Walking The Walk

 We Christians are not super human beings but we are human beings whose lives have been graced by a Sovereign and Almighty God.  God has done a profound thing by transferring us from the dominion of darkness into the dominion of light, something He will do for anybody who will give him opportunity. 

This is where the Church comes in.  Followers of Jesus have been given the awesome privilege of letting people know that God is not removed from their lives but longs to be front and center in them.  How do we share a message like this?  We share it by living it. 

Ephesians 5:1 tells us to "be imitators of God, as beloved children."  As children of our heavenly Father we look like Him, as a child might look like his or her father.  It might be our eyes, our smile, our mouth, an expression of some kind that leads people to say, "Man you look like your dad." (I get this all the time from people who knew my dad). 

As a child of our heavenly Father we are gifted to reflect the image of God by the way we live and move and have our being.  Paul takes it a step further and says that how we live is like being "a fragrant aroma," an aroma of Christ (Eph. 5:2). 

Go out and smell good for the Christ you serve.  Make God look good.  Show by the way you live that His grace and mercy are real and valid and at work in the world.  Be the light and salt of the lavished grace of God.  Be contagious.  May the character of our lives be a problem for those who don't believe in God, a positive problem that God can use to touch others by His Amazing Grace.  

A New Self

 The Bible calls followers of Jesus to "Lay aside the old self" and to "be renewed in the spirit of your mind" (Eph. 4:22-23).  There is a "new self" to which God calls us and it is a new self that is rooted and grounded in the life of Jesus.

God works His very life into our lives and calls us to live in excellence, an excellence we first see in Jesus.  This miracle of redemption is an awesome act of God's grace and mercy, and lifts one out of the junk and stuff of life and up into the righteousness and holiness of God. 

It is a miracle when a person is enabled to no longer give themselves to the stealing, killing and destroying ways of the one Jesus calls, "The thief" (John 10:10).  The apostle Paul said that what God does in the human life is so dramatic that "if anyone is in Christ, he or she is a new creature; the old things passed away; behold, new things have come" (2 Cor. 5:17).

Isn't it a wonderful reality to know that the past doesn't have to control the present or the future, that the grace and mercy of God can bring into us a new way of being?   I've watched the old ways long enough now to know they are not working out well.  This old world needs a dose of something new.  This something new is Jesus who loves us so much He died upon the cross of Calvary to set us free from the thief and to bring us to life in the glory of God.

An Aromatic Presence

 To those of us who are followers of Jesus how we live profoundly matters.  It is so important that it led the apostle Paul to say to the church, "I…implore you to walk in a manner worthy of the calling with which you have been called" (Eph. 4:1).  Then he calls for certain actions and attitudes: humility, gentleness, patience, tolerance, peace (Eph. 4:2-3).

           

We followers of Jesus have a high calling to live out the meaning of our faith in a way that reflects the honor and dignity and love of God.  Is there a way to be Christian in this world?  There is.  Paul says it is to live a life reflecting what we see in Jesus -- humility, gentleness, patience, tolerance, peace.

           

I am wondering how well the Christian community has lived out the miracle of redemption, a redemption that has been worked into their lives.  It is easy to talk the talk but a far different reality to walk the walk.  The Bible calls us to walk the walk. 

           

When Jesus called us to follow Him I'm quite sure He meant living in His mind and spirit.  The apostle Paul said it this way, "Therefore be imitators of God, as beloved children, and walk in love, just as Christ also loved you and gave Himself up for us, an offering and a sacrifice to God as a fragrant aroma" (Eph. 5:1-2).

           

A fragrant aroma -- what a wonderful way to say it.  We are called to be an aromatic presence emanating a distinctive and pleasant smell, as it were, -- the fragrant aroma of Jesus Christ.

           

We can handle that, can't we?  By the power of the Holy Spirit in us, we can reflect outwardly what has happened to us inwardly. Surely we must.  The reputation of God is on the line.  Let's go out and make God look good.  He is, you know.

