Baptism: Grave, Garden, Stage

Posted on July 30, 2024 by salooper57

We baptized 7 people this past Sunday in a joyous celebration of God’s work in their lives and their determination to be Jesus’s people. Standing next to the pool where we baptized these committed people, I shared the following brief introduction:

This is a grave; you could say that we are attending a burial at sea. Today, we bury the “old persons” that Andi, Amanda, Travis, Aaron, Jennifer, Hannah, and Melissa have been. When they connected to Messiah Jesus by faith, they doomed the old person they were without Christ to death. This is a grave.

This is nursery, a garden, where we “plant” seeds and watch them spring to life before our eyes. “For if we have been united with him like this in his death, we will certainly also be united with him in his resurrection.” Or, as the King James wonderfully puts it, “For if we have been planted together in the likeness of his death, we shall be also in the likeness of his resurrection.” These friends will be planted, watered, and will spring up to glory. So far, as St. Paul says in 1 Corinthians 15, we have only seen the seed. What wonder will it be to see the flower in bloom?

This is a stage, and we are the audience, watching with fascination as we see the life and death and new life of these loved ones played out before our eyes. But it will be lived out in a world that is full of joys and woes, and they will need us, the people of Jesus, to live it together with them. Let’s help each other live the Jesus way.

Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged , , , , | Leave a comment

The Case for Judgment: Why It Is Necessary

Posted on July 27, 2024 by salooper57

The Associated Press once ran a story about Fidel Castro’s visit to Venezuela. The Cuban president used the occasion to sign a big oil contract with Venezuela, then toured the country with President Hugo Chavez, and took in an exhibition baseball game between Cuba and Venezuela.

Chavez, who was then in his mid-forties, actually played in the game that Castro watched. He manned first base and went 0-for-3 at the plate. After the game, President Chavez insisted on pitching to Castro, who was then seventy-four, but had been a good baseball player in his day.

Chavez’ first pitch did not even reach the plate. Castro swung and missed on the second pitch. On the third he tried to bunt, and got called for a strike. Then Chavez threw two more balls, so the two leaders were locked in a full count.

Chavez stared his mentor down, took his windup, and launched his best pitch. It sailed right over the heart of the plate, but Castro’s bat remained on his shoulder. The umpire shouted, “Strike three!” But Castro simply said, “It was a ball,” and took first base. Chavez didn’t say a word. The opposing team stood mum. The ump looked away.

Later Castro joked, “Today just wasn’t Chavez’ day.”

There is reason to worry that some of our leaders are growing more Castro-like all the time, thinking they can do whatever they want, overruling others, and ignoring moral judgments. But while Castro could overrule a Venezuelan umpire, even he could not overrule God. The Scriptures everywhere teach that humans will face an ultimate judgment, and no one will overrule that Judge.

On any list of biblical high points – creation, Fall, the call of Abraham, monarchy, the birth, death, and resurrection of Jesus – the Day of Judgment must be included. The Hebrew and Greek nouns for judgment appear well over five hundred times in the Bible. The verb form appears almost two hundred additional times. Judgment is one of the Bible’s most prominent themes, and it comes with the repetition of the promise (or warning) that a final, conclusive judgment is coming.

There are not just dozens but hundreds of biblical texts on the subject. So, why is it that judgment, which is such a major part of the biblical revelation, is almost entirely ignored by the contemporary church?  Judgment is, in our time, the Church’s forgotten doctrine.

Perhaps we are silent on the subject because we have been taught to think of Judgment as a threatening, negative thing. We know that we have done things that deserve to be condemned, so we fear it. But there is another side to judgment.

In the Bible, the Day of Judgment is sometimes applauded by people. They speak of it with longing: “Let the heavens rejoice, let the earth be glad; let the sea resound, and all that is in it; let the fields be jubilant, and everything in them. Then all the trees of the forest will sing for joy; they will sing before the Lord, for he comes, he comes to judge the earth. He will judge the world in righteousness and the peoples in his truth.”

Here the writer yearns for God to judge the earth. Similarly, the Apostle Paul refers to the day of judgment as a part of the gospel, that is, the good news. But how can judgment be good news?

It is good news because it promises to give every person the thing for which they are best suited. At the judgment, people get what they are made for, or what they have made themselves for. You can be sure that even the man who finds himself in hell will be perfectly suited for it.

Judgment is good news because it is the means by which everything that has gone wrong will be set right. Creation itself, St. Paul says, echoing the psalms, longs for the day. It is good news because judgment spells the end of evil, pettiness, hatred, and bigotry.

Judgment, while it certainly means the diminution of some, means the elevation of humanity. Judgment is history’s watershed moment, its turning point, when humanity finally grows up and becomes what God intended it to be all along.

Posted in Bible, Christianity, Theology | Tagged , , , , | Leave a comment

Baptism: What Is It All About?

Posted on July 25, 2024 by salooper57

Note: We are changing the way we post videos, so I will wait until that is completed before I post the video of this sermon. I will post the manuscript (which always differs a little from what it actually said) below.

Next Sunday after church, we’re all going to Mark and Diana Osborn’s house for lunch. After we eat and hang out for a while, we will baptize more than a half-dozen people. In obedience to Jesus’s instructions, we will take each of these people into the pool and dunk them under the water, and we’ll do it in the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit.

When you think about it, that is a strange thing to do. “You want to begin a new life? That’s fantastic! Let’s stick your head under water.”

In the past, I have often officiated baptisms in very public places – on the beach, at the community pool, or in a lake with speedboats and jet skis zooming by. That was intentional. Even now I encourage people to invite friends and relatives to their baptism, but when people who know nothing about baptism see me “push” someone under water, what must they think?

When we baptized people at the city pool, we were required to hire certified lifeguards. I wonder what they thought as they watched us do this strange thing? I’m a little surprised that none of them jumped in to save the poor woman the crazy guy was holding under water.

(If you’re one of the people getting baptized next week: I don’t really “push” people and I definitely don’t hold them under water. I help them under the water, then lift them back up … after the bubbles stop rising. Not really. Baptism is perfectly safe, though it makes people wonderfully dangerous.)

Why did Jesus tell his disciples to do this to people? When I was a boy, a few of us formed a club – there used to be such things in those days: The Blood-Brothers; the Tribe; the Wild Ones. Club members had a secret sign – a handshake or a code word – to identify them. Was baptism some kind of secret sign among those who had joined the insurgency of love? Whenever they met someone who might be part of the insurgency, did they say enigmatically: “Have you come through the water?”

When I speak or teach or even just talk about baptism, it is not uncommon for someone to say: “But you don’t have to be baptized to be saved.” I’m not sure what these folks mean by “be saved” – probably something like, “go to heaven when you die,”– but I’ll grant them their point gladly. Still, I wonder what they’re worried about.

If they’re worried that I might be teaching that water baptism is a soul-saving add-on to the work of Christ, they can relax. I’m not. But if they are trying to say that baptism is an if-you-feel-like-it-but-it-really-doesn’t-matter kind of thing, I’m worried about them. If they think Jesus’s instructions are only important when they are about getting into heaven, do they just ignore what he said about love, truthfulness, forgiveness, and self-denial?

