June 9th, 2013
Weather Report From Heaven: Sunny and bright, with an abundance of light and lots of singing and rejoicing.
Bible Verse of the Day: Psalm 43:1 " Fear not, for I have redeemed you; I have called you by your name; You are Mine."
We live in a time and place where there is plenty of fear to go around. All one has to do is to open up a newspaper or turn on the news to get an instant feel for the how messed up our world is. The U.S.Government spying on their own citizenry and using the IRS to target people who disagree with their agenda is reminiscent of George Orwell's futuristic thriller 1984, but it is no longer the future, it is the present, and it is scary because it is happening right here in the U.S.A. There are wars and rumors of wars all over the Middle East. North Korea threatens the destruction of S. Korea, Japan and the U.S. on almost a regular basis now. Terrorists want to destroy the freedom that we enjoy as Americans, and they seem to be doing a good job at chipping away at our liberties in both subtle and overt ways.
We live in a broken world, that is desperate for the truth of what will make it all better and will help us deal with our fears. But the Truth is right before our eyes and our real internal freedom from all of our fears is right there alongside the Truth in Jesus Christ, who says in John 14:6 " I am the way, the truth and the life; No one can come to the Father except through me." The most important question we can ever ask ourselves in this lifetime is, do we believe Him? Do we believe that Jesus is who He said He was? Because if we believe Him, and we trust that in Him we have eternal life that can never be taken away from us, then that makes all of our other fears seem insignificant within the scope of that promise. Don't get me wrong, as humans we will struggle with fear because our nature is to want to control things and as we come to the stark realization there are so many things in this life that are beyond our control, our natural reaction is to become fearful. We can't control what is going on at our neighbors house, or in the guy's car next to us on the freeway or the rogue employee at the office who has had a bad fight with their spouse. But each of these people and situations has a chance to spill over directly into our lives and can have a tremendous effect on us and we can't stop it. A drunk driver next to us could suddenly swerve into our car and cause major damage or worse. A rogue employee can decide to take out their frustration by committing violence on innocent people and their is nothing we did to cause that, nor is there anything we can do to control that. Those types of thoughts about our ultimate lack of control can make us fearful.
But those are external events. What about our ability to control fear and remove anxiety from an internal perspective? Luckily, God has given us a road map of how we can lean into Him to find some real and everlasting internal peace amongst the chaos that is happening all around us. Prayer is the biggest tool that we have in our arsenal to alleviate our fears. As a matter of fact, God promises us that prayer can directly lead to peace. In Philippians 4:6-7 it says " Do not be anxious about anything, but in every situation, by prayer and petition, with thanksgiving, present your requests to God. And the peace of God, which transcends all understanding, will guard your hearts and minds in Christ Jesus." Again, the question is do we believe it?
Another thing that we can do is to get our hearts right before the Lord. He promises to forgive us of our sins if we repent and turn to Him for forgiveness. For He alone can forgive our sins. We must realize that we are only as sick as our secrets. When we have nothing to hide, than we truly have nothing to fear. Often times, however, our initial reaction when we do something we are not proud of is to hide. We run away from God, rather than leaning into God to help us through the mess we have created. We try to justify our running away by saying things to ourselves like"what I did wasn't so bad compared to what this person does" or " no one got hurt as a result of what I did" or " I don't even think what I did was sinful," like somehow we get to play God and make judgements on what is sin and what isn't. But here is the real truth: We can't trick our souls! Our souls are the feedback mechanism God built into us to know when we do something wrong. Even little 1 year old babies have the ability to know when they do wrong. They usually let us know because they start to cry even before we have ever said anything about what they have done wrong! A dog slinks around the house when they know that they shouldn't have eaten the stuffing out of the chair. A drug addict even knows when they use that it is a bad choice, even though they may feel powerless to stop.
