1 Corinthians 13

My fellow Believers,

Remember always that we are called to love.  And not just a little bit, either: we are called to love beyond even our innate ability to love.  We are called to love the unlovable.  The obnoxious, the ignorant, the dirty and rejected.  We're called to love the attractive, the intelligent, the rich and the reasonable.  We're called to love our friends.  More importantly, we're called to love our enemies.

We have to love.  Don't be a resounding gong.  Don't be a clanging cymbal.  Don't be content to gain nothing, or to be nothing.  Be what the One inside of you is.  Don't just show love, have love, or share love; but be love.  Learn how to be love.  Jesus did it and so can we.  So can you.

We have to love, we are called to love.  We are called to be patient and kind.  We are called to be humble.  We are called to rejoice with the truth.  We are called to protect, to trust, to hope, to persevere - always.

Remember that we are not called to envy.  We are not called to boast.  We are not called to be proud.  We are not called to dishonor others, or to seek only for ourselves.  We are not called to easy anger, or to keep records of wrongs.  We are not called to delight in evil. 

We are called to the impossible - for us.  For us it is impossible to love our enemies and bless those who curse us.  For us it is hard to be humble.  We often rejoice in falsehoods, fail to protect or trust, cease hoping, give up.  We envy too much, boast to often, and rally around our pride.  We dishonor others regularly.  Too regularly we rejoice in evil and keep long records of wrongs.  We are self-seeking above all.  We are called to what we cannot do in the flesh, but we are not called to love from who we are; we are called to love from who He is.  We are called to love because God is love and he can do nothing else but love, love, love.

We are called to love.  Please, please don't forget it, please please give yourself up to the call.

In love,

A fellow Believer

Desparation

"Listen to my cry, for I am in desperate need; rescue me from those who pursue me, for they are too strong for me." - Psalm 142:6 (NIV)

"Most men lead lives of quiet desperation and go to the grave with the song still in them."
-Henry David Thoreau

In desperate need is not such a bad place to be, because we humans have a tendency to turn our back on God when all is well.  When all my joints are working, and my wife and I are happy, and the kids are healthy, and the bills are paid, and the job is humming along, and the terrorists are silent in their caves somewhere; when all is apparently right with the world, my apparent need for the power of God is greatly diminished.  I say "apparent" because of course my need is constant.  But there is something about being in desperate need of God.  When we are desperate, we'll believe in the grandest possibility.  When we are desperate, we're ready for a miracle.

I don't think it should surprise us that we in America generally don't see much of the "miraculous" works of God.  When you read the gospels and see all the people Jesus healed, the waves and wind he stopped, and the baskets of food he multiplied, you start looking around at your own life and wondering why those amazing things aren't happening.  After all, Jesus said himself that we would do greater works than him.

"Truly, truly, I say to you, whoever believes in me will also do the works that I do; and greater works than these will he do, because I am going to the Father." - John 14:12

But here we sit (most of us), witnessing very little that could be described as "greater" than what Jesus did.

It occurred to me that God provides power commensurate with the need.  In Psalm 142, David is in desperate straights; he is in hiding.  He obviously needs and wants the Lord to rescue him, and his prayer is both general and specific.  The Psalm is generally a prayer for rescue, but specifically David needs to be rescued from his pursuers.  He prays for God's power to meet his timely need.  The same could be said of how God moves among peoples, among nations, among generations.  In the day of Jesus, people were hard up.  There were few options for the sick or lame but to die or languish or make due.  And a lot of people, particularly in large cities, had little or nothing to eat.  Life was tough around the turn of the age.  There were no Wal-Marts or corner medical clinics, antibiotics or refrigeration.  And so the power of God met the needs of the moment.  Jesus healed serious ailments and diseases, things that would never have gone away otherwise.  He multiplied food for the crowds of otherwise starving people.

And think back on the powerful miracles of the Bible.  When the Israelites needed a way to escape Pharaoh, the Lord parted the Red Sea.  When Joshua needed to conquer Jericho, God came through with a ludicrous plan that brought down the walls.  When the disciples of the recently ascended Messiah needed to preach the Gospel among a multi-national group, the Lord gave them many different tongues.  God's power amazingly comes to fill the needs of those who are desperate for Him.

