Month: May 2012

It is impossible to know Jesus Christ without knowing His compassion. One of the most profound truths of conversion is the realization that, though we are justly condemned, the One who would rightfully condemn us does not desire to do so. As we viscerally come to know this truth, that Jesus deeply desires us to be redeemed and healed, we become willing to let Him do it.

It is easy to read about Jesus having compassion on someone in Scripture and miss the profound depth of what that means. God incarnate sees our misery and His reaction is not “they are getting what they so richly deserve” but instead a passionate desire to help. The Lord of the Universe is moved by humankind’s pain. God not only weeps over our lostness but in Christ He extends Himself to find us. This is the definition of compassion, not only being affected by someone’s suffering but actually acting to relieve that suffering. All the healings in Christ’s ministry are examples of this love in action, this willingness to enter into our place of pain and do something about it.

One of the hardest tasks in the believer’s life is to trust that when they hurt, God hurts. In the world we see so much indifference towards, often even pleasure in, the sufferings of others. We even see it in people that call themselves Christians but who seem to glory in judging others for the sake of judging others. These Christians get some sort of high from making others feel guilty rather than convicted. It seems impossible to believe that the kind of radical compassion we so desperately need could exist in such a world especially when it cannot be found in some of our churches! The bottom line is that the misery of this fallen place we dwell in seems overwhelming; and so it is apart from the reality of Christ.

But in the Son of God there dwells a transcendent love for us, one that is unaffected by the darkness of this time and place. It is the compassion of the cross. The love that brought Jesus to Golgotha was also the love that ultimately raised Him from the dead and it is this same power that enables us to be brought to and changed by our risen Lord today. When we are touched from above by God, when we are freed from some pain, healed of some wound, we need to remember that the Lord is not doing this reluctantly or begrudgingly. He is simply revealing the depth of His compassionate nature. He knows our anguish and he shares in it. Our Savior has not been called the ‘Son of Compassion’ without glorious reason. Our pain truly is His pain and, because of His very nature, Jesus Christ will not let that pain go forever unremoved.

We live in a self-absorbed age. Self-absorption has always been endemic in fallen humankind, but some eras have been more congenial to it than others. Of all the ages in our race’s tragic history the one we live in today is perhaps the most agreeable to excessive inwardness. Decades of material affluence and spiritual secularism in the West have probably done more to re-enforce our “natural” tendency to deify the self than anything else in our collective past.

Christians are, of course, in no way immune to the temptation towards self-centeredness. Even a cursory glance at the Western Church today reveals compromises with the cult of human personality that is the unspoken religion of the world around it. Our culture often seems to be having more influence on us than we on it. The simplicity, sacrifice and “Godwardness” of the early church at its best are seldom found in many congregations in these early years of the Twenty-First Century. The kind of practical everyday holiness that came from God being bigger in our eyes than ourselves has become scarce. Such holiness once made Christians stand starkly in contrast with the world. That contrast is harder than ever to see today.

Lest the reader come away with a sense that I put myself outside this drift towards self-absorption in the Church let me put your mind at ease. I see it as much in myself as in my spiritual fellow-travelers. I was raised the only child of a marriage between wealthy American non-believers. While nearly half my life has been spent as a professing Christian the legacy of my upbringing, and the accepted influence of a “navel-gazing” society, have left their mark on my soul. I think about myself and my problems all too often. I magnify myself far more than I magnify the Lord. I pray endlessly for God to be truly first in my life but this has not, thus far, changed the unsettling truth of the matter. I am a typical Post-Modern Western Christian, circa 2011.

Yet, by the grace of God the answer has not been wholly lost on me. In fact it came to me quite clearly and simply in a recent time of journaling. I found myself writing the following:

“It is Who You are that matters. So much more than who I am.”

This is, I believe, the truth and it is a truth that sets forth the antidote to the presiding spirit of this time in human history. I need desperately to have God loom larger in my heart than myself, to have Him become the greatest “thing” in my consciousness. I think this is universally true for the true believer, and always has been. The question, really, is do I want this to happen as badly as I need it to happen?