We baptize because Jesus commanded it. The early church was completely convinced of this. When St. Peter, on the day of Pentecost, was asked what his hearers should do about Jesus, he told them: “Repent and be baptized, every one of you, in the name of Jesus Christ for the forgiveness of your sins” (Acts 2:38). When Philip the evangelist was preaching “the good news of the kingdom of God and the name of Jesus Christ” people were “baptized, both men and women…” (Acts 8:12). When the first Gentiles came to Christ in Acts 10, Peter “commanded that they be baptized in the name of Jesus Christ” (Acts 10:48). When Saul (soon to be Paul) believed in Messiah Jesus, the first thing he did was get baptized. The first convert in Europe, a woman named Lydia, came to faith at a Bible study. We read, “The Lord opened her heart to respond to Paul’s message” and “she and the members of her house were baptized…” (Acts 16:14-15). The early followers of Jesus did not see baptism as an if-you-feel-like-it-but-it-really-doesn’t-matter kind of thing. They knew it was important.

But why was it important? What did it mean? When, after his resurrection, Jesus met his people on the mountain in Galilee, how did they understand what he said to them? This is Matthew 28:18-20: “And Jesus came and said to them, “All authority in heaven and on earth has been given to me. Go therefore and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, teaching them to observe all that I have commanded you. And behold, I am with you always, to the end of the age.’”

We tend to think that Jesus was sending the disciples out on a mission trip, but that is a late Western idea read back into the text. If Jesus was telling the disciples to head down to the docks and book passage on the first cruise ship to the mission field, they either did not understand him or they were downright insubordinate.

Then what is going on here? To understand that, we need to put this passage into context. Remember that Jesus was crucified and on the third day was raised from the dead. Over the next 40 days, he met with his disciples and talked to them about the Kingdom of God (Acts 1:3). God’s kingdom – the establishment of God’s rule on earth – was the subject of a forty-day study program, which is why the disciples asked if Jesus was going to restore the kingdom at that very time (Acts 1:6). So, when Jesus came to them and said, “All authority in heaven and on earth has been given to me,” they understood what he said in a kingdom of God context.

When we read those words, our minds probably don’t go where the apostles’ minds went: Daniel 7. When Jesus announced that all authority in heaven and on earth had been given to him, the words of the prophet Daniel echoed loudly in their minds. Daniel wrote about one “like a son of man” (Jesus’s favorite self-designation) who was led into the presence of the Ancient of Days, where (and this is what the disciples understood Jesus to be talking about): “… to him was given dominion and glory and a kingdom, that all peoples, nations, and languages should serve him; his dominion is an everlasting dominion, which shall not pass away, and his kingdom one that shall not be destroyed.” (Daniel 7:14).

Remember Jesus had been instructing his disciples for the last forty days – for the last three years, really – in the Kingdom of God. We may miss the point when he announces he has been given all authority in heaven and on earth. The disciples did not.

Now, here is some important background. When Jesus was born, Herod the Great was king of Israel. Herod had been appointed governor of Galilee when he was just 25 years old. Later, because he fought valiantly for Caesar in the Roman Wars, the Senate conferred on him the title King of the Jews. In 37 B.C., he went to Rome to be crowned by the Emperor Augustus. His coronation didn’t take place in the land of the Jews but in the seat of power, in Rome.

What happened to Herod was not unique. Other vassal kings had done the same thing. They went to Rome to receive a kingdom, and authority to rule was given them. Here’s what we miss, but the early church understood: Jesus did the same thing. After his resurrection, he went to heaven, the seat of power, and was crowned king. He is the rightful King of the earth, but his coronation took place in heaven. In theological parlance, his return to heaven and his coronation are called “The Ascension.” We use the term in the same way history books do when they say, “King John ascended to the throne in 1203.”

After Herod was crowned king, he returned from Rome to Israel to take up his rule. And Jesus will return from heaven to earth to take up his rule. This is what the biblical writers understood had happened and would happen. They knew two things: (1) it would be some time before Jesus returned (though they didn’t know how long); and (2) he had already been crowned king. That was what St. Peter was talking about on the Day of Pentecost, when he said: “For David [King David] did not ascend into the heavens, but he himself says, ‘The Lord said to my Lord, “Sit at my right hand, until I make your enemies your footstool.” Let all the house of Israel therefore know for certain that God has made him both Lord and Christ, this Jesus whom you crucified.’” (Acts 2:34-36).

In his first letter, Peter wrote that Jesus “has gone into heaven and is at the right hand of God, with angels, authorities, and powers having been subjected to him.” (1 Peter 3:22). St. Paul says that God “seated him [Jesus] at his right hand in the heavenly places, far above all rule and authority and power and dominion, and above every name that is named, not only in this age but also in the one to come. And he put all things under his feet and gave him as head over all things to the church…” (Ephesians 1:20-22a). This is what we miss but the early disciples understood. They regarded Jesus as the reigning king of the world, which is why they were accused of turning “the world upside down” and of “acting against the decrees of Caesar, saying that there is another king, Jesus” (Acts 17:7).

In Matthew 28:18-20, King Jesus is telling his key leaders what to do to prepare for his return and coming rule. The Great Commission (as it is called) launches the Great Campaign, in which the followers of King Jesus work from within the kingdoms of the world to prepare for the return of the king. They do not do so by armed rebellion or political activism, but by recruiting and training members of The Insurgency – that is, citizens of the Kingdom of God. That is what making disciples is all about.

Disciples are recruits, loyal to King Jesus, and living as his agents in the world. But they are not only recruits; they are trainees, apprentices, learners. They are learning how to live for God in the Jesus way. And they start by being baptized.

Jesus doesn’t tell us to give new recruits a secret handshake but a baptism because baptism is full of meaning. In baptism, the person is buried under the water. That means something. He dies. His old life is resolutely left behind. He begins a new life, now as Jesus’s person. Baptism is a decisive, intentional break with the God-less or God-lite life. It marks the transition of our loyalties to King Jesus.

Baptism is a public “Yes” to Jesus. The church has for nearly two millennium referred to baptism as a sacrament. The Latin word sacramentum referred to the oath a Roman soldier took when he joined the military. He swore to be obedient unto death. Our baptism is a sacramentum: We decisively join Jesus, regardless of the cost.

In baptism, a person leaves the old life behind just as Israel left Egypt behind when they crossed the Red Sea. St. Paul says the Israelites were baptized into Moses (1 Cor. 10:2) in the Red Sea. They were joined to him. After the deliverance at the Red Sea, their destiny was all tied up with his. The same is true when we are baptized into Jesus: our destiny is all tied up with his.

Baptism reminds us that we are inseparable from Jesus. This is the heart of baptism. In Romans 6, when Paul speaks of baptism, he says in verse 4 that we were “buried with” (note the word with) “him” (Jesus); in verse 5 we were “united with him” (twice); in verse 6, we were “crucified with him”; in verse 8, we “died with him.”

If that is not impressive enough, listen to this. “I have been crucified with Christ,” Gal. 2:20; “We died with him,” 2 Tim. 2:11; were “buried with him,” in Colossians 2:12; “made alive with him,” in both Colossians 2:13 and Ephesians 2:5; and “raised with him,” Ephesians 2:6. My baptism speaks of the union of my life with Jesus’s life and, if you are also united to Jesus, my baptism speaks of the union of my life with yours.

Prior to John the Baptist and Jesus, the kind of baptism with which we are familiar was only performed on Gentile converts to Judaism. A Gentile man would take off all his clothes, go under the baptismal waters and come out naked as he was on the day he was born. It was said that he had been reborn as a Jew. Our baptism means that we have been reborn into Jesus’s family. We are his people now. We have a new identity.

