Are you 'truthy'?

Are you ‘truthy?’

Tolerance is the gold standard of our times.  We strive to respect choices made by others. Our schools reinforce the value starting in Kindergarten. On the whole, this is a good thing!  Society is not a better place where groups of people are reviled because of their race, creed, or gender. But, are we losing our ability to discern right from wrong, sin from righteousness, what is best? Yes, I know, discernment slips ever so quickly into discrimination!  It is hard not to get our personal preferences mixed up with what is right.  Christians need to dialogue about this, need to pray together about this, need to find the way to remain in Truth and Love at the same time. Being a ‘truthy’ person is not at that enjoyable.  Any person attempting to parent a teenager can tell you that the truth is not highly valued by the 15 year old that loves Xbox more than algebra. Telling them the truth and enforcing safe boundaries will earn nothing but anger and contempt. 

Jesus reminds us that being ‘truthy’ people in our world will not earn admiration or applause. “If the world hates you, keep in mind that it hated me first. If you belonged to the world, it would love you as its own. As it is, you do not belong to the world, but I have chosen you out of the world. That is why the world hates you. Remember the words I spoke to you: ‘No servant is greater than his master.’ If they persecuted me, they will persecute you also. If they obeyed my teaching, they will obey yours also." (John 15:18-20, NIV)  When we stand in the way of injustice, when we speak up for the poor, when we remind another of the consequence of his refusal of God –   we should not expect to be sent flowers.  Yet, we are called to live the Truth. I am sobered by Ezekiel’s reminder when he compares God’s people to watchmen on the city wall. “Now, son of man, I am making you a watchman for the people of Israel. Therefore, listen to what I say and warn them for me. If I announce that some wicked people are sure to die and you fail to warn them about changing their ways, then they will die in their sins, but I will hold you responsible for their deaths. But if you warn them to repent and they don’t repent, they will die in their sins, but you will not be held responsible." (Ezekiel 33:7-9, NLT)  

Essential to our mission is love.  The cliché tells us to ‘hate the sin and love the sinner.’  But, walking that line is hard.  In my own life, if I find myself taking any personal delight in the telling of a hard truth, my love is suspect. If I am able to speak of Hell or judgment without sorrow, I should not open my mouth until I have regained the heart of Jesus.  If I take up the role of the watchman while motivated by fear for my own comfort, my message will be corrupt.  But, it is not unloving to speak the truth, even when it hurts; and that is where Truth runs head-long into tolerance.  It is not arrogant to tell others that life is found in Jesus Christ. It is not arrogant to speak of God’s judgment to come. Remember, remember, remember…  Jesus saves the world through sacrifice, not through coercion!  God sent His Son into the world as a Servant, not as a Soldier. He accomplished His mission on a Cross, not at the head of an army.  In our quest to tell the Truth, let’s  be known for our willingness to follow in His steps.

We stand in this assurance.  As you prepare to live a ‘truthy’ life, keep this promise always in mind.  "Then I saw heaven opened, and a white horse was standing there. And the one sitting on the horse was named Faithful and True. For he judges fairly and then goes to war. His eyes were bright like flames of fire, and on his head were many crowns. A name was written on him, and only he knew what it meant. He was clothed with a robe dipped in blood, and his title was the Word of God. The armies of heaven, dressed in pure white linen, followed him on white horses." (Revelation 19:11-14, NLT)  "Then I saw a new heaven and a new earth, for the old heaven and the old earth had disappeared. And the sea was also gone. And I saw the holy city, the new Jerusalem, coming down from God out of heaven like a beautiful bride prepared for her husband. I heard a loud shout from the throne, saying, “Look, the home of God is now among his people! He will live with them, and they will be his people. God himself will be with them. He will remove all of their sorrows, and there will be no more death or sorrow or crying or pain. For the old world and its evils are gone forever.” (Revelation 21:1-4, NLT)

Hallelujah! Amen!

