Jeff McSwain

February 15, 2018February 18, 2018

Jesus Changed His Mind

“After this Jesus went about in Galilee. He would not go about in Judea, because the Jews were seeking to kill him. Now the Jews’ Feast of Booths was at hand. So his brothers said to him, ‘Leave here and go to Judea, that your disciples also may see the works you are doing. For no one works in secret if he seeks to be known openly. If you do these things, show yourself to the world.’ For not even his brothers believed in him. Jesus said to them, ‘My time has not yet come, but your time is always here. The world cannot hate you, but it hates me because I testify about it that its works are evil. You go up to the feast. I am not going up to this feast, for my time has not yet fully come.’ After saying this, he remained in Galilee. But after his brothers had gone up to the feast, then he also went up, not publicly but in private.”’ John 7:1-10. ESV.

This passage has blown my mind in several ways.

First, we see that Jesus’s half-brothers have murderous intentions by challenging Him to go up to the Feast of Booths (also called the Festival of Tabernacles) in Judea, because the Jews there were seeking to kill Him. The sarcastic and derisive challenge issued by Jesus’s own brothers hides a thinly veiled desire that Jesus would be publicly humiliated, or worse, by going there! In the least, we see the brothers are hating Jesus, and are jealous of Him at this time. Remember that Jesus said hating your brother is like murder in your heart.

The spirit of their challenge reminds me of Joseph’s half-brothers, and how they want to kill him because of their jealousy, and how they mock him before actually taking action against him. Joseph, is, in this way, a “type” of Christ. Joseph’s brothers wanted to kill him to save themselves in various petty ways, not realizing that Joseph would subsequently be used to accomplish a greater salvation than anyone could imagine, which included all of Egypt and Israel.
Their actions against him, (they were going to murder him, but Reuben intervened and the brothers ended up selling Joseph into slavery, and then they lied to their father, Jacob, about Joseph being killed by a wild animal), made him “dead” to their father, which allowed them to go on with their lives without him. Joseph was seen to be “resurrected” when the brothers traveled to Egypt to get food during the famine, for Joseph had risen to a position of second to Pharoah by interpreting Pharoah’s dream. God had revealed through Joseph a plan to provide for all the people, during the seven year famine prophesied in the dream, through the storage of seven years’ worth of abundant harvests that preceded it.

The brothers were shocked at the eventual discovery of Joseph’s “resurrection” and glorified position, and were immediately alarmed at the depth of their guilt, and the power of Joseph to pass judgment on them, even though Joseph reassured them of His forgiveness. And Jacob enjoyed renewed fellowship with his son after Joseph had purchased salvation for all Israel—the sons of Jacob and their families.

In the same way, our sin brought about the need for the Son’s physical body to be sacrificed to death, in order to accomplish a salvation that we are powerless to secure for ourselves. For a time, Jesus was considered “dead” by His Father, when the sin of the world was upon Him, and the hatred, and murderous intention of mankind, was allowed to kill His human body. Jesus was physically resurrected and revealed to His brothers, and all mankind, as the second person of the Trinity, after purchasing the salvation of all believers on the cross. And fellowship was restored with the Father, after being broken for our sake.

There are other parallels between Jesus and Joseph, (how Joseph was falsely accused and taken into custody, for instance), but I just wanted to plumb the depths of the hearts of Jesus’s half brothers within this short account in John 7, through illumination of the “types” in the Old Testament account of Joseph.
The second mind-blowing realization is that Jesus seems to change His mind later about going to the feast, or it seems that He deliberately misleads His brothers by saying that He is not going up to this feast.

The Feast of Booths, or Sukkot, is a seven-day feast in remembrance of the 40 years of wandering in the desert during the Exodus from Egypt. During that time, the Israelites moved from place to place, following the pillar of cloud that indicated the presence and will of God to stay put or to pack up and go. Since the Israelites had to be ready to move at a moment’s notice, their ephemeral dwellings were light wooden structures covered with branches or palm fronds. These “booths,” then, could be quickly constructed or dismantled to suit the will of the Lord. I will come back to this important idea in a moment.

Jesus could very well have known that He would later be going up to the feast, and so was telling the truth about not going up to “this feast,” today. The festival is seven days long, with feasting each day. Perhaps Jesus’s words convey the truth that He was not going up to this feast on this day, but leaves room for Him to go to tomorrow’s feast, or one of the other feasts, later in the week.

This doesn’t really square with how the feast is represented in a later verse, where the whole week is presented as “the feast.” “On the last day of the feast, the great day, Jesus stood up and cried out, “If anyone thirsts, let him come to me and drink.’” (John 7:37. ESV. Italics mine). This verse refers to the whole week as “the feast,” and does not distinctly describe the sub-feast on the last day. Otherwise, it would have said, “At the feast on the last and greatest day…”

If Jesus is speaking in a specious manner in John 7:8, then we would have to admit that He is delivering an impression to His brothers that would later be proved false. He knew that they were suggesting He should go up to the Feast, (any time), and He says that He is not going up. His appearance at the feast, then, would make it appear to His brothers that either He lied, or changed His mind. We know, however, that Jesus cannot lie.

We can observe from Jesus’s statement, in John 7:6, “my time has not yet fully come,” that the Father has made Him aware that “now” is not the time to go to the feast. I believe that Jesus spoke the words matching what the Father gave Him to know. Since Jesus does not speak in half-truths, as Satan does, I’m inclined to believe that Jesus only knew “not now.” If He had known that He would eventually be going, He could have avoided the charge of lying or making a specious statement to say that He isn’t going “yet,” instead of “I am not going up to this feast.”

What we can say definitely here is that Jesus’s mind was made up about one thing. His mind was constantly set upon following the Father. If the Father says, “No, do not go up to this feast,” then Jesus expresses that He will not go up to this feast. If the Father later says, “Now, go up to this feast, and go privately,” then Jesus goes up to the feast, and in a way that He will not seek to be known until the proper time. With such an interpretation of the event, we may rule out that Jesus lied about not going.

Jesus appears to all the world to have changed His mind, when, in fact, His mind is made up, and His allegiance is to the Father’s whim and will. This desire manifests throughout His life as spontaneity, as the Father’s instructions are immediate, and freshly updating, within the mind of Christ.

Jesus constantly lives out the idea behind the Festival of the Booths, and it is poetic how this question of going up to the feast actually demonstrates the meaning of the Festival! Jesus was led by the Father to decline the invitation initially, and then led by the Father to accept the invitation privately, at a later time.

When He did go, he went incognito, led by the Father. Though He went clothed in such a manner as not to be recognized, He subsequently reveals Himself and begins to preach publicly, “About the middle of the feast” (John 7:14. ESV). Jesus changed in intention from blending into the crowd to standing out. Did Jesus change His mind, or was He expressing the flexibility of obedience to the Father in a life lesson about the Booths?

Jesus was responsive to the move of the Father, obedient down to every moment. He did not build a solid paneled house in one spot, settle down, and set out strong roots into a place. Instead, Jesus moved from place to place, traveling in such a way as to follow His Father (in the “pillar of cloud” or “pillar of fire,” to use the Exodus 13 idioms).

When He replied to His brothers’ invitation to go up to the feast, He responded with the words given Him by the Father. He did not build an estate upon the idea of not going up to the feast, however. If He had, He might have reasoned with the Father, when the Father gave a new command to go down to the feast, that He had already stated that He was not going up to the feast, and that going to the feast would then cast doubt upon His word. Knowing that His brothers would think Him a liar under such circumstances, He might have contended with the Father, that He should not go to the feast in order to appear to remain true to His word because, after all, He must live up to being “the Way, the Truth, and the Life.”

This is a very good point, and one that seems to elevate Truth to the highest place. It is hard to find fault with such an idea, and I wonder if Jesus did have just such a conversation with the Father, similar to His questions in Gethsemane?

On the other hand, while seemingly elevating Truth, such an argument is formed around maintaining the appearance of truth from man’s perspective.
Jesus constructs and dismantles His booth moment by moment, according to the desire of the Father, regardless of what mankind may think or say about His structure or His vacillating modes. He is unafraid of criticism from man for following the immediate and precise instructions of the Father. We see this later in the matter of the cross. Jesus was ultimately unconcerned that His death on the cross would make it appear that He is weak and an imposter.
So, what lesson can we draw from the Festival of the Booths? There is a multitude, I am sure, and I’m not writing here a comprehensive survey of lessons to be drawn from a very rich tradition. I am merely pointing out that Jesus lives in constant obedience to the Father, even when others would censure Him for His words or actions. We are merely men and women, however, and our imperfect interpretations of God’s leading, moment by moment, require continual adjustments and updates. If we feel that we have received a leading from God—good! We should act upon the leading, but remain open to Him for fresh instruction—and even be willing to reverse ourselves at a later time—ready to dismantle our plans and understanding should God give us updated orders.

We may look to the world to be foolish. We may look to the world to be hypocritical. Our actions will invite censure. We will be persecuted.
In every way, when we live out the Festival of Booths in our lives as Jesus did, God is honored in our hearts, and glorified in the world. Through continual adjustments, we can endeavor to allow the course of our lives to be shaped and altered by the whim of the Spirit, Who leads us to stop and build, or to get up, dismantle, and move on. As we consciously throw aside our concealing habit in mid-feast and stand up in Christ, He reveals Himself to the world in our thoughts, words, and actions, and the world will hate us.

The special days, in which our lives are an open invitation and a demonstration of the “rivers of living water” flowing from within, will be the greatest days in our lives, not because of our own accomplishments, but because the Spirit makes a way in the desert and moves us hither and yon, all the while revealing that a promised land has already been entered through a sweet fellowship with Jesus. Though we may feel that we are in a small, insecure, and uncomfortable booth in the desert, and long for a spacious, secure, and luxurious eternal dwelling, we have living water to drink and Heavenly manna to eat, and may luxuriate even now within the personal and powerful presence of the Lord.

No matter where we are or what circumstances befall us, we have an open invitation to luxuriate in the company of Jesus and the fellowship of His sufferings. The booth is a palace, and Jesus, our brother, is GOD HIMSELF, THE KING OF KINGS, and LORD of LORDS!!!

February 14, 2018February 18, 2018

God’s “Value Added” to Our Moments

While I am often tempted to think about life as if it is a journey, like the water running through the land that I wrote in the last chapter, I have become aware of a tendency to consider myself as not having arrived, and that there is a destination that recedes from me, even as I approach. In some ways, this is biblical, and there are good reasons to see myself as unfinished. My pride will always be kept in check when I remember how perfect Jesus is, and how constantly I fall short in my thoughts, and fail to appreciate God, and how quick I am to lean on my own understanding.

A new understanding is breaking into my heart. It is the awareness of God in me.

Eph. 3:20. “Now to him who is able to do immeasurably more than all we ask or imagine, according to his power that is at work within us…”

We are constantly flawed in thought and weak in action, but He is constantly perfect and powerful. Our love is inconstant, and limited by our short-sightedness and our selfishness, but His love is never ending, never failing. His sight is infinite, in its simultaneous and complete grasp of the present, past, and future.

Though I’m always looking forward to something, and thinking how I’m not where I want to be with respect to what I know of God, and I tend to measure my “progress” by looking at externals, I’m beginning to appreciate the unlimited “value added” that God brings to every moment, and to see that God’s friendship and power is not limited to the size of our abilities, nor the extents of our intelligence.

We have been given the Holy Spirit!!! What more do we need in order to express God’s purpose and power to a world that reels in its desperate need of Him? He more than completes the finite “us”—He applies His eternal and infinite power and wisdom to our moments. He not only supplies what we lack, but through an incalculable spiritual multiplication, He accomplishes eternal kingdom work through us that no man or woman could have built, nor can any man or woman tear down.

What God builds is beyond comprehension, and even with a resurrected body and purified eyes, we will not see the beginning nor the end of God in us. He will increase our ability to see His work, but without unlimited sight, we will not completely grasp it. Joy and delight is available in the discerning of His presence, love, and power, and it is meant for NOW! The fellowship and communion that God seeks with us is always NOW. The sweetness that the Holy Spirit can speak into any moment is always NOW. The unlimited power of God is being dispensed NOW, at this moment.

He does not wait for us, but quickens our spirits to accomplish His purposes in each one of us. “After this, the word of the LORD came to Abram in a vision: “Do not be afraid, Abram. I am your shield, your very great reward.” Genesis 15:1, NIV. God refers to Himself in present tense. His name is “I AM.” And He tells Abram that He IS Abram’s shield, presently, and He IS Abram’s very great reward.