Even before I became a Christ follower, I knew right form wrong. I just didn't take time to stop and repent before God and ask for His forgiveness and guidance the next time the same situation occurred as I do now. Therefore I had never dealt with the root problem, my sin, and that caused me to be fearful because I was hiding something from God ( or thought I was, not realizing that He already knows everything I HAVE EVER DONE OR WILL DO. ) I was trying to run from Him, afraid He was like an angry traffic cop behind a billboard just waiting to cast judgement upon me. Guilty He would surely say! I didn't know if I was ready or able to handle His harsh response. Little did I know at the time that " there is no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus," as Romans 8;1 tells us. In fact, I know now that He alone can remove that heavy load of guilt that I was carrying on my back from my life of unrepentant sin. Not only is there no condemnation, but there is actually freedom and peace in the place where guilt and fear once roamed. In Matthew 11:28 Jesus says " Come unto me, all you who are weary and heavily burdened, and I WILL GIVE YOUR REST!" Rest not only for our bodies, but for our tired souls. Why would we ignore such a blessing?
God knew the desperation of our sinful guilt and resulting fear, and that it why after Jesus had died on the cross for forgiveness of our sins, He sent the Holy Spirit as an advocate for our lives to lead us in ways of real truth. He said in John 15:4-5 " Remain in me, as I also remain in you. No branch can bear fruit by itself; it must remain in the vine. Neither can you bear fruit unless you remain in me. For I AM the vine and you are the branches. If you remain in me and I in you, you will bear much fruit; apart from me you can do nothing."
How can we remain in Christ even though Jesus has left the physical earth for now? God sent the answer in the Holy Spirit. The Holy Spirit leads us in righteousness and in the way everlasting. We must pray to stay connected to God. We must read the Bible, the living word of God, to stay connected to God. We must fellowship with others to stay connected to God. We must love others, the way He has loved us, to stay connected to God. We must forgive others, including ourselves, as He has forgiven us. We must stop running and learn to lean into God when we make mistakes and fall in our sin. He is not surprised when we sin. In fact, I believe He is much more surprised when we don't! Repenting removes fear because it removes our desire to hide. It brings our weaknesses out into the open and it says, please God forgive me, for I am a weak and broken person and I am sorry. I want to lean into you and your strength, mercy and grace. God works well with humility. Humility aligns us with the Spirit of His Son, the most humble person to ever walk the face of this earth. He will work to restore our brokenness, heal our wounds and remove our fear. The question is, will we let Him?
Sunday, June 9, 2013
Tuesday, June 4, 2013
Baby in a basket
June 3, 2013
Weather Report From Heaven: Sunny and bright, with an abundance of light and lots of singing and rejoicing.
Bible Verse of the Day: Proverbs 4:23 "Keep your heart with all vigilance, for from it flow the springs of life."
If I am perfectly honest, I say that I am a devoted follower of Christ and that I am "all in," but in many instances my actions tell a completely different story. Oh, I indeed want to follow Christ and seek him with all of my heart and soul, its just that I keep letting the world and all of its worries, get in the way. It is like I want to have all ten toes in the water with Christ, but I keep finding myself with like 7 toes trying to hang on to something in this world. I want to give myself credit for "doing it my way", as Frank Sinatra used to sing about so proudly. But why? My way never works out so well and the things of this world that I still find myself distracted by and drawn to only leave me empty, frustrated and angry. Why can't we all get along and love each other the way we're supposed to? Why does our Government act as if they are above the people, instead of for the people? Why does the media endlessly promote all the negative news at the expense of the hopeful things that could make people feel more positive. I tell myself I am over all this, it saps my strength and leaves me depleted and that the peace that I find in Christ is an obvious oasis where I should spend all of my time. Psalm 46:10 exhorts me "to be still and know that I am God" and I have felt this calmness and crave to bottle it up and keep it always by my side.
Yet when opportunities come up to serve his kingdom and to bless others, many times my own fears or lack of convictions keep my from doing the vary things I wish to do. I can fully relate to Paul in Romans 7: 15 when he says " I do not understand what I do. For what I want to do I do not do, but what I hate to do." My heart screams "yes", this is the opportunity I have been waiting for to align myself with the Lord's servant heart. I know that if I act on these feelings, the reward is a connection to a loving Savior that is pleased with my compassion and which leaves me feeling euphoric and meaningful, for I have felt this on many of those such occasions. But many times, my mind and my body are tired, lazy or fearful. Instead of seeing opportunity, I see inconvenience.
