Tag: Jesus

Honest To God Christianity

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I have been thinking recently how living the Christian life faithfully is not so easy or simplistic as sometimes we would like to make it. Even though we are new creations in Christ there is still the ‘old’ at work in us. We are sinners and saints at the same time. We are citizens of heaven and worldly people.

Let’s take for example Jesus statement that we cannot love God and material things at the same time. I think we can and we do. It is a tension of the Christian faith that needs to be realized, admitted and even confessed.

I love God and as I recently discovered I love my material and worldly circumstances. My wife and I moved from New York to Colorado for family reasons and I found myself quite obsessed with the ‘things’ around me, most of all my muddy yard that needs to be landscaped and fenced. Day after day I look at it with some anxiety about getting it fixed up before the winter comes.

And there is much else to be concerned with as any knows who has ever moved some distance away from all the known to the mostly unknown. Things like internet and good TV. service were on the priority list. What WOULD we do if he evenings were oh so quiet?

So I began to think, ‘Hey, how can I love and trust God while at the same time loving all this stuff. And even if I don’t term it loving, well, I am certainly spending an inordinate amount of time thinking about it. So am I going against what my Lord would want of me? In some ways yes but it’s the journey I am on and Jesus knows it so well.

Think of Jesus in the Garden of Gethsemane, so in love with God and in some ways so desirous to avoid his own agony. It was the fullness of his earthly journey that brought him to the place of saying to his Father, ‘Thy will be done’.

And so it will be with us in those hard places even though one foot is stuck on earth and mired in the things of this world. We are a work of God. Sometimes I like to think of myself as a ‘real piece of work’ as the expression goes.

And if we stay with the disciplines of faith and not quit being the apprentice/disciple that Jesus calls us to be, we will love God more and more and the things of earth will grow dimmer as the old hymn suggests. I hope it will be sooner than later, for myself at least.

So as I gazed upon the mud surrounding my new home I also gave glance to a passage of scripture I read in the MESSAGE PARAPHRASE, which is a wonderful rendering of scripture by Eugene Peterson. This passage is Colossians 3:2.

So if you’re serious about living this new resurrection life with Christ, act like it. Pursue the things over which Christ presides. Don’t shuffle along, eyes to the ground, absorbed with the things right in front of you. Look up, and be alert to what is going on around Christ—that’s where the action is. See things from his perspective.

Wow, this puts life in a proper perspective. So I walked on out my deck, looked over the yet to be landscaping and thought, ‘this is nothing compared to loving God.’ I want to be thinking and praying about what Christ is up to, what he thinks about all this material stuff. And I know that he brings me back to reality. His reality. So while material things DO have some value in my life I want God to know that it’s God who I want to put FIRST.

Oops, hold the presses. My wife just informed me that we are going to have the lawn put in. Well, the dialectic of living the Christian life continues.

 

Message for Roseburg

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If I were a pastor in that little community of Roseburg, Oregon or any community that is connected to the people there here is what I would want to say:

Let’s stay with Jesus for a while. Let’s not hurry on even to a sense of victory. The resurrection is muted. We just need to stay with Jesus. Look at his body, the blood, his tears. See his weakness on that cross. Don’t turn away with some easy answer to the senseless tragedy. No, stay with Jesus. Each one of these lives, these precious souls whose death has pierced their loved ones hearts, belongs to Jesus, the Jesus who suffers with each aching heart.

Don’t rush to change laws right now. Don’t rush to blame. Don’t rush to judgment. Just stay with Jesus.

Don’t rush to revenge. Leave that to the Lord. There was none of that on Good Friday. They just stayed with Jesus, cried with Jesus, and something in each of them died with Jesus just as something in all of us dies with these young men and women, their families and communities right now. They stood for Jesus. Jesus stands with them. Their hurt is his continuing pain. Don’t rush to find the end just yet. Believe right where you are, right where your heart breaks right not. If you need to doubt or rage against heaven, go ahead because heaven knows how to bear our doubt, disbelief or uncontrollable anger. Heaven has been here before.