So, while we are tempted to think that we are becoming more equipped over time to accomplish God’s work, and we assume that we will be ready on some future day to do this or that thing as we journey onward, the reality is that GOD Himself inhabits our moments with us–(“Emmanuel,” God WITH us!)—and that His power makes every moment a DESTINATION and a complete miracle! He is our shield, even NOW!

God’s presence and power is available to every believer, no matter how young or new, and He is not limited by our imperfection. If He were, we would never see the hand of God moving in anyone, since we are all hopelessly broken. We will never perfect ourselves, or arrive, in our own strength.

God’s “value added” packs treasure into “jars of clay,” and turns the mundane into the sublime. 2 Cor. 4:7, “But we have this treasure in jars of clay, to show that the surpassing power belongs to God and not to us.” ESV.

I used to think that the best treasures were visible—something physical, that you could reach out and call your own. Within the band of my wedding ring, I had the jeweler inscribe a Bible verse reference, “Psalm 37:4-6,” before I even knew the depth of meaning these verses contain:

“Delight yourself in the LORD and he will give you the desires of your heart. Commit your way to the LORD; trust in him and he will do this: He will make your righteousness shine like the dawn, the justice of your cause like the noonday sun. ”

I used to think about this verse, and what the Lord would do for me. If I follow Him, I reasoned, He would give me the things that I want most. He would give me a beautiful wife whom I love, a job that I thoroughly enjoy, wonderful children, good health, a comfortable house, a safe and comfortable car, and other stuff, as it comes to mind. Of course, I believed that I was already getting the first one, and that was why the verse was put into my wedding ring. The inscription was to be a reminder to me that God was providing the desires of my heart, starting with my prayers for a lovely wife.

In looking back, however, I see that my thinking on this verse, and about God, was completely errant. I thought that the desires of my heart were other things or conditions. I didn’t know then the new heart that God had given to me, with a capacity to appreciate and know Him more deeply—with a design to grow in love for Him above all else.

Ezekiel 36:26, “I will give you a new heart and put a new spirit in you; I will remove from you your heart of stone and give you a heart of flesh.”

I have realized that the deepest desires of this new heart are set upon HIM, and that if I aim this new heart at other things, the heart will lose out, in comparison. He did not gift me this new heart so that I can run with it away from Him—that would be stealing the heart that is His. He gave it to me so that I will run to Him with this heart, and constantly return to Him what is actually His alone.

My God, I have squandered years of my life setting my heart on other things, casting but a glance over my shoulder toward You, the Beautiful ONE… When I feel the emptiness of my pursuits, then I set my heart to honor you, and then you fill my vision!

God gave me a realization that my love for Him was shallow, and that the heart He gave me was malnourished and weak through my neglect of Him. I wanted to have a heart that loved Him unreservedly, but I knew that I was far from possessing it. I began to pray consistently, a few years ago, that God would show me what it means to love Him with all my heart and soul, mind and strength.

I don’t presume that I can attain a heart that is unreservedly, unflinchingly whole in my complete and constant surrender and devotion to Him (this side of Heaven), but I do see that God is inclining my heart toward Him, (sometimes precipitously), and drawing me to Himself with cords of loving kindness. My motivations and hunger for fellowship with Him are deeper when I invite the activity of the Holy Spirit. When I delight in His presence and friendship, I realize that I already have Him, and that I am complete in Him, no matter what may happen to me, or whether I get anything else on my wish list, or if something else I treasure gets taken away. Jesus said, “Never will I leave you; never will I forsake you.” Hebrews 13:5 NIV.

God points out that David had a heart after Him. As I mention elsewhere in this blog, the life and heart of King David is fascinating to me because of its contrasts. I feel the contrasts within myself and my own heart. There is a strong desire for God in my best moments, but there is also a strong drive for other things, and a temptation to fan the flames of those other desires, to build passions for them. The struggle between conflicting desires is reassuring, actually, because it shows that my heart is deepening in understanding my God and my self. If my awareness of the struggle were small, it might be an indication that I have become spiritually dull, or proud. In my ignorance and sin, I can be lulled into a state of complacency or laziness, so that I do not recognize the Lord calling me. In my pride and sin, I can become drunk with the satisfaction of my own “spiritual” work or progress, and begin to lose the desperation for Him that is the foundation of the abundant life He offers me.

I think one of the most important verses in the Bible about the heart is Malachi 2:2, “’If you do not listen, and if you do not set your heart to honor my name,’ says the LORD Almighty, ‘I will send a curse upon you, and I will curse your blessings. Yes, I have already cursed them, because you have not set your heart to honor me.’”

It sounds harsh, that the Lord will send a curse upon us if we do not set our hearts to honor Him. Actually, the power of the curse is found within the precondition of not honoring the LORD. Put another way, not honoring the Lord, or delighting in Him, (to use the language of Psalm 37), IS ITS OWN CURSE. This is a circular curse. Absence of honoring and appreciating the Lord is a failure to enjoy the greatest blessing available to mankind: the fellowship and goodness of the Living God. We curse ourselves, because we fail to accept His blessing.

In the same way, the blessing in Psalm 37:4 is a circular blessing. Delighting in the Lord is the highest, and best, and truest desire of the new heart He gives!!! When you truly delight in the Lord, you will ALREADY have the desires of your new heart, and realize they are for HIM.

When this is fully realized—well, you’ll be dead and face-to-face with Jesus Our Righteousness and Our Beloved when you FULLY realize this—but when you begin to more fully realize this on earth, your capacity to appreciate everything else is increased. You realize that you don’t deserve anything, and that the next moment of life and the next breath and the next heartbeat is a blessing, and anything else is gravy. You also begin to realize that pain and suffering is your opportunity and can be a great blessing if it drives you to HIM. If, in desperation, you throw yourself on Him—then you will truly live!

“Humble yourselves, therefore, under God’s mighty hand, that he may lift you up in due time. Cast all your anxiety on him because he cares for you.” 1 Peter 5:6-7.

Knowing Him and delighting in Him—relying on Him, I have begun to see that it is true what Jesus said: “my yoke is easy and my burden is light.” See Matthew 11:27-30. I want to spend time with Him, I want to know Him better and better, I want to do His bidding, I want to tell others how great HE is! I want to embrace suffering, and my own weakness, because to follow Him is to be weak on one hand, and to know His glory and power on the other! THIS is GOOD NEWS!!!

Our greatest treasure is God Himself. We should stop looking around for other treasures to pack into our jars of clay. There is no greater treasure to be filled with, than God Himself.

God, give us eyes to see who You really are, and what you are doing, and hearts to praise your handiwork in the seemingly empty spaces of our days. Enliven your people to look for your saving hand at all times, to look up, because You are working out Your redemption of our moments constantly, and You will not fail to wring eternal glory from every cranny of creation and moment of existence…

I am writing this chapter in a broken plastic lawn chair on a laptop computer in my back yard. I have been painfully bitten five or six times on the leg by one fly or another, (and AGAIN just NOW), but… I have seen the Lord! Not with my own eyes, but with the eyes of my heart, and not because I am special, but because I have looked for Him and found Him. He has shown me where He is. Today He was out back, with me and the flies. He was in this common place, and He is in every common place everywhere. Is there really any such thing as a common place or common moment?

Open your eyes and see that YOU are on holy ground! It is underfoot, wherever you may find yourself. Understand that you have a priceless treasure in you, if you have received Christ, and that the Holy Spirit has packed your jar. You are full, and rich, even if you have thought of yourself as poor. We were created to know Him.

Acts 17:27-28. “God did this so that men would seek him and perhaps reach out for him and find him, though he is not far from each one of us. ‘For in him we live and move and have our being.’” NIV 1984.

Know the LORD. He is not mere “value added.” He is your life. Delight in Him, and you will understand what real living is meant to be. You will know the true desires of your heart, and you will know that your heart, and your jar, has been filled.

February 14, 2018February 28, 2018

The Value of a Moment

Despite the inestimable worth that our God places on fellowship within the trinity, we think nothing of breaking fellowship with the Lord to go and get something for ourselves that we feel we need… we think there is little consequence or meaning in our sinful pursuits, and so our momentary devaluation of God approaches infinity. The pain that Jesus endured to relinquish fellowship with the Father for a moment, we eagerly trade into for ill-gotten and utterly rotten “gain.” Teach us, Lord, to more rightly measure your worth, and to see more accurately the true value of fellowship with you!!!

Miscalculations

We bargain our lives, oblivious to the fullness of the stakes, with a chip both infinitely grand and impossibly tiny—the mere, measureless moment. Born and passing away by the trillions every second, the moment is the smallest copper in the currency of time, but, unlike a penny in a piggy, it can’t be saved. In rapid fire execution, we have to spend each moment as we receive it, before we even know what value it holds. At times, we understand some of the significance of the passing moment, as we blow candles to count a birthday, say “I do” at the altar, or shed tears at a deathbed, but the majority of life is made up of commonplace forgettable moments of transition between the “important” moments. These forgotten moments have their own importance, as they set up the big moments, but there are simply too many of them for us to live intentionally within.

Even if we could fully engage in all our moments, we are limited in our understanding, ability, and strength to make the most of them. Moments fly past at the speed of… time, and we are no more able to grasp the full significance of yesterday, today, and tomorrow, or any moment in between, than catch a tornado by its tail. We fail, as a people, to grasp the value of a moment. This failure to note the significance, importance, and value of the moments we are given, often accompanies a spiritual nonchalance, and a desire to live for earthly pleasures.

Some of the value of a moment can be understood with the example of the “do-over.” A “do-over” is what we, as kids, used to ask for, if there was some kind of mistake or foul-up while we were playing a game. I called for a do-over if I suspected that someone cheated somehow, or if I got distracted or impeded by uncontrollable circumstances, such as when a passing car impacts the play of kickball in the street.

There is a certain do-over mentality that we learn as children, and carry over into adulthood. Everyone has heard, “if at first you don’t succeed, try, try again.” This is an encouragement for learning and applying new knowledge and skills, and for the development of perseverance. Unfortunately, we extend the principle to cover sacred things, like marriage. “If at first you don’t succeed…” We also give ourselves over to sin quite easily, since we are sure that we’re covered by grace, and we can overcome the sin on another day. “My sin just looks too good today! Some day I’ll be ‘tight’ with God… He knows my heart loves Him… it’s just that right now, my sin is just too hard to stop.”

As a result, we are tempted to spend another day in captivity, enslaved by our own desires, and looking after our own interests. Unless something changes in our hearts, tomorrow will be the same story. We reason ourselves back into our cages, because we think we have unlimited “do-overs.”

God is the God of second chances, we understand. Do we fly more quickly into sin, because God is so forgiving? Does His grace become one of our biggest excuses to just do what seems right in our own eyes? If so, we are slowly piddling away “life more abundantly,” in order to live life more “tenaciously” (selfishly)–to grab, get, and hold on to everything we can through mortal means. Life more tenaciously seeks a false abundance, consisting of status, material success, and the glory of appearance, and promotes our own ingenuity and strength to attain and hold on to what we desire.

Life more tenaciously ignores the “Value Added” to our moments that is God. (I’ll come back to this in a moment).

We let most of our moments slip by without paying much attention to them on a spiritual level. We live life on the surface, engaged in a thousand concerns, but we (intentionally, or “accidentally”) leave God out of our concerns. What’s more, we tend not to ask God to show us what His concerns are for the moment, for the day, and for our lives. We become comfortable in the state of repeated “do-overs.” Assuming that we have unlimited second chances, we devalue the present moment and ignore the pricelessness of “now.” We look more to what we can get out of “now” for ourselves, and ignore what God is looking to do in the moment.

Our moments are of inestimable value, but we are asleep to this fact. Some of us get a “wake-up call” in the form of a close brush with death on the highway, or grave news from a doctor. Perhaps we are reminded by the death of someone close to us that we are not guaranteed another chance… another “do-over.”

If you were told, right now, that you only had one, maybe two weeks, to live, how would you live differently? My guess is that you would learn, in that relatively short time, the value of a moment. Every moment that passes by brings you closer to the death that you would love to put off. Every moment contains a richness that, more often than not, goes unnoticed when we think we have all the time in the world left to live.