My servant, Nebuchadnezzar

My servant, Nebuchadnezzar

"Lord, I want to trust You, to follow You with my whole heart, but this doesn't make any sense!" Have you ever prayed that way? I found myself on my knees in the sanctuary recently in prayer and working through that very thought. It would make a nice story to say that an angel showed up and sorted it all out for me, but that did not happen. I could tell you that I got up from my prayer refreshed and full of sweet peace, but that would be untrue, too. What did happen was re-discovery of the 27^th chapter of Jeremiah!

A few years after Nebuchadnezzar first invaded Jerusalem and carried off Judah's king and nobles to Babylon, envoys of nations surrounding Judah gathered to consider forming an alliance and seeking military backing from Egypt to rebel against Nebuchadnezzar.   It seemed like a reasonable plan, since he was pre-occupied with internal strife and issues in the eastern part of his empire. At last, the puppet king, Zedekiah, thought it was the right time to free his land. There was a shared assumption that this had to be God's will! 

Jeremiah showed up at the council wearing a yoke on his neck claiming to have a message from God that nobody in that room wanted to hear. "Now I will give your countries to King Nebuchadnezzar of Babylon, who is my servant. I have put everything, even the wild animals, under his control. All the nations will serve him and his son and his grandson until his time is up. But then many nations and great kings will conquer and rule over Babylon. So you must submit to Babylon's king and serve him; put your neck under Babylon's yoke! I will punish any nation that refuses to be his slave, says the Lord. I will send war, famine, and disease upon that nation until Babylon has conquered it." (Jeremiah 27:6-8, NLT)  Jeremiah claimed that the Lord regarded that pagan king as 'His servant!' He also claimed that God wanted them to voluntarily submit themselves to Babylon. He went on to tell the priests that they should prepare themselves for sorrow because the Temple was going to desecrated, and God was going to allow it! "For this is what the Lord Almighty says about the bronze pillars in front of the Temple, the bronze Sea in the Temple courtyard, the bronze water carts, and all the other ceremonial articles. ... Yes, this is what the Lord Almighty, the God of Israel, says about the precious things kept in the Temple and in the palace of Judah's king: They will all be carried away to Babylon and will stay there until I send for them, says the Lord. But someday I will bring them back to Jerusalem again." (Jeremiah 27:19-22, NLT)

None of this fit what they believed to be true about God and His relationship with them. They assumed He would always defend them, that He would never let His Temple be destroyed. Surely, with enough prayer He would miraculously bring deliverance, so they thought. But, no, it was not to be. God was using the Babylonian king to accomplish His will. They just couldn't believe it.

Christian, do you know that the Lord refuses to fit into your neat little box of expectations? He is not a tame Deity that we can keep on retainer to rain down positive answers to prayer so that we can live 'happily ever after.' He is the Eternal Lord of Heaven and Earth, loving and good, but also mysterious in His ways.  

Isaiah asks us to trust Him even when we cannot see where He's leading because the Lord told him, "I don't think the way you think. The way you work isn't the way I work." God's Decree. "For as the sky soars high above earth, so the way I work surpasses the way you work, and the way I think is beyond the way you think. Just as rain and snow descend from the skies and don't go back until they've watered the earth, Doing their work of making things grow and blossom, producing seed for farmers and food for the hungry, So will the words that come out of my mouth not come back empty-handed. They'll do the work I sent them to do, they'll complete the assignment I gave them." (Isaiah 55:8-11, The Message)

We are led by the Spirit, but the route He chooses may not necessarily be the one we prefer. We have two important choices - to be wisely discerning of His will and then to obey, regardless of whether we find it to our liking.  

And here's His promise for those willing to be led: "You will live in joy and peace. The mountains and hills will burst into song, and the trees of the field will clap their hands! Where once there were thorns, cypress trees will grow. Where briers grew, myrtles will sprout up. This miracle will bring great honor to the Lord's name; it will be an everlasting sign of his power and love." (Isaiah 55:12-13, NLT)

_________

Blessed Assurance

Blessed assurance, Jesus is mine,

O what a foretaste of glory divine!

Heir of salvation, purchase of God;

Born of His Spirit, washed in His blood.