Just stay with Jesus right now. That’s right. Where their blood poured out it is mingled with the blood of Jesus. That word ‘Jesus’ right now is the only word we can speak.

Dietrich Bonhoeffer once said, ONLY A SUFFERING GOD CAN HELP NOW. May each of our hearts find a place where that suffering God can rest for a while.

Just Good Enough

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Luke 13:24 “Exert every effort to enter through the narrow door, because many, I tell you, will try to enter and will not be able to.

In high school I had grades that were just good enough to make the ‘honor society’, but never to achieve loftier goals of any academic excellence. I played baseball just good enough to make the team but not to be very good. I played various musical instruments just good enough to get by but never really well to be the best at any of them. I have come to discover that just good enough is not really ‘good enough’.

And so sometimes I think have faith just good enough to be accepted into God’s kingdom, love that’s just good enough to care about a certain number of people near me and some who live on the fringes of life.

But Jesus says to exert myself or as the original language says, ‘strain every nerve’, or we might say to strain every muscle or fiber of your being, to step into the way of grace where with God nothing is impossible and where we can be the best and give God our best. Like those two women who made it into the Army Rangers, straining every ounce of muscle, energy, and emotional stamina to be not just good enough to get by but to be the best.

For me it has to do with my thoughts, my prayers, my reading of Scripture, my search for good fellowship and worship and striving to live my life as Jesus would live his life in me.

And as my grandfather used to say, ‘we don’t want to do it just good enough. We want it to be ‘right’’. Amen. And in this day the world needs to experience the excellence of a Christian witness that is much more than ‘good enough’.

 

“Faith is believing something you know ain’t true.”- Mark Twain

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Three mighty big words in that quote; faith, belief, true. A lot of folk think that the first two belong to the realm of the unreasonable while truth is what science and materialism and the real world is all about.

I like what the late Dallas Willard writes in his book Knowing Christ Today. He uses the illustration of how science taught us how to kill crop pests by using DDT. And what we eventually learned was that it killed all kinds of wild life too. He then goes on to write that ‘scientific knowledge’ will not solve practical problems in life. It takes knowledge plus wisdom of HOW to live. “The best physical, chemical, and other scientific knowledge will not tell us what to do or who to be.”

Religion answers the question of how and who. There is a knowledge beyond but may include science. There is a knowledge given by God to those who will listen. We call that knowledge ‘faith’. Faith is trusting that what God has said and what Jesus said and did are true and that they inform all life.

Woe to humanity that would toss religion out because of the mistakes religious people have made. Better it would be to correct those mistakes with a sincere faith that is informed by knowledge.

Let me give an example that is all too real in our world today. And in doing so I am aware that there who those who agonize over choices they must make.

We as a nation allow and, it would seem through some recent investigation, even promote the taking of human life. Science has taught us the procedures for abortion but science has not taught us the God given sanctity of all human life. Abortion is a realm that needs more than materialistic, scientific or even enlightened thought. This is a realm of life that needs to be informed (given information) by the religious meaning of ‘life’, in all its forms.

If there is no God, and we are but atoms, electrons, molecules and such, then the practical answer to an inconvenient life is what is approved today according to the desires of society. But if there is a higher truth, a more informed truth, a truth that governs this creation we need to discover that truth by all means possible. For such truth will tell us who we are, and how we are to live on this planet in the best possible way.

If there is a way to investigate the reality of God then we as an enlightened people ought to do our best to discover a knowledge that might just best arrive in the form of faith. And that is as true of religious people who have ‘used’ faith to rationalize some terrible behavior. We can all ‘learn’.

Faith, real faith, is an informed confidence in Christ from whom we learn ‘truth’ and not blind irrationality.

For Skeptics and Believers: What draws me to Christianity

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At the outset I admit, without being trite, that it’s Jesus who attracts me to the Christian faith. The most attractive quality of Jesus is the way he shows us the character of God that is loving, and forgiving. God, through Jesus, has told me I am loved and God has told that nothing can separate me from God’s love. Not even my own stupidity, negligence or sin. God in Christ pursues me until he brings me back into God’s wonderful embrace. This is for me the essence of Christianity in my being and worked out through my life and the community of faithful believers.