I’m guessing that you would learn to treasure the people around you and to appreciate your few remaining interactions with them. Perhaps you would call that friend you haven’t spoken to in years, or write a letter to a dear relative to communicate how much you love them, or to ask for forgiveness. Maybe there is someone you would want to make peace with, knowing that your time is so short, and seeing that the issue that divides you is not all that important, after all.

Looking into the yawning jaws of death, and considering how you lived, maybe the regrets start setting in. “I should have lived differently… I wish I had never made this or that choice… I wish I had spent less time at the office, and more time with my wife and kids. I wish I had enjoyed the moments I had, dwelling within them, instead of being distant and detached by always looking to the future. I wish I had made more of an effort to know God.”

You begin to understand that there really are no “do-overs.” You can’t go backward in time and choose differently to love that rebellious son at the moment he needed it. You can’t go and take back those hurtful words you uttered that pushed your spouse over a precipice, that hurled your daughter out of your home, that estranged your father, that severed your fellowship and made an enemy out of a friend.

You can’t go back to the same moment in time and do differently, and the cascade of consequences that poured from that wrong choice or lack of intention, (or attention), can’t be made to run uphill again and run afresh through a more pleasant valley. The streams of your life run onward and plunge toward a sea, and every moment is a continental divide, an encounter with a rock, a moment of swirl, an eddy, a lap onto the shore, a freefall, a tumble, and a splash…

Every moment is a statement of your existence and representation of your beliefs—and your thoughts, words, and actions are like a turning and a flowing—this time right, this time left, this time straight away. And a watercourse stretches behind you with evidence of your passing… a worn stone, an eroded bank, a drowned harvest, a sunken ship, a wedding ring tumbled and lost in the sediment.

If your streams flow in the Lord, He will cause the course of your life to be a blessing, and a plain is watered, a thousand saplings nurtured, an oasis created, a message in a bottle delivered, a treasure uncovered, and a canoe turned toward adventure and a true home.

If we could grasp this idea, that our notion about “living for God” is not about the future, but instead is “living in Christ” right NOW, and Now, and now, and now, then our lives would be filled with the significance we crave. No matter how small the moment is in our own eyes, it contains the opportunity for a special expenditure of the power of God as we align our hearts in concert with Him, or it can contain a hardening of the heart that exerts its own kind of power, which grabs, scratches, spits, and mars, as it leaks its way into the land.

Consider a song. What is a song, but an orchestrated collection of notes… individual moments filled with an assigned sound? A song that is good and lovely to hear has a cadence and a harmony that is recognizable and pleasant. Each individual note, played in isolation, and without the context of the song, is not nearly as inspirational. Weighing the worth of a single note is like our thinking that a moment doesn’t really carry much weight.

But when one note is played, and then another after it, and another, a song develops, and our appreciation of the song can build. Sometimes a song can move us to tears, or to laughter, or call up a memory—accomplishing heart-work—because the composer and the players worked together to fit sounds (moments) together that inspire, or encourage, or cause deep and good reflection, or stir the memory of the mind or heart.

But if you take a musical score and delete some of the notes, or if unpracticed musicians skip notes, or beats, or play discordant sounds, we are reminded how important a note is to the whole, and we hear that the song is not the same, or falls apart and loses its power, because the players lost sight of the moment, and the will to play a strong and right note, or willfully chose to play a note that sounds foul to the ear and heart.

There is a Composer, and He desires to feed us the notes to play in each moment. Sometimes the note feels like a strange one to play, but because I trust this Composer, I will play the note in His strength, though I am unable to hear or fully appreciate where the song is going. I have to put aside my notion of what note would be better to play at this instant, thinking that my song will be better than the one My Composer is teaching me to play.

I want more and more to be able to see what God is doing in the moment, to hear what note He desires my part to play, and then have the will and conviction to play the strong note at the right moment. This is like what Paul says, in Ephesians 5:19-20, “Speak to one another with psalms, hymns and spiritual songs. Sing and make music in your heart to the Lord, always giving thanks to God the Father for everything, in the name of our Lord Jesus Christ.”

Your life, full of individual moments, is a song—a “poema,” in the Greek, translated to “handiwork,” in Ephesians 2:10—a masterpiece. “For we are God’s handiwork, created in Christ Jesus to do good works, which God prepared in advance for us to do.” NIV. Invite God to play through you, and God will make the song beautiful to Him. The world may hate the sound of it, but playing it faithfully produces a joy that is independent from the approval of man, and fixed on the One through Whom all true joy comes. The music expresses God’s love for us, and our love for Him, and every note carries a beauty in the ears of God, because He Himself inspires it and gives it weight in a divine composition.

February 13, 2018February 14, 2018

Why Does Jesus Have to Ask?

In pondering the prayer of Jesus in John 17, I am amazed anew that Jesus would ask the Father anything. Why does Jesus ask? Does He need to ask, or is He just doing it for our benefit, so that we can grasp a proper pattern for living? It is tempting to think that the Father is so dominant, that the Son is the passive slave, only. I find myself wondering why I should pray for a certain result, when God already has His purposes, and can see all sides of every situation that are hidden from me? God is God, and I’m not, and I’m learning to be contented with Him, no matter the circumstances. But if I think of myself as a passive slave, and let God do what He will through me, then my feelings, opinions, and desires don’t really matter, and my prayer adds nothing of value.

Since Jesus asked for certain results, there is something deeper going on than a master-to-slave relationship. When the Son asks the Father something in prayer, or when He talks about asking, He expresses a proper Father/Son relationship. Remember Matthew 26:53, when the soldiers came to arrest Jesus in the Garden of Gethsemane, and Peter struck Malchus with his sword? “Do you think I cannot call on my Father, and he will at once put at my disposal more than twelve legions of angels?” NIV 1984. As mentioned before, Jesus operated from within His humanity in constant surrender to the Father. But there is another aspect to this asking that must come to light.

Jesus is here indicating that, in the case of a momentary inclination to do something spontaneous, His protocol is to call on His Father—that He would engage the Father—and be given something in response… in this case, twelve legions of angels. We marveled before that Jesus would even “stoop” to using angels rather than the power of the Spirit.

(Perhaps mention of the large number of angels is something that is easier for man to understand, in terms of raw power, than something more difficult to quantify, such as the power of the Holy Spirit. Maybe Jesus used angels in the example to show that God the Father could overawe any force that man could muster).

Jesus is saying that if He wanted something, He would ask the Father. This is the pattern He upheld in His prayer at Gethsamane, where he asked if there could be another way than the imminent cup of suffering and crucifixion. This pattern is upheld when Jesus asked for the Father to unify all who would come to believe in Him, in John 17.

The Devil himself recognized and challenged this pattern in his temptation of Jesus in the wilderness. If you review Matthew 4:1-11, you will see that Satan wanted Jesus to act on His own volition apart from asking the Father.

In recognizing this pattern of asking, we are not merely trying to pick out principles and procedures to follow so that we can “do what Jesus did.” Instead, we are trying to understand why Jesus did this or that so that our own actions and intentions can be informed from a fuller knowledge of what our Savior is like, and what God is calling us to do in the moment.

The biggest message from this is that the Son engaged the Father, and there was fellowship and a sense of doing things together. Satan does not want us to engage the Lord, but to reason our way out of our situations.

Remember that “the Son can do nothing by Himself…” John 5:19. The Son can ask the Father to accomplish something that He wants done, however. In doing so, in asking, Jesus brings glory to the Father, confirming His pre-eminence, power, and authority, and He looks to the Father for everything. When Jesus asks the Father, He is perfectly willing for the Father to say “No,” when Jesus would prefer a “Yes,” and has set His heart to honor His Father by submitting to the decision of the Father. (Gethsemane).

I believe this is why Jesus asks, because He is bringing the Father glory and properly counting all things as proceeding from the Father. Ephesians 4:6… “one God and Father of all, who is over all and through all and in all.”

If we do not engage God by asking Him, are we not robbing Him of the glory that is His alone? If we say, “God will do as He pleases,” and so we do not bother to ask, are we not discounting the pleasure He takes in us, and downplaying God’s attentiveness to our needs or desires? Inasmuch as there is glory in our acknowledgment that God is in sovereign control, there is somehow more glory in our engaging God Himself in conversation. And God loves to give answers to those who seek Him and love His company.

An angel from the Lord was sent to Daniel, in response to his prayer, in Daniel 9:23. “As soon as you began to pray, an answer was given, which I have come to tell you, for you are highly esteemed…”

Asking is the exercise and action of our faith. If we don’t ask, our faith will atrophy. If we don’t ask, we will not look for Him to move, which reveals sinful beliefs in our hearts that God is hard of hearing, hard-hearted, or too weak to act. If we don’t ask, we declare to the world that we doubt the worth of asking God for anything.

James 4: 2,3. “You desire but do not have, so you kill. You covet but you cannot get what you want, so you quarrel and fight. You do not have because you do not ask God. When you ask, you do not receive, because you ask with wrong motives, that you may spend what you get on your pleasures.”

Let us then not fail to ask, but also, with hearts of thanksgiving, consider that God values our thoughts, and loves it when we ask Him, because it shows our orientation toward Him, and dependence on Him for everything. We may not get the answers we are looking for, in the way that we expect, but the glory of the King is acknowledged in the asking. God’s people will demonstrate their reliance on Him in everything, by asking Him to do the work that we know is only possible through Him.

February 13, 2018

God Forgets?

This is the other instance that I wanted to discuss: God will choose to not remember our sins. “For I will forgive their wickedness and will remember their sins no more.” Hebrews 8:12. Here is the infinite Godhead promising to limit His active recall of our sins!

This will be of great benefit to us when we go to be with Him forever. This self-imposed limitation is completely for our benefit, and He will glorify Himself in our eyes greatly, and increase our joy in His presence.

I don’t know about you, but I am plagued at random times with the memory of some way or another that I have embarrassed myself over the years. For some reason, I seem to have a plethora of these memories from high school. Perhaps you know the kind of memory I’m talking about—one that you wish you could just strike from your memory, and from the memory of anyone that was there at the time!

For me, these memories were times of shame and embarrassment relating to wanting to make a good impression, and then instead, through poor performance or some personal setback or lack, inviting ridicule. In most cases, I’m the only one that actually knew how far I failed to meet my expectation for myself in the instance, and I’m probably the only one that remembers it at all. We are, after all, the star (or the dud) of the highlight reels of our own memories, and play mostly forgotten roles in the highlight reels of old friends, because they are, after all, focused on their own roles, too.

Anyway, I beat myself up at times just by remembering, and catch myself almost swearing in my mind at my own stupidity or foolishness or outright ineptitude. I don’t know why these memories come up randomly, instead of memories where I was praised or honored, or where I exceeded my expectations for myself, but the general tendency of my heart is to pull out the “reel of shame” from the memory banks rather than the “highlight” reel.

Whenever this happens, a shadow of sorts clouds my heart in my present moment, and I show myself how inferior, bad, or stupid I am. I mortify myself all over again when I think about who may also remember my embarrassing moment.

Well, God knows everything. How would you like spending eternity with someone who constantly points out your previous faults or reminds you over and over how you fell short? I’m sure God could point out ways that we have fallen far shorter than we give ourselves credit for!

If God were to do this, it would be like bringing a cold and unfriendly shadow into heaven, a reason for ongoing self-reproach and condemnation. Thankfully, He has made a provision to keep from rehearsing to us the facts of our sin-ridden histories. Instead, He will choose to look only at the all-consuming righteousness of the Son within each of the redeemed, and we will fellowship with Him unhindered by accusation.

What a relief!

Some of you may know what it is like to live with someone who constantly points out your faults, or have friends that like to get together and share embarrassing stories about you. The thought of that continuing in heaven would strike fear in anyone, especially if every actual truth about your life in the flesh was to follow you around paradise. If this were to be the coming reality, then heaven might look like paradise but feel a bit more like Hell!

But our God has thought of everything that will make heaven really heaven for those that love Him. “No eye has seen, no ear has heard, no mind has conceived what God has prepared for those that love Him.” 1 Corinthians 2:9. And God will not be upset with us, nor remind us of how far we fell short, nor will we have any reason to find fault in any of the other redeemed souls, seeing how we are all justified, accepted, and loved by The Blessed One!

God has, and will, selectively limit His access of certain knowledge for His glory and our good, and the Father hand-fed Jesus the knowledge He operated within while He walked in human flesh. Jesus accepted the limitation and subordination as inherent in the role of a surrendered servant, and as the Son.