In the Catholic Church, a child is given his Christian name at baptism because baptism is about identity. So, St. Paul could say, “Therefore, if anyone is in Christ, he is a new creation. The old has passed away; behold, the new has come.” (2 Cor. 5:17).

Jesus instructed his followers to baptize in the name of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. This is much more than saying a formula over people when you dunk them. The Greek word βαπτίζω means “to immerse.” It was used, for example, of a sunken ship; it was immersed.

We don’t just dunk people in water. “Baptizing them in [or into] the name of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit” means immersing them in the life and character of God – which is to say, in the reality of who and what God is. This is the church’s principal job. Jesus wanted his apostles to teach people how to live their lives in God’s presence, just as he had taught them. A baptized person comes out of the water, but he or she never comes out of the God-bathed life.[1] They live a baptized life.

Jesus wanted his leaders to bring people (their work, their play, their family, their relationships, their leisure, their trouble – everything) into the environment of God’s life and presence. A fish spends its life surrounded by water. The baptized person spends life surrounded by God. There is nothing in a Jesus follower’s life of which he or she can say, “This doesn’t have anything to do with God.” Everything has to do with God.

This is very different from religion, as popularly conceived. Disciples – recruits, apprentices, whatever you want to call them – are learning to live in (and count on) God’s presence at work, at home, with others, when alone, in sickness, in health, and all the time. Unless they learn this, unless they are baptized into the name, immersed in the reality of God’s life, discipleship to Jesus will simply not succeed.

Churches often try to make disciples by teaching them (this is verse 20) everything Jesus taught. There are two problems with that: One, that’s not what Jesus said. He told his leaders to teach the recruits to keep (in some versions, observe or obey) everything he taught. Just reading the Bible, even learning the Bible, even memorizing the Bible, misses the point if people aren’t keeping King Jesus’s instructions.

The second problem, which is even more foundational, is that obeying Jesus’s commands is only possible when we are living as Jesus lived: immersed in the reality of the present and powerful God. Baptism in water expresses our desire to live that way—the Jesus way. It is our response to God’s invitation to live our lives immersed in his presence.

Maybe you were baptized long ago and you’re thinking: “Nobody told me any of this stuff.” Well, you’ve been told now. Start living this way today: an agent of the Insurgency of Love. Ask for God’s support; he’ll give it.

If you were baptized as a believer in Jesus – you weren’t just an unbeliever getting wet – you don’t need to be baptized again. You need to re-up. Tell Jesus: “From now on … from now on, I will be your person. I want to learn how to live from you. I want to learn to live with you, as an agent of your kingdom, an operative in the insurgency. I want to learn how to live in the presence of God and not go out.

If you have not been baptized, are you ready to join up? Are you ready to confess Jesus as your Lord the king? Are you ready to join him and his people?

Whether you are a member of the insurgency or not, know this: The revolution has begun. No one could have foreseen where it would start—on a cross. It was there that King Jesus disarmed the rulers and authorities and triumphed over them (Colossians 2:15). And who can envision where it will end? In joy unspeakable that is full of glory. In a new heaven and new earth, where righteousness dwells. In a perfected and mature humanity, enfolded in the presence of the most joyful Being in the universe, the Blessed God, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. This is the destiny of those who belong to Jesus.

[1] Dallas Willard’s term. See Divine Conspiracy, chapter 3.

Posted in Bible, Church, Encouragement, Faith, Mission, Sermons, Theology | Tagged , , , , , , , , , | Leave a comment

Find Your Part in the Never-Ending Story

Posted on July 20, 2024 by salooper57

We live in a never-ending story of God’s love, power, and goodness, as it plays out in real time in the universe. There we are, on page 9,653,745,853. God has written us into the story.

It is an interactive story and we, in our small way, are contributors to it. We get to write our own lines, at least some of them, and construct our own scenes, at least some of them. God trusts us to share in the making of his story. Or – and this might be more to the point – he trusts himself to make the story come out right even though he allows us a hand in writing it. But we mustn’t forget that it is still his story.

And it is so easy to forget, to think that the story is ours and that we can write it however we choose, even in total disregard of the Author. But the Author will not easily allow us to forget him. He will write chapters into the story that bring us face to face with him – comedies, if possible; tragedies, if not.

The final scene, the death scene, is designed so that we have to face God, whether we want to or not. For those who refuse to be a part of his story, death is a tragedy. For those who choose to be part of his story, death becomes a comedy, a divine comedy in which everything works out in the end. And the end turns out to be just the beginning.

Some people, however, refuse to be part of God’s story, though they may still want him to play a part in theirs, usually as a deus ex machina. Their stories follow a simple plotline: achieve fulfillment, gain respect, and live happily; or do your best, be misunderstood, and suffer as a tragic hero. But whichever plotline a person’s life follows, the story will come to a dead end. Only if a person is written into God’s story will their story continue on, happily ever after.

Some intellectuals insist that life’s story is meaningless and absurd. “It is a tale,” they might say, in the words of Macbeth, “told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.” And the truth is, they are absolutely right. Life is meaningless and absurd for everyone who refuses to become part of God’s story. If I refuse to co-author my story with God, then mine really is a “tale told by an idiot.”

When all is said and done, there will only be one story: the glorious, all-encompassing story God is telling. If we refuse to be a part of it, we will lose our place in the storyline. We will be cut out, excised. We won’t make the draft; we will be missing from the final edition.

Will everything in a person’s life fit into God’s story? No. There are always some things that don’t fit, things that must be cut out of a person’s life, the way an editor cuts lines and paragraphs out of a story. That kind of editing is what the Bible calls repentance, and we find that even after we have been written into God’s story, there are plenty of unwise plot elements and flawed character traits that need to be edited out.

Sometimes my editors (my wife or my sons) tell me that some paragraph I’ve written doesn’t fit well in an article. It is invariably a paragraph I like, one with some really good stuff in it. But they are usually right and, with some reluctance, I edit them out.

Something like that happens in our lives. There are things that don’t align with God’s story and never will. So, he gets out his red pen and puts an X through them, and then we have to edit them out of the story. That can be painful, but the story is always better for it.

This story that God is writing is an adventure. It is a love story. It is a mystery. Our part in that story is rarely one of comfort and ease. But it is important. It has meaning. When God writes our story, it is always a masterpiece.

Posted in Christianity, Faith, Spiritual life, Theology | Tagged , , , , | 2 Comments

The Rest of the Story (of Unanswered Prayer)

Posted on July 16, 2024 by salooper57

Watch at: https://www.christianworldmedia.com/watch?v=2aJfs45h41-R (sermon starts at 22:07)

Read below:

This is week seven of a series on prayer, and I beg your indulgence to remind you of some of the things we have already seen. You can think of this as the “Previously on…” scenes at the beginning of your favorite TV show.

We have seen that the kind of life you live will determine the kinds of answers to prayer you receive (and, frankly, the kinds of prayers you offer). The proud who look down on others will not receive many answers; the humble will.

We saw that God wants to answer our prayers but frequently these prayers need to evolve and be shaped to his will. So, the first time we pray, our pray may be in the general direction of God’s answer and yet require significant course modification. I once read that the Apollo missions’ spacecraft were off-course over 90 percent of the time. They only reached their destination by repeatedly altering their direction as they received guidance from mission control. So, with our prayers. They will not be aimed right unless we let God guide our praying. We learned we must pray with the help of the Holy Spirit.