Plunged Into The Arms of God

 In her book, My Story, My Song, (Upper Room: Nashville, 2012), Lucimarian Roberts speaks of the difficulties she faced during and after the hurricane Katrina catastrophe. It was a most difficult time.  Her life was upset, she lost many of her possessions, and the pain of it all was almost unbearable.  Yet, the result of it all wasn't anger or bitterness or utter frustration on her part.  Instead, Lucimarian Roberts wrote, "Katrina plunged me into the arms of God" (109)

                       

King David wrote, "Even though I walk through the valley of the deep darkness, I will fear no evil, for You are with me.  Your rod and Your staff, they comfort me" (Ps. 23:4).  Lucimarian Roberts, a solid rock disciple of Jesus, had bumped into God early on in her life and when the deep darkness of Katrina hit she found herself safe in the arms of God.

                       

Life is filled with pain  born of a thousand sources but there is safety in the arms of our God.  He is the Shepherd and He comforts His people with the divine rod and staff.

                       

What is your Katrina?  Are you safe in the arms of God?  Remember that God is present and as Mrs. Roberts says, "Wherever we stand is holy ground if God is revealed and revered there (99)"

                       

May God embrace you today.  Let your Katrinas plunge you into the arms of God.

Grace And Mercy Have Faces

 

I don't recommend cancer to anybody, but if you have to go through it, it is a gift the greatness of which is beyond description, to go through it in the grace and mercy of God. 

                       

In my journey grace and mercy have faces. They are the faces of the people of my little flock who love me and care about me, and who daily pray for me.  Their hugs and notes and gifts reflecting their hearts of love and prayer have touched me over and over in ways I am incapable of expressing.  I just don't have the words.  Bresee Church you may be small but you are great.  You remind me of another church who was praised by a missionary once for her "work of faith and labor of love and steadfastness of hope in our Lord Jesus" (I Thess. 1:3).  Paul's letter made it into the New Testament canon.  I'm quite sure this missive won't have that impact but I am also sure, that out of your lives flow grace and mercy.  Thank you, thank you, thank you.

                       

God's grace and mercy have another face, too. Her name is Vonnie.  On December 7, 1968 she said, "I do," and married me for better or worse; Over 43 years later I am quite convinced she really meant it.  Now, in this daunting health journey she has again incarnated God's grace and mercy to me. 

                       

On December 7, 1968 Vonnie didn't really know what she was getting into.  Forty-three years later, she knows it fully; and, get this, she still loves me.  Who would have thought it? I don't think I am missing the mark when I say she loves me even more.  And, as much as I know how to love, I love her with all my heart.

                       

Grace and mercy have faces, don't they.    

The Valley Of Deep Darkness

 

Psalm 23 came alive for me one day when I was getting ready to speak to a group of recovering alcoholics.   I wanted to speak about the shepherd heart of God but I was lost in how to communicate that to a group of men who had hit the bottom, and who were trying to recover and embrace life again with hope and meaning.

           

In my prayers that early morning my eyes fell on an alternate translation of the words, “Even though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death.”  I would have had no problem using this historic translation, but for this assignment the alternate reading crashed into me at light speed and became the theme of the day.”  The alternate reading?  “Even though I walk through the valley of deep darkness.”

           

The valley of deep darkness is all around us. Deep darkness.  I suspect that if you took a moment right now to think about it you would name some people in your life who are going through that valley right now.  Maybe you are one of the people you would name. 

           

My friends with whom I shared the message sure got it.  It became a more powerful image even than death.  We set around for two hours after the message and just talked about light and darkness.  Many of them had lived on the streets of L.A. in a drunken stupor for years.  One day they bumped in to God.  Their darkness was embraced by God’s light, they were adopted into God’s family, and now they were recovering from the darkness, seeking to live in the light of Jesus.

                       

No valley is too deep, no darkness so dark, no person so lost that Jesus can’t shake the foundations and take broken lives and turn them into something beautiful for God.

Routine Acts of Outrageous Generosity

 We Christian folks have been called to be a generous people, not measured by the amount we might be able to give but by the spirit of our generosity.  Jesus shared about a woman who had next to nothing but gave it from her heart.  Her gift probably didn't make much of a difference to anybody but God; but then isn't our whole life about living in response to God? 

