I Wish That You Would Prophesy

Brothers and sisters, I wish that when you got together you would prophesy.  I wish that you would get together expecting that God would move.  That when two or more of you are gathered together you would know that God is there too and that He can do something powerful and amazing and unexpected.  I wish that you would expect the Lord to come among you and change you for the better and show you powerful things.

I wish that you would speak the words of the Lord in encouragement.  I wish that you would speak His words of comfort to one another.  I wish that you would sit and listen to God and wait, even through the awkward silences, until He says what He wants to say to you.  And then I wish that you would tell everyone else in the room what He says, even if you aren't certain that it is what He said.  I wish that you would say it and let it stand of it's own accord or let it fall to the wayside, and that you would be content to have tried.

I wish that you would not consider only a few to be prophets, to believe that only a few can prophesy.  I want you to practice speaking the word of God to each other with conviction, knowing that there is power in His words, and knowing that each one of you as a believer can be a messenger of those powerful words.  If you would only give it a shot and expect God to show up in your midst I know you would be encouraged.  I know that you'd be hooked once you experienced His presence, the way He uses us to build each other up, the way He reveals truth to us through our own words.  I know that you would never be the same.

If you could grasp that the Spirit of Jesus lives in you I don't know how you could keep from prophesying.  You would spend your hours mulling over the words of God - what you have read in the Bible, what you have heard preached, and what He has spoken directly to you - and you would spend your days sharing His truths.  I wish that you would prophesy because the Body of Christ, the Church around the world, and your little groups of fellow Christians all need to hear the word of God.  Your brothers and sisters need to be encouraged, they need to be comforted, then need to be urged to pursue the Lord.  And they need to hear it from someone who loves them and is close to them, not just from a preacher or a teacher or a Prophet or someone who stands in a position of authority, but from the humble mouth of a friend.

I wish that you would prophesy, more than any other powerful work of God that you could do through the Holy Spirit.  Don't get me wrong, I wish that you would share the gifts of the Holy Spirit, all of them.  But above all I wish that you would prophesy and build up the church.  The church needs to be built up.  The church can be a fragile thing, composed as it is of so many broken people.  Your fellow believers are not all perfectly content.  Many of them are sad or depressed, discouraged, full of fear, confused, uncertain and unsure, or just plain screwed up.  Do you know what they need?  They need a friend to speak the word of God in truth to build them up, encourage them, comfort them.  This is why I wish that you prophesied above all other gifts: because prophecy brings healing.  Because the Body needs healing and truth and freedom, and the Word of God can deliver.

The Fulfillment of the Law

Do not think that I have come to abolish the Law of the Prophets; I have not come to abolish them but to fulfill them.

- Matthew 5:17

Recently some comments I received to a previous post got me to thinking more deeply about the Law and our relationship to the Law as Believers.  The Law I am writing about is capitalized, as it is in this passage from Matthew, because it refers specifically to the first five books of the Bible, and also to the Mosaic law given to Israel.  For the most part my references in this post to the Law will be general references to the rules and laws given to Israel by God.

The Law is a difficult guide for living.  Not only are there a lot of rules, many of which are burdensome and downright odd, but the Law is a thing taken in its entirety, so that regardless of whether some parts are "greater," all of it has to be kept in order for a man to be righteous.

Therefore whoever relaxes one of the least of these commandments and teaches others to do the same will be called least in the kingdom of heaven, but whoever does them and teaches them will be called great in the kingdom of heaven.  For I tell you, unless your righteousness exceeds that of the scribes and Pharisees, you will never enter the kingdom of heaven. (Matthew 5:19-20)

Jesus seems to be saying two things here, but since God does not contradict himself, let's figure out what the one thing he's saying is.  First of all he says that we have to keep the whole Law, even the little stuff.  So when the law says not to wear garments woven from both wool and linen, you'd better obey.  The second thing he says is that you can't keep the whole law.  Did you catch that?  "Unless your righteousness exceeds that of the scribes and Pharisees."  You see, the scribes and Pharisees were expert in the details of the law, and consequently they upheld it to the letter in their own lives.  Paul was himself a Pharisee, and he says (under inspiration of the Holy Spirit) that be was blameless under the law; he kept all of the commandments (Philippians 3:6).  And Jesus tells us that, unless we are more righteous than the likes of Paul, we will never enter the kingdom of heaven.

These apparently contradictory statements are resolved in the man who said them.  As Jesus says, he is not abolishing the law but fulfilling it.  Where the law, in its entirety and kept perfectly, conferred righteousness, now Jesus is given as our righteousness.  As the sacrifice for all sin for all time, Jesus becomes the righteousness of God's Law, and we have only to accept him as our own to be completely righteous before the Lord.  The Law, however, does not pass away.  That is, we are not off the hook for our behavior just because we are saved by Jesus Christ.  While I don't think God cares if we wear linen/wool shirts, He does care about how we behave.  He is still just and holy and abhors sin, and He knows that it brings disruption and chaos into our lives.  But He isn't mad at us, and He doesn't keep a record of our wrongs.  The Law is just that: a record of our wrongs, a record of what we can screw up.  By fulfilling the Law Jesus gives us the gift of freedom from the burden of trying to do everything right.

