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.

Greener Grass

At the collision of two cliches maybe I can find a little wisdom.  The first cliche is "the grass is always greener on the other side of the fence."  The second is the prodigal son.

The story of the prodigal son Luke 15 is the story of a young man looking for greener grass.  It is obvious that he has had it with his life because he demands something unheard of, culturally speaking for that age, by demanding his inheritance before his father is even dead.  As soon as he can after he's gotten the money, he goes on a journey and "squanders his property in reckless living."  He has a good time.  He lives it up.  He takes the trip that so many of us have either taken or dream of taking: the trip in search of greener grass.

This urge within us to find something better than we have is at its root a problem.  If we think the grass is greener somewhere else, than we are simply discontented with where we are.  While I don't know that gazing at green grass is always bad, I feel certain that it is rarely good.  Contentment is a very Godly place, because it is necessarily a place of peace.  It is also a place of faith, because in order to be content you must also recognize that God has you taken care of where you are.  If this is the case, discontentment is a place of doubt and unrest, not a place the Lord has for us.

This is a thing that is next to impossible for us to come to terms with, that we should be content wherever we are.  And it comes back to the fact that our circumstances do not determine our peace, or our joy, or our success.  Peace and joy are a product of the Spirit; we find them in full when we walk in the fullness of the Spirit.  Success is obedience to God, and so we can find success anywhere.  But to say all of this is not to say that we are always where the Lord wants us to be.  However, I suspect we are rarely discontented because we are not where the Lord wants us to be; we are usually discontented because we are not where we would like to be.

The prodigal son is discontented because he wants to live recklessly.  So his father, who is a good father, let's him give reckless living a shot.  Did you ever consider in this story that the father may have had some idea what was in his son's heart?  How could he not?  I imagine that the son had grumbled or moped in the past, or mentioned how he would like to travel away to some other greener place.  The father give his son the opportunity to decide for himself what he would do, and at great expense to the father, not only monetarily (the inheritance) but also emotionally, personally.  Spiritually.  It is no doubt painful for the father to watch his son walking over the hill.  The father sees how green the grass is near at hand, and how withered it is outside the fence.  There is wisdom in giving heed to what is near at hand.

We have a good Father, one who is willing to give us everything knowing that we will squander it.  And if you are anything like me, you have squandered a good deal of what you've been given and still find yourself gazing at faraway green fields.  And if that's the case, I encourage you (and I encourage myself) to look nearer at hand, closer to home.  The grass can be green on both sides of the fence; yes!  Did you know that?  And did you know that God is on both sides, too?  Just look for peace where you are, and when you get somewhere else later on, look for peace there, too.

  

How Walls Come Down

The story of the fall of Jericho to me is emblematic of how peculiar a thing it is to follow the Lord.  Jericho was a walled city, a fortified city.  To the Israelites, having wandered in the wilderness for 40 years, I think it must have looked more or less indestructible.  However, God had told Joshua that He had given the land and the city into their hands, so they moved forward to fight.

God also told them how to take the city, and His plan is bizarre.  The army is to march around the city, and the priests with them, bearing the Ark of the Lord and blowing trumpets continually.  Days 1-6 they go around once, saying nothing, and then they go back to camp.  On day 7 they are to march around seven times, and then shout after the trumpets are sounded the last time.  When they do this, they are told, the walls will fall down.

I don't know about you, but if I'd been a member of the army listening to Joshua tell me the plan, I probably would have been skeptical.  And on day one, after having marched silently around the city, armed for war, while the priests blew their trumpets, only to go back to camp and eat dinner and go to bed,  I would have felt like an idiot.  The same on day two.  By day six I would have been antsy as hell.  And on day seven, I can guarantee I would have been nervous, mostly about whether or not it was actually going to work.

So say you're like me.  Say God has told you to do something and you're doubtful, or you're skeptical, or your nervous, but you do it anyway.  Guess what?  The walls will still come down, because the power is not in you, or in the size of your faith, the power is in your obedience.  This is success then: obedience.  This is what makes walls fall down - big walls mind you, big hulking solid walls built over the course of years.  They fall down not because you strategized and practiced and have come to a place where you can level them.  They fall because God knocks them down.  He specializes in knocking down walls.

So many times we are not called to do the thing that seems so obvious in the course of battle.  We would expect that we could build an army and figure out how to win, and then go to God and ask Him to bless it and give us victory.  But that's backwards.  Sometimes God does tell us grab a sword.  Sometimes He says to beat the sword into a plowshare.  Sometimes he tells us to do something seemingly ridiculous, something that in no way appears to lead to the goal of victory.  They're all good.  If God is saying it, it's good, and we'll know victory if we're just obedient.

I think it's important to remember that, if we are in fact at war (spiritually), then everything we do is a part of a battle.  This is not meant to intimidate anyone, or hype up the charismatics, but rather I say it to remind us that everything we do has a place in the Kingdom.  My job has a place in the Kingdom of God, and I'm not in ministry, I'm in the energy industry.  My hobbies making beer and gardening have a place in the Kingdom.  My tendency to joke around with cashiers and the folks at the counter at the coffee shop, that has a place in the Kingdom.  So does the music I like, the books I read, and the blogs I write.  It's peculiar, but these things matter.