Knowing God more means making the choice to know myself less. I know this statement is anathema to this therapeutic age, and I do concede that self-knowledge is not inherently a bad thing, but true self-knowledge comes from the encounter with our Maker and Redeemer, not our ego. I can look for myself through my ego, and my earthly resources, and find nothing but the despair that C.S. Lewis spoke of in one of his apologetic volumes. “Aim at Heaven”, he once said “and you will get earth thrown in. Aim at Earth and you get neither.” Lewis knew that self-absorption was both deadly and the sickness of his own time. If he were alive today he would recognize how much worse that sickness onto death has become in our own time. We who look first to God will get our selves thrown in. We who look only to our selves will get neither in the end.

I hope and trust that, in the end, I will choose to let Who God is become greater than who I am, who I perceive myself to be. I do not presume to know exactly how to make this happen, but I also trust in the grace of God towards those who have called sincerely on the Name of His Son. That grace is part of Who He is and is therefore, by definition, a yet more powerful a force than my self-absorption….that is if I want it to be.

I continue to pray that I will want it to be, and I pray the same for you.

Because it is only the true dawn, and continuing light, of God-absorption, that will save both our souls.

Facing reality is sometimes hard, but living in unreality is harder. The Christian journey is about moving from the unreal to the real. We are born into a world that calls delusion truth. In fact it calls delusion truth so effectively that at one time many of us fully believed we could have a healthy, happy and meaningful life while leaving the God of the Universe completely out of the picture. Only eating the horrible fruit harvested from living in estrangement from Him brought us to our senses, and to our rebirth. Part of that rebirth was seeing ultimate reality, His ultimate reality, for the first time in our lives.

But some of us have been to a place where, after enduring terrible pain we feel we did not deserve, we have been tempted to blame God and walk away from Him. For a moment we think of our old way of existing, as being somehow easier or better than facing the daily struggles that are part and parcel of the Christian walk. So we look back at the days we knew before Jesus came into our lives imagining something better was there for us. Usually such musings, thank God, do not last very long. This is because they wilt when we also remember the terrible meaninglessness of those days.

Such meaninglessness is the product of living in a “reality” that does not include God. We may have had money, power, pleasure or fame but it was in a spiritual vacuum and all these things ultimately led us deeper into the lie of the serpent, and into our own pit. The serpent’s deception was simple yet profound; he told us we did not need God to find meaning, purpose and blessing in our lives. When we, in the guise of Adam and Eve, believed him our once real world become horribly unreal, though our fallen hearts learned to think otherwise. Only divine intervention could restore us to the true sanity we mistakenly came to think was already ours. The blood of the Son of Man has achieved many things for us within the greater rubric of salvation. One of these things was the opening of our eyes to what is truly real, and always has been.

Of course this opening of our eyes was just the beginning. Discovering God’s truth is part of the grand pilgrimage we walk out in this life. Such discovery is progressive. This is why we say that no one believer has a monopoly on truth. There is always more to find.

There is also a need to test all we have come to believe is truth, for we still live in the serpent’s neck of the woods. The Devil is forever trying to lure us back into believing the deception he has personally fathered and continues to feed to an unbelieving world. You can be sure that when those “turn back from the plow” temptations hit us Satan and his surrogates are somehow involved.

The best thing to do when such moments come is to remember what made us Christians in the first place. Before our rebirth most of us rode the lies, the unreality we believed to be real, into the pit. The darkness finally became visible as it began to suck the will to live out of our being. All of the once pleasant things in our past, things that we had made idols out of in the absence of God ultimately dragged us to the very gates of Hell. It was then that we cried out to our Lord and exchanged the dark lies of a fallen world and fallen self for the bright, blessed truth of God and the redemption He offers. When we remember the emptiness and despair we knew and compare it to the incredible fullness and hope we have found, the past does not look as good as it first did. We realize that our temporal troubles will pass away and we will once more know the joy of His presence.