“Your attitude should be the same as that of Christ Jesus: Who, being in very nature God, did not consider equality with God something to be grasped, but made himself nothing, taking the very nature of a servant, being made in human likeness.” Philippians 2:5-7. NIV 1984.

While omniscience was certainly available to Him within the Godhead, Jesus made himself nothing, and did not grasp it of His own accord. He took the very nature of a servant, who must operate under the authority of the Father. The Father obviously gave Him special foreknowledge or knowledge outside His direct line of sight and experience in specific instances—such as when He spoke to the woman at the well about her five husbands and the man she was living with—but, at other times, the Father restricted the flow of extra information to Jesus, as in the case of the woman who touched His clothes from behind and was healed, and in the case of the centurion who astonished Jesus with his faith. Let’s look more closely at these last two cases.

As recounted in Mark 5 and Luke 8, the woman who had a condition of uncontrollable bleeding for twelve years approached Jesus in a crowd and determined to touch His clothes by faith to be healed. When she touched His clothes, she was healed immediately, and Jesus felt power go out of Him. When He asked, “Who touched me?”, in that moment the Father had not revealed to Him the answer, but gave the direction to Jesus to ask the crowd. The Son honestly did not know that it was the woman. He could have asked the Father in that moment and received unlimited knowledge about the circumstances, but instead the Father directs Jesus to work from within the human limitation.

Why that way? Well, we see the woman come forward, on display for all to see, and confess in front of everyone her action, fearful and filled with dread about how Jesus would see it. At first, she had denied it, along with everyone else (Luke 8:45). So now she has the added guilt of having lied to His face about it. The way Jesus was asking, it seemed that He might be upset that someone came and took power from Him without asking, and His persistence in looking for the person shows that it was a weighty matter to the Father. This woman may have felt that Jesus was going to accuse her of stealing. Perhaps she realized that the consequences of confession might be that she would receive back her illness, or worse!

She was moved to confess, despite all consequence, and it was beautiful! She fell at His feet and confessed the whole truth, in front of Jesus and the entire crowd. She threw herself upon His mercy and totally disregarded her reputation in the eyes of the crowd, counting as the only important thing to come clean with Jesus, no matter the cost. By submitting to the Father, Jesus had searched and waited for a raw and heart-rending response from a woman whose soul was stricken by guilt, and was burdened by a fear of enduring punishment.

God released her, in peace, because of her confession. As an aside, I’ll ask if you think she would have had such a peace for the rest of her life if she had not come forward? She may have been able to leave the scene without discovery, but in her heart she would have always carried around with her the knowledge that she stole her healing from Jesus and then denied it. Some people live their lives under a burden of guilt that they can’t allow themselves to drop. Jesus, by calling it out, gave her the opportunity to be completely free, not only of her sickness, but free from guilt, as we see in Luke 8:48,
“Then he said to her, ‘Daughter, your faith has healed you. Go in peace.’” NIV 1984.

Let’s suppose, for a moment, that He was operating in full knowledge. If that is the case, then there is something of pretense in this interchange, as if He was doing a bit of acting. Jesus wheels around dramatically in response to the touch, and, knowing full well who had touched him, put the question to the crowd, “Who touched me?”

One could go on, along these lines, to make the argument that all of reality is a matter of presentation, carefully revealed in bits, because our finite minds simply can’t take it all in, and that God is a Master Director. Physical reality, in this view, is a carefully edited movie. There is so much behind the scenes and within the sets that would frustrate living if the director were to reveal too much of it to us. Our minds could easily become overwhelmed to the point that our lives would lack the linear continuity that makes living enjoyable, (and liveable).

The movie, “The Truman Show,” toys with this idea. Truman’s life is an elaborate TV show, and everyone that he sees or interacts with is acting a part. As he begins to question his reality, his comfortable routine is more and more disrupted. (The movie seems to put forth, through satire, the idea that real living begins to happen when we escape the limitations and machinations of the Director, “Chistof,” who is an arrogant, manipulative, stand-in for God).

Another movie, “The Matrix,” picks through some of the same themes. The destiny of mankind is controlled and scripted by computers, until a savior can be awakened to overthrow the evil computer and restore free will.

Could Jesus just be toying with this woman… indeed, with every person that He meets? Is He playing His part so that we will be manipulated into thinking and saying the lines that are destined to come from us?

There is another remarkable thing about the interchange with the woman in the crowd: power apparently went out of Jesus without the involvement of His specific intentional will. I’m not saying something happened outside His will, or that He was unwilling, but rather, the Father accomplished something through Jesus that did not involve a co-directed, specific intention from the Son.

The Son has proven constantly that He was here to serve the Father and was wholly subservient to the Father’s will. There was no resistance within Jesus to being used this way, and so there was, as a result, a general cooperative intention and action in the healing of the woman that seemed to bypass omniscience and the specific intention of Jesus. “But Jesus said, “Someone touched me, for I perceive that power has gone out from me.” Luke 8:46. ESV. This wording is very revealing in this instance, and shows us that Jesus was not specifically directing the healing Himself!

The Father often works His will this same way through us, and the power that goes out from us is the action of God through the Holy Spirit, and is not our own in any way. Oftentimes, when God uses me, I am unaware, (or at least not specifically expecting to be used in a certain way), and then find that the Spirit moved or is moving through me to speak truth, give a challenge, share encouragement, or call for peace. When surrendered, the general sentiment of my heart is cooperative with the Lord, and I want Him to use me as He will, and when He wills. I don’t need to know exactly how God intends to use me, nor am I dependent on seeing any results, (I am not smart enough to know what God is accomplishing in any specific moment), but there is additional joy that comes when I become aware that God has done something through or around me.

The joy that Jesus experiences in surrender to the Father is available to us, and the Spirit accomplishes through us all the more, when we submit. When the Spirit moves through us, it is not our own power or strength, but God’s. We can’t order the Spirit to move, and so we are dependent on the will of the Father, but our hearts can be co-operative and have an invitational expectation that God will work in our circumstances.

In Matthew chapter 8, Jesus speaks with a centurion, who comes to ask Him to heal his servant. If Jesus operates here in full omniscience, then His response is all mere theater. Jesus makes an offer to go to the sick servant, knowing that the centurion would decline graciously and make a beautiful declaration of faith. And then Jesus would act astonished even though He knew how the centurion was going to respond.

Jesus, however, is genuinely astonished at the centurion’s faith: the centurion’s assertion that Jesus could accomplish a healing of a specific person that only the centurion had in mind, and that Jesus could do so without being taken into the servant’s presence. The centurion probably even had more than one servant. It really is remarkable faith that trusts like this. In effect, the centurion was saying that he didn’t need to even see Jesus had the right person in mind to heal, miles from where they stood.

The Father, Son, and Holy Spirit teamed up again to heal in a miraculous way, this time demonstrating omniscience, omnipresence, and omnipotence in concerted action and through human exchange. What we see, over and over again in Jesus, is our Living GOD, acting in the NOW, with a fresh and unrehearsed action, reaction, thought, and word. What a unique way for God to reveal what He is really like, to a people that would be overwhelmed to see His undiminished glory! The infinite Godhead made Himself finitely accessible so that we can understand and love Him, not for the riches we think we can get from Him, as sycophants hope, but through understanding His character and qualities in a body of flesh.

Jesus did not have to act, in a theatrical sense, in the scene with the centurion, nor did he stage a morality play when He came to His own hometown, Nazareth, described in Matthew 13 and Mark 6, where he is amazed at their lack of faith, (Mark 6:6). It says that He did not do many miracles there.

“And he did not do many mighty works there, because of their unbelief. ” Matt. 13:58. ESV.

“And he could do no mighty work there, except that he laid his hands on a few sick people and healed them. And he marveled because of their unbelief.” Mark 6:5. ESV.

Did Jesus lose His power to heal in the presence of unbelievers, like Superman loses his powers in the presence of Kryptonite? No way. Was He unwilling to heal them? I believe He was willing. (Who, ever, could deserve a healing through perfect belief? All who have been healed have received it as a gift and not as a reward for performance). But when it says He “could not” do many miracles there, this is an indication that He was surrendered to the Father, and did not receive permission to display His miraculous powers except in a few cases. He was restricted by the Father, and accepted the limitations the Father placed on Him, trusting in the timing and discretion of the Father.

I’m sure Jesus wanted to gather the children of his hometown like a hen gathers her chicks, just like he wanted to gather the children of Jerusalem, (see Luke 13:34), but they were largely unwilling. Only a few people there presented themselves to Jesus for healing. What’s more, there are no recorded unbidden miracles in Nazareth at the time, such as the feeding of the five thousand in Bethsaida, in the next chapter. If I were Him, the temptation would be great to do some kind of miracle to show the doubters, the ones who took offense at Him in Matthew 13:57, that I AM. It must have been disappointing to be rejected by those he grew up among. Jesus didn’t try to dazzle his hometown crowd, nor counter the sting of rejection by a snatch at glory.

Jesus has a perfect record of obedience, despite the worst that man and the Devil could dish up. Don’t discount the surrender of the Son by thinking, “He knew just how to play everyone, since He already knew everything about everyone.”

We have the same opportunities that Jesus took, to seek the Father and look for His lead, and to act under the authority of the Father and the power of the Holy Spirit. The results of surrender are up to Him. Sometimes, many miracles may result while at other times we will find that we “could not” do many miracles. But we can gain an increasing confidence in the power and discretion of our Loving Father, and know that His decisions to work or not to work in a certain way are best.

In this way, we will agree with our Savior, the Son, and live and relate to the world with fresh expectation that God the Father can, and may do, anything. We find that we are like Jesus, not relying on omniscience, but able to depend upon and engage the Father in our moments. We see that the Holy Spirit moves in us to perform miracles when the Father directs, even when we’re unaware that He is doing something. And finally, we see that when we submit to the Father, it is Jesus Himself submitting again in us, abiding with us, and fellowshipping with us within the community of the Godhead. It is comforting and inspiring to grasp that Jesus did not even lean on His own understanding, nor function within His own strength, but in every way relied on the Father, and we understand that God is calling us to this very same thing.

February 13, 2018February 13, 2018

Jesus on Earth: Perfect Knowledge or Perfect Submission?

When we consider that Jesus laid aside some of His physical characteristics and rights for a time to take on flesh, which is astounding in itself, we should also consider that the Son, demonstrating total surrender to the Father, accepted a limitation of “operating knowledge” that was, day to day, similar to our own. This post is going to be a circuitous journey, but we will meet Jesus along the way and behold Him in different lights. Our desire here is to completely honor the condescension of the Son, and to see that in everything, Jesus was perfectly surrendered to the will of the Father.

The Godhead, (Father, Son, and Holy Spirit—“the Trinity”), we understand to be Omniscient (all-knowing), Omnipotent (all-powerful), Omnipresent (everywhere at once), and All-Loving. These are qualities that are unchanging and inherent in our God. As part of the Godhead, Jesus, the Son, operates within these attributes throughout eternity. There is no doubt about Jesus operating in full omniscience and omnipotence in eternity before the incarnation, and there is no doubt that Jesus has done so ever since the resurrection. But what about the time in between, when He dwelt with man in human flesh?

I suggest that during that time Jesus never used His supernatural powers, including omniscience, of His own accord. Jesus seems to have voluntarily laid aside unlimited access to perfect knowledge as well as absolute power during His earthly ministry, to say nothing of omnipresence. Jesus’s surrender to the Father is so complete that He relied on the Father to spoon-feed however much or little information the Father willed, and it appears that Jesus often worked within a limited knowledge set when he was interacting with the Father, or with people around Him.

As an example of this, let’s examine a particular instance of prayer. Before choosing the disciples, Jesus prayed through the night. “One of those days Jesus went out to a mountainside to pray, and spent the night praying to God. When morning came, he called his disciples to him and chose twelve of them, whom he also designated apostles…” Luke 6:12-13. NIV 1984. This is a rare occurrence in the accounts given in the gospels, where Jesus goes off to pray all night. (Another instance is right before the crucifixion, in the Garden of Gethsemane). Even though the content of Jesus’s prayer is not recorded, I will make the suggestion here that at least for some of the time, Jesus was discussing with the Father whom He should choose. I wonder if there was even some extended discussion about Judas, who would eventually betray Him?