The apostle Paul told the early church "For you know the grace of our Lord Jesus Christ, that though He was rich, yet for your sake He became poor, so that you through His poverty might become rich" (2 Cor. 8:9).  Because of what Jesus has done for us we can't keep it contained.  And, it's not just about money, even though our culture seems to be obsessed (overly obsessed) with money.  It is about living in response to the incredible and amazing grace of God. 

           

Someone said we ought to practice random acts of kindness.  I don't think this is true at all.  There ought to be nothing random about kindness or generosity.  When one knows that he or she deserves nothing from God but judgment but has received, instead, love, acceptance, and forgiveness, heaven, if you would, how could one be random in generosity? 

           

The ways of God in our lives ought to compel us to live lives of outrageous generosity, generosity with our resources, our kindness, our mercy, our forgiveness, our love.  Christians can't be cheapskates and seriously think they are walking in the steps of Jesus. Somebody once said, "Find a need and meet it."  This is the spirit of generosity. 

           

Let's choose to live in response to the self-giving of Jesus.  We can't do everything but we can live in the spirit of generosity, with our eyes fixed on Jesus.

God's Outstretched Arms

 Our God is a reconciling God.  It seems that God is always reaching out in healing and restoring acts of amazing grace, to draw us to Himself.  We don't have to be separated from our Creator.  His love has driven Him to us, in the context of our humanity, and reached into our lives restoring us and reconciling us to His very life.  Jesus is God's supreme reconciling response to our lives.  In fact, Jesus is God's response to the deepest needs of the human heart.  In Him, we are not separated from God, alone because we have been disconnected from our Creator.  Instead, Jesus is God's outstretched arms, extending to us a grace and mercy and love that staggers the imagination.

           

When God could have written us off He included us.  When He could have judged us and rightly sentenced us to the kind of life deserved by those who would sin against God and who, in their nature, fall short of His glory, He died upon the cross of Calvary so as to draw us to Himself and to make a place for us at His table.

           

Now we are called to participate with God In His reconciling life.  His love fills our hearts and moves us to be to others what God has been to us.  He didn't hold our sins against us, and we extend the same grace to everyone in our world.  Jesus is for everyone and we are called to stand with Him as He extends His crucified and resurrected life to the entire world.

           

What a God we serve!  What an awesome God to love us so fully and freely that we are privileged to share with others the greatest news ever to come down the historical pike.  In Him we are free to resign as manager of the universe and become voices of grace and mercy.

           

What a God!

God's Incredible Pledge

 Christians believe we are children of two worlds.  We are of the physical, flesh and blood, mortal world of the cosmos and we are of the spiritual world in which God is covering His people with "a house, not made with hands, eternal in the heaven" (2 Cor. 5:5).  We believe the mortal is a gift from God into which He pours His very life so that even as we dwell today in the world before us, we also dwell in the life of God who at some future moment will work in such a way "that what is mortal will be swallowed up by life" (2 Cor. 5:4).           

I, for one, find this to be exhilarating.  We live in an "earthly tent," experiencing the sense of temporary, moral, broken, and human, a life that can be taken away from any of us at any time.  Yet, we live in this "earthly tent" filled with "the Spirit as a pledge," the Spirit who fills our life with "good courage" (see 2 Cor. 5:1, 5).

Are you living in a spirit of "good cheer?"  Every Monday when I check in for a weekly physical exam just after a radiation treatment, Dr. Moorhouse asks me, "How is your spirit?"  Each week I have truthfully responded, "It's good."  It is good because God is holding me within the embrace of His grace through the abiding presence of His Holy Spirit.

In this "earthly tent" world "we walk by faith, not by sight" (2 Cor. 5:7).  Some times it hurts to live in the world.  Man's inhumanity to man is at epic proportions.  Wars and rumors of war, countless hostilities both physical and political, and suffering of countless kinds are a part of the story of daily living in the world.

Sometimes we might want to run away from it all, but this wouldn't be wise.  Instead, may God help us to live, whether here or in the heaven of which Paul speaks, with a zealous "ambition" (2 Cor. 5:9).  Heaven holds much intrigue for me, I'll be honest; but so does living in a temporal world embraced by grace, energized by God's power, and filled with the Spirit, who is given to us as a "pledge."