It’s difficult to imagine that Jesus is just an imaginary figure created to satisfy the human need for a god or a crutch in life’s hard times. The character of Jesus is not the sort you would, on your own, invent. I will admit that the church has been guilty over the years of producing a version of Christ that takes the form of power but those powers are hard pressed to find the Jesus they affirm from the scriptures of the New Testament particularly the Gospels.

There we find Jesus, the wisest and most loving teacher who ever lived, instructing his followers to ‘love one another’, to ‘love their enemies and bless those who curse them.’ In Christ we discover a religious master who seeks all who feel lost and left out and find themselves as society’s outcasts. His harshest condemnations are reserved for the proud, the self-confident and judgmental.

Jesus taught his followers to engage the world through ‘weakness’ not ‘strength’. He said they should take up a cross and be willing to die for one another and that behind such ‘foolish’ talk was the love of the Father, God. That kind of teaching goes against the grain of our ego but aligns itself with the Creator. And Jesus not only teaches these principles. He lives them, taking upon him, servant-hood even to the point of death.

I am currently watching all the political posturing of the possible candidates for the office of President and all I witness is self-aggrandizement, judgementalism, pride and power. Maybe I need to look harder and elsewhere.

A skeptical view of Christianity usually addresses the failures of the church, the institutional and individual sins and while it could be made abundantly clear that the church has done more good on this earth than any other institution let’s admit that the church has had its share of failure and sin.

Skepticism does have its place for they wonder if the church didn’t invent this Jesus within the pages of history of the course of the first few centuries C.E. And skeptics do well to question Jesus role today especially in matters of evil, suffering and injustice. These are valid queries into Christianity as long as those asking are willing to do the appropriate searching into the person and work of Jesus. And those of us willing to believe them must be willing to bear a healthy investigation.

To dismiss Christianity because of perceived contradictions in the Bible is not sufficient because most skeptics have seldom read the Bible. And contradictions that might be found are to my mind evidence of the veracity of the witness accounts. Eyewitness accounts rarely find total congruence. We would be even more suspicious if they did.

I think a bigger problem is that Christianity has been around for 2000 years and has been put up on our mental if not physical shelves to be disregarded and a dust collector at best. Many people have simply not tried to place their confidence in everything Jesus did or said. And we are part of a society, which is pretty self-absorbed whereby life, the way we decide to live it, is just fine. THAT would be a religion created in our own image, a religion that we take off the shelf every once in a while, blow the dust off and look for the self-help section.

But not so with Jesus. In every aspect of life Jesus claims Lordship and he calls for our devotion not because he is an egomaniacal dictator but because as God he knows what’s best for his creation.

People say that Christianity is a ‘weak’ religion. I say that dying to self takes more ‘guts’ than to live by any other code. And what is so incredibly reassuring about it is that we don’t have to go it alone.

Grace and Peace

george

Doctor

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A clinician is a doctor whose practice focuses on observation of the patient to provide a diagnosis. A good clinician knows the ins and outs of the body’s system and can detect through their knowledge,  listening skills and observations what the problem might be. I have a doctor who is magnificent at observational diagnosis. I am always amazed at his knowledge, understanding and remedial suggestions.
Jesus was a physician by his own admission. He was the kind of physician who not only diagnosed but provided the remedy for the illnesses of body and soul. And so when he came across a man born blind from birth (John 9) he was not particularly interested in the causes for this blindness as the curious disciples were. They wondered what sin might have caused this? Something from the man’s life or the parents’ lives but Jesus disregarded their question and went to the heart of the matter that in the process of healing this man the presence of God would be evident.
Certainly in modern time doctors look for causes to illness and there were times when Jesus himself knew a particular cause as in the case of demons. But as common Christians our responsibility is to move in at God’s direction and offer the help of prayer and compassionate ministry believing in the power of God to heal and  believing that Christ is still present to heal and forgive.
Let not our curiosity get the better of us. Let love move us to help.