So what are we desperate for?  What are those of us in these United States desperate for?  We are well-fed and well-attended medically; our subsistence needs are broadly met so that we are far beyond mere survival.  As the Thoreau quote suggests, I think we're emotionally desperate.  With our basic needs fulfilled, even to excess, we find ourselves wanting for purpose and relationships.  The traditional things that filled humanity's time from the outset of history - farming, family, villages and community, interdependence and local culture, hard physical labor and hardship - these things have been replaced by a luxurious, disparate, alienating cultural existence in which the individual is often overlooked and finally lost.  What we need most, what I see time and again in the lives of those I encounter, is healing for our hearts.  I don't say this to suggest that we don't need physical healing, or miracles, or any of the other gifts of the Spirit; I say this to point to what is probably the biggest contemporary need, and what God is addressing in powerful ways.  We need friends.  We need to be loved, and to love.  We need purpose, and to have our hearts mended and made whole.

Rest assured that God can meet you in your most desperate place, and He will if you are willing.  Rock Bottom is a great place to be if you need a rescue.  God scours Rock Bottom for the upheld hands, and His arm is not too short to save.  His love for you and I, and the power that He will pour into our needs, is just as big when are hearts are broken as when our bodies are.  It's just a different kind of healing.

Identity

The scriptures are loaded with verses about identity, and for the believer identity is the most important thing to grasp.  We are, according to the Bible, new creations, born again, a royal priesthood, adopted heirs of God, and so on.  The gist of the Gospel is that Jesus came to restore our identity as children of God, and that if we believe in him and his sacrifice we will be made whole, new, Christlike.

There is (thankfully) a growing sense of the importance of identity within the Church.  I am hearing more preachers refer to identity as an important aspect of spiritual development.  It makes sense that this is the case, because how far were we ever going to get if we didn't first figure out who we are?  Instead of forcing the old theology of self-improvement onto the backs of the unworthy - the "sinner saved by grace" perspective - we're waking up to the fact that we are righteous in God's eyes.

When we recognize that as believers we are righteous, our perspective changes.  Instead of dirty old me trying to get clean, I realize that I am clean and I need to just stop getting dirty.  Instead of putting the onus on myself to improve, I give the glory to Jesus for making me perfect in spirit.  You see, the problem is that for too long we have believed that shame leads to repentance, when the Word of God tells us differently.  "The goodness of God leads you to repentance," Paul says in Romans 2:4, not shame or guilt.  For too long we have believed that the Holy Spirit comes to convict us of our sins when the opposite is true.  The enemy Satan comes to convict us of our sinfulness.  The Holy Spirit of God comes to convict us of our righteousness.

This then is the struggle with identity, the push and pull of the flesh and the spirit.  "The spirit indeed is willing, but the flesh is weak" is what Jesus said concerning temptation.  The spirit in us which has been made perfect is willing to recognize our righteousness; the flesh that is not perfected is weak in this regard and is always ready to brood on its own sinful nature.  And to which are we called to live?

"There is now no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus, who walk not according to the flesh, but according to the Spirit." - Romans 8:1

We are called to our identity in Christ, the perfection of our spirit; yet it does us little good to realize our identity in Christ on the one hand, and hold onto our old identity on the other.  This is what many of us do: we grab hold of this truth of who we are in Jesus and set it alongside the half-truths and lies we hold about who we are, and we go along our merry way dragging all of it behind us.  Think about what this does to someone; it's schizophrenic.  We proclaim our new identity in Christ ("I'm a saint saved from sin."), but hold tightly to our old identity in the flesh ("I'm a sinner saved by grace.").  If you walk around like this long enough, you and everyone you know will be confused about who you are.

It is a struggle to walk in your identity in Jesus.  You may be a new creation, but you have a long memory; getting over the old is not as easy as quoting scripture.  But can I just say that this struggle should be primary in your life?  If you are going to war for anything you've been promised by the Lord, go to war for your identity, because everything else will follow that.