I want to so desperately be free from the shackles of conditional servitude, but many times I play that game with God that if I do this for you, then what are you going to do for me? Will I get instant payback and have the laundry list of perceived wants fulfilled? Like God is some cosmic deal maker in the sky, like a Monte Hall: should I take the box or the curtain? of course not, because God loves me too much to give me what I think I want. Instead, He always gives me what i need and in His perfect timing. One thing I have finally started to realize in my walk with our gracious Lord is we do not do deals with Him. His word promises us that we will be richly rewarded for our acts of loving others with kindness, forgiveness and patience, but that it is best to serve in secret. Matthew 6:3-4 says that " when you give to the needy, do not let your left hand know what your right hand is doing, so that all of your giving may be in secret. Then you Father, who sees what is done in secret, will reward you." I struggle with this one mightily because of my pride that fuels my need for recognition. Hey, did anyone see what I did today for this orphan or that widow? How about a little r-e-s-p-e-c-t for going out of my way to help someone or to give some of my hard earned money to a charity which I don't even really know about. I could have done a lot more with my time or resources than that. Of course, in all honesty, that was the best thing I could have ever done with my time and resources and it also made me feel better than anything else I could have done.
That is the amazing thing about God; He never let's us down and His words are always true and always will be.It is just we struggle so much in our broken humanness with the paradoxes. It is better to give than receive? The last shall be first? If someone forces you to go one mile, go with them two miles? The meek shall inherit the earth? What happened to an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth? What about I deserve to have all that I can get because of.... fill in the blank. I mean, these things are so counter intuitive to the way I have been raised in this world, it requires total surrender of 48 years of human experiences in order to comply and of course, no one ever fully has or will except for Jesus himself. But here is the rub: When we fully trust in God through Christ Jesus, He can take away all of the fears and doubts and actually make us see the great value in His ways, which he reminds us in Isaiah 55:9 are so much higher and greater than our ways. When we learn to trust the way that the Mother of Baby Moses did, when she placed her baby in a basket, and sent him floating down the Nile into unknown territory with all of her hope and dreams resting solely on the large shoulders of her God, then we are truly free at last.
There are things that happen to us in this world that we simply were not designed to handle. Luckily, God tells us we don't have to. He is big enough to handle them for us. The question is do we trust Him? I have come to the firm belief that we are all one giant, faithful decision away from seeing His glory manifest itself in our lives in a tangible way. I mean He is a present God and He cares deeply about all of the details of our lives. He loves the world and everything in it, which by inference means He loves us and cares about us. He is not distant; he is present, through the gift of the Holy Spirit, as we struggle to pay our bills or as we plant flowers in our garden or as we work in technology to help develop a new way of speeding up our lives.That is a discussion for another day. Why do we really think that if we speed up our lives, we will somehow blow right past all of our problems, when in reality we need the complete opposite? We need to repent and ruthlessly eliminate all hurry in our life and spend time alone in the presence of our King, so we can hear His still voice. He is pleading with us to trust him. Why is it so hard for us to let go of whatever is holding us back? Psalm 127: 1-2 says " Unless the LORD builds the house the builders labor in vain. Unless the LORD watches over the city, the guards stand watch in vain. In vain you rise early and stay up late toiling for food to eat- for he grants sleep to those He loves." I see the Lord pleading with me in this verse that I don't need to work harder or to stay up later toiling, I NEED TO PRAY MORE! I NEED TO TRUST MORE.
I occasionally get a good glimpse of my prideful condition that keeps me from given Him all the glory in my life and it both saddens and sickens me. it shows me a glimmer of my despair and it is uncomfortable at best. Pride is the biggest threat to our fruitful relationship with Christ because it cuts off the source of all good fruit, the Vine which is Him, and offers a cheap substitute which can never last, which is us, the branches. No wonder why Proverbs 16:18 warns us that "first pride, then the fall." We have heard it said that for every 100 people that can handle failure, only 1 can handle success and that is because of our prideful condition that longs to feed the flesh. The battle that rages between Flesh ( evil ) and the Spirit ( God ) is a fierce one that every person is constantly engaged in. Love, hope, peace, kindness, vs lust, anger, pride, greed. It is spelled out it Galatians 5 and it is a battle that we can handle on our own. Many times, we don't even realize that we are in it and certainly not until we become a Christ follower.