We also learned that the condition of our heart – the central part of us, the control center of the human being – will impact the effectiveness of our prayers. If “our hearts know something against us,” (this was 1 John 3:19-21) it will be hard for us to pray in faith and receive answers. But if “our hearts do not know something against us,” we will see many and sometimes remarkable answers to prayer.

Once, several years ago, after I preached on that 1 John 3 passage, I received an email from a friend. He said that my sermon led him to question his own heart, for God had not answered his most urgent request. After church, he and his teenage son were talking about the sermon, and his son asked if their request – that his mother would be healed of cancer – was rejected because they had done something wrong.

I was stung by the question. My sermon aroused terrible doubts in these friends who had just lost wife and mother. Perhaps it produced false guilt in others. I don’t want that to happen to any of us. What I shared about the condition of the heart and its impact on answered prayer is profoundly important. I believe that all of us sometimes, and some of us at all times, fail to see prayers answered because our hearts know something against us. But that is not the whole story. Not by a long shot.

Our failures, sin, and corruption may be the reason for unanswered prayers, but there is more to it than that. Unanswered prayers may stem from our wrongness, but they also may stem from God’s rightness. Even the greatest saints (as we will see) have their requests turned down. Unanswered requests and requests that receive a no answer are not always – and may not even usually – be the consequence of our sin.

Dave Roever was a gunner on a river patrol boat in Vietnam in 1969 when a phosphorous grenade exploded. He was literally on fire when he jumped into the river, but phosphorous burns in water. When medics found him, they thought he was dead and put him in a body bag. When, at the MASH unit, the body bag was unzipped and they found him alive, they rushed him to surgery. But every time the surgeon’s incision exposed embedded phosphorous to the air, it would ignite, and Roever would catch on fire all over again.

Despite his suffering and disfigurement (even after more than 50 reconstructive surgeries), Dave became a spokesman for Jesus. His story has helped thousands of people. Yet once, when he got up to speak at a prosperity gospel church, a group of congregants rose simultaneously and marched out. Their spokesmen went last, and when he reached the door, he turned and said to Roever in a loud voice: “When you get the sin out of your life, God will heal you.”

Had Dave’s disfigured body gone unhealed because his heart knew something against him? I don’t think so. There are other reasons that God does not answer our prayers. That was true even in St. Paul’s life. He, the author of more than a quarter of our New Testament, the Apostle to the Gentiles, hero of the faith, and martyr for Jesus, also had his request denied. Let’s read what he wrote about that in 2 Corinthians 12:6-10.

 …if I should wish to boast, I would not be a fool, for I would be speaking the truth; but I refrain from it, so that no one may think more of me than he sees in me or hears from me. 7 So to keep me from becoming conceited because of the surpassing greatness of the revelations, a thorn was given me in the flesh, a messenger of Satan to harass me, to keep me from becoming conceited. 8 Three times I pleaded with the Lord about this, that it should leave me. 9 But he said to me, “My grace is sufficient for you, for my power is made perfect in weakness.” Therefore I will boast all the more gladly of my weaknesses, so that the power of Christ may rest upon me. 10 For the sake of Christ, then, I am content with weaknesses, insults, hardships, persecutions, and calamities. For when I am weak, then I am strong.

Look again at verses 7 and 8. “…a thorn was given me in the flesh, a messenger of Satan to harass me … Three times I pleaded with the Lord about this, that it should leave me.” This is Paul the Apostle, the Ambassador for Christ, the writer of Holy Scripture. He had been a Jesus-follower for many years. But he suffered greatly from a chronic problem, which he calls a thorn in the flesh, Satan’s messenger (or angel).

No one knows what this “thorn in the flesh” was, but that has not stopped Bible readers from speculating about it. Many older scholars believed it was a physical disability. Taking their cue from one line in Galatians, some thought Paul suffered from an eye disease that caused him pain or vision loss. Others believed he had some chronic illness like migraine headaches, or epilepsy, or malaria. Many contemporary scholars argue that Paul’s thorn in the flesh was a metaphor for difficult people, because the Old Testament uses the idiom in a similar way. They think Paul’s thorn in the flesh was not a physical illness but a person or group of people who continually nettled him – and Paul certainly had such people!

We cannot be sure about the nature of Paul’s thorn, and we don’t need to be. That is not the important thing. The important thing is that Paul ached to be rid of it. It harassed him or, as the Greek has it, “it battered me.”)

You and I know the feeling. “I can’t take it anymore. I just want it to be over.” Enough is enough.

That is how Paul felt, and he did just what you and I do when we feel that way: he prayed. Surely God would not say no to his loyal apostle. He would not say no to a man who was full of faith and cleansed of sin.

Paul says, “Three times I pleaded with the Lord about this, that it should leave me.” He pleaded … but God refused his request.

It’s one thing when God denies my request, but to deny the great Apostle Paul’s was another. We want to say, “God, it doesn’t make sense. What possible reason could you have for saying no?”

Let me ask you a question and let me preface it this way. Think of the thing in your life for which you have prayed most earnestly but have not received the answer you wanted. Imagine that God spoke to you in a vision and said to you, “I want you to know why I denied your request. I did it because I was looking out for you and for many other people. I have something better in mind.” Would that satisfy you? Would you feel better after the vision?

If you did, it would mean that your heart and God’s heart were aligned; it was your mind that was agitated because of a lack of knowledge – and we humans always lack knowledge. But if, after the vision, you continued to be upset or bitter, it would be a sign that your heart was and remains out of alignment with God’s heart. The mind can never be at rest when the heart, which it serves, is in upheaval.

Here is the thesis of this message: When God says no, he does so because of love. When he says no, it is because saying yes would be unhelpful in the long run to you and to others. When he says no, it is to preclude some evil that would happen or to promote some good that would not happen were he to say yes.

The evil that must be precluded and the good that must be promoted may not be apparent to you now. They may not even be apparent in your lifetime. That good or evil might be four generations away, or fourteen. We cannot see it, think it, or even imagine it – our minds are too limited; we are still babes in the infancy of humanity. There is so much we don’t know.

But God knows. He stands outside of time is already present with those great, great grandchildren, four generations removed from us. He exists in their time as truly as in ours. He is as concerned with their needs and prayers as he is with ours. He doesn’t guess; he knows. He knows – he sees – the consequences of some action it never entered our minds to consider.

Paul’s situation helps us get a grasp on this. Let me give you some background. In a rhetorical flourish, Paul lets the proverbial cat out of the bag and informs the Corinthians that he has had visions, remarkable revelations from God. He has been – whether in body or not he could not tell – in the third heaven, the very throne room of God.

Paul doesn’t speak of a revelation, but of revelations; he uses the plural. This is not something that happened once. It has happened repeatedly.

Along with the rapture of these revelations came the misery of what Paul calls “a thorn in the flesh, a messenger of Satan.” Whether it was a physical disability or an unrelenting adversary, it was painful and perpetual, and Paul wanted relief. He could see how much better things would be if the thorn was pulled. So, he prayed for that and, as we’ve already seen, God said no.

But notice the reason God said no, which Paul seems to have gathered in hindsight (verse 8): “So to keep me from becoming conceited because of the surpassing greatness of the revelations, a thorn was given me in the flesh, a messenger of Satan to harass me, to keep me from becoming conceited.”

The etymology of the word translated “conceited” is “to lift or raise above.” Paul, the great apostle, theologian, and martyr was in danger of getting above himself. He was in danger of looking down on others. Or, as the ESV put it, of “becoming conceited.” Let that sink in for a minute.