Perfect submission, all is at rest,

I in my Savior am happy and blest!

Watching and waiting, looking above,

Filled with His goodness, lost in His love.

This is my story, this is my song.

Praising my Savior, all the day long.

This is my story, this is my song.

Praising my Savior, all the day long.

Fanny Jane Crosby | Phoebe Palmer Knapp

Public Domain

More than 'going to Heaven'

“If you accept Jesus as your Savior, you will go to Heaven when you die,” was the basic message that I took away from presentations of the Gospel for a long time. Thrown in was a substantial amount of “be good so that you have a rich reward when Jesus returns.”  Now, there’s nothing wrong with those statements, except that they are just half the truth!  I started to wonder, does this present world count for nothing, except to be a holding area for us until we die?  Isn’t the Gospel for here, for now? And, it is!  

I am looking forward to Heaven’s perfect enjoyment of the Presence of God, but there is a whole lot of living to be done in His Name before I depart.  When we read of Jesus sending His disciples out on mission, He did not tell them to go and promise the faithful a home in Heaven. He  “gave them power and authority to cast out demons and to heal all diseases. Then he sent them out to tell everyone about the coming of the Kingdom of God and to heal the sick." (Luke 9:1-2, NLT)  God’s rule is breaking into Creation once sub-let to sin and the devil, now being reclaimed by the preaching of the Cross and the Resurrection.  We are not to be totally future-focused. We are to be priests who bring the power of God, the wholeness of the Spirit, the restoration of the world that God loves.  Just before His ascension to the right hand of the Father, Jesus promised that His followers would "receive power when the Holy Spirit comes … “ so that they would be able to carry the Kingdom message “to the ends of the earth.” (Acts 1:8, NIV)

The letters to the Church are full of promise about the full life of the Spirit now.  In the amazing 8^th chapter of Romans, we learn that we cannot will ourselves to be good enough for God.  That is living ‘by the Law,’ and because we have a sinful nature, it only condemns us until we come to Christ. Then, we learn that by the Spirit the "righteous requirements of the law” are fully met in us who live “according to the Spirit." (Romans 8:4, NIV)  In other words, we don’t have to wait for Heaven to know God intimately and to defeat sin’s power.  Note the present tense of God’s promise.  “Those who live in accordance with the Spirit have their minds set on what the Spirit desires.  The mind of sinful man e is death, but the mind controlled by the Spirit is life and peace;  the sinful mind f is hostile to God. It does not submit to God’s law, nor can it do so. Those controlled by the sinful nature cannot please God.  You, however, are controlled not by the sinful nature but by the Spirit, if the Spirit of God lives in you.”  (Romans 8:5)

Certainly there is a perfection coming after the Return of the Lord when the Kingdom’s promise will be fully revealed.  And yet, our heavenly life is not to be deferred until some future event. It starts now. "We have an obligation—but it is not to the sinful nature, to live according to it. For if you live according to the sinful nature, you will die; but if by the Spirit you put to death the misdeeds of the body, you will live, because those who are led by the Spirit of God are sons of God." (Romans 8:12-14, NIV)

The completion of the Gospel is not the Cross though the message of forgiveness and reconciliation found there is both wonderful and key to our salvation.  The Gospel is finished at the Empty Tomb.  The Resurrected Christ is God’s statement to all of Creation that He reigns supreme, that His will triumphs, that the power of sin to hold humanity enslaved is broken.  Against that backdrop, we take Christ’s commission to “go, preach, and make disciples,” and we wed it to the assurance that is found by the testimony of our Risen Lord. 

Here’s the word from the Word.  I pray it deepens your faith, strengthens your hope, and fires your passion to do the work of the Kingdom – right here, right now. "Who got the last word, oh, Death? Oh, Death, who’s afraid of you now? It was sin that made death so frightening and law-code guilt that gave sin its leverage, its destructive power. But now in a single victorious stroke of Life, all three—sin, guilt, death—are gone, the gift of our Master, Jesus Christ. Thank God! With all this going for us, my dear, dear friends, stand your ground. And don’t hold back. Throw yourselves into the work of the Master, confident that nothing you do for him is a waste of time or effort." (1 Corinthians 15:55-58, The Message)

Joyful Joyful We Adore Thee

Joyful, joyful, we adore Thee;

God of glory, Lord of love!