When Christ is at the center of all of our lives, he starves our need to feed the fleshly desires we crave. When we truly align with Christ's heart, we find that we are able to do things that would be unimaginable on our own. We are able to forgive those who have hurt us badly in the past, be it in love or finances or abuse or whatever the situation. Sometimes, we are even able to forgive ourselves for the messy areas of our lives and the destructive wakes we have left behind. For when we truly believe that Christ loves and forgives us, and that the love is so deep that He was willing to die for forgiveness of those sins, then we are free to live the lives that He intended for us all along. We can become the earthly vessels through which His grace, love and mercy can flow. We become stewards in all the gifts he has given us, freely able to let them pass through us to grow and bless His kingdom. We can't fully comprehend a love so deep in our human condition. But we can learn to trust it.
Weather Report From Heaven: Sunny and bright, with an abundance of light and lots of singing and rejoicing.
Bible Verse of the Day: Proverbs 4:23 "Keep your heart with all vigilance, for from it flow the springs of life."
If I am perfectly honest, I say that I am a devoted follower of Christ and that I am "all in," but in many instances my actions tell a completely different story. Oh, I indeed want to follow Christ and seek him with all of my heart and soul, its just that I keep letting the world and all of its worries, get in the way. It is like I want to have all ten toes in the water with Christ, but I keep finding myself with like 7 toes trying to hang on to something in this world. I want to give myself credit for "doing it my way", as Frank Sinatra used to sing about so proudly. But why? My way never works out so well and the things of this world that I still find myself distracted by and drawn to only leave me empty, frustrated and angry. Why can't we all get along and love each other the way we're supposed to? Why does our Government act as if they are above the people, instead of for the people? Why does the media endlessly promote all the negative news at the expense of the hopeful things that could make people feel more positive. I tell myself I am over all this, it saps my strength and leaves me depleted and that the peace that I find in Christ is an obvious oasis where I should spend all of my time. Psalm 46:10 exhorts me "to be still and know that I am God" and I have felt this calmness and crave to bottle it up and keep it always by my side.
Yet when opportunities come up to serve his kingdom and to bless others, many times my own fears or lack of convictions keep my from doing the vary things I wish to do. I can fully relate to Paul in Romans 7: 15 when he says " I do not understand what I do. For what I want to do I do not do, but what I hate to do." My heart screams "yes", this is the opportunity I have been waiting for to align myself with the Lord's servant heart. I know that if I act on these feelings, the reward is a connection to a loving Savior that is pleased with my compassion and which leaves me feeling euphoric and meaningful, for I have felt this on many of those such occasions. But many times, my mind and my body are tired, lazy or fearful. Instead of seeing opportunity, I see inconvenience.
I want to so desperately be free from the shackles of conditional servitude, but many times I play that game with God that if I do this for you, then what are you going to do for me? Will I get instant payback and have the laundry list of perceived wants fulfilled? Like God is some cosmic deal maker in the sky, like a Monte Hall: should I take the box or the curtain? of course not, because God loves me too much to give me what I think I want. Instead, He always gives me what i need and in His perfect timing. One thing I have finally started to realize in my walk with our gracious Lord is we do not do deals with Him. His word promises us that we will be richly rewarded for our acts of loving others with kindness, forgiveness and patience, but that it is best to serve in secret. Matthew 6:3-4 says that " when you give to the needy, do not let your left hand know what your right hand is doing, so that all of your giving may be in secret. Then you Father, who sees what is done in secret, will reward you." I struggle with this one mightily because of my pride that fuels my need for recognition. Hey, did anyone see what I did today for this orphan or that widow? How about a little r-e-s-p-e-c-t for going out of my way to help someone or to give some of my hard earned money to a charity which I don't even really know about. I could have done a lot more with my time or resources than that. Of course, in all honesty, that was the best thing I could have ever done with my time and resources and it also made me feel better than anything else I could have done.