Lets leave the future to the God whom we trust with all our heart.  In the mean time, lets pursue life walking by faith, with a passionate ambition to be pleasing to God.

Life in GOD'S Life

Life within Life.  This is the way of Jesus.  Our lives are lived in His life, covered, if you would, by the amazing grace revealed in Him.  This is good news, according to the Bible.  The apostle Paul reminds us that our life is what he calls an "earthly tent."  It is temporary and mortal.  It won't be forever.  However, "if our earthly tent is torn down, we have a building from God, a house not made with hands, eternal in the heaven" (2 Cor. 5:1).

           

I have been facing "earthly tent" issues recently because of health issues, very conscious that my body is temporary and mortal.  Even if God should give me many more years, a day will still come when this old body will expire.  As many years or days as I have left God helping me, I will live for Him and Him alone.  On that day when the Life in which I have been living my life is revealed, it will not be a sad day for me. 

           

The abiding presence of the Holy Spirit daily reminds me that my life is covered by the God of all grace, the God who emptied himself of all but love and actually died for me on the cross of Calvary.  Whether I am here or there does not matter.  What matters for me as I live in an earthly tent is that I "walk by faith, not by sight"  (2 Cor. 5:7).

           

I have been asking God to remind me everyday  that "momentary, light affliction is producing…an eternal weight of glory far beyond all comparison" (2 Cor. 4:17).  I can live with that; I can live in day-by-day victory with that. 

Life in HIS Life.  That is living.  I'll take this every time.

Very Few Obligations

 The Good News of Jesus sets my imagination to running sometimes; and, I need it to do this because, like too many people, I can tend to take things for granted and forget that I have very few obligations to which I must unequivocally yield loyalty.

For instance, did you know that not one of us is obligated to take with us the situation into which we were born?  We may have been born in the pits, but we do not have to take the pits with us into our tomorrows.  There may be things we can't change but we are under no obligation to let the past dictate our future.  We can if we want to, but we are under no obligation to do so.

We are under no obligation to live in the muck and mire of life, either.  We can if we want to, but we are under no obligation to do so.  Also, we don't have to let sin reign in us or continue to make poor decisions or build personal relationships with people who tear us down.  We can if we want to, but we don't have to.

Maybe the most setting-free verse in the entire Bible is the one where the apostle Paul said, "We have obligation -- but it is not to the flesh, to live according to it" (Rom. 8:12, NIV).   As believers in Jesus we can choose differently.  We can give ourselves to a different values system, say no to the things that destroy the quality and meaning of life, and say YES to the setting-free and life altering amazing grace of God.

The future can be different than the past because the past and the future have been invaded by the God of all grace, the God who loves us with an everlasting love. 

Floodgates of Grace

 When I was a kid my family made a trip back home to Missouri, a part of which was to the Ozarks where my mom was raised.  She and her family took us about as far from reality as my young mind could comprehend, to the home in which they were raised. It was August in Southern Missouri, and it was hot (humid hot), I mean hot hot. 

           

As we walked around the old house that had not been lived in for quite some time, someone remembered an old Artesian well they used for family needs.  They began a search and after some time, found it.  It was covered by a piece of wood about two feet by two feet.  As they lifted up the cover, sure enough the water was bubbling away.  And, like everyone else, on that hot and humid August Missouri afternoon, I placed my face right down into the bubbles and I tell you for a moment on that August afternoon I thought I was in heaven.  It was cool and clear and clean and it rejuvenated my body and made August a doable month in Missouri.

           

And Jesus tells us, "He who believes in Me, as the Scripture said, 'From His innermost being will flow rivers of living water'" (John 7:38).  Greater even than an Artesian well on a hot and humid Missouri afternoon, Jesus opens the flood gates of grace so that the waters of the living God will rejuvenate our lives and quench the thirst that is in us.

