The Will of God ...

Is your life random, or is it the will of God?  Is your behavior self-determined, or do you follow the will of God?  And what of your circumstances.  Do you find yourself where you are because you follow the will of God; or because you have chosen to follow your own path, what you have believed will make you happy, or what you believed was what you “had” to do.  When most of us hear of someone who claims to know the will of God, we are immediately skeptical, and so we should be.  People who claim to know the will of God, usually do not live or love in such a way they would be easy to believe.  Very often the messages are critical and almost always intended for others (never a look in the mirror).  In addition, most of these same messages are punitive in nature; a sort of “do this or else” presentation.  It lines up with Old Testament thinking, if how you perceive God is a God who loves to punish in the first place.  But just take a second look at all those Old Testament “promises” once again.  Yes, I used the word promises, because they are each one a promise.  They all began with what is possible for those who follow God.  They each one describe the cause and effect of the submission of our own will and ideas to those of God.  The will of God in these cases always begins with a promise of better life.

It is the choice of self-determination that leads us away from the will of God, and inevitably towards the dark side of the cause and effect of each one of those same Old Testament promises.  Our will changes the promises of God into the curse of our own determination.  It is not God who punishes us for straying from His will.  It is we who punish ourselves by the same.  Human leadership turns out to be not one of freedom but one of slavery to self, with the inevitable cause and effect of degradation leading to ever lower standards of misery for ourselves and others.  This is not a threat.  It is a revelation.  It is a revealing of truth.  Our God would not have us ignorant of the differences between His ways, and the ways of self-determination.  He knows where His ways lead.  And painfully, He also knows where the end of our roads would take us to without a change in direction back towards Him.  God does not tell us of the misery we are destined to face without Him, because He is being punitive.  He tells us so that we might be redeemed from what we would otherwise face.  He loves us.  He does not want us to suffer and die.  He knows we can avoid it if we will turn from our own ways, back to his ways.  It nets down to following God leads towards life.  Following our own ideas leads towards death and suffering.  So has God changed between the Old and New Testaments?  Or have we been reading the Old Testament with bad images of who God is, and only reading the New Testaments with Jesus filtered images of who God is?

Luke offers his friend Theophilus a glimpse of this dichotomy in his gospel letter, in the sixth chapter.  Whenever we might ask, what the will of God is for our lives.  Luke presents an answer picking up in verse 12 saying … “And it came to pass in those days, that he went out into a mountain to pray, and continued all night in prayer to God.”  It is SO EASY, to simply skip over this text and proceed to what comes next, as if what comes next happens by accident, or luck, or happenstance.  It does not.  At least it does not for Jesus.  What happens next can ONLY happen, because Jesus begins here, with a submission of His own will to that of His Father God.  Jesus does not just offer a ten second prayer in a rush to be somewhere else.  Instead Jesus is thoughtful about this.  He waits till nighttime, when most of us humans have already found the need for sleep overwhelming.  Jesus feels that need too.  But Jesus needs one-on-one time with His Father God.  He loves us too much to turn us away for it.  So He waits till we are gone to bed, and He separates Himself away up into a solitary mountain where He will not be disturbed.  There He will have the privacy He needs to pour His heart out to God and seek the will of God in how to move forward.

It takes all night.  Imagine that.  Even for Jesus to sort out the next day’s plan, it takes Him all night with God.  And while Jesus feels the pull of sleep, He feels greater the need to talk with God, and to let God talk to Him.  Jesus is in full submission, as we should be.  Jesus makes this a regular thing, as we should too.  Jesus did NOT follow what He thought was best; He ONLY followed what God told Him to do.  So what happens next is not random.  It is the will of God.  It is expressed by God to Jesus in one of those all night prayer sessions on some lonely mountain.  It is expressed to Jesus when others are sound asleep.  It may sound like sacrifice to us, but to Jesus this kind of communication was oxygen.  Talking with God, spending a long time with God, was a bigger need to Him than anything other than loving us.  It is why you see Jesus doing this at night, on mountains, in the only alone time He gets.  And imagine that.  Communication with God can be even more rewarding and energizing than sleep itself.  We could make this discovery as well, if we ever tested it.  But most of us pray in the down times, when we are alone, in our cars on the way to somewhere.  Or in the bathroom while we are otherwise detained.  We pray in the middle of our lives, when nothing else is clambering for our attention.  This is one of the chief reasons the devil keeps us “so occupied” with distractions.  Our spare time is so little, our focused times so few, and between sleep and prayer, sleep nearly always wins.