From the text, we don’t even know that Jesus discussed the choosing of the disciples that night at all. He could have been talking about the weather, shooting the breeze with the Father, or talking sports, like we do oftentimes. But I think not. The narrative is set up to show a connection between the all night prayer, the importance of the choice the next day, and the beginning of a new era of discipleship.

If Jesus always functioned in full omniscience, though, why would He even consult with the Father about it for any length of time, let alone all night? He would already know what the Father wanted from every moment on earth–why go off and spend all night praying to the Father about something so finite as choosing twelve disciples? But there were times like this one where the Father led Jesus to seek a solitary and quiet place for unhindered fellowship. God places great value on Fellowship, not only within the Godhead, but also between Himself and every person. (And I wanted to start with this example for this very reason: we should never forget, with all this emphasis on “Surrender,” that God created us for fellowship with Him).

In and of itself, this instance doesn’t prove Jesus laid aside anything, except for time and sleep, but it does show a dependence on the Father, and the worth He attributed to long, focused, and uninterrupted conversation with Him. In one sense, the Father and Son never really experienced “interrupted” or “hindered” fellowship, except when the Father heaped the rotten monstrosity of the sin of all mankind onto the Son on the cross, which I delved into in the previous post. What Did Jesus DO? “WDJD” – PART 2 . But there was something about “getting away” to a quiet spot for more intense conversation that was necessary for Jesus.

If Jesus was operating constantly in omniscience, what more, really, was He getting when He went off to pray, than He was already getting millisecond by millisecond in constant community with the Father and Spirit? What need was there to speak with the Father “in private” that was not already filled moment by moment in unbroken omniscient consciousness?

The short answer to why Jesus would go off to pray is: that He was led by the Father to do so. This is the short answer for this entire chapter. Jesus didn’t “need” an answer or time alone in the same way that we feel that we need them. His only “need,” if you can call it that, was to do the exact will of the Father. Remember Psalm 23, when David said, “He makes me lie down in green pastures, He leads me beside quiet waters.” This is the level of surrender in the Son, that He was led in everything by the Father, down to the level of when to lie down, when to get up, and where to go.

Jesus did not do anything, go anywhere, or speak any words without the commission of the Father. It was exactly this constant submission that the Devil tempted Jesus to break. If he could just get Jesus to do something of His own accord, without consulting the Father, (even if it were a “good” thing, like making rocks into bread), then Jesus would be disqualified as the Savior, and His streak of perfect obedience would be broken.

You see, Jesus was not just obedient to the principles and general commands of the Father, but He was obedient down to the submission of every thought, and He deferred to the Father in everything… EVERY thing, EVERYTHING!!! Every moment. We are called to this kind of obedience to the Lord, by the way, though it is impossible for us to maintain… (See 2 Corinthians 10:5, “We demolish arguments and every pretension that sets itself up against the knowledge of God, and we take captive every thought to make it obedient to Christ.”) NIV 1984, italics mine.

We see this voluntary relinquishment of power and the submission of will when Judas comes with the Roman soldiers to take Jesus into custody, and Jesus’s companions draw their swords. Peter cuts off the ear of the servant of the high priest. “‘Put your sword back in its place,’ Jesus said to him, ‘for all who draw the sword will die by the sword. Do you think I cannot call on my Father, and he will at once put at my disposal more than twelve legions of angels? But how then would the Scriptures be fulfilled that say it must happen in this way?'” Matthew 26:52-54. NIV 1984. In addition, recorded in John 18:11, “Jesus commanded Peter, ‘Put your sword away! Shall I not drink the cup the Father has given me?'” NIV 1984.

Jesus constantly points back to the will of the Father to explain what He does. He says He could call to the Father, and twelve legions of angels would be rushed to His side, to be put at His disposal. Even here, we see an astounding submission to the Father. Why call to the Father, and then the Father send angels? Doesn’t this seem needlessly inefficient? With a single word from Jesus, at a future moment, and with the Father’s order, the Devil will be overthrown.

Why this workaround, when facing puny men? Jesus is God Himself… why mention going to the Father and have angels do something, instead of waving his finger and doing it immediately and with absolute power? Jesus was careful in every instance to submit to the Father, and did not consider any decision or thought to be His own to act upon without the Father’s command.

Even if Jesus had called, and the Father sent the angels, and Jesus had them at His disposal, it is guaranteed that Jesus would not employ them, apart from the Father’s will. The Son, by role definition, cannot act without the Father. It merely appears that He did a lot of things without consulting the Father, simply because we don’t see a pause in Jesus’s response time. We know that it would take us some time to ask God, and so we assume, as we read the accounts of what Jesus did, that there wasn’t enough time for Jesus to get feedback from the Father.

We have been given a glimpse of some “behind the scenes” interaction in the Godhead, right before Jesus calls the dead man, Lazarus, out of the tomb, that indicates otherwise.

“So they took away the stone. And Jesus lifted up his eyes and said, ‘Father, I thank you that you have heard me. I knew that you always hear me, but I said this on account of the people standing around, that they may believe that you sent me.’ When he had said these things, he cried out with a loud voice, ‘Lazarus, come out.'” John 11:41-43. ESV. Jesus had already prayed, in stream of consciousness, to the Father about Lazarus, and the Father had made known to Him what to do and say, and how. Jesus relates, out loud, some of what He had been praying to the Father, and gives evidence of a constant, holy conversation.

There is a remarkable account of this constant conversation within the Godhead, recorded in the gospel of Luke, when the will of the Son and the will of the Father appear to diverge.

In the Garden of Gethsemane, Jesus took Peter, James, and John with Him, and then went a short distance away (“a stone’s throw” according to Luke 22:41. ESV) and knelt and fell on his face to pray: “Abba, Father, all things are possible for you. Remove this cup from me. Yet not what I will, but what you will.” Mark 14:36. ESV. He went to check on the three disciples and wakened them to pray, then He came back to the Father, and asked again… “And again he went away and prayed, saying the same words.” (Mark 14:39, ESV).

In Matthew 26:39, one of the ways that Jesus expressed Himself was in the form of a question: “And going a little farther he fell on his face and prayed, saying, ‘My Father, if it be possible, let this cup pass from me; nevertheless, not as I will, but as you will.'” ESV. By asking the question, Jesus demonstrates that He is operating from within a self-accepted limitation in knowledge. The Alpha and Omega was only able to ask such a thing, (if indeed it was a legitimate question, and not a rhetorical one), from a restricted vantage point.

The Son actually called attention to the fact that He desired that another provision of grace be made, instead of the one the Father was calling Him toward. He made a distinction between the will of the Father and the will of the Son. “…NOT as I will, but as You will.” REMARKABLE!!!

Does this strike you, as it does me, to be a singular and near-unbelievable condition? It seems inconceivable that there would be even a hint of a question at this point in time about what to do, especially since it was foretold that the Son would suffer and die as the sacrificial lamb, and Jesus Himself spoke of it to His disciples on numerous occasions, including just hours before this moment in Gethsemane!

If, instead, Jesus was operating within constant and infinite knowledge, then this question is more akin to acting, or posturing. It is not a real request. He would have been asking a question to which He already knew the unchangeable answer. So why waste any effort or time asking questions, when the answer is fully known?

Perhaps He is modeling here, only? I suppose this is possible. If this is the case, Jesus makes a show of going off to pray, to model for us how we should deal with difficult decisions. He then demonstrates, through His questioning of the Father, how we can ask God to do something different than the expected answer.

Even if He is only modeling here, as could be asserted, what are we to learn from this model? I would say that what speaks louder than anything else here is still submission to the Father. In another word: Surrender. And it is BEAUTIFUL, no matter what anyone can say, otherwise, about it!

I don’t believe the Son was only modeling behavior, or being dramatic, for the sake of a good story, or to present a good example.

This is one of those moments where it is easy for us to see the humanity of Jesus, as He engages the Father, and the inspiration to us in this moment is that we, like Jesus, can surrender our flesh to His will, though our bodies may want to run in a completely different direction. There must be something about a brain of flesh that desires to protect itself, if it is thinking properly, in order to value the sanctity of life, and God’s Holy Breath. Otherwise, the Father would have been offended by the very question that the cup be taken from the Son, Jesus would have sinned in asking it, and the enemy would have exulted in the disqualification of the Savior.

So we see that the Son constantly surrenders to and accepts the limitation of the Father, and only operates within the mechanics of the flesh, (though empowered by the Spirit), and the boundaries of revelation given by the Father. There are times when Jesus obviously demonstrated supernatural knowledge, as we would expect. It is logical to ask, “How could the infinite Son not operate in infinite knowledge, constantly?” In fact, it is irrational to assume that God the Son would operate in anything but infinite knowledge. As a response, I would like to point out a couple of very startling instances of our infinite God choosing to limit His grasp of infinite knowledge.

Matthew 24:36 and Mark 13:32 are identical in asserting that there is something of a secret about the timing of the Second Coming within the Godhead (which, again, is mind-boggling): Jesus said, in referring to the timing of His own second coming, that “No one knows about that day or hour, not even the angels in heaven, nor the Son, but only the Father.” NIV 1984. Here, at least, is some information that the Son is not privy to.

Proverbs 25:2 says, “It is the glory of God to conceal a matter; to search out a matter is the glory of kings.” NIV 1984. But to conceal a matter within the Godhead!?! This is beyond my understanding. Somehow, God’s glory is even greater and more beautiful in that there is a bit of a surprise within Himself! The Son is waiting, even now, for the time to be revealed when the Father says “NOW!!!” “GO!!!”

I am getting goosebumps writing this. Can you feel some of that excitement that is pent up and carefully managed within the Godhead, where the Son and the Spirit are willingly ignorant of the time of the wedding, when the Son as Groom comes for the Church, His Bride?

I know something of this excitement from personal experience. As tradition suggested, I did not see my bride’s wedding dress, nor her in her wedding dress, until our wedding day. And furthermore, my eyes did not see her on that day until that moment when the organ music swelled, and Purcell’s “Trumpet Voluntary” began to play, and the double doors in the back of the Church were opened, and she was there standing in a glorious white dress, with her arm under her father’s arm! And she was radiant in her love for me, and our eyes were on one another finally as Bride and Groom.

The experience was surreal and one of the most powerful visions I have ever seen, made completely sublime by the fact that I had waited my whole life to see and know my bride the way that she was revealed to me in that moment and known by me that day. My breath was taken away at the sight, and I could not have been more thrilled in the moment!

And so I cry at weddings, even if I don’t know who it is that is getting married, because my heart is taken back to the day it was covenanted to my wife, and the day when she surrendered herself to me, and I surrendered to her. And more and more, as age and experience of the Lord gain advantage within me, I feel a building excitement at the thought of THE WEDDING of the ages, and what that moment will be like for the Savior of the World when He comes for His dearly purchased Bride, made completely sublime by the fact that the Groom has waited for the one single solitary right moment in all of eternity for the Father to open the doors to the completed Bride, assembled together and presented for the first time to the Groom, awash in the reflected radiance of the Shining One, surrendered to Him and full of love for Him.

And so the Son waits for the moment the Father will reveal, willingly “in the dark” about the exact time, in increasing anticipation and in a constant state of readiness to do the Father’s bidding in the instant the Father commands.

I suggest to you that He is right now continuing in eternity the surrendered way that He lived among us—active in the will of the Father and constantly ready to do the Father’s bidding in the instant the Father commands. (May God reveal in us, the chosen ones, how we are to be like the Son in this respect, and may He grow in us an increasing sense of His purpose and activity and will in our moments, despite our desires and the tendency of our own wills to deviate)!

This shows an ongoing instance of voluntary relinquishment of eternal fact, presumably for the enhancement of Glory and Joy within the Godhead. We should be glad that God is willing, in this same manner, to suspend access or reference to certain knowledge, because He actually promises to do this very thing over something else that is very significant in eternity future. God Forgets?

February 12, 2018February 13, 2018

What Did Jesus DO? “WDJD” – PART 2

It is written:

“God made him who had no sin to be sin for us, so that in him we might become the righteousness of God.” 2 Corinthians 5:21. NIV 1984.

How could the Holy One, Jesus, actually BE sin? We know from this verse that He was considered “SIN” by the Father. Sin, in many places in scripture is equated with darkness. In 1 John 1:5, it says,

“This is the message we have heard from him and declare to you: God is light; in him there is no darkness at all.”