WHY GOD WON’T FORGIVE US

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Recall that after Jesus teaches his disciples about prayer he concludes that if we don’t forgive others their sins, God won’t forgive us. Is that really true or was Jesus just using hyperbole to encourage this band of students to keep their community alive in love.

I want to throw this idea out there. It’s probably from someone else because that’s where all good ideas come from. Forgiveness means letting go of someone as though you were holding him or her by the neck for their debt to you or their trespass against you. It’s hard to hold out your hands to receive from God if you are preoccupied with payback from another.

You may remember Jesus telling the parable of the unforgiving debtor, one who having himself been pardoned by his master subsequently finds a debtor to himself out of whom this man almost literally chokes the life. Jesus concludes by saying that the first debtor was locked away for good.

Here’s the thing about forgiveness. It’s grace. It means doing for another what they cannot do for themselves. Grace means that you and I take the debt on ourselves as Jesus did for the whole world. If we cannot issue grace to another then it is evidence that we do not receive the grace of God and if we do not place our confidence in the grace of God we are left alone, removed from God as it were.

Amidst all the evilness of the world there is no one who does to us what we did to Christ. And make no mistake. He willingly took all that upon himself. He did it to make the world right with God. And anyone who wants to stand in that new world needs to do the same work with the help of God working in and through us.

Certainly it is possible to desire to forgive when the action comes with difficulty. God understands that. How hard was it for Jesus to take action to bring forgiveness to the world. Towards the end he would have like to escape such self-denying love.  So when it is difficult for us to forgive the best place to go is in the arms of our Savior to rest with him and abide with him and let him do the loving within and through us. Maybe it’s a little baby step at first but baby steps are good when we look to the growth they will bring.

So think of someone who needs your forgiveness even someone who has died. Think of someone far away or maybe in your own household. Then go to school with Jesus and let him teach you…and me the essence of his Grace.

And if we won’t forgive? Well, what we are saying to God is ‘no thank you.  We will handle life in our own way’, and we won’t want God anyway.

Many will come in those last days to Christ saying, ‘Lord Lord’ but Jesus will say that some will have to depart because they really didn’t want God’s will anyway.

But I would submit that forgiving another will be one of the greatest christian spiritual experiences of your life when you …and I let go of another to embrace God. That is the good life. So let’s be students of the good life.

 

 

What Is God Waiting For?

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Sometimes I think that God wants to lavish God’s goodness on us more than we want to seek God out but God withholds such extended grace until we are ready to receive that grace as individuals and as the corporate people of God, until that grace works effectively in God’s world for God’s glory and for our good.

I refer you to Jeremiah 29 where God says to the people, ‘if you seek me with all your heart you shall find me.’ That’s a big ‘if’. It seems to be a condition as when God tells the people:  2 Chronicles 7 “If I shut up the heavens so that there is no rain, or if I command the locust to devour the land, or if I send pestilence among My people, and My people who are called by My name humble themselves and pray and seek My face and turn from their wicked ways, then I will hear from heaven, will forgive their sin and will heal their land. Now my eyes will be open and my ears attentive to the prayer offered in this place.”

I wonder if that was what was going on when Jesus would not answer the Syrophoenician woman (Mark 7) who asked for help for her daughter. Was he helping her and the disciples to understand that God waits for us all to be ‘ready’ to receive from God?

Is that perhaps why Jesus told the crowds of people to seek first the Kingdom of God and everything else needed would be added? (Matthew 6)

I’m just not sure even about my own faithfulness in seeking, desiring, longing for God. I am striving to be better but I see how weak my longing is unless I am perhaps desperate in a crisis situation, but I should always be desperate for God. Isn’t that a line in a contemporary Christian song, ‘I’m desperate for you.’ Yes, I just looked it up. ‘Breathe’ is the name of the song.