Hearts unfold like flowers before Thee,

Opening to the sun above.

Melt the clouds of sin and sadness,

Drive the dark of doubt away.

Giver of immortal gladness,

Fill us with the light of day.

Thou art giving and forgiving,

Ever blessing, ever blest.

Wellspring of the joy of living,

Ocean depth of happy rest.

Thou our Father, Christ, our Brother;

All who live in love are Thine.

Teach us how to love each other

Lift us to the joy divine.

Mortals join the mighty chorus

Which the morning stars began.

Father love is reigning o'er us,

Brother love binds man to man.

Ever singing, march we onward,

Victors in the midst of strife!

Joyful music lifts us sunward,

In the triumph song of life.

Edward Hodges | Henry Van Dyke | Ludwig van Beethoven

Public Domain

"I'll be good even if it kills me!"

I’ll be good even if it kills me!

Nothing in this world gives me more joy than watching a person go through genuine spiritual metamorphosis. And, it is an inside job! Then, there is the tragic farce of those who are attempting to live the Christian life without real faith in the power of the Holy Spirit. They work hard at being religious. There is no mistaking their sincerity. Yet, they fail. Dallas Willard coined a phrase to describe that lifestyle. They are practicing the “gospel of sin management.”  Using various behavior modification techniques, an attempt is made to be moral and devout.  Failure is inevitable.

The Bible says that “if anyone is in Christ, he is a new creation; the old has gone, the new has come! All this is from God, who reconciled us to himself through Christ." (2 Corinthians 5:17-18, NIV) “In Christ!”  That is not the same as ‘member of a church,’ or ‘competent in knowledge of the Bible.’  It is a state of being, a result of a response of faith to the invitation of the Spirit. The Word tells us that "to all who believed him and accepted him, he gave the right to become children of God. They are reborn! This is not a physical birth resulting from human passion or plan—this rebirth comes from God." (John 1:12-13, NLT)  “For God so loved the world that he gave his only Son, so that everyone who believes in him will not perish but have eternal life." (John 3:16, NLT)

This is not new information to you, is it? We know that we are made right with God through faith in Christ.  The tragedy is that once we come to Him in faith, many of us revert to trying to live for Him by our own determination!  Like the Christians in ancient Galatia, come to know Jesus in faith and then slip back into the old patterns of religion. Paul rebuked those Galatian believers: "I am astonished that you are so quickly deserting the one who called you by the grace of Christ and are turning to a different gospel— … You foolish Galatians! Who has bewitched you? Before your very eyes Jesus Christ was clearly portrayed as crucified. I would like to learn just one thing from you: Did you receive the Spirit by observing the law, or by believing what you heard? Are you so foolish? After beginning with the Spirit, are you now trying to attain your goal by human effort?" (Galatians 1:6, 3:1-3, NIV)

Because of this error, determination is more common among Christian than delight. Guilt is the more common feeling than joyous freedom. The Holy Spirit was given to us so we may live without fear of sin, so that we can be holy people, from the inside out.  Take your guilty feelings and leave them with Christ.  Confess your inadequacy for holy living honestly and thank God for the gift of the Spirit.  Receive the gift.