We again understand that reality, ultimate and redemptive, is only found in Him, and it is Him that we truly want.

Sin is, of course, the universal experience of all mankind with the single exception of Christ. As believers we are each called not just to reckon with our own sins but to also appropriately reckon with the sins of others. Dealing with a sinning brother or sister is one of the most difficult challenges of the Christian life. The temptation in these situations is always to either accuse or excuse. Both these reactions come from the flesh and not the Spirit. When we angrily point the finger at someone we are acting out of a prideful arrogance that conveniently glosses over our own evils and when we alternatively give them the impression that sin is no big deal we act out of a permissive laxity that does the same thing. Either approach is equally wrong and sinful in and of itself.

It is vitally important to take the time to recognize our own impulses in reacting to transgression in others. Otherwise we may multiply their transgression by our own and lose a precious opportunity to be agents of reconciliation and healing. The key is found in not immediately reacting to whatever the person has done wrong. Wisdom dictates thinking before we speak on many occasions and certainly this is one of them. Our immediate passion for either accusing or excusing must not be allowed to possess us; rather we must control our initial urges and remain silent for the moment. This gives us the opportunity to determine whether we are ready to truly “speak the truth in love” or whether we need to be silent for the time being and check our own spirit.

It has been said that motive is everything and this is clearly the case in how we react to someone else’s moral lapses. We must search our motives before we presume to say one word of correction to another human being. We must also ask the Holy Spirit to help us enter into this self-examination, while at the same time granting us a spirit of sincere love. Then we can deal with the sinning person, as God would have us, not as we would have us. This is the only way to insure that we do not compound another’s sin with our own.

When we look at the sheer beauty of the natural world it can be easy to forget that nature is under the same curse we are. The Scriptures tell us that when humankind fell so did humankind’s environs. Even though the natural world is not intrinsically evil, as we are apart from Christ, evil has gained a foothold in nature because of the catastrophe that was and is the Fall.

We see this in destructive storms that destroy everything in their path and in droughts that exterminate flora and fauna across the spectrum. We observe it in Killer Whales that have been known to stalk and kill their prey for the sheer sport of it, leaving the carcasses uneaten and in parasites like heartworms that not only feed on their hosts, but finally kill them as well.

Even the beautiful tree outside my window could, under the right adverse conditions, fall on my home and harm my wife and me. Even the sparkling ocean can be whipped into frenzy by Hurricane or tsunami and do the same to our family members who live close to the sea.

Even that which is lovely in nature can turn deadly.

What is sadly ironic about what our own species’ disobedience has done to the natural environment is the fact that God originally entrusted the care of His creation to us. In the Pre-Lapsarian Garden of Eden our first parents were given the wonderful responsibility to tend that garden and even name the animals that inhabited it. This was, no doubt, a microcosm of what God had intended on a global scale, that is man and nature living in harmony without the shadow of death that came from our decision to choose disobedience, to choose the evil over the good.

This is horribly tragic. It was enough that our race condemned itself to the futility that accompanies physical and spiritual death; how inconceivably sad that we had to take nature down with us, the very nature we were once entrusted to take care of (and we have not even touched on what the depredations of humankind have since inflicted on the natural environment apart from the initial curse.)

Thankfully the Resurrection power of the soon-coming Son of God will not be restricted just to the final redemption of man.

When we talk of salvation we sometimes forget that what Christ had to do to save us He also apparently had to do to save the rest of His creation as well. The Bible speaks of a time when not only ourselves but nature too will finally be set free from the “bondage to decay” that has marked all of human history. The return of Jesus will mean a complete renewal of the natural world, its deliverance from an evil that it was never guilty of, only subject to.

So as we look out at that towering tree or majestic sea, both lovely and potentially lethal, we can give thanks to our Lord that He has not forgotten the plight of His natural world in the plan of redemption. When that plan has been fully realized nature herself will enter into the same perfection as we and she will, once again, be only purely beautiful….and purely life–giving.