Nevertheless, what happens next is not random, it is the expressed will of God.  Let that sink in for a moment.  Luke continues picking up in verse 13 saying … “And when it was day, he called unto him his disciples: and of them he chose twelve, whom also he named apostles; [verse 14] Simon, (whom he also named Peter,) and Andrew his brother, James and John, Philip and Bartholomew, [verse 15] Matthew and Thomas, James the son of Alphaeus, and Simon called Zelotes, [verse 16] And Judas the brother of James, and Judas Iscariot, which also was the traitor.”  These were imperfect men.  None of them were preachers.  Most of them uneducated.  None too wealthy.  This choice was not random.  These men were not picked randomly.  They were willing.  They followed.  And now God the Father reveals to His Son to gather them all together and make this fellowship more official.  They are to know they have all been called of God to fulfill the will of God.  This is a high honor.  This is not a threat.  This is also a promise.  They will lead better lives, better because what is inside of them will be changed for the better.  They will have the joy of fellowship in service, the joy of pointing other lives to Jesus.  Even though NONE of them are prepared for that honor right now.  And all of them will fail at one point or another as their lives progress.  It is hard to keep human will in submission.

And to show where the mind of God is with respect to punishment or redemption – Judas is chosen by God Himself.  NOT to be the traitor, but for the chance he will abandon that idea and become the zealot for Christ, instead of attempting to force Christ to become the king Judas wants Jesus to become.  Judas is to share in every single opportunity, not out of a sense of fairness, but out of a deep abiding love to save Judas from himself.  The will of God is that Judas be an honored disciple.  The will of Judas made him a traitor to that.  God could not force Judas to abandon his own will, but He could so reveal to Judas what He had in mind for Him.  God made Judas a part of everything.  He loved Judas.  God left no stone unturned where it comes to the redemption of Judas.  He yearns to have Judas be redeemed, and save Judas from the act that will so darken him that he commits suicide rather than face his guilt.  The salvation of Judas is not known.  He may still be your neighbor in heaven.  But the pain of Judas was surely known.  God wanted to spare Judas this.  But the will of Judas to decide what God needed to do, was stronger than Judas’ willingness to put aside his own ideas.  And so the pain Judas would bring upon himself, would still come, undeterred by this honor, and the expressed will of God Himself, the promise Judas would partake of as well with all the others.

What happens next is not random.  What happens next is not happenstance or luck or “intentions”.  What happens next is the expressed will of God.  Luke continues in verse 17 saying … “And he came down with them, and stood in the plain, and the company of his disciples, and a great multitude of people out of all Judaea and Jerusalem, and from the sea coast of Tyre and Sidon, which came to hear him, and to be healed of their diseases; [verse 18] And they that were vexed with unclean spirits: and they were healed. [verse 19] And the whole multitude sought to touch him: for there went virtue out of him, and healed them all.”  A great sermon will be preached.  But it is not started, until the needs of the people are met.  Our God loves us.  The revelation of truth is coming.  But He would not have us sit in misery while we hear it.  He would have us redeemed and restored as much as we want first.  We would do well to alter our ideas of church service in this regard.  What if we changed “going to church” into taking action for our brothers and sisters in need first.  Meet those needs as best we can, BEFORE we begin any kind of formal service where great sermons will be preached.  It is what Jesus did.  For those who claim to “follow” Jesus, do we also claim to have better ideas about the priorities of our days?

They were all healed.  Would that our faith was so great that our congregations looked exactly the same as this one did, and for the same reason.  Luke continues with perhaps the greatest sermon ever preached picking up his highlights in verse 20 saying … “And he lifted up his eyes on his disciples, and said, Blessed be ye poor: for yours is the kingdom of God. [verse 21] Blessed are ye that hunger now: for ye shall be filled. Blessed are ye that weep now: for ye shall laugh. [verse 22] Blessed are ye, when men shall hate you, and when they shall separate you from their company, and shall reproach you, and cast out your name as evil, for the Son of man's sake. [verse 23] Rejoice ye in that day, and leap for joy: for, behold, your reward is great in heaven: for in the like manner did their fathers unto the prophets.”  Here is the promise of God revealed.  Jesus tells us that while life and the devil may try to bring us pain, through God we can look past the pain into the blessing God yearns to bring.  This is about changing how we think, and how we love.  It is about internal reformation.  It is about internal re-creation by the Creator of the Universe.  When sin slams against us, look past it, to the blessings of God interacting in your life.  It is a promise of hope even in the darkest times, and under the darkest conditions.  And most of these slights listed above would come from church leadership over those who truly follow Jesus Christ instead of what the church leaders would proscribe.