Do you know how ruinous for the Church of Jesus and for the world a conceited Apostle Paul would have been? It would have been disastrous! Christianity would be unrecognizable. Our Bible would be entirely different. A conceited Paul would have posed far greater danger to the church than an unconverted, rampaging Paul.

Had you asked Paul if he thought he was in such danger, I don’t know that he would have said yes. He probably did not see the danger or its consequences, but God did. We can be thankful that God didn’t spare Paul the terrible thorn. If he had, who knows if we would even be Christians? And the danger to Paul himself, the personal loss and the spiritual devastation caused by pride, would have been a heavier burden by far than the thorn he carried.

Before my 14-year-old brother died of cancer, lots of people were praying for his healing. My parents would have given their lives for it, and they certainly gave their prayers. But God did not heal my brother. Perhaps he saw some consequence, invisible to our eyes, that would have brought evil into the world – maybe not then, fifty years ago, but a hundred years from now and for a thousand years to come! All we could see was our own pain and loss; it is a rare human being who sees beyond that. But God does.

God addresses this directly in Isaiah 57:1. Speaking of the deaths – seemingly tragic and premature – of good people, God says: “The righteous perish, and no one ponders it in his heart; devout men are taken away, and no one understands that the righteous are taken away to be spared from evil.”

Sometimes, when God does not answer our prayer the way we want, it is to spare us and the world from evil. By not taking Paul’s thorn away, God prevented an evil – a conceited apostle – that would have been ruinous for him and a plague on God’s church. If God says no, it may be to preclude or prevent some evil that would have happened had he said yes.

But there’s more to it than that. His answers not only preclude evil; they also promote good. This was certainly the case in Paul’s life. Look at verse 9: “But he said to me, “My grace is sufficient for you, for my power is made perfect in weakness.’ Therefore I will boast all the more gladly about my weaknesses, so that Christ’s power may rest on me.”

Paul’s thorn in the flesh, whatever it was, became the means through which he experienced God’s grace as power in his life. I believe if you had asked him, “Paul, if you could change the past so that you never experienced that thorn, would you?” he would say, “No. I experienced the riches of God’s grace in my life because of that thorn. I have been strengthened with power because of that thorn. I hated that thorn, but it has bloomed into a rose.”

My older brother, my hero, my closest friend, died, despite our prayers. I will never say his death was a good thing; it was not. But his cancer was instrumental in bringing me to faith in Jesus Christ. It was not a good thing, but the good God made good come out of it. Had God said yes to our prayers, I do not know what would have happened. I do know what did happen – or a little of what happened – because he said no.

So even St. Paul had requests turned down. But go further. Even Jesus, the perfect son of God, never once out of alignment with God’s will, who “offered up prayers and supplications with loud cries and tears to him who was able to save him from death” (Hebrews 5:7), received a no answer.

Think of that. There was never a more just and reasonable request, nor a person so deserving. What was about to happen to him was unjust, heinous, and evil. Yet, had God said yes to his request, we would know nothing of the cross, of the sacrifice, of the atonement Christ made for us. Had I been God, I would have said yes … to the detriment of the world. But I am not God. I don’t know what he knows.

It has been estimated that all the knowledge (and nonsense) on the internet adds up to just over 1 million exabytes (a billion billion bytes) of data. If all of that – the vastness of human knowledge – was downloaded onto two terabyte hard drives, they could be stored in a space the size of our local Walmart. Human knowledge, impressive as it is, is limited. What we don’t know far exceeds what we do.

We cannot understand God and his works, but we can trust him. Yet how can we trust him when the things we desperately pray won’t happen do happen – people we love leave, or they die? How can we trust him when the things we desperately pray will happen – it seems like all our happiness depends on it – don’t happen? How can we trust him?

We can trust him not because we understand him – never that – but because Christ died for our sins. Everything in the Christian life depends on this. “But God demonstrates his own love for us in this: While we were still sinners, Christ died for us” (Romans 5:8). Our challenge as we stumble along with our unanswered prayers and troubling questions is to trust him.

That trust is a choice, and I am asking you to make it. But there is more to it than that. That trust grows when we start praying within the story God is telling. Then our prayers actually become the pens that God will use to write his story. More about that when we come back to our prayer series in two weeks.

Posted in Bible, Faith, Prayer, Sermons, Theology | Tagged , , , , , , , | Leave a comment

How to Be Content in Your Marriage

Posted on July 13, 2024 by salooper57

One out of five Americans in a romantic relationship admits to cheating on a partner. Over half of cheating men claim to be happy in their marriage. Only a third of cheating women do. Happy or not, marriages rarely survive the discovery of infidelity. 85 percent of marriages end when a spouse learns their partner has cheated.

Sexual infidelity is not the only problem. Nearly half of American couples argue about money, according to Fidelity’s “2024 Couples and Money” study, and one out of four couples identify money as their greatest relationship challenge. When couples love money more than each other, their relationship cannot flourish.

Sex and money represent two of the biggest challenges to marriage in America. But America is not alone in this. Sexual and financial infidelity have devastated marriages around the world across the ages. The author of the Book of Hebrews, writing in the first century, understood this and warned against both in the context of talking about marriage.

“Marriage should be honored by all,” the author wrote, although “honored” is a secondary meaning of the word he used. It’s primary meaning is “valued.” It has the sense of putting a price on a thing. If someone organized a sale and put prices on each item, this is the Greek word that would describe what they were doing. A high price would value (or “honor”) an item more than a lower price.

To honor marriage, it is essential to set a high price on it. One must invest thought, time, and money into it. When a couple does this, other people – friends, family, co-workers, even bosses – are likely to honor their marriage too. But if they don’t honor their marriage, other people won’t honor it either. They may even expect them to dishonor their marriage, and that leads to the what follows: “…and the marriage bed kept pure for God will judge the adulterer and all the sexually immoral.” Affairs don’t start with a flirtation but with a failure to highly value one’s marriage.

But affairs are not the only evil that results from a failure to honor marriage. The author goes on to say, “Keep your lives free from the love of money and be content with what you have.” “Keep your lives free from the love of money,” translated literally, is “not a money-loving way of life.”

All of us have a way of life. A friend of mine was turned down for a position with the CIA because he was about to turn 34, and (at the time) that was their cut-off for hiring. They assumed that a 34-year-old had already been formed and his way of life set.

A successful marriage requires a person to be more supple than that. They must be able to make changes, regardless of their age, changes that reflect the high value they set on their marriage. The author of Hebrews understood that people who do not value their marriage leave room for a wedge – whether sexual immorality or money or something else – to be driven between them.

Though Hebrews was written for first century folk, the warnings against sexual immorality and a money-loving way of life speak to our day, when many people choose money over their spouse. They arrange their calendars, their work life, their family responsibilities, and their involvement in a church community so that they can keep company with money. They value money more highly than spouse and family.

The author of Hebrews spurns such a life and urges people to be content with what they have. The word translated “content” means more than “satisfied.” It carries the idea of self-sufficiency. Contented people believe that God has given them all that they need to be all they can be.

The phrase, be content with what you have, is literally, “in the present.” Many couples encounter marriage-ending obstacles because they cannot stop living in the past (which they cannot change) or in the future (which they cannot know). People who are trapped in the past or tyrannized by the future can never be content.

Faith makes contentment possible, faith in the God who said, “I will never leave you nor forsake you” (Hebrews 13:5).