It has been said that the unexamined life is not worth living. The opposite is also true. The too much-examined life isn’t worth living either. Self-centeredness has always been a tendency of fallen humanity. In fact it could be said to be the essence of our corporate rebellion against God, for only He is the rightful center of all things. Our race was created to live for and through Him, not for ourselves. Part of the mutiny of the Fall was the attempted enthronement of the human race over God. We tried to make ourselves the center of the universe and throughout human history have suffered the divine curse that was its result. In unregenerate human beings self-centeredness is as natural, and often as unopposed, as breathing. In Christians it is an inclination of the flesh that must be consciously and consistently fought by the power of the Holy Spirit.

One aspect of this tendency is an obsession with finding out what is wrong inside us. The “therapeutic” culture that has become so prevalent in the Western world in recent years is indicative of a perceived need to find answers by looking within. It is thought that self-examination is the path to uncover the solutions for much of the pain that plagues the human condition. What might be called “the Psychology Boom” is a function of a society that has come to believe that the primary way to find happiness is to somehow change the self through self-examination.

Unfortunately self-examination in and of itself is a dead end. There is much that is wrong within each one of us but to constantly pore over our flaws in an attempt to cast them out is not only futile but also potentially destructive. Depression and, ultimately, despair is the fruit of an overly examined life. When we try to seek deliverance in forever looking at and to ourselves we will forever reap the whirlwind. The answer to our fallen-ness is not to be found in an obsessive examination of the very fallen-ness we seek to restore, but in the One who is our Restoration. It is ultimately in God-centeredness, not self-centeredness, that freedom from the ravages of sin can be found, to the extent that is possible while still living on this side of the Resurrection.

That is not to say that looking inside ourselves is wrong in a comprehensive sense. The issue is who is directing it. The Word of God specifically tells us to sometimes examine ourselves so the Holy Spirit Himself can use it to reveal something inside us that needs to change. The problem is not necessarily one of self-examination but of its purpose and focus. The right purpose is to become aware of what God wants to do in order to clean out our hearts and replace what needs to be removed with the likeness of Christ in us. The focus is not just on determining the thing that needs to go but also on how we can participate in the process by entrusting it to the sanctifying work of the Spirit. One of the fruits of healthy self-examination, for instance, is a new knowledge of what we need to pray for in regards to our sanctification.

Moreover, there are times when there is the need for human help in a healthy process of Godly self-examination. Some of us have more internal damage than others, both as a result of trauma that was inflicted on us in the past by others and by the sinful ways we dealt with such trauma. As in other aspects of the Christian life we sometimes need “Jesus with skin on” in the form of fellow believers who, inspired by the Spirit, can help us to see what is wrong and point us to Godly solutions. These are often those brothers and sisters in the Faith who are also our closest friends. If the ravages of trauma and sin are beyond even their ability to understand the Spirit may sometimes direct us to a professional Christian counselor more able to aid us in a deeper, but still appropriate, level of self-examination.

In the end both the unexamined and too much-examined lives are not worth living. What is needful is to find the balance between these two poles through the direction and purposes of the Holy Spirit, both directly and in the person of His human helpers. In such a God-centered balance is true spiritual health.

Before becoming a Christian I thought love was a warm emotion I felt for someone or something. Not so the love of God. This love is not just some manageable, pleasant feeling that we can in some way control. It is all-powerful and all consuming. This love demands everything of us. Too often we try to keep it at bay. What we need is to be both lost and ultimately found in it. It is not, should not, and cannot be under our rule. This may seem obvious to most but I’ll state it again: divine love does not exist to be controlled by men. Such love is for us, it is ours in the sense of our ability to receive it in and through Jesus Christ, but it is something beyond our ability to manipulate or contain.

