outsiders Jesus attracted are not attracted to contemporary churches, even our most avant-garde ones. We tend to draw conservative, buttoned-down, moralistic people. The licentious and liberated or the broken and marginal avoid church. That can only mean one thing. If the preaching of our ministers and the practice of our parishioners do not have the same effect on people that Jesus had, then we must not be declaring the same message that Jesus did.”

 

That is real cause for repentance and grace from the Lord to do as He did and to say what He said.