           

I wonder how many people are living in hot and humid days in their inner lives, days in which relief seems never to come.  Yet, relief has come.  There is a Savior and to believe in Him is to have let loose in one's life the river of God.  This awesome Savior says, "If anyone is thirsty, let him come to Me and drink" (John 7:37).

           

Go ahead.  Come to Him.  Put your face right down into the fresh, cool, clear, wonderful river of life, a river that flows from the throne of grace, and soak it all in.    

Awesome News

 Can things really be different in this world?  Can people really change?  Can persons really alter their core values?  Is the old Christian teaching about transformation just a lofty and noble sales pitch or is it an actual possibility in a world broken by the harsh realities of sin?

The Bible says something awesome about God, His Word and the ramifications of God and His Word in a persons' life. I John 5:3-5 says, "For this is the love of God, that we keep His commandments; and His commandments are not burdensome. For whatever is born of God overcomes the world; and this is the victory that has overcome the world—our faith.  Who is the one who overcomes the world, but he who believes that Jesus is the Son of God?"

The awesome news is that in Jesus the future can be different than the past.  Priorities and values can change.  Weakness can be embraced in the power of God.  Old things can pass away when Jesus is invited into a person or situation.  There is a way of not being a victim anymore and of overcoming the ways and means of the world.  To "the one who believes that Jesus is the Son of God?" new beginnings and awesome possibilities are a heartbeat a way (I John 5:5). 

Do you feel like you are going down for the third time?  Are you sick and tired of being sick and tired?  Is there a way out of the story that has become your story?  Jesus stands, inviting you into His life.  It's not magic he performs.  It is transforming love embracing you out of the past and into a new and wonderful future.

IF GOD IS LOVE

How is this for a direct statement, "The one who does not love does not know God, for God is love" (I John 4:8)?  Period, exclamation point, end debate.  Well, almost.  John's thinking is rooted in a great, cosmic size reality that says, "In this is love, not that we loved God, but that He loved us and sent His Son to be the propitiation (an atoning sacrifice) for our sins" (I John 4:10).  Then the great conclusion, "Beloved, if God so loved us, we also ought to love one another" (I John 4:11). 

Here is the reasoning.  If God is love and loved us so much that He sent His Son, Jesus the Messiah, into the world to be the atoning sacrifice for our sins, then it is unthinkable that to really know this God one would live in a way contrary to what has been revealed in God's loving actions.  Therefore the conclusion, "The one who does not love does not know God, for God is love" (I John 4:8).

To take it a step further, how do we know we really are of God?  John gives us the answer.  He writes, "Whoever confesses that Jesus is the Son of God, God abides in him, and he in God.  We have come to know and have believed the love which God has for us.  God is love, and the one who abides in love abides in God, and God abides in Him" (I John 4:15-16). 

There is no doubt about it.  Acts that do not reflect the love of God are not of God, no matter how loudly one may protest that he does in fact love God.  To quote another source,

If I speak with the tongues of men and of angels, but do not have love, I have become a noisy gong or a clanging cymbal. If I have the gift of prophecy, and know all mysteries and all knowledge; and if I have all faith, so as to remove mountains, but do not have love, I am nothing. And if I give all my possessions to feed the poor, and if I surrender my body to be burned, but do not have love, it profits me nothing" (I Corinthians 13:1-3).

Practice, Practice, Practice

I heard about a man who was visiting New York City and asked a cab driver, "How do you get to Carnegie Hall?"  The Cabbie responded, "Practice, practice, practice:"  probably not what the tourist wanted to hear but still very good advice. 

           

The Bible calls us who follow Christ to love, "in deed and truth" (I John 3:18).  How do we go about doing this?  Practice, practice, practice.  We take the call seriously, and we give ourselves to do whatever it takes for us to live this way.  It may not come easily, but it is the call.  Shall we take it seriously?  Absolutely!   How could we not when "God so loved the world, that He gave His only begotten Son" (John 3:16)?

           

Here is an important reminder, however.  The call to love does not stand a lone.  It is a part of a two-fold call.  I John 3:23 says, "This is His commandment, that we believe in the name of His Son Jesus Christ, and love one another, just as He commanded us."  Believe in Jesus and then we are able to love with God's kind of love. 