Posted in Christianity, Family, Marriage and Family, Spiritual life | Tagged , , , , , | Leave a comment

Beyond Words: What Your Life Is Saying to God

Posted on July 6, 2024 by salooper57

In devotional literature, one sometimes reads of “a life of prayer.” That does not go far enough. Life is a prayer, or perhaps a curse. Whichever it is, God hears what a person’s whole life is saying.

Most of us do not, and those who do frequently try to spin their life’s message to make it sound right and reasonable. But God has no problem understanding what a person’s life is saying. He hears our real voice.

What does God hear people say in their real voice? Some say, “Leave me alone.” Others, parroting Eden’s serpent, say, “I would be like God.” Still others repeat idiotically, over and over, “It’s not fair. It’s not fair. It’s not fair.” On the day of judgment, the real message of our lives will be dug out of us, and it will be clear, beyond any shadow of a doubt, the prayer our lives have been repeating all along.

That prayer might contradict the prayers our mouths speak. Take the Lord’s prayer as an example. Though we may say, “Hallowed be thy name,” our lives might demand, “Honored be my name.” We might pray “Forgive us our debts as we forgive our debtors,” when our life is saying, “I want him to pay.” We might intone, “Lead us not into temptation,” even while our life chants, “Get me as close to temptation as possible.”

This idea that our life can speak a different message than the one our words convey is present throughout the Bible. Though we will be judged by our words, as Jesus stated, he made it clear that judgment will not be based on our carefully crafted words but on our careless ones. They are the ones that reveal the true message of our lives.

This is not hypocrisy, at least not as usually understood. It is not about deceiving but about being deceived. When I play golf, I really think (I’ve concluded this is a form of insanity) that I am as good as my best shots. I’m the golfer who hits the ball 250 yards down the middle of the fairway. But that’s not the real (or, to be more precise, the complete) me, as anyone who’s ever played golf with me knows. For every shot that lands 250 yards down the fairway there are two in the woods, a half-dozen in the rough and one in someone’s front yard.

In the same way that I overestimate my golf ability, I overestimate my holiness. I quickly forget my failures, evil thoughts, and unkind words, and assume that I am as good as my best prayers and most pious feelings. Now God does take note of our prayers and pious feelings, but he sees them for what they are: a part of the whole. They are a few lines in an enormous manifesto.

How can our lived prayer be aligned with our spoken prayers? When we trust God in spite of the trials and temptations that have left us bruised and weary, when we fight to believe God, holding on by our fingertips to faith, that’s when we become something we could never otherwise be: ourselves. That’s when the voices of our lived prayer and our spoken prayers converge and become one.

St. James addresses these issues in a warning to the “double-minded.” We think of the double-minded person as someone who can’t make up his mind, but that is not exactly what James meant. He was thinking of a person whose life says one thing while his words say another. His mouth says, “Thy will be done,” but his life says, “My will be done.”

A life that communicates a different message than one’s words is a problem for everyone – for the pastor and the parishioner, the sinner and the saint. It is our life work, in a sense, to bring our lived prayer and our spoken prayers into alignment. As the two converge, we will begin to see many more answers to prayer. More importantly, our life will become the answer to a prayer we might not have even known we were praying.

Posted in Bible, Christianity, Prayer, Spiritual life, Theology | Tagged , , , , , | Leave a comment

What God Put in My Heart: A Sermon from Nehemiah 2

Posted on July 3, 2024 by salooper57

You can watch this sermon at https://www.christianworldmedia.com/watch?v=wr4nhf4VsDU9. The sermon begins at approximately 20:57 and lasts about 27 minutes. If you would prefer to read a manuscript (not a transcript) of the sermon, you can read it below.

**********************************************************************************

We have spent the last month-and-a-half in a series on prayer. Prayer is such a big subject that we could spend years on it, but we haven’t been trying to treat it comprehensively. I have instead been trying to look at prayer from angles of approach that are not usually taken. I have a strong sense that we don’t fail at prayer because we lack proper techniques. Technique is important in communication, and prayer is a form of communication, so I don’t want to minimize it. But communication is more than technique, and it’s the “more than” that we’ve been focusing on.

Last week, we looked at how strands of prayer can be woven through daily life. Our teacher was the biblical hero Nehemiah. We left him in a crucial conversation with King Artaxerxes. Well, actually he was carrying on two crucial conversations simultaneously: one with the great Artaxerxes and the other with the greater king of heaven. Chapter 2, verse 4, says: “Then the king said to me, “What are you requesting?” So I prayed to the God of heaven. 5And I said to the king…” We saw how valuable it is to be able to talk to God and to someone else at the same time. To talk and listen to God while we are talking and listening to others can transform both our relationships and our prayer lives.

We also saw that the “spontaneous” prayer of verse 4 was launched from a platform of prayer that Nehemiah had built over the previous five months. Both kinds of prayer – intentional and emotional, planned and spontaneous – must be kept in balance for a prayer life to be effective. People who try to live on spontaneous, as-the-mood-hits-me (or as-the-crisis-erupts) kinds of prayer are not good pray-ers. That kind of praying – what people used to call “arrow prayers,” the kind you shoot toward heaven in a time of crisis – lacks powers when it is unconnected to a daily, disciplined prayer practice.

Trying to shoot a prayer to heaven without the strength generated by a discipline prayer practice is like trying to shoot an arrow from a bow that is only strung from the upper limb. That arrow is going to fall to the ground. And so do many spontaneous prayers because they have no connection to an ongoing prayer life.

One more reminder of what we learned last time from Nehemiah, and then we’ll move on. If you aren’t willing for God to interrupt your life, you might want to think twice about praying, because when we call on God with a request, he often returns the call with a command. When Nehemiah prayed, he ended up taking a leave of absence from his job and moving out of the country. Prayer is not a practice for people who are committed to the status quo. If you don’t want your routine interrupted, you might not want to pray.

Successful pray-ers have the kind of attitude the prophet Isaiah had. He said to God, ‘Here I am, send me!” But if we say to God, “Here I stay. Send someone else,” we’re not going to see many answers to prayer.

So, let’s pick up Nehemiah’s story in chapter 2, verse 4: “(Nehemiah 2:4-12b) Then the king said to me, “What are you requesting?” So I prayed to the God of heaven. And I said to the king, “If it pleases the king, and if your servant has found favor in your sight, that you send me to Judah, to the city of my fathers’ graves, that I may rebuild it.” And the king said to me (the queen sitting beside him), “How long will you be gone, and when will you return?” So it pleased the king to send me when I had given him a time. And I said to the king, “If it pleases the king, let letters be given me to the governors of the province Beyond the River, that they may let me pass through until I come to Judah, and a letter to Asaph, the keeper of the king’s forest, that he may give me timber to make beams for the gates of the fortress of the temple, and for the wall of the city, and for the house that I shall occupy.” And the king granted me what I asked, for the good hand of my God was upon me. Then I came to the governors of the province Beyond the River and gave them the king’s letters. Now the king had sent with me officers of the army and horsemen. But when Sanballat the Horonite and Tobiah the Ammonite servant heard this, it displeased them greatly that someone had come to seek the welfare of the people of Israel. So I went to Jerusalem and was there three days. Then I arose in the night, I and a few men with me. And I told no one what my God had put into my heart to do for Jerusalem. There was no animal with me but the one on which I rode.”

So, five months after Nehemiah had begun asking God to intervene for Jerusalem, he found himself asking the king to do the same. If you’re like me, you are more comfortable asking God for something you need or want than you are asking someone else. We know God will understand and want to help, but we are not so sure about our boss, spouse, friend, neighbor, or fellow-church member.