I remember Keith Green’s song where he sings, ‘My flesh is tired of seeking God but on my knees I’ll stay, I want to be His pleasing child until that final day.’ The bolded type is the title of the song.

I must admit that indeed the flesh is tired. Even too tired at times to start let alone to continue our prayers. I found myself this morning just spending time praying, God I want to know your will and do your will even if I don’t know it. (Thomas Merton wrote a great prayer about that.) I do think we can know God’s will. That’s what Paul writes in Romans 12:2. But how much do we really want to know? How much do we want to seek?

Wow, here’s a prayer for all of us from Psalm 27: …Hear, O LORD, when I cry with my voice, and be gracious to me and answer me.  When You said, “Seek My face,” my heart said to You, “Your face, O LORD, I shall seek.”  Do not hide Your face from me, Do not turn Your servant away in anger; You have been my help; Do not abandon me nor forsake me, O God of my salvation!”

But let’s see if it is true. Let us all implore God more. Seek God more intensely and see if we don’t ‘FIND’.

Let me close with a quote from John Chrysostom (Archbishop of Constantinople in the 4th Century):

Our soul should be directed in God, not merely when we suddenly think of prayer, but even when we are concerned with something else.  If we are looking after the poor, if we are busy in some other way, or if we are doing any type of good work, we should season our actions with the desire and the remembrance of God.  Through this salt of the love of God we can all become a sweet dish for the Lord.  If we are generous in giving time to prayer, we will experience its benefits throughout our life.

PRAYER- FIRST THOUGHTS

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So begins some thoughts on prayer which is probably best understood by doing it rather than talking too much about it but since there are so many questions surrounding the idea of prayer some conversation is needed. This arises from speaking with my son, Josh, about praying for a friend of his who has cancer. Many people are praying for this young man and many are wondering what kind of prayer and how many people are needed to pray effectively.

One of the first questions surrounding prayer is the nature of the One to whom we are praying whether in praise or in petition. If I am talking with someone I want to get to know them, know about them and know how best we can communicate together. And in the case of God I want to know God which means intimately understanding God and how it is that God communes with his creation and how God relates to his people. There are thousands of books on prayer. Right now I am reading Calvin, Foster, Bounds and C.S. Lewis as well as understanding more about Father, Son and Holy Spirit through the Scriptures. I would like my better understanding of prayer to be dialectic by which I mean a dialogue, a conversation, and an investigation if you will of the matter of prayer.

To the issue at hand. First of all I begin by the assumption that God is good, that God’s mercy, love, and kindness are everlasting. I believe that God’s love for us is at best revealed on the cross where Jesus died for us because ‘God so loved the world.’ I believe that God is sovereign which means that God’s reign, or rule extends to wherever God wants it to throughout God’s creation for his will and pleasure and for our good.  So we have a sovereign and loving heavenly Father whom Jesus himself said cares infinitely for his children. How did the old song go? “His eye is on the sparrow”. (see Matthew 10)

So when I commune, communicate, converse or just talk with God I believe the above to best describe the One to whom I am praying. Am I making contact? How should I feel? How does God view me? What is God up to in my life and in his creation and how do I join God in that work? I believe that when Jesus prayed to his Father it was concerning the will of his Father. That’s what I want to know. What is the will of God? In my life and in this world. See there is much to know about prayer.

You might not know this but the longest section on any one topic in John Calvin’s ‘Institutes of the Christian Religion’ is on prayer.

On my mind as I write is the story Jesus tells of the Pharisee (religious ruler) and the Tax Collector (publican and thief) who go before God to pray. The ‘religious’ one prays to God so self-righteously and the tax man simply says, ‘God have mercy on me, a sinner.’ You can read this story in Luke 18. Jesus concludes by saying that when the two guys were finished praying it was the tax collector who was in ‘right relationship’ with God. All this helps me to know that I need to be in a right relationship with God before I think to really plumb the depths of prayer. And being in a right relationship doesn’t mean I have it all together. By no means. It is Jesus who has it all together and it is Jesus who by his love and sacrifice and resurrection makes a way for me to God. Even if I feel far away from God I know that through my confession of my sins and my distance from God that God is as ready to wrap his arms around me as the Father was in the story of the Prodigal Son, which you can read in Luke 15.