           
Love is defined by what it means to live in response to Jesus Christ, by living in His mind and spirit. It is in getting in step with Him that we are enabled to live in a way that may or may not come naturally to us, but in a way that is of the essence in being truly human and truly alive.   When we get our own inner selves in order we are then in a place where we can begin to "love one another."

           

Jesus said to His disciples one day, "By this all men will know that you are My disciples, if you have love for one another" (John 13:35).  Isn't that interesting?  Its not simply that we believe in Him that enables us to model to the world that Jesus lives in us.  It is that we love one another.  Francis Schaeffer said the mark of Christian is love.  Belief is important but it is love that reveals just how important. 

A Beautiful Discovery

 The resurrection of Jesus takes us many places, one of them being into the inner arena of our personal life, where nobody lives but us, and where nobody knows what goes on except God and each one of us personally.  Rather than scare us to death, this ought to ignite energy and enthusiasm in us.  In Jesus' life we are empowered to confront just who we are and to find that we are not trapped in hopelessness but set free to be what we never dreamed, in the wildest stretches of our imagination, we could be.  

           

Perhaps the greatest awakening in the human heart, made possible because Jesus lives, is that we do not have to give ourselves to the self-destructive ways of sin.  Sin is not our friend; it is a destroyer of everything good in us and in our world.  In Christ we are under no obligation to weigh ourselves down by that which, in the end, seeks our demise and not our benefit. 

           

I John 3:1 says that God's love, which is "great," lifts those who receive His love into the status of being "Children of God."  We human beings don't have to be children of sin.  We don't have to call evil our father, and conclude that what has been must always be.  Jesus can set us free from that sort of nonsensical thinking.  We don't have to practice things that lead us to be less that whom God has created and called us to be.  We are created in the image of God.  His likeness is in us, and when we truly connect with His likeness it is a beautiful discovery. 

           

Jesus has come to destroy the works of the evil one (I John 3:8), works that deny the amazing grace of God.  Now we are on the journey toward a day of great revelation.  Soon, "when He appears, we will be like Him, because we will see Him just as He is" (I John 3:2).  Today we look forward in hope because we know God is at work in Jesus. 

           

Let's put our hands in to Jesus' hands and live up to the grace given us, live like "Children of God" (I John. 3:1).

Ain't gonna study war no more

I have no idea when Christ is going to come back for His Church.  What I do know, however, is that we are living in the last days and have been living in them since the birth of Jesus' Church recorded in Acts chapter two.  What I know, too, based on the words of an Old Testament prophet, is that in these ongoing last days God has been at work in His world through His Messiah. 

There are many religions in the world, many gods, but Micah 4:5 speaks for the people of Yahweh, "Though all the peoples walk each in the name of his god, as for us, we will walk in the name of the LORD our God forever and ever." And, just who is "our God?"  He is the God who brings people to the place of peace.  In His community people "hammer their swords into plowshares and their spears into pruning hooks."  When God is worshiped as the Living God "Nation will not lift up sword against nation, and never again will they train for war" (Micah 4:3). 

When people are calling for war and retaliation and retribution one can count on the fact that in that people Jesus isn't Lord.  They may call Him Lord but their actions don't rise up to their words.  His people continually live before God and they are always saying, "Come, let us go up to the mountain of the Lord, and to the house of the God of Jacob, that He may teach us about His ways and that we may walk in His paths"  (Micah 4:2).

This old world has been beat up on for too long.  She is bleeding and hurting, gasping for breath.  When will we put away our swords and let God be God?  Please, somebody, tell me, when.  Whatever the answer might be, let it start in the Church of Jesus.

HOLY AND AWESOME

When the Psalmist spoke of God he said, ‘Holy and awesome in His name” (Ps. 111:9).  It’s true, isn’t it?  God is holy and He is awesome.  How could we reach any other conclusion.  He is the God of grace and love and mercy, working so as to draw people into Himself.

                       

When the prophet, Isaiah, spoke of God he said, “Trust in the Lord forever, for in God the Lord, we have an everlasting Rock” (Is. 26:4).  What a great word for a world like ours, so needy and hurtful, so angry and bitter, so selfish and self-serving. 