This is not a promise of wealth.  Many of the promises of the Old Testament sound like promises of wealth.  The gifts of God had been misinterpreted as signs of His favor, instead of signs of His love.  It is what goes on inside that matters more than what is happening outside.  Jesus tries to bring the people to this new revelation.  And in this, the New Testament promise looks much different than the Old but not how we would expect.  Luke continues in verse 24 saying … “But woe unto you that are rich! for ye have received your consolation. [verse 25] Woe unto you that are full! for ye shall hunger. Woe unto you that laugh now! for ye shall mourn and weep. [verse 26] Woe unto you, when all men shall speak well of you! for so did their fathers to the false prophets.”  And there is the entire Old Testament brought back into clarity by God.  Wealth was never the goal.  Alignment with the will of God is.  Being rich or poor is not a sign of the favor or displeasure of God.  God love both sets of people.  But being rich is a burden, because most of us who become rich learn to love money and the ease that comes with it, more than we love God who has entirely different priorities.  Being rich offers the illusion of being self-reliant.  Being poor forces the dependence on God all of us should have, whether rich or poor.  It is this false trust in wealth that leads to the destruction of the soul.  And so many in church in good standing believe themselves to be in alignment with God because they are in church in good standing.  That was never the measure, and it never will be.

How many people in church who are “well to do” ever seem to be those who give of themselves to those in need.  They give funds.  But time and personal care are far more rare.  Love rarer still.  And for those outside the church.  The rich man says, I built this, this is mine, I did all this by the sweat of my brow and my hard work.  The rich man resents the poor for being poor, blaming them for being too lazy to pull themselves out of their poverty by their own hard work and invention.  These are signs.  These are signs of the heart.  The heart that does not break for the poor, is more aligned with funds, than with giving.  The heart that sees the suffering and can still refuse to give everything away to try to meet that need – is what we call “normal”.  There is always someone more wealthy than you are.  There is always someone poorer too.  What happens in your heart is what matters, not how many zeros follow the number in your bank account, or credit debt.  The will of God was to reveal this truth to us, through the words of Jesus Himself.

It is the focus on the heart that matters.  Re-creation of your heart happens in direct proportion to your willingness to submit your will to that of Jesus Christ.  As you retain your own ideas, your heart remains callous to the needs of others.  As you let go what you think in favor of how He loves, you have a harder and harder time holding on to what is “yours” and a easier and easier time letting it go to try to help anyone you encounter who is suffering and in need.  Not just sharing; but letting go.  Treasure is what you believe it to be.  Treasure could very well be what is in your bank account.  Or Treasure could very well be the lives of your children, the lives of your family or community, even your own soul.  How you think about that is a function of how much you submit yourself to Christ.

The will of God has always been a promise to you.  The promise was to make your heart so much better than it is today.  Following His will sees this done in action.  Keeping to your own ideas always ends in tragedy.  This is not the fault of God.  But it is the absolute truth of cause and effect.  In a bit of irony, it seems to me that looking back at the Old Testament promises we might like them better.  They have an appeal to our wealth quotient.  This New Testament promise recognizes the pain of sin, and promises only a better heart, not a better wallet.  God has not changed.  But it is ironic we have read those Old Testament promises as threats of disobedience all along.  When we fully ignore the conditions of this New Testament promise because they mirror us too closely.  Is it any wonder our God is so intent to save us from ourselves?  To save us, is indeed the will of God.

 

Preferences, Habits & Addiction ...

Can you tell the difference between a “need” and a “want”? Before you answer, consider the level of variations than could be proposed in any question regarding the two. For example, we all “need” to eat in order to live, however, do we “need” the food we are holding in our hands right now, or do we simply “want” this particular piece? Could it be that even more than our actions, our preferences are what defines us, makes us who we are? Is mankind simply a random collection of likes and dislikes, an amalgamation of what we want, translated into the lifelong pursuit of those goals? Perhaps. But that thinking is limited by the blinders of evil; there is a freedom beyond what we have imagined.

There is a reason why our enemy does not simply bribe everyone he wishes to turn from God with untold wealth and riches. It is not the attainment of these things that brings us any peace, or real happiness. So instead, he keeps us focused on attaining them, always in the journey towards the illusion, rather than arriving and determining how big an illusion it really is. We dream of wealth. We dream of riches. We fantasize about what it must be like to have money without end, fame around the globe, perhaps power from our vast resources. And in so doing, we idolize the material things of the world, and make ourselves slave to their acquisition. Never realizing, we will not attain them, we will die in the financial condition we were born to, and our chances of truly being different are only as good as those chances of winning the lottery – slim to none. But like the lottery, our enemy trots out a weekly “winner” making the argument that someone has to win, why not you. He masks the pain and emptiness of the rich, burying it in a flurry of activity, so that the poor see only what they wish to see, not the reality of life with the burden of wealth.