So don't be afraid of or embarrassed about what God asks you to do, just be obedient, and watch as the landscape of your life changes.  You'll find it easier to get from point A to point B, and then C and D and so on, without so many walls to walk around.

Authority in Jesus' Name

There is a passage in Luke that I've always thought was weird and inapplicable, but now I know better.  We own a house in the country in the rolling hills and breaks due north of Amarillo.  Like all of rural west Texas, this area is dry, windy, sunny, and full of critters.  Although there are tarantulas, black widows, skunks and the occasional coyote, my two least favorite are rattlesnakes and scorpions.

Snakes and scorpions are the bane of the existence of any dweller in a temperate and arid landscape.  When we moved to our rural home, with three young children and no real safe outdoor space, we were worried about snakes and scorpions.  So instead of worrying about it we prayed that God would keep us safe from snakes and scorpions, and at the very lease that we would see them if they were around so that we could kill them before they harmed us.

When Jesus sent out the 72 disciples in Luke 10, they came back ecstatic about what they were able to accomplish in his name.  "Lord, even the demons are subject to us in your name!" they said.  And Jesus' response is kind of odd, which is typical for Jesus.

And he said to them, "I saw Satan fall like lightning from heaven.  Behold, I have given you authority to tread on serpents and scorpions, and over all the power of the enemy, and nothing shall hurt you.  Nevertheless, do not rejoice in this, that the spirits are subject to you, but rejoice that your names are written in heaven." - Luke 10:18-20 (ESV)

Whenever I have heard a preacher come to this passage of scripture, typically the words of Jesus here are described as symbolic.  And I understand why preachers are afraid of treating this passage as if it's literal.  For one thing, there are stupid people out there who will take a passage like this and build their religion around it.  I have heard of snake handlers and other lunatics who think it's somehow Godly to tempt death with a viper in your hands.  But I also think that we're afraid of treating this verse literally because, well, if I do get bitten by a snake, I don't want that to bring the truth of the words of Jesus into question.

In the two and a half years that we lived in our rural house we saw some scorpions and we saw some snakes.  In fact, I saw three rattlesnakes total - two diamondbacks and one prairie rattler - and I was able to kill all three without issue, without my kids around, and without fear.  Two of those snakes were within six or seven feet of me when I spotted them.  One night I remember there was a scorpion sitting on the threshold of our girls' room, and we were walking over it for a minute before we spotted it and killed it.  No one was stung.

Our rural house is now rented to a family, and recently they complained of having scorpions in the house.  They didn't complain of being stung, which I think is significant, but they have seen scorpions inside.  And I'm praying now over that house still, and over this family.  Because I know what the scripture says - it says that I will have authority over snakes and scorpions.  I'm not going to tempt death because of that, but I will speak the name of Jesus and walk in his authority.  And I will appreciate that this authority is very literal.

What we come back to

"Like a dog that returns to his vomit is a fool who repeats his folly." - Proverbs 26:11 (ESV)

Everybody has something that they come back to.  In the world of church vocabulary we call these people Backsliders, or we say the Devil "has a foothold."  With some people what they go back to is obvious: alcohol, sex, drugs, suicidal acts.  These folks receive a lot of pity and a lot of shaken heads and wagged fingers.  It sucks to be the one whose vomit is so apparent when the fact is that we're all going back to our vomit.  But if your vomit is fear, or anxiety, or self-loathing it's just not as obvious.  I've seen dogs go back to their vomit, and chances are that if you're a dog owner you've seen it too.  It's gross.  Your dog hacks something up and then he eats it.  Like I said, it's gross.  Sometimes they don't eat it right away.  Sometimes they kind of eat it surreptitiously so that you don't see since they know it pisses you off because it's gross.  And sometimes they dig right in until everything they hacked up is right back in.

I think these visuals are important.  The proverb itself is rather disgusting; a striking visual way to highlight a serious moral problem.  But without harping on the substance of what the proverb addresses, I'd rather point out that you have some vomit in your life.  We all do.  The fact of the matter is you're going to throw up and you're going to, at least once in a while, go back to that putrid pile of waste and pick through it for whatever it is you want.  More than likely you'll do it in shame and disgust.  More than likely you won't enjoy the experience.  But more than likely you'll do it.  You'll walk in fear again, or go back to the bottle, or call up your ex hoping she'll let you in her bed.  More than likely you'll do it; but you don't have to.

Here is the good news, which is what "gospel" means: God still loves you.  He sees you returning to the vomit and he loves you.  In fact, He knew that you would go back to it and He still loves you.  In greater fact, He knew all of the shortcomings and failures and vomit-eating awfulness of humanity and He still sent His son Jesus to save us all.  Happy ending.