                       

Things don’t have to be the way they are.  Things can change.  People can change.  God can enter into stories and redirect the storyline.  In fact, that is exactly what God did and is doing, in the life of Jesus the Messiah.

                       

The weak and powerless have an advocate, the afflicted and helpless have a voice.  The unassailable city (Is. 26:5), the fortress that keeps the weak, weak, and the powerless, powerless, has met an adversary and that adversary is God.  The powers that afflict, are now afflicted by the standard of their own measure.  God’s “Upright One” (Is. 26:7), is on the move and grace is on the horizon.  The future can be different than the past.  A new way of being is afoot, and those who trust in God will be kept in peace (Is. 26:3).

                       

God is going to take down falsehood and raise up truth.  God is going to bring a reversal of fortune.  The last shall be first, and the first shall be last.  In Jesus Christ, God redefines the meaning of things, and He will “establish peace” (Is. 26:12).  The thing this world most needs is found in God’s Upright One.  In Him the life we all seek is here. In Christ we study war no more and we “learn righteousness” (Is. 26:9).  We come to the place of peace and discover we are home.

Let the Living Begin

Here they go again, those crazy Christians, proclaiming that the one they saw die on a cross on a certain Friday afternoon outside Jerusalem is, in fact, alive.  The rumors were wild and almost silly, to think that a dead man could come back from the grave, and take up where He left off a few days earlier, only take up with greater power and authority than before.

           

Those first Christians were really naïve, or something really had taken place that staggered their world view and changed them.  It is a great challenge to undermine the scope and quality of their witness and to call their integrity or sanity into question. 

           

How do you stop a movement based on a teaching that says her Lord and Leader was crucified, died, and was buried, but on the third day rose up again?  How do you stop a movement so rooted and founded on this truth that persecution and death could not stop them from sharing their story?  I don’t think you can stop that kind of movement, that kind of people.

           

Today, we are privileged to be named among “those crazy Christians.” Once our lives were broken and wounded, and held no hope. Then Jesus revealed Himself to us to be alive, and the revelation so profoundly struck a nerve in our very souls, we made a decision that, come what may, we have decided to follow Jesus and that, for us, there will be no turning back.

           

To some people the whole idea of Jesus is either a stumbling block or simply utter foolishness.  If you know someone like this, don’t be too hard on them.  It is quite a thing we ask of people.  Instead, just pray for them.  Love them.  Show them what a life based on the resurrection looks like.  People are hungry for God, for truth, for some sense of destiny.  We believe Jesus is God’s response to the deepest needs  in the human heart.  He has risen, so we say.  Now, let’s live in light of a resurrected Lord and Savior.  

Welcome Home to God

I'm still thinking about last Sunday.  We call it Palm Sunday.

 

The parade went on as planned but it failed to capture the real meaning of the Christ event.  The folks sang and danced and celebrated and, all in all, had a great time.  At Sundown, they reflected on the great day they had had; He reflected upon the upcoming week where He would be pierced through for our transgressions, crushed for our iniquities, and chastened for our well-being (Is. 53:5).  What a day.

    

Getting the biggest picture possible is always a great idea.  Snapshots can fall short in communicating the whole story of an event. Truth be known, Jesus did not come to town this day to be the grand Marshall at a parade.  He came to town because His destiny went through Jerusalem and on to a hill called, "Calvary."

    

Redemption is not accomplished through a parade.  Redemption is accomplished when one qualified to do so, has placed on Him the iniquity of everybody else and is scourged so that the guilty are healed and the prodigals can return to God. 

           

So it was that the parade became the introit to a crushing process that put Jesus to grief and ultimately death.  It was not pretty.  It was very ugly.  Yet, in the upside down world of God the ugly was very beautiful.  Out of suffering, dying and death came one who bore or griefs, carried our sorrows, and was pierced through for our transgressions. 

"Ho! Every one who thirsts come to the waters;

and you who have no money come, buy and eat.

Come, by wine and milk without money and without cost"

-- Isaiah 55:1