There is more that can be said, and mine is not a final word of any kind, but take away this at least: "For our sake he (God) made him (Jesus) to be sin who knew no sin, so that in him we might become the righteousness of God."

 

Mercy, not Sacrifice

There is a verse of scripture that I can't get out of my head.  Ever.  It rolls around in my mind and makes contact with my spirit on a regular basis.  It's something Jesus said to some religious people.  These are typically my favorite things that Jesus says, because it has become my life's work of sorts to strive against religiosity.  Here's what he said that I can't get over:

"I desire mercy and not sacrifice..." - Matthew 12:7

The context in Matthew 12 is that Jesus and his disciples are walking through grain fields on the Sabbath.  His disciples were hungry, so they plucked some of the heads of grain and ate them.  When the Pharisees saw this, they said it was unlawful.  The Pharisees taught that you could do nothing on the Sabbath that might be considered work.  So you would prepare your meals the day before, and finish your other chores as well, so that you could spend the Sabbath doing nothing.  Resting.  This was the command of God, to rest on the Sabbath.

Here we encounter what is typical of a religious person, and before I go further I'd like to define religious.  By religious I mean someone who sets the rituals of life, the outward signs of piety and religion, above the more important aspects of a godly life, such as love, compassion, intimacy with God, and so on.  A religious person may very well believe that their ritual and activity are evidence of their love or intimacy with God, but this is rarely, if ever, the case.  Religiousness is self-focused - what I can do - whereas true religion is focused on others, particularly on the Lord.

So the religious people accuse the disciples of doing what is unlawful.  You can imagine a similar accusation in your own life.  Someone asks you why you celebrate Christmas, since it's a pagan holiday, or why you don't celebrate since it's a Christian one.  Or why you use birth control.  Or why homeschool.  Or why you don't homeschool.  Or why you don't go to church, or why your church plays rock music instead of hymns, or why you drink alcohol, or why you don't take communion every week, or why you don't have a Quiet Time, or why you read the wrong translation of the Bible.  And so on and so on.  This happens to us all the time.  We are constantly running into Pharisees who have etched out their own interpretation of righteousness and are ready to accuse us of falling short.

Jesus has a response that is incredible.  He asks them if they remember the story of David when he and his men were hungry when they came to Ahimelech when David was on the run from Saul.  David asked the priest Ahimelech for some bread, but the only bread the priest had was the Bread of the Presence, which was holy and only to be eaten by the priests.  David and his men take this bread and go on.  Jesus then tells them "something greater than the temple is here" and delivers the smackdown:

"And if you had known what this means, "I desire mercy and not sacrifice," you would not have condemned the guiltless." - Matthew 12:7

You can practically feel the tension when you read this, even if you yourself don't understand what "I desire mercy and not sacrifice" means.  Which I'll admit I didn't.  I knew when I first read this that the phrase was significant, but I just didn't quite get it.  Jesus is quoting from Hosea 6:6, which reads:

"For I desire steadfast love (mercy) and not sacrifice, the knowledge of God rather than burnt offering." (ESV)

Since Hosea was one of the prophets of Israel, you can bet that the Pharisees were familiar with this phrase.  But they didn't understand it either, even if they thought they did, as Jesus points out.  So Jesus is saying to them in essence, "If you understood God's word, you would be doing right.  Since you don't, you're doing wrong."  They knew the word of God, but only as far as it informed their religious perspective.

This verse from Hosea sheds all the light we need on this small phrase of Jesus.  It means that God desires knowledge of Him over bunt offerings.  He desires the intangible relationship over the tangible activity.  He desires our devotion over our ritual.  He desires the thing we know He wants, which is our hearts.

Sacrifice in this phrase is representative of the religious approach, and mercy the Godly one.  When God gave Israel the laws of His covenant, it wasn't really about the laws at all, it was always about the covenant.  God never intended for His people to become like the Pharisees, who did what was lawful because they felt they had to, and because it made them feel important and righteous.  God wanted his people to desire to be intimate with Him, and be willing to abide by the laws in order to get and stay in a place of intimacy, of "knowledge of God."

We of course are in a new covenant, the one that Jesus paid for, and so are not bound by the Law.  But the knowledge of God can escape us as surely as it escaped the Pharisees.  The truth of the matter is that God desires mercy, and not sacrifice, all of the time.  He has always desired it.  The Bible says in Ephesians 1 that God chose us, humanity, through the person of Jesus, to be holy and blameless before Him, and that this happened before the foundation of the world.  God always knew that Jesus would be the sacrifice that brought us back, but it was not the sacrifice He desired, it was the mercy behind it.  God always knew that His creation would fall away from him, but so great is His love that mercy never escaped Him.

You see, our sacrifices do not satisfy the Lord, and they never have.  Religious ritual does not satisfy God.  Right living does not satisfy Him.  Good intentions do not satisfy Him.  But mercy does.  So does a contrite heart.  So does humility.  God is after sincerity above all else, above discipline or leadership or (gasp!) evangelism.  Above all of the things that we do that we could put our name on, God wants our sincere love.  He wants our hearts, absolutely nothing less.  If God desires sacrifice, it is this: living sacrifice.  He wants us to lay our lives on His alter and just love Him because He is good.

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.