But when you ask God for something, he may tell you to ask someone else. That was the case for Nehemiah. And make no mistake: It can take faith to ask people, especially people in authority, for help. But when asking comes out of praying, good things happen.

Did you notice that Nehemiah didn’t ask the king for just one thing, but for many Send me to rebuild Jerusalem (verse 5). Write letters for me to the governors of Trans-Euphrates (verse 6). Order the king’s forester to provide timber (verse 7).

Do you know what that means? Nehemiah had not only been praying for Jerusalem; he’d been thinking about Jerusalem. He thought about what needed to be done. Prayer is a phenomenally important part of the Christian life, but it is not a substitute for thought. We want to pray and then forget about it, as if we’d done our duty; that’s a mistake. We need to pay attention to the thoughts that come to our minds during and after our prayers. Write those thoughts down. Think them through. Have a two-way conversation with God; give him the chance to speak to you.

Very many times, while in the act of praying, unexpected ideas have come to my mind. I don’t immediately assume that those thoughts are from God, but I do think about them. I remember them. Sometimes, I write them down so I won’t forget. I may talk with other people about them. I believe that God does communicate to us in this way.                                                                                   

We see something here that could have hindered that two-way conversation with God, the same kind of thing that can prevent us from hearing him or recognizing the answer he wants to give. Call it the “We’ve-never-done-it-that-way-before” syndrome.

You see, when an earlier group of exiles returned to Jerusalem to rebuild the temple (you can read all about that in Ezra), the leaders decided to make the long journey without any military presence. They thought that asking for protection demonstrated a lack of faith. So, they went without military escort. But later, when Nehemiah went to Jerusalem, he welcomed a detachment of cavalry. Sometimes we get the idea that the only way to do something is the way it was done before. We get it in our heads that God will only do it the way we’ve always done it. But don’t tie God’s hands. He is amazingly creative. Too often, we can’t see what he’s doing and can’t hear what he’s telling us because our own expectations are blocking our view or drowning out God’s “still, small voice.”

When Nehemiah reached Jerusalem after what would have been a two-month journey, he did not call a meeting or arrange a press conference. Verse 11 says that he settled in and stayed for three days. That is reminiscent of something the prophet Isaiah wrote: “Whoever believes will not be in haste” (Isaiah 28:16). When we know that God is working in the details, we can take time to look and think and pray. But when we think it is all up to us, we panic and rush in. That’s the “We have to do something now” syndrome. I know about this from personal experience. But Nehemiah, who had been in an ongoing conversation with God, took his time. He didn’t panic.

But he could have. When God answers (or is about to answer) our prayer, it is not unusual for opposition to flare up. You can see this clearly in what happened to the Israelites in Egypt. The time finally came for God to fulfill his promise to Abraham. People were praying. God heard them. So, what happened next? Their troubles got worse! They were on the edge of experiencing God’s answer when opposition flared, and they wanted to give up. Spurgeon said something like, “The devil roars loudest right before we experience a victory.” If we give up then, we give up too soon.

Don’t be surprised if things get worse after you have prayed! Nehemiah prayed, and (verse 10) “…When Sanballat the Horonite and Tobiah the Ammonite official heard about this, they were very much disturbed that someone had come to promote the welfare of the Israelites.” They were disturbed and they did everything in their considerable power to oppose Nehemiah and prevent his prayer from being answered. The rest of the book chronicles that opposition.

And that leads us to something else we need to know about prayer. If you only pray in order to get out of uncomfortable or painful situations, it won’t be long before you give up on prayer altogether. Prayer is not a way to get around conflict. Prayer is a way to join God in his work, and his work is accomplished in a broken, conflicted, and often hostile world.

After three days passed, Nehemiah had a look around. Neither during those three days nor during his inspection did Nehemiah try to sell anyone on his plan to rebuild the walls. He didn’t even mention it. Verse 12 says, “I had not told anyone what my God had put in my heart to do for Jerusalem.” That may have been because Nehemiah did not trust the people in Jerusalem. As we learn later, some of the nobles had aligned themselves with the opposition. Had Nehemiah told them what he was thinking, they would have done whatever they could to hinder him.

But I think there is more to it than that. Nehemiah had learned to talk to God first, and only then to talk to others. He’d learned to spend more time talking to God than to people. Nehemiah let God speak to people’s hearts before he tried speaking to their minds. Just because you believe God wants to do something doesn’t mean that other people will believe it. You need to give them time and allow God to convince them.

I’ve seen pastors make this mistake. They come to a new church, diagnose all its ailments, and then set about changing everything. But even if their diagnosis is spot on and their course of action is well chosen, they make a huge mistake because they are going about things in the wrong order. They are speaking to people first when they should first speak to God. And they compound that mistake by trying to push their ideas rather than asking God to show people the things they’ve seen. It takes faith to talk to God first. It takes faith to wait.

Did you notice the phrase in verse 12, “… what God had put in my heart”? That’s interesting: God puts things in people’s hearts. All that time Nehemiah was praying – those four or five months we talked about last week – he was not just talking to God, God was talking to him. God was putting something into his heart. If we are going to be effective at prayer, we need to learn to recognize when God has placed something in our hearts. That something will energize our prayers and sustain them.

But how do you know when God has placed something in your heart? How do you know it is not just your imagination? Even more importantly, how do you know that it is not the devil, for Scripture teaches that he can also place things in people’s hearts? How do you know when God has placed something in your heart?

That is not an easy question to answer because it is concerned with a relationship, and relationships are not comprised of simple questions and answers. I know it would be nice to have a five-step process to accurately discern whether or not God has placed something in your heart, but if we had that kind of process, we’d skip the relationship, which is where almost everything God is doing in your life is based. There are principles to go by, but there is no substitute for knowing God.

There are times when I will know what my wife would like before she has even thought of it. She says, “How did you know I wanted that?” I know because I’ve lived with her for 45 years. More than that, I know because I have loved her for all those years and more. In the interactions of a loving relationship, we come to understand each other … at least a little. I admit that there is still much about Karen I don’t (and may never) understand, and there is even more about God I don’t understand. Nevertheless, it is in relationship that I will understand them, not in a sheet of bullet points.

That being said, let me share a few principles for discerning whether the idea in your mind and the burden on your heart comes from God. But remember: these principles can’t be reliably applied outside of a healthy relationship. That cannot be stressed enough

First, if the idea in your mind and burden on your heart is all tied up with your self-image, go carefully. If the pastor who comes to a church with a grand plan to make it successful is tangled up in anxiety about his own reputation, it will be very easy for him to mistake his own thoughts for what God is saying. Ask yourself: who gets the glory if this idea works – God or me?

Second principle: when God puts something in your heart, it stays there. There is a weight to it. It is not effervescent, not here today and forgotten about tomorrow. You can’t get away from it. It took Nehemiah four or five months to act on what was in his heart, but it didn’t go away. In fact, if was still there ten years later!

Third principle: you have to have room in your heart and mind to receive the things that God wants to put in there. This is one of the biggest problems we face, and one of the main reasons we don’t see more answers to prayer. If your heart and mind are filled with what Jesus called the “worries of this life and the deceitfulness of wealth” (Matthew 13:22) or with unforgiveness or pride, you won’t have room for what God wants to put there. This was the case with the Pharisees to whom Jesus bluntly said, “…you have no room for my word” (John 8:37, NIV).