Though most of us will live lives denied the burden of the reality of wealth, we nevertheless seem to place a great deal of trust in our desires. While I may not acquire the mansion on the hill, perhaps I can still find a way to own my own home. While I may not drive the Maserati, perhaps I can find a used sports car within my price range. When disappointed in achieving our more modest goals, we attribute the loss to a lack of real spending money for the original purchase. The used sports car that does not drive how we would have liked, we blame on not having the cash to afford a better one. But what if the issue is not with our car, but with our thinking? What if the reality is … that there actually is NO better sports car out there. Perhaps every other one has even more mechanical failures, cosmetic issues, and engineering design flaws than the one we drive today. Worse yet, perhaps it is a flaw of ALL sports cars that ruins the lives of those who thought to crave them. The long and short of it is, we have been taught to want things that are likely not the best things for us.

So if I cannot trust me, who can I trust? Listening to advertisers is what will have gotten most of us in the condition we find ourselves in. And the theme of modern media makes the whole problems worse. How many times have you turned on your television set only to have the programming you watch be a life affirming drama who’s moral is … you can only rely on yourself? American culture and American media are equally grounded on the idea of self-reliance. The “American Dream” is a variation on a story about how through hard work, innovation, and perseverance anyone can achieve anything. Of course few people personally know someone who has truly achieved the American Dream, absent parental help, or a boost from others. But nonetheless the myth remains, and our culture deifies it.

But the best we have ever been able to say about achieving the desires of our heart, is that the fulfilling effects were temporary. We may want nothing more than to eat a piece of chocolate cake at the moment, but upon eating it, our appetite will grow again. Men put tremendous time, effort, and energy in attempting to make love to a particular woman; but having achieved the goal, they rarely spend as much effort to do it again. Most married men are tempted by the allure of something new, rather than wholly satisfied with what they have at home. Some of the blame can be placed on an incessant marketing media blitz that glorifies the myth, and trashes the truth. But rarely is there any thorough self-examination to see why the achievement of this kind of goal is rarely as permanently satisfying as the quest to achieve it would have indicated.

Perhaps it is collective insanity to believe the outcome will be different next time, when all the factors leading up to achieving our desires are identical to the times before. Perhaps our desires are nothing more than verbal admissions of our more deep seated addictions. Perhaps we believe ourselves to be in more control over our behavior than in fact we are. For if we know what we want will lead us to harm, and we choose to pursue it anyway, have we not lost all rationality? Helpless pursuit of behavior that will lead us only to harming ourselves is the very definition of addiction is it not. And yet we go through our lives, day in, and day out, doing exactly the same things.

So what do we do about it? Give up? Yes actually. But instead of just giving in to our desires and running hog wild until we invariably die from them, perhaps we should simply give our weakness to a Savior who has asked for nothing more than this “gift” from us. For us to escape the pain that is coming in our future, we must change what we want now. In order for the addict to fundamentally change his addiction, he must find outside help. This is our situation. We need our Savior not just to forgive what we do wrong, we need Him to stop us from doing it, and even more importantly to help us to not WANT to do wrong in the first place. Changing what it is we want, is the beginning of our Salvation. Nothing can force us to do what we do not WANT to do (short torture). Our problem is that when all is said and done, we still “want” to sin, and so we do. The only remedy for this is to change what we “want” to do, and the only hope to implement that change is from Christ.

Some hold to our analogy of comparing evil with poo. They would say that like poo, we will commit evil again simply because we do not have a choice in the matter as long as we are alive. As long as we live, we poo, and we commit evil. This is true, from a human perspective. In our own strength, we are as powerless to stop committing evil as we are to stop going to the bathroom. However, Christ is not bound by human limitations. He did not create us with the intention of having a waste disposal system, rather He enabled this when it became necessary for our survival in a world of evil. So too, now that we realize our condition, and come surrendered at the foot of the cross, we give Him our entire lives including our desires, and He changes them. It is a miracle in our lives that He performs. And while it is humanly impossible to stop going poo, with God all things are possible. We can cease to do evil, not because there is something special about us, but because there is something special about what Christ does in our lives when we let Him.