Any believer who has not at some time felt the profound gravity of the love of Christ has not yet gone far in the journey of faith. To know His love is to be in some sense undone by it. Most “mountain-top” experiences are, at root, experiences of coming into visceral contact with the love of God in a way we never have before. The reason many of us go into the “valley” shortly afterwards is because after having known the ecstasy of being loved that way the often loveless, fallen world we live in seems that much worse by comparison. We are also undone because the presence of God received in such a pure and powerful form reveals the depth of our own loveless-ness. Being loved by our Lord never leaves us unchanged. Each revelation of His feelings for us plays a part in the ongoing melting of the persisting fear manifested in the hardness of our hearts.
“Perfect love casts out fear.” This love is not only manifested in power but in perfection. The love of God is perfect, as He is, and so it perfects us.

In addition to power and perfection we can use another word to describe such a love and that word is passionate. It is appropriate to describe the last hours of Christ’s life as his passion because it was his love that was the candle that burned so brightly even as the candle of His physical life flickered and went out. Only an infinitely fierce love could have taken the Son of God to that hill outside Jerusalem. Calvary is mute testimony to how passionately we are desired. This was no lukewarm affection that the Creator of the universe held and holds for us. Never could any human being be more loved than in the passion that compelled Jesus to face the cross. This is how much we mean to Him.

As we read our Bibles, pray our prayers and sing our worship songs do we live enough in the recognized, received love of God? If not what keeps us from knowing our beloved-ness? It is true that all human beings know Him, as Paul said, “through a glass darkly.” These questions are not posed without the knowledge that we are not yet in Heaven. We cannot receive God’s love today, as we will then. But all too many of us are not basking in the love He does desire for us to experience even now. Why? Perhaps it is because we want it to not be too intrusive. We are afraid of what it will do to the safe little worlds we have constructed in ourselves for our own protection. We are right to have this fear. God does want to destroy any false sense of security we might hold on to at the expense of knowing what it is to be wholly His. He is truly the lover of our souls and He knows that to receive more of His love we must be willing to lose everything we have built that stands between Him and us. Thank God that in the power, perfection and passion of His love for us we can submit ourselves to such a loss. Thank God that, in the end, this will be no loss because we will have gained Him as He has gained us. That is all that matters.

“You intended to harm me, but God intended it for good to accomplish what is now being done, the saving of many lives.” Genesis 50:20

In these words spoken by Joseph, the cast-off boy, later made virtual prince over Egypt, is the essence of the grace of God. Out of what man intends for evil the God of Israel brings good. The Light of the World co-opts even the darkness that opposes Him to serve His redemptive ends.

Grace is defined as unmerited favor. Perhaps never was grace more unmerited than in the case of the brothers of Joseph, who sold him into slavery out of envy and, for all intents and purposes, wrote him off as dead. From our human perspective such an act would seem to make them prime candidates for a divine “smiting.” Instead they and their families are saved from famine by the gracious hand of a deeply wronged man who was, like David, a man after God’s own heart. It is stories like these in the Bible that reveal the character of a Deity none of us would have ever created for ourselves. We are a vengeful race. When people do something we consider wrong often our first inclination is to condemn them. This temptation towards angry judgment is not limited to those who do not know the Lord. We Christians are just as likely to have that initial impulse as anyone else.

Sometimes the Scriptures do seem to back up “an eye for an eye” as the only divine answer to wrongdoing. From the 20,000 Israelites swallowed up by the earth in Exodus to the swift punishment visited upon Ananias and Sapphira in Acts we are sobered by the manifest vengeance of God and its ramifications for our own lives. Yet this same Bible speaks of a God who over and over again forgave His erring people, who forgave the adulterer and murderer who was once their king and who, in the likeness of a man, bled and died on a cross to redeem we who were complicit in his murder. A God of judgment, yes, but also One of mercy.

In Joseph we see a type of Christ, an early scriptural figure representing God’s unmerited favor towards guilty human beings. Joseph suffers at the hands of elder brothers who had reason to be angry because of Joseph’s unusual position of favor with their father, yet who ought to have restrained that anger from birthing the sin that made their youngest brother a slave in a far country. But in captivity Joseph proves to be a righteous man and even in the years of hardship springing from what his brothers did to him God prospers everything he touches. Ultimately he is put in a position where he can easily exact revenge against his brothers. Instead he forgives them in tears. Not only does this bring healing to him and his immediate family but also is used to save and prosper the infant people of God and prepare them for the latter miracle of the Exodus. Ultimately Joseph’s act of forgiveness becomes a great link in the chain of destiny of a people who would bless the entire world though Jesus Christ.