There are other principles, but I’ll just mention one more. Whatever God puts in your heart will be consistent with what he’s put in the Scriptures. No hidden word from God in our hearts will ever contradict his revealed word in our Bibles. You can count on that.

I think God puts things in our hearts regularly, when we have room to receive them, and the thing he puts there becomes one of principal drivers of our prayers. But we must have room in our hearts.

With that in mind, I close with this prayer from A. W. Tozer. If it echoes your desire, make it your own: “Father, I want to know You, but my coward heart fears to give up its toys. I cannot part with them without inward bleeding, and I do not try to hide from You the terror of the parting. I come trembling, but I do come. Please root from my heart all those things which I have cherished so long and which have become a very part of my living self, so that you may enter and dwell there without a rival. Then shall You make the place of Your feet glorious. Then shall my heart have no need of the sun to shine in it, for You will be the light of it, and there shall be no night there. In Jesus’ name, Amen.”

Posted in Bible, Prayer, Sermons, Spiritual life | Tagged , , , , , , , , | Leave a comment

Straightening Bent Souls: A Study in Transformation

Posted on June 22, 2024 by salooper57

Be sure to read the brief addendum. The timing – and the irony – was perfect.

I recently bought a hand-held shower head and hose from a big box home improvement store. The shower head and five-foot PVC hose were embalmed in an impossibly small package. I worked hard to extricate the goods without destroying the packaging, just in case I was dissatisfied and wanted to return it.

But it worked fine, though the hose was stiff and wanted to spray at a 30-degree angle, which meant the shower wall got more water than I did. I assumed it would relax after a day or two out of the package, but I was mistaken. I tried warming the hose, hanging the hose, wedging the hose, but it kept returning to its 30-degree angle for weeks.

Once, while in the shower, I tried to physically manipulate the hose at its trough, unknowingly twisted the shower head, and shot the spray over the shower curtain and doused the whole bathroom. In the two months that have followed, the hose has slowly bent to my will, but it clearly had a way about it that was not my way.

People are like that too. They have a way about them. What begins as a propensity in childhood is bent into a way of life after years of confinement in the small package of adulthood.

I have a friend who applied for a position in the CIA when we were both still in our thirties. The CIA turned him down because he had already reached their cut-off age for new hires (though they encouraged one of their contractors to hire him and employ him at Langley). They did not want to take on the challenge of unbending someone who had reached the advanced age of 34 and was already stuck in his ways.

People are like my shower hose: they have a way about them. That way is deeply engrained and usually bent. The problem is that we don’t know that we are bent. We think that we are the norm, the standard for what is right and good.

But the prophet Isaiah told us long ago that God’s ways are not our ways. We assume that we are the straightedge that determines morality, even though we have been twisted by sin and sorrow and hardened by routine. We imagine ourselves the measuring stick for what is normal. We are mistaken.

Christians believe that God is the standard of what is right and good—God as he has revealed himself in Jesus Christ. But how can we measure up to that? Jesus oriented his life around God. He put others’ needs before his own. He refused to pay back evil for evil. He spoke truthfully and eschewed manipulative and deceptive speech.  He poured out his life to help others.

If Jesus is the straightedge of normality, we are all crooked. We are “curved in on ourselves,” as Augustine of Hippo, one of history’s greatest thinkers, described us. And that curve has hardened. Can we ever be straightened out?

It is possible. Augustine himself had been bent in the wrong direction, but he was significantly straightened out. Millions of others have been too. But for a human to be reshaped, especially one who has been tightly restrained by sin and selfishness for a long time, is no easy thing. Straightening a stubborn shower hose is a cinch compared to straightening people who long have been coiled around themselves.

For one thing, people need to see and admit that they are bent. Biblical writers call this “repentance.” Until we see the problem, there is little hope that we will be straightened out.

It took many gallons of hot water, running through the shower hose for months before it was pliable enough to be straightened out. There is something that corresponds to this in Christian spiritual formation. People need a new Spirit within to soften them and make them supple.

They also need to develop new habits. Spiritual disciplines like giving, worshiping, serving, silence, and many others are tools the patient Divine Helper uses to bend us back into shape. That shape, not surprisingly, resembles Jesus, and makes us useful to others and a joy to ourselves.

Addendum

After I finished this article, and before my wife proofed it, I went to the basement and into the aptly named crawl space in search of a shut-off valve to an outside spigot. We are new to an old house, and I hadn’t been in the crawl space before. I searched in vain for a shut-off valve, got dirty in the process, and took a shower afterward while my wife proofed the article.

The shower head, which has been well-behaved for more than a week, immediately bent back to its old, familiar 30-degree angle and sprayed the shower wall. When I readjusted it, it turned stubbornly back. If I may put it this way, I have a backsliding showerhead.

It’s a lot like us. Even after we have begun to change, we can fall back into our old ways. How we need a patient Divine Helper to straighten us out!

Posted in Bible, Christianity, Spiritual life, Theology | Tagged , , , , , , | 2 Comments

Life as Prayer (James 1:1-8)

Posted on June 19, 2024 by salooper57

This sermon compares our “lived prayer” with our spoken prayers. When the two contradict, it is unlikely that we will see answers to the prayers we speak. You can watch the sermon by clicking the link below.

https://www.christianworldmedia.com/watch?v=hQ4igcy251-f. (Sermon starts at 31:15.)

Excerpts

In the church and in devotional literature, people often refer to a life of prayer, but that doesn’t go far enough. A life of prayer? Your life is a prayer. We may say a great many prayers about a great many things, and not see any answers because the prayers we occasionally speak request very different things from the prayer we constantly live. When it comes to prayer, a primary reason people do not receive answers is that their lived prayer contradicts their spoken prayers. God hears what your whole life is saying.

Sometimes pastors tell people, “You just need to pray more.” But more prayer is only a solution when too little prayer is the problem. It is not the solution when the problem is the wrong prayer – when our life is repeating a different request than our words.

Take the Lord’s prayer: We may say, “Hallowed be thy name,” while our lived prayer says, “Honored be my name.” We can say, “Thy kingdom come, thy will be done,” but contradict that by a life that says, “My authority be established, my desires be done.” We might pray “Forgive us our debts as we forgive our debtors,” when our life is saying, “I want him to pay.” Many people pray, “Lead us not into temptation,” but their life is saying, “Get me as close to temptation as possible.”

What does God hear people say in their real voice? Some say, “Just leave me alone.” Others say, “Worship me. I would be like God.” Some people’s lives just repeat idiotically, over and over, “It’s not fair. It’s not fair. It’s not fair.” Others say, “My will be done, my will be done, my will be done, my will be done…” to all eternity. On the day of judgment, the real message of our lives will be dug out of us, and we will hear, beyond any shadow of a doubt, our true voice. We will know then what prayer our lives have been repeating all along.

God does take note of our prayers and pious feelings, but he sees those things for what they are: a part of the whole; a few lines from an enormous manifesto. If you’re thinking, “How then can any of us be saved?” the answer is, “We can’t – not by our own efforts – but we can be saved by Christ. Our lives can be redeemed, our hopes secured. Not because we are as good as we think but because God is better than we dreamed.

And don’t give up. Perseverance is key. Don’t quit trusting God. On the cross, suffering a separation we cannot imagine, Jesus refused to stop trusting. The very last thing he said from the cross was, “Father, into your hands I commit my spirit” (Luke 23:46). You’ve trusted God this long; if you stop now, you stop too soon.

Posted in Bible, Faith, Prayer, Spiritual life, Theology | Tagged , , , , , , | Leave a comment