It goes on to say that there is no fellowship between the light and the darkness. So we see that, for however short or long, perhaps only for a moment, the Father broke fellowship with the Son. We might be tempted to think that this was no big deal, because we think in finite terms, and we measure the meaning of a moment to be very little. Many moments will pass before you finish reading this sentence, in fact, and it seems almost trivial to skip a moment or lose a moment in time.

We tend to measure the value of a moment by what was accomplished in that moment, and we really don’t see much happening in most of our moments. You might be having difficulty reading these sentences because you are growing tired, and experience as I do sometimes a “checking out” of the brain, where your brain pauses in understanding while your eyes continue to move over the page. After many moments, sometimes I realize that I have no idea what I just read, and have to start all over again at the last sentence I remember!

If you fell asleep for a few seconds while sitting there in your chair reading this message, and upon regaining consciousness you have the sense that everything around you is the same, you would count those missed moments as inconsequential… unimportant. You can just go back to the previous paragraph and “recapture” the missed moment. But if you fell asleep while driving your car down a highway, and woke just a moment too late to avoid a head-on collision, then by virtue of the consequences enacted within that moment, you would count those missed moments as having great import and everlasting value.

You can’t recapture that moment, which is, of course, the reality of every moment–it can only be lived once. Every moment has tremendous value, and is irrecoverable, or irrevocable, once lived.

God is not limited in His experience of moments like we are, and in fact, He knows the worth of every moment because He lives in every cranny of existence at once and understands all things completely. Every moment is an eternity to God, and every eternity is a moment. What God accomplishes in every single moment is beyond calculation, and His work in every moment holds infinite and everlasting value. This idea is hinted at in 2 Peter 3:8…

“But do not forget this one thing, dear friends: With the Lord a day is like a thousand years, and a thousand years are like a day.” NIV 1984.

Do you know how many billions of processes are occurring in your body each second so that you can continue to live? You are just a single person. Now think how many concurrent processes are sustaining every human being at this moment. Expand your thinking to take in the processes that must also be ongoing for every living animal, and do not forget all the plant life, and the microbial activity that supports the whole system. Finally, consider the subatomic work that is taking place at every single moment so that elements may hold together, suns and stars may burn and give light, planets may orbit, and galaxies may coexist.

No one understands the true value of a moment like God does. Since He is everywhere at once, His experience of, and work within, a single moment is boundless. Does this give you a deeper appreciation of time, and of the mere moment? Let’s reevaluate the moment when the Father broke fellowship with the Son:

The break in fellowship between the Father and Son was absolute, since there was silence between them, as long as the Son was counted as darkness. The Father erected a momentary and infinite wall between Himself and the Son, so that the infinite wall of sin that separates man from God could be thrown down like the walls of Jericho. If the value of a moment could be measured in terms of what was accomplished within it, this moment is singularly priceless in all of eternity.

How long did it last—this break in fellowship? We might be tempted to think that when Jesus said, “It is finished,” that the Father was on speaking terms again with the Son. Shortly thereafter, Jesus said, “Father, into your hands I commit my Spirit.” Luke 23:46. ESV.

I can’t make any conclusion about the length of time that fellowship was broken within the Godhead, but two things are certain. One is that the Son was fully submitted to the Father’s will even in this: that He waited for the Father to decide when fellowship would be restored. How do we know this? I would point again to the times before the cross when Jesus said He always did the will of His Father.

So Jesus said, “When you have lifted up the Son of Man, then you will know that I am he and that I do nothing on my own but speak just what the Father has taught me. The one who sent me is with me; He has not left me alone, for I always do what pleases Him.” John 8:28. NIV 1984. (Italics and boldness, mine).

(It is interesting to note that when Jesus says here that the Father has not left Him alone, it is before the crucifixion)…

The second certain thing is this: the homecoming and return to fellowship carried with it a sweetness and joy of a restored fellowship that was broken only for the noblest of purposes, a celebration of the Son with His victory over sin and death and final proof of His submission to the Father in everything, and exultation in the finished work of God at the cross that the LORD Himself had never experienced before. It was a moment that Jesus had eagerly looked forward to:

Hebrews 12:2. “Let us fix our eyes on Jesus, the author and perfecter of our faith, who for the joy set before Him endured the cross, scorning its shame, and sat down at the right hand of the throne of God.” NIV 1984. (Italics mine).

Think of all the hero movies and the dramatic moments when the foe has been vanquished, and the victor turns to receive his praise or medal or reward…the swelling music… the victory celebrations—they are puny and hollow compared to the celebration of the completed redemption of believing mankind!

The vain imaginations of the human heart and mind cannot conceive what an incredible shockwave resounded in the heavens at the return of the Son to sit down at the right hand of the throne of God after completing the sacrifice to end all sacrifices! Oh, I wish I could have seen it!!!! There is no dramatic music that could be written or scored to match the tumultuous ecstasy at the restoration of harmony within the Godhead, and the ascension of the Son Victorious to the throne. There are not writers in the world who could pen dialogue worthy of The Welcome of the Son back to the arms of the Father. No locking of eyes could ever say as much as the eyes of Father, Son, and Spirit in the pleasure of restored fellowship and the only worthy work of salvation that will ever be esteemed.

Much is made of the second coming of Christ, and rightly so. I can’t wait to see that moment, as well! (I know that it has its own glory and eternal significance and worth, and God Himself makes EVERY moment of eternity priceless simply because the LORD, the Living God, LIVES and REIGNS at ALL times)!!! The Second Coming seems to my fallen heart more of a denouement than a climax, however, when I consider the work at the cross. In my limited eyesight, I am tempted to think that the work on the cross is THE defining moment of eternity. It is the moment that is most representative of Who God IS. It is the displayed answer to the question, “Who is I AM?”

I AM is the one who created Heaven and Earth, and the people He loves so dearly that He would give up His rights for a time to suffer as one of them at their hands so that He could save the very ones who once spit in His face.

I AM is the one who paid a price He didn’t have to, that was too expensive for all of humanity or angelkind to afford, so that He could show loving kindness and mercy to His enemies.

Hallelujah! WHAT A SAVIOR!!! What a FRIEND!!! What a CHAMPION!!! Is there anyone like OUR GOD? HE did not even consider His own rights something to be grasped tightly in a righteous and iron grip, but He opened His hands and allowed His beloved creatures to nail iron spikes into them. He did not resist their torture and their scorn, when instead He could have rightly BROKEN OUT against them.

But He was careful and gentle with us, though we had murderous thoughts in our hearts, and the intention to kill our GOD. Through mercy and grace at the cross, God has offered peace to His enemies and forgiveness.

How can anyone complain about this I AM? He is undeniably WONDERFUL. And if anyone maintains that He is not, some day they will see Him and all that HE IS, and their own mouths will proclaim that Jesus Christ is Lord. And it will be their own knees that bow down before Him. But it will be a sad day for them, who did not recognize the Lord during their lifetimes.

JESUS now has the Name Above Every Name and was exalted by the Father to the highest place, because He surrendered every moment to the Father and ALWAYS did what the Father directed, even though the Father, for a time, DID leave Him “alone” for our sake…

“In your relationships with one another, have the same mindset as Christ Jesus:
Who, being in very nature God, did not consider equality with God something to be used to his own advantage; rather, he made himself nothing by taking the very nature of a servant, being made in human likeness. And being found in appearance as a man, he humbled himself by becoming obedient to death—even death on a cross! Therefore God exalted him to the highest place and gave him the name that is above every name, that at the name of Jesus every knee should bow, in heaven and on earth and under the earth, and every tongue acknowledge that Jesus Christ is Lord, to the glory of God the Father.” Philippians 2:5-11.

And so perhaps the most valuable moment in eternity (in terms of what God accomplished within it) is defined by what was given up for us… the one moment in eternity when the Father was not speaking to the Son. Ironically, this holy moment of surrender and silence speaks, more poignantly and powerfully than any other, of the extent of God’s love, mercy, and grace to you and me… that the Godhead would break fellowship internally to secure our own fellowship with Him, “whosoever believeth.” John 3:16.

February 12, 2018March 1, 2018

What Did Jesus DO? “WDJD” – PART 1

Our God did the unthinkable: He accepted limitation and pain and suffering just by taking on human flesh! One of the three persons of the infinite Godhead stuffed Himself into a finite human body, and not only that, but He chose to start as a human embryo… to go the whole distance of human experience and suffer total human helplessness and limitation, and, eventually, to endure the worst physical and spiritual torture ever inflicted. As we look more closely at what is called the “Incarnation,” Jesus taking on human flesh, and what God accomplishes through it, we see that one of the defining features of the Son is complete and constant surrender to the will of the Father. We also see that surrender is something that everyone can do, irregardless of circumstance and life station.

In Bible Study this week, one of my friends was commenting on how Jesus, as he dealt in person with everyone, knew everything about everyone everywhere. My friend expressed what seems like common sense, that Jesus always knew exactly what to say and do from His omniscient vantage point. This idea could lead us to think that everything was easy for Jesus, because, after all, He is God. I wonder, if we allow ourselves to think along these lines, if we may begin to downplay the unceasing surrender of the Son? And if we believe that surrender was somehow easier for the Son because He held onto traits like Immortality, Omniscience, and Omnipotence, then we might consider the kind of surrender He demonstrated and the spiritual assets He held as something impossible for us to live out, and assume that miracles are completely out of the question for us. Looking for other treasure, we might completely miss the abundance that Jesus sought and bought in relationship with the Father, and ignore the source of power that Jesus Himself relied upon, the Holy Spirit…

We generally try to make choices to avoid pain and suffering. The thought of sustaining a bodily injury, like the loss of a leg, or one of our senses, like hearing, or eyesight, is scary. Even our sense of taste informs our existence in so many important (and wonderful) ways, it is difficult to imagine life without it. As we consider the condescension of the Son into a body of flesh, it is good to recall the glory from which He came, and compare it to our own starting point, a healthy human body.

To think that He who can see all things… in fact, the One in which all things hold together—

[“For by Him all things were created: things in heaven and on earth, visible and invisible, whether thrones or powers or rulers or authorities; all things were created by Him and for Him. He is before all things, and in Him all things hold together.” Col. 1:16-17. NIV 1984.]

–would accept the limitation of the poor eyesight afforded by two human eyeballs… is amazing. His infinite vision was not only limited by the physical apparatus of the eyeball, (the human eyeball isn’t able to discern detail even as well as the eyeball of a hawk), but those comparatively weak eyeballs are set to rotate within a head that has to turn in order to interpret even part of the surrounding environment. Objects that are nearby obscure the awareness of other objects (near or far) that are behind them.

Human eyes don’t see well in dark places, either. To go from seeing everything at once, as Jesus did, (and now does again), to seeing only a small patch of surroundings, is like you and me making sense of our surroundings looking only through a straw. The constraint of physical human vision Jesus accepted was almost infinite, compared to seeing everything.

Jesus, who could hear every thought and word of every brain and voice, accepted the limitation of the audio range and distortion of the sound waves that the human ear can take in. Imagine if you were given special earplugs that filtered out all noise beyond a range of 36 inches from the ear. You would suffer greatly from the loss of distant hearing. Jesus gave it up willingly, and the reduction of divine hearing to the constraint of human earshot was almost infinite.

Jesus, the Living Word…

[“The Son is the radiance of God’s glory and the exact representation of His being, sustaining all things by his powerful word.” Hebrews 1:3. NIV 1984. Italics mine.] The New King James Version has it, “and upholding all things by the word of His power.”

…chose not only to limit His voice to a vocal range that could be produced by a human throat, but also to throttle His communication with mankind for years within the cries and coos of an infant and the babbling, garbled speech of a toddler.

How can we understand the condescension of Jesus’s spoken language in order to relate to mankind? Perhaps if we were to limit our spoken communication through the sound apparatus of a cricket, we might begin to understand what that is like. It makes a nice comforting sound on a lazy summer evening, but doesn’t come close to capturing the range of emotions and expression that we might want to communicate. (However, if we are sent to crickets, we will be understood better than if we go into the grass speaking dog language).

By the Father’s will, the Son accepted a nervous system like yours and mine, capable of feeling intense pain, knowing that very fabric of nerves would some day be assailed in every way, and deliver an excruciating combination of signals to His brain that His tissues were being tortured and marred beyond a physical body’s healing capabilities. Every human sense was going to be attacked viciously and unmercifully so that a death sentence would be realized in every molecule of His flesh.