We do well to learn from his example.

Elsewhere the Bible tells us that God takes no pleasure in the death of the wicked. He is a God of justice but never a God of sadism. The whole counsel of Scripture and, above all, the witness of the cross are testimony to His first desire being the repentance and restoration of human beings to Himself. We are also told that it is His kindness that leads us towards that restoration and repentance. We love only because our Lord first loved us.

Yes, God’s ways are mysterious. We cannot completely comprehend the reasons why He appears to be unbelievably merciful in some situations and sternly punishing in others. But if we take a long, hard honest look at ourselves in the light of what people just like us did outside the walls of Jerusalem 2000 years ago we may come to realize this; that we are always deserving of worse than what God gives us, not better. It is only once we arrive at this place of conviction and humbly cry out to Him for mercy that it becomes possible for His loving grace to turn our own evil, like that of those long ago brothers, into good. As with them we have only to trust the God of Joseph, now revealed to us in Jesus Christ, for the redemption we so desperately need. Then we will know, like Joseph, that for those who truly trust Him, mercy forever triumphs over justice.

If we long for a better season in our earthly life we do well to give that longing to God, and wait for His timing, method and purpose to bring such a season about. The temptation is to forever attempt to make a better life for ourselves by ourselves, often while trying to believe it is the Spirit making things happen and not our flesh. We need to long for, and trust in, our Lord’s direction for our lives. If we need peace, rest or comfort we must expect it to come on God’s terms, never our own.

This may be one of the most difficult lessons that confront us on the pilgrim pathway through this life. We are creatures who, not surprisingly, get tired of pain, even pain we trust to be redemptive. We are also believers living in the age of “Self-help” a time in human history when we are constantly being bombarded with the idea that we can re-make our lives by lifting ourselves up by our own bootstraps. If this sounds like an absurdity that is because it is; we can no more lift ourselves into a better state of being spiritually through our own ego-strength than we can grab the straps of our boots and lift ourselves up off the ground physically. Spiritual self-help, at least spiritual self-help that is not grounded in the power and purpose of Christ, is simply an impossibility for the child of God. In fact it is a turn away from Him and towards the modern West’s all-pervasive idolatry of the self.

We can, of course, fool ourselves into thinking we have come into a truly sunnier season in our lives without the primary power of our Lord. Our circumstances may improve, at least in our own eyes, through some resolution to change. We may find chemical release from some of the pain of life in the form of medication or some other controlled substance. We may even find ourselves expecting to live happily ever after when we enter into the powerful, but temporary throes of the romantic mania our culture passes off for permanent transcendence.

All these things are not lasting because, in the final analysis, there are no stand-alone solutions for what ails us. All or at least some of them may, be used by God in a limited way to bring us into a place and time of blessing, but as tools in our hands alone they bring nothing of eternal value.

What remains for us is to pray, and pray without ceasing, for relief from the dark and even not so dark nights of the soul that we inevitably must pass through in this aptly named “veil of tears” that we call our earthly existence. God can and does provide seasons of blessing and lightness of being for even His hardest pressed children. We may not have those times come to us when we are convinced we must have them come to save our sanity. We also may not enjoy them, when they do come, for as long as we would like. God is not in the business of making us feel “at ease in Zion” for extended periods, because He knows our tendency to try to find a heaven on earth now rather than the true Heaven that awaits us at the end of our days.

The answer to our need for respites along the hard road of Christian discipleship is to look to the One who ordained that road of redemption and sanctification for His rescued sinners. We dare not allow ourselves to consciously or even unconsciously attempt to take a vacation from the rigors of the faith by our own lights. It is infinitely better to instead let God’s perfect light lead us to the green pastures and quiet waters of blessing that He knows we need even more than we do.