I read that story and realize that the Son had to come back to the Father to receive that love. While the Father was looking ‘for’ the Son, he did not go after the Son but waited for him to come back home.(perhaps I am reading too much into this parable) In prayer that is what I am doing, hopefully, coming home to God, my Father. And I may come tentatively like the ‘prodigal’ but come home nonetheless. And for me to return home is to know that I have a Father who, as I said in the beginning, is loving and sovereign. The God whom I worship is forgiving; removing my sin away from me and from God as far as the east is from the west. (Psalm 103) And the great thing is that God is looking for the ‘lost’ like those parables indicate in Luke 15. Jesus said that his mission on earth was, among other things, to ‘seek and save the lost’. So there is no doubt in my mind that I can come to God in prayer.

I know that some people say in reference to the healing of the blind man in John 9, that God doesn’t hear the prayer of sinners, which I think might mean people who are obstinately opposed to being faithful to God but using God more as a vending machine. However I do think that God listens to sinners and people of various religious persuasions who want to draw closer to God in the best way they know how. They too are coming humbly to God as that tax collector and as that ‘prodigal’ son.

So in conclusion for this time I should like to say that the God of the Bible is One who wants a relationship with us, so much that he paid the ultimate sacrifice to reconcile the world to God’s self. He loves us. While we don’t understand God’s mind we understand God’s heart and it is towards that heart that we draw when we pray. And as we draw closer, practicing this discipline of prayer we will more fully understand “our Father” as Jesus refers to God in the Lord’s Prayer.

I said to my son that as we talk ‘about’ prayer, one of the things we have to do together is pray. Good place to begin. And then write the questions you have. Let’s have a dialogue for I too am trying to understand how we go about this.

A Blessed Holy Week and Resurrection Sunday to all.

 

GOD KNOWS HOW WE FEEL

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God knows how we feel. Ever hear that and wonder just how God who is so ‘up there’ and seemingly far from us can somehow know or even sense what we are going through? I am not sure how other religions grasp any concept of divine empathy but let me share what I know about Jesus being the one who put it on the divine heart to know you and me so well. Besides God knowing how many hairs on our head or how much more we are worth than all the sparrows. There’s something going on through the death and resurrection of Jesus.

We know that Jesus was tempted, that he suffered, that he was obedient and that he ministered to hurting people. He wept at a friend’s funeral and sorrowed over Jerusalem for not accepting him. And how does all that translate to God?

Been reading a theologian. H.R. Mackintosh, a Scottish Theologian around 1900.

He suggests that since God and humanity are one in Jesus Christ (the incarnation) through the Word becoming flesh something wonderfully unique happens. Jesus through his experiences on this earth ‘are received into the eternal memory of the Godhead.’ Through the experience, the death and resurrection of Christ the human experiences are part of the Eternal memory. See, what Jesus went through, although ‘foreknown’ by God is made real in time and kept as part of the experiential memory of God, the Trinity. There is a person within the Trinity who has actually experienced pain, sorrow, death and resurrection. So within the Trinity there is an incredible awareness of what you and I go through because Jesus went through it all including being tempted sorely.

Mackintosh concludes this by writing, “The heart of man and the heart of God beat in the risen Lord.” (p. 371 of his book on the doctrine of the person of Christ)

So as we continue this Lenten time let us remember that God remembers, through Jesus, just what we are going through right now, in this moment that will be etched in the eternal memory forever. And so as the song suggests:

Have we trials and temptations?
  Is there trouble anywhere?
We should never be discouraged,
  Take it to the Lord in prayer.
Can we find a friend so faithful
  Who will all our sorrows share?
Jesus knows our every weakness,
  Take it to the Lord in prayer (WHAT A FRIEND WE HAVE IN JESUS)