This part of Jesus’s suffering we understand, at least in concept, and a few of us have experienced the pain of brutality and torture, but none of us has been attacked by the sin of the entire human race through all human history—past, present, and future. Some of us have been subjected to the violence and sin of a hate-filled mob, but in the case of our Savior, He was brutalized at the same time by the will of the Father, receiving within Himself the complete spiritual penalty for the collective rebellious rot of human rejection and selfishness.

The Father was unmerciful to His own Son so that He can extend completed mercy to mankind!!!

What a stench humanity has made itself in the nostrils of God! When the Father poured the whole stinking cup of sin onto the the sacrificial lamb, it covered the lamb in such an offensive display that the Father had to turn away in repulsion. If the Father ever turned to vomit, it was surely at this time!

In Galatians 5:11, we are told of the “offense of the cross.” In Galatians 3:13, we see that the Savior was actually made a curse… “Christ redeemed us from the curse of the law by becoming a curse for us, for it is written: ‘Cursed is everyone who is hung on a tree.'” NIV 1984.

The moment this happened, the Father did what He had never done before, and would never repeat again… He broke off fellowship with the Son. We know because of the puzzling, anguished question Jesus launched into the air with a few of His last labored breaths under the full crushing weight of humanity’s sin, and just moments from the death of the body that was broken for us:

“About the ninth hour Jesus cried out in a loud voice, “Eloi, Eloi, lama sabachthani?”—which means, “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” Matthew 27:46. NIV 1984.

THIS is the ultimate expression of the full cost that was paid for the penalty of sin which we have each incurred. The physical punishment of the body through torture and crucifixion serves as a shocking and astounding symbol for us because the wounds and physical pain can be understood and measured in human terms, but it does not come close to expressing the true spiritual cost and pain that was endured for us. Jesus gave up fellowship with the Father for a time in order to guarantee fellowship in eternity for those who will accept it.

There is a part of the Apostle’s Creed which says, “He” (Christ) “descended into hell.” The case could be made that the moment most apropos to this phrase is when the Father forsook the fellowship of the Son. (The most defining feature of the Hell that will be prepared for the devil and all those who reject Christ is that God will not be there. Separation from God and others will be the most torturous aspect of eternity future in Hell. A place from which God will withdraw completely is incomprehensible, since God is omnipresent. Perhaps God will not limit Himself or His extents, but rather remove in the hellbound soul any ability to sense or appreciate His presence? I do not pretend to know).

I can’t pretend to know how the Father and the Spirit withdrew from the Son, but I suppose it was a continuation of human limitation within the Son beyond physical death where the Father allowed Jesus to experience the abandonment that we all deserve. Jesus tasted the second death so that many of us would not have to.

Hebrews 2:9, “But we see Jesus, who was made a little lower than the angels, now crowned with glory and honor because he suffered death, so that by the grace of God he might taste death for everyone.” NIV 1984.

And so the storm cloud or eclipse that obscured the sun on that day at the cross, which darkened the earth at the time, was only a hint of what was going on in the Godhead. To Be Continued in What Did Jesus Do? “WDJD”- PART 2.

February 12, 2018February 13, 2018

Surrender and Temptation

I had received a friend request on Facebook from someone from my distant past. Seeing this person reminded me of someone else from the fourth grade—a girl named Monica. In my little fourth grade world, Monica was the reason I went to school.

We even exchanged notes that said “I like you.”

Halfway through the school year, however, Monica announced that her family was moving away. There was a goodbye party for her at a local skating rink on her last Saturday in town. Everyone came except for Monica. We couldn’t reach her, as we didn’t have iphones or social media back then—we didn’t even have the internet—and, as far as I knew, she didn’t leave her new address or phone number with anyone…

I never saw her again. This was one of the greatest mysteries of my childhood.

When I thought about her two weeks before a talk I was preparing on “The Surrendered Moment,” I wondered if she was out there on Facebook now, so that I could find out whatever happened to her that year? I typed in her name, and within a page or two of the results, I think I actually found her…

I then did something that was very uncharacteristic for me… I composed a message to the Monica I found, saying basically that I thought she might be Monica from the fourth grade in so-and-so’s class at my old elementary school in the city where I grew up, and that I remembered she had to move out of the state part of the way through the school year. I simply asked her if she was, in fact, the Monica that I once knew…

After re-reading the message a few times, I hesitated, with my finger hovering over the mouse button that would select “send.” I had an odd feeling, and I realized that this was a peculiar and borderline questionable usage of Facebook for me. I was feeling like tiny alarms were ringing and red flags were going up, but…

I hit “send.”

Almost immediately, the question that had been growing in my mind came to the forefront, “What are you doing?”

This is one of those God questions. After they ate the forbidden fruit, God asked Adam and Eve, “Where are you?” He asked Cain after he committed the first murder, “Where is your brother Abel?” When Satan had to report to God in the book of Job, God asked Satan, “Where have you come from?” God knows all the answers, of course, but the question is for the benefit of the hearer, for directed reflection.

This is where we sort of stammer in response, and begin to try and justify… “well, I just wanted to see what happened to her. I only sent an innocent little message. I don’t really mean anything by it…I just want to make sure she turned out okay!”

But I felt God begin to put His finger on something in my heart, and another question formed in my mind, “If she were unattractive to you, would you have been so interested to contact her?”

“Ouch!”

Maybe I wanted more than I was willing to admit to myself. Looking back on it, I think I wanted to be remembered by someone I cared for. It would be gratifying, even flattering, to find out that such a pretty girl, now a beautiful woman, was affected by separation from me for a year or two afterward, the way that I was affected by her disappearance. Validation was what I craved at that moment—I wanted to know that I meant something to someone important to me at that age. To be fondly or wistfully remembered is one of the greatest joys of the aged.

After careful consideration, I weighed my heart and realized that I would not have sent that message, taken that risk, gone against my better judgment, turned away from the warnings of the Living God, if there wasn’t something attractive that I felt like I needed in that moment and that I could easily secure for myself.

God helped me to see that I was seeking to fulfill a legitimate need for connection, significance, and recognition in a way that was unwise. In this case, smoldering coals in my soul were starting to glow. The fact is, I have known some husbands who have reconnected with an old flame through Facebook, put gas on the coals, and then set fire to their marriages and families to go after “the other woman.”

I don’t want to say here that it is a sin to contact someone through Facebook, but for me, at the time, my decision did not proceed from faith. Upon further examination of my heart, I realized I was vulnerable and needy, and that my choice to reach out was unwise. I’m sure the landscape of America is littered already with tombstones for destroyed marriages, with an inscribed quote from the husband, “I just wanted to see if she was fine… and she was FINE!”

“It was only a little note… it was only a phone call… it was only meeting for lunch… A man has to eat, you know!” It all starts with a small, seemingly innocent inclination to connect with someone.

The internet has lowered the collective moral guard in American culture. As a married Christian man, you might agree that it is morally unwise to go into a private room and have an intimate conversation with an attractive woman, yet it seems harmless enough to have that same conversation by email or IM. Essentially it is the same thing, it’s just that cyberspace and physical distance gives the illusion of safety and propriety, even as the net of compromise spreads over the planet.

So, back at my computer, I had just sent the message, and had the ensuing reflection with the Lord, and I realized that, in my situation, I had sinned and that I needed to tell my wife, Wendy, right away. She was running an errand at the time, and I wanted to tell her in person, so instead of calling her, and not trusting myself to bring it up later, I sent her an email so that I wouldn’t talk myself out of it in the meantime, saying,

“Hey,

I did something very uncharacteristic for me with Facebook, and want to tell you about it asap to remain above reproach.

Love,
Jeff”

Before I hit “send” on this message, I paused a little longer than with the email I sent to Monica, thinking, “this really isn’t that big a deal. I’ll probably cause more trouble than it’s worth by mentioning it. I’m making a mountain out of a molehill! This is embarrassing! Nobody ever needs to know, because I didn’t do anything wrong…!”

I hit “send.”

I am so glad I did. My flesh really did NOT want to tell Wendy about what I had done. My flesh tried to reason with me and make me afraid that she might begin to doubt me or become suspicious, or that I would lose respect in her eyes. Still, I knew it was the right thing to do, and I surrendered and humbled myself before the Lord, and before my wife. I was willing to take that risk in order to be right again with God, and with Wendy. I was willing to trust God for my future by being obedient in the NOW, whatever it would cost me later.

When she came home, my flesh was giving me the full court press to sugar-coat the confession and explain it with nonchalance, to present the mountain as a molehill, but I had sent that message ahead to Wendy by email, and it had a serious tone.

As it turned out, God gave me the words to accurately reveal the sin in my heart, to repent, and to ask for her forgiveness. She was gracious to me, and I think she respected me more for my choosing to share my weaknesses, and for my reliance on God, that He may be glorified.

Since then, I shared this incident with my close friends, and with my Community Group, and in my talk about “The Surrendered Moment” to the men at church. I didn’t want to set up a destructive pattern in my life, and I know that I need the accountability of transparent fellowship to guard against the cunning wiles of my flesh.

(Let me say here that I’ve made many other impulsive and more overt sinful choices since this time almost ten years ago that I didn’t handle with transparency and immediacy. I won’t allow myself any kind of pedestal or congratulations for being this careful consistently. I have shared this example from my life because it combines the subtleties of temptation and sin with a serious and appropriate repentance, and I daresay that most of us have these kinds of needs and opportunities without recognizing the danger and temptation in them, and that many of us have made deeper immoral choices setting foot on a path that seems as harmless).

Concerned friends have asked me if Monica ever responded. She never did. And you know what? The need for connection that I was looking to fill in reaching out to Monica was satisfied through my confession to the Lord and strengthening the connection to my wife, and we were closer because of it. I was reminded that I already have forgiveness, grace, and love, and that one of the keys to contentment is to value what you have more than what you don’t have.

What’s more, if you want to be remembered fondly, make decisions to honor God and those you have committed to love, and God Himself will bless you and enrich your moments, and even now will snatch your feet from the fire and save you from the seduction of “what if?” and the destruction of impulsive selfishness.

Surrender is a Window to LIFE

There is a final point that I’d like to highlight from what happened. Surrender to God is a like a window to LIFE, and life more abundantly. It’s like being in a burning building that only has one window for escape. The window is an opportunity to escape the flames and to live and breathe freely, but if you stay you will choke and burn.

Many of us are choosing to stay in the burning building in our present moments. We are choked with fear and worry, but we will not go through that window because of the unknown on the other side. We would rather maintain the illusion of control over our own lives than to surrender to an authority that in many ways we distrust. We say to ourselves, “if I jump through that window, I don’t know what’s going to happen. But if I stay in here, I might find another way out.”

1 Cor. 10:13-14. “No temptation has overtaken you that is not common to man. God is faithful, and he will not let you be tempted beyond your ability, but with the temptation he will also provide the way of escape, that you may be able to endure it. Therefore, my beloved, flee from idolatry.” ESV.

NOW is All You Have

The fact is, you are swimming in temptations to save yourself or to make your own way. You only have right NOW to surrender—you can’t go back and surrender your past because it can’t be undone, and, when it comes down to it, you can’t be sure that you will even be alive one hour from now, so you can’t really surrender the future. You can pray that God will give you insight and words and strength for that big opportunity tomorrow, but when tomorrow comes so that it turns into NOW, you might find yourself out of synch with God because you have succumbed to the temptation to live the moment in your own wisdom and strength, or chasing after idols, or ruled by your fears. Or you might be dead tomorrow.

I don’t want to manipulate you with that, but to state the truth in a sobering way. We all know someone that has died young, whether a child or young adult. No one is guaranteed another “now.”

I think, when it comes down to it, we don’t trust God enough to surrender to Him moment by moment. We value the comfort and ease that we feel we can secure for ourselves, more than the uncontrollable and unpredictable abundant life that God offers us through our surrender. We fear that God will not be enough for us if we give up control to Him—that He will not save us if we step out in faith, and that we will lose the praise of men by following the Lord Jesus too closely.

Does surrender scare you? If you are in Christ, you have the Spirit of the Living God!!! Col. 2:9 says, “For in Christ, all the fullness of the Deity lives in bodily form, and you have been given fullness in Christ, who is the head over every power and authority…” NIV 1984.