Ponder this passage prayerfully today.  It’s an amazing one.  "When the time arrived that was set by God the Father, God sent his Son, born among us of a woman, born under the conditions of the law so that he might redeem those of us who have been kidnapped by the law. Thus we have been set free to experience our rightful heritage. You can tell for sure that you are now fully adopted as his own children because God sent the Spirit of his Son into our lives crying out, “Papa! Father!” Doesn’t that privilege of intimate conversation with God make it plain that you are not a slave, but a child? And if you are a child, you’re also an heir, with complete access to the inheritance. Earlier, before you knew God personally, you were enslaved to so-called gods that had nothing of the divine about them. But now that you know the real God—or rather since God knows you—how can you possibly subject yourselves again to those paper tigers? For that is exactly what you do when you are intimidated into scrupulously observing all the traditions, taboos, and superstitions associated with special days and seasons and years." (Galatians 4:4-10, The Message)

The paradox (at least from our human point of view) is that the more we are willing to abandon our need to do something to earn our acceptance with our Father and trust radically in Christ’s sacrifice for sin, the more freedom we find.  Love springs from our heart and we are known as ‘children of God.’  Is anything more wonderful than that?

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In Christ Alone

In Christ alone my hope is found

He is my light my strength my song

This Cornerstone this solid Ground

Firm through the fiercest drought and storm

What heights of love what depths of peace

When fears are stilled when strivings cease

My Comforter my All in All

Here in the love of Christ I stand

No guilt in life no fear in death

This is the power of Christ in me

From life's first cry to final breath

Jesus commands my destiny

No power of hell no scheme of man

Can ever pluck me from His hand

Till He returns or calls me home

Here in the power of Christ I'll stand

Keith Getty | Stuart Townend

© 2001 Thankyou Music (Admin. by EMI Christian Music Publishing)

CCLI License # 810055

Monday Mornings

Which of these phrases comes from you today: “Oh, Lord, it’s Monday!” said with a groan, or; “It’s Monday, Lord!” spoken with expectation? Some of you are smiling as you read and some of you are growling, “Jerry, you don’t know my boss” or "You do not know what I am up against."  Of course, I do not. But, God does! 

God has given us the ability to shape our emotions and our lives. We can live positively if we develop the habits of happiness! Some of us fall into the futility of the blame game, "it's your fault that I am miserable."  Others demand that someone else change to fit our expectations before we will attempt to be happy.  But, joy does not come from outside; it grows from the inside out. God gives us a choice each day - to accept the day and His gifts in it, or to resist the day and live miserably!

People who find the most joy in life are not those who are ‘lucky.’ Joy is discovered in a choice to adjust and adapt to circumstances.The Bible calls this contentment. A deep reverence for the rule of the Almighty dethrones the ego that insists on having its own way and in that submission we find serenity.  

The Bible says, "The fear of the LORD leads to life: Then one rests content, untouched by trouble." (Proverbs 19:23, NIV) St. Paul, in the middle of a life full of rejection and hardships, said that he had "learned to be content whatever the circumstances. I know what it is to be in need, and I know what it is to have plenty. I have learned the secret of being content in any and every situation, whether well fed or hungry, whether living in plenty or in want." (Philippians 4:11-12, NIV) He repeats it twice, impressing the importance of this choice.

Contentment is not passivity. It is not apathy. It is found in faith. If this passage describes what we really believe to be true about our Lord, how could we live in anything other than contentment? “O Lord, you have examined my heart and know everything about me. You know when I sit down or stand up. You know my every thought when far away. You chart the path ahead of me and tell me where to stop and rest. Every moment you know where I am. You know what I am going to say even before I say it, Lord. You both precede and follow me. You place your hand of blessing on my head. Such knowledge is too wonderful for me, too great for me to know!" (Psalm 139:1-6, NLT)

On this Monday morning, if you’re dreading the week, if you’re full of anxiety, if you’re already wishing for Friday- it’s going to be a l o n g week. Reframe the way you choose to enter this day. Give it to the Lord and pray for faith to accept where He leads and to be the one who is His light and life in those situations. We are, the Word says, “Christ’s ambassadors.” Let’s represent Him well, with joyful faith today.

Father, help me to trust You today,

Expecting, not dreading; responding to each challenge with faith.

When I feel alone, whisper - “I am here!”

For there is real and complete joy in Your presence.

Silence the rebellion of my heart and

Grant me the contentment of a child who

Knows that His Daddy loves him completely.

And, in all my words, in the very attitudes of my heart,

May You be honored.

Jesus, I ask this in Your holy name. Amen.