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."