His power and authority is absolute, so that the One who is with us is greater than all other powers put together. Consider Philippians 2:9…”Therefore God exalted Him to the highest place and gave him the name that is above every name, that at the name of Jesus every knee should bow, in heaven and on earth and under the earth, and every tongue confess that Jesus Christ is Lord, to the glory of God the Father.” NIV 1984.

Jesus Christ, the King of Kings and Lord of Lords, is Faithful and True, and He is yours. NOW is your testimony about Him. Surrender the moment, and let GOD be praised!!!

February 11, 2018February 12, 2018

A Challenge to “WWJD” (What Would Jesus Do)? – PART 2

In Part B, I outline three practical ways to surrender that run counterpoint to the three rational WWJD mistakes I wrote about previously. We can pray in surrender within the moment, or ahead of an upcoming situation, for God to work in at least three key ways.

(If you missed Part 1, please read that first: A Challenge to “WWJD” (What Would Jesus Do)? – PART 1 . In that post, I revealed three problems with using a rational perspective to determine WWJD, and presented the solution of The Surrendered Moment).

Surrender Solution #1: Give me your eyes to see what you are seeing.

This is a surrender to God of my own viewpoint, (which is myopic, tainted, and biased), and a plea for God Himself to give light to my eyes that I may have vision that transcends human perspective and perception. In asking this, I don’t expect God to give me perfect spiritual eyesight, but I do expect Him to give me corrective or enhanced sight so that I can experience the moment or the crisis with Him and rely on Him to show me what I need to know.

I must rely on the Spirit, 1 Corinthians 2:10-16 (NIV).

“The Spirit searches all things, even the deep things of God. For who knows a person’s thoughts except their own spirit within them? In the same way no one knows the thoughts of God except the Spirit of God. What we have received is not the spirit of the world, but the Spirit who is from God, so that we may understand what God has freely given us. This is what we speak, not in words taught us by human wisdom but in words taught by the Spirit, explaining spiritual realities with Spirit-taught words. The person without the Spirit does not accept the things that come from the Spirit of God but considers them foolishness, and cannot understand them because they are discerned only through the Spirit. The person with the Spirit makes judgments about all things, but such a person is not subject to merely human judgments, for, Who has known the mind of the Lord so as to instruct him?’ But we have the mind of Christ.”

Seeing with spiritual eyesight is essential to walking by faith, as we must continually filter our human experience through a recognition of God as sovereign and through a reliance on Him to save us in every way and correct our vision.

John 5:19: “So Jesus said to them, ‘Truly, truly, I say to you, the Son can do nothing of his own accord, but only what he sees the Father doing. For whatever the Father does, that the Son does likewise.” ESV. (Italics and boldface, mine).

Even Jesus, who has the “mind of Christ” in a way that no one else can, chooses to look to the Father in order to see what the Father is doing, and to do in the moment what He sees the Father doing. You and I can’t see perfectly what God is doing, nor do we have the mind of Christ in the same way that He has it, but we can look for God to inspire our vision and to reveal truth to us that we can’t find on our own.

When we pray for God’s perspective, we may not consciously recognize or understand anything different, but the most important aspect of this is that we have an eye that looks for God spiritually in the moment; an eye that honors God and acknowledges His presence, and that desires to see Him moving.

In the New Testament, we see that God, the Father, gives Jesus, the Son, special insight into a person’s past or private thinking so that He can directly address something very specific. The Spirit is able to cut through outward appearances to reveal truth directly and powerfully. When I’m asked for counsel, my best first response is to silently ask God to give me insight so that I may hear from Him and speak truth that is most needed. This prayer of surrender can be as simple as one heartfelt sentence or even an instantaneous acknowledgment that God is with me to help me help someone else. With a spiritual glance toward God in the room, or a nod in His direction, He catches my meaning and the setting of my heart on Him.

Sometimes I am surprised by the truth that comes out of my mouth in my response, because I am often convicted, instructed, and challenged by it, just as much as the person to whom I am speaking. The content sometimes is more than I could know or understand, and the manner of expression is far better than I could compose on the spot. I marvel when this happens, not at my own thoughts and words, but at God’s wisdom and power, and His expression of mercy and grace to me that He would use such a broken vessel in a redemptive way!

I’m not always cognizant of anything special in my surrendered responses, by the way, and sometimes I may go away thinking that God didn’t show up like what I had hoped, or it might seem that my answer was inadequate. When I catch myself thinking like this, I have to remember God will accomplish what He desires through such moments, and that God’s timing and His ways are better than my own. God can provide another opportunity for that person to hear truth clarified, and it doesn’t have to be through me. It’s actually a relief that the results are up to Him.

How can the LORD help us see more clearly in these situations, to know how to think, or speak, or act? Ask Him, yourself!

Surrender Solution #2: Teach me your ways. Psalm 25:4-5: “Show me your ways, O Lord, guide me in your truth and teach me, for you are God my Savior, and my hope is in you all day long.” NIV.

God’s ways are not our ways, but He wants to show us His ways, and we can know more and more of His ways if we are looking for Him. Jeremiah 33:3: “Call to me and I will answer you, and will tell you great and hidden things that you have not known.”

Sometimes, in my desperation to see God move, I become aware that I have left God behind, and that I have forged ahead to obtain results that I can see immediately. Coasting on my own gifts and talents, I can become too attached to a particular mode of ministry, too presumptuous as to what needs to happen, or too focused on meeting particular goals. Success in ministry can become its own end, and the craving for continued or increased impact can draw us to rely on those methods or gifts that brought results before. It’s a blessing to come to the realization that we have been trusting the trappings of ministry more than we have been trusting God Himself, so that we can make a change in course.

The line is a fine one, and easily danced across and moved around, where we leave off relying on the Spirit to move us and correct us, and instead pick up the work to establish our own heritage within a certain sphere of influence or mode of working. The larger the ministry, the more difficult it is to stay responsive to the Spirit. Each person should look to God to follow Him, and collectively the Church needs to be responsive at a grass roots (down to the individual!) level to the move of the Spirit.

When I look at the movements of Jesus with eyes of flesh, I scratch my head and think that He was often very impulsive, or even wishy-washy. At the wedding of Cana in John 2, His first reaction to His mother’s insistence that He do something about the wine that had run out was to indicate that it was not the right time to reveal Himself by doing miracles publicly. A few moments later, He seems to contradict Himself, and turns the water into wine.

In Mark 7, Jesus at first resists the request of the Syrophoenician woman to heal her daughter of demon possession, and then reversed Himself and healed the daughter after a single repartee from the mother.

I don’t point out these instances to suggest that following God must look impulsive, but we should all recognize that God’s ways are not our ways, and also that God is not limited to acting through prescribed methods nor traditional channels nor historical precedence. We must set our ways aside and make straight paths for the Lord to move when and how He will, and we should seek to be open to God’s leading, even if it looks like we are being detoured from a more well-planned, excellent, or expedient way.

Oftentimes, the Spirit calls us from the path of comfort into unfamiliar, uncharted, (and unplanned) routes and territories. Here, outside of our careful plans, we realize that we can’t control anything, and are wholly dependent on Him. God is not against planning, but if we plan to do anything, let us first plan to follow Him wherever He leads, and over all other plans, remain responsive to His call and command.

Surrender Solution #3: Instruct me what to say and do, and give me your strength to accomplish your will.”

Jesus says in John 12:49-50: “For I did not speak of my own accord, but the Father who sent me commanded me what to say and how to say it. I know that His command leads to eternal life. So whatever I say is just what the Father has told me to say.” NIV 1984, (Boldface and italics, mine).

Jesus obeys the Father in WHAT to say and HOW to speak!

There are whole aspects of Jesus’s communication that we are not privy to… His tone of voice, His gestures and body language, His eye contact. Everything He said was commanded by the Father, and every aspect of His delivery was ordered by the Father.

Other translations express these verses more like what is in the ESV: “For I have not spoken on my own authority, but the Father who sent me has himself given me a commandment—what to say and what to speak. And I know that his commandment is eternal life. What I say, therefore, I say as the Father has told me.” Jesus seems to be redundant in this version, saying that the Father gives Him the specific words to “say” and to “speak.”

Speaking goes beyond mere content, however, and indeed we understand that we can speak the exact same sentence and change its meaning by emphasizing certain words. If I were to say, “Please give that to me,” my meaning can change based upon my inflection and body language.

If I say, “PLEASE give that to me?” then I’m politely asking you to give that to me. If I say, like my children do sometimes, “PLEEEEEEEEEASE give that to me?”, then I’m begging you to give that to me. If I say, “Please GIVE that to me?” then I’m asking that you would make it a gift with no strings attached, or otherwise differentiating the mode of delivery from another mode (like loaning). If I say, “Please give THAT to me?” then I’m emphasizing that you give me that thing instead of the other things. If I say, “Please give that TO ME,” then I’m emphasizing that you give the thing to me instead of to the other people. The content of what we say is modulated by our manner of speaking and the context of the situation.

Jesus didn’t speak like a robot, but instead, with emotion and body language and inflection, He communicated not only the content that the Father gave Him, (the specific words in order), but He also expressed that content as the Father directed, within the specific context, and to certain people.

Paul describes how we can do this same thing, in Ephesians 6:19-20. He asked for the Ephesians to pray “that words may be given to me in opening my mouth boldly to proclaim the mystery of the gospel, for which I am an ambassador in chains, that I may declare it boldly, as I ought to speak. ESV.

Paul asks that God will give Him the specific words when he opens his mouth, and for a manner of delivery that is bold, so that He can speak without fear of saying the wrong thing or being afraid of what the hearers may think. Surprisingly, Paul admits that fear is often with him when he speaks. In 1 Corinthians 2:3-5, Paul emphasizes the mode of expression in which he spoke to the Corinthians in person:

And I was with you in weakness and in fear and much trembling, and my speech and my message were not in plausible words of wisdom, but in demonstration of the Spirit and of power, so that your faith might not rest in the wisdom of men but in the power of God.” ESV.

He mentions here that his message is not of rational human wisdom, and God speaks through Him in the power of the Spirit even though he himself is weak and trembling with fear.

This is what is available to us no matter our personal limitations—any time! God can communicate His Truth through the power and expression of the Spirit! In fact, Jesus calls the Holy Spirit the “Spirit of truth,” in John 14:16-17: “And I will ask the Father, and he will give you another Helper, to be with you forever, even the Spirit of truth, whom the world cannot receive, because it neither sees him nor knows him. You know him, for he dwells with you and will be in you.” ESV.

Jesus said, in Luke 12:11-12: “When you are brought before synagogues, rulers and authorities, do not worry about how you will defend yourselves or what you will say, for the Holy Spirit will teach you at that time what you should say.” NIV. This kind of promise is scary, because God tells of a deliverance that happens “at that time.” We are not to expect in these situations that God is going to give us a speech ahead of time to practice, and to perfect the delivery. In an interview or cross-examination, anything prepared could be derailed or redirected, and if our confidence rests on a specific sequence of thought and phrase, we may take our eyes off of the Lord in worry over the performance.

The LORD told Moses in Exodus 4:12, “Now then go, and I, even I, will be with your mouth, and teach you what you are to say.” Nevertheless, Moses had no confidence that he would be able to say the right thing when the time came, even with the promise from God, and so he asked for God to send someone else. This fear of faltering in speech at an important moment—I know it well, myself. One of my biggest fears in college was the fear of public speaking. God has given me numerous opportunities to trust Him, standing before a crowd to speak, and, though I see that He has come through, time and again, this fear threatens me at every occasion. As I get older, I notice that I’m not as sharp or quick in memory as I was even last year, and I have fear that, if I am put in the spotlight, and many eyes are on me, I will not be strong or persuasive in speech. I may falter, and may not be able to pull up the words that would show themselves as true and bring honor to the LORD. However, GOD Himself is with me. I must rest in HIM. Jesus rested in the Father, Himself, and gave His own mouth to the Father:

John 14:10-11. NIV. “Don’t you believe that I am in the Father, and that the Father is in me? The words I say to you I do not speak on my own authority. Rather, it is the Father, living in me, who is doing his work. Believe me when I say that I am in the Father and the Father is in me; or at least believe on the evidence of the works themselves.”

Jesus Himself did not take credit for His words and His actions, but testified that it is God the Father living in Him!

As we surrender our eyes to see what He is seeing, as we submit ourselves to be taught His ways, and as we yield our bodies to speak His words and do His works, we will experience the truly abundant life, and the world will get to see that God the Father is still at work.