That is the amazing thing about God; He never let's us down and His words are always true and always will be.It is just we struggle so much in our broken humanness with the paradoxes. It is better to give than receive? The last shall be first? If someone forces you to go one mile, go with them two miles? The meek shall inherit the earth? What happened to an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth? What about I deserve to have all that I can get because of.... fill in the blank. I mean, these things are so counter intuitive to the way I have been raised in this world, it requires total surrender of 48 years of human experiences in order to comply and of course, no one ever fully has or will except for Jesus himself. But here is the rub: When we fully trust in God through Christ Jesus, He can take away all of the fears and doubts and actually make us see the great value in His ways, which he reminds us in Isaiah 55:9 are so much higher and greater than our ways. When we learn to trust the way that the Mother of Baby Moses did, when she placed her baby in a basket, and sent him floating down the Nile into unknown territory with all of her hope and dreams resting solely on the large shoulders of her God, then we are truly free at last.
There are things that happen to us in this world that we simply were not designed to handle. Luckily, God tells us we don't have to. He is big enough to handle them for us. The question is do we trust Him? I have come to the firm belief that we are all one giant, faithful decision away from seeing His glory manifest itself in our lives in a tangible way. I mean He is a present God and He cares deeply about all of the details of our lives. He loves the world and everything in it, which by inference means He loves us and cares about us. He is not distant; he is present, through the gift of the Holy Spirit, as we struggle to pay our bills or as we plant flowers in our garden or as we work in technology to help develop a new way of speeding up our lives.That is a discussion for another day. Why do we really think that if we speed up our lives, we will somehow blow right past all of our problems, when in reality we need the complete opposite? We need to repent and ruthlessly eliminate all hurry in our life and spend time alone in the presence of our King, so we can hear His still voice. He is pleading with us to trust him. Why is it so hard for us to let go of whatever is holding us back? Psalm 127: 1-2 says " Unless the LORD builds the house the builders labor in vain. Unless the LORD watches over the city, the guards stand watch in vain. In vain you rise early and stay up late toiling for food to eat- for he grants sleep to those He loves." I see the Lord pleading with me in this verse that I don't need to work harder or to stay up later toiling, I NEED TO PRAY MORE! I NEED TO TRUST MORE.
I occasionally get a good glimpse of my prideful condition that keeps me from given Him all the glory in my life and it both saddens and sickens me. it shows me a glimmer of my despair and it is uncomfortable at best. Pride is the biggest threat to our fruitful relationship with Christ because it cuts off the source of all good fruit, the Vine which is Him, and offers a cheap substitute which can never last, which is us, the branches. No wonder why Proverbs 16:18 warns us that "first pride, then the fall." We have heard it said that for every 100 people that can handle failure, only 1 can handle success and that is because of our prideful condition that longs to feed the flesh. The battle that rages between Flesh ( evil ) and the Spirit ( God ) is a fierce one that every person is constantly engaged in. Love, hope, peace, kindness, vs lust, anger, pride, greed. It is spelled out it Galatians 5 and it is a battle that we can handle on our own. Many times, we don't even realize that we are in it and certainly not until we become a Christ follower.
When Christ is at the center of all of our lives, he starves our need to feed the fleshly desires we crave. When we truly align with Christ's heart, we find that we are able to do things that would be unimaginable on our own. We are able to forgive those who have hurt us badly in the past, be it in love or finances or abuse or whatever the situation. Sometimes, we are even able to forgive ourselves for the messy areas of our lives and the destructive wakes we have left behind. For when we truly believe that Christ loves and forgives us, and that the love is so deep that He was willing to die for forgiveness of those sins, then we are free to live the lives that He intended for us all along. We can become the earthly vessels through which His grace, love and mercy can flow. We become stewards in all the gifts he has given us, freely able to let them pass through us to grow and bless His kingdom. We can't fully comprehend a love so deep in our human condition. But we can learn to trust it.
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