It is our pride that keeps us from experiencing these kinds of victories in our lives. We do not surrender fully to Christ because we believe we can do it on our own. After all, few of us will admit to being an addict of any kind. We cherish our cultural ideas of self-reliance and believe whatever short comings we have can be managed and worked out over time. Many believe they are in partnership with God, as if God needed our help in any way. He does not need our help, but does need our permission. If we have to rely on our own “faithfulness” to see us saved, we are surely doomed. Rather we can trust in His “faithfulness”, He has yet to break a promise. Everything He says is truth.

It is time for us to know the rest in coming to our Lord. It is time for us to know the peace only He can restore in us. It is time to enjoy a level of freedom we have not even begun to imagine. And it is time for us to allow Christ to do His work in us fully, trusting in Him to save us completely …

Creation Revelation ...

The reason why our origins are recorded in the Book of the Genesis is for far more than a mere historical perspective on where we come from. It is more than an alternate theory to the one posed by evolution and its trillion to one odds of success. And it goes beyond describing the fall of man and a renewed hope for a second chance. The lessons learned from the study of perfection BEFORE the entrance of sin, give us an insight into the motives and intentions of our God. They foretell what He intends to restore unto us. They contrast the beauty of the plans of God, with the inevitable results of deviating away from God’s plans. And finally they predict the eventual reconciliation of our God with His created peoples.

What has happened since our fall, continues to happen today. We have an enemy who seeks our destruction. His entire aim is to distract us away from the source of relief. He lures us with the promise of power or wealth, or he tempts us with the idea of unlimited self-gratification. He injures us, and then reminds us that we alone need to be looking out for number one. And he has a skilled accomplice to help him carry out his mission of evil – it is the image you see in the mirror in front of you. You are not my enemy, but you are your own. It is why I entitled this work … “I am the enemy”. It is a hard revelation to face, but 6000 years of genetics, an environment custom tailored to feed my ‘need’, and a natural inclination to serve self – combine to form an unbeatable combination of originator of sin in my life. When being honest, most of us do not need to be tempted by the devil himself to fall into behavior we know to be wrong. Most of us, hardly need a gentle nudge to do what evil we are already inclined to do.

This was the contrast in Eden. And this will one day be the contrast between who we are now, and who we will one day become. It is our natural instincts to deviate from God and serving others, towards the gratification of self that MUST die in us before we will be a “new” creation. When he first walked this earth Adam had no desire to ingest cocaine and rape a strange woman on his way home. It was not the absence of refined cocaine, or perhaps other women, that restrained his behavior – it was natural for him never to feel these urges. His natural state of being, was to be in harmony with the character and nature of God. It was a conscious choice away from the plans of God, that led to Adam’s fall. Man lost his dominion over the earth, but way more importantly, over himself.

Man is no longer free to love as much as he wants. Instead he is the bound servant of the evil one, held captive to evil instincts despite his freewill, or inclinations to do better. Man is powerless to remove the evil he once invited inside himself, to leave once and for all. This is not the inclination of evil. Evil perpetuates like a cancer causing virus, seeking out as many as possible to hurt and destroy. It is not the questionable random acts we perform today that make us unfit for heaven. It is our natural inclination behind them, the motivation that drives each evil act, that is our real disease.

Alcoholics in society today, have a treatment option of a 12 step plan to help them cope with their disease. But for the remainder of their lives, they remain alcoholics (slave to the potential future drink they may indulge in). Generally when an addict relapses it takes time to restore their sobriety. Often they must repeat each step one at a time, taking each day at a time to regain any sense of composure after a significant failure. This is because the root motivation, and chemical genetics, that make us susceptible to become alcoholics remain in tact. The 12-step programs can do nothing to undo our genetic codes and responses. 12-steps are a wonderful disease management program, but not a cure.

In Eden there was no equivalent thinking that could describe addiction. Prior to sin, there was no basis for understanding truly what it means to be powerless to resist something we know will destroy us. This was non-sensible, it was illogical, and therefore it was highly suspect thinking – and yet every word of it was true. Prior to our fall, man had only the knowledge of Good. God alone, could foresee the horror of evil and where it would lead. This was the knowledge the serpent promised Eve, the knowledge of both sides of the coin – both good and evil. She was lured into thinking that she would have the knowledge without the personal experience but this was not to be. And once bitten, the evil fruit did its work, transforming the noble self-sacrificing daughter of Christ, into the temptress bent on securing her husband’s participation in her own doom. Had Eve been able to reason as she did before, her love would have driven her still farther from Adam’s side, so as not to risk his Salvation for the loss of her own. That is how perfect love thinks. It cares not about itself, only the object of its affection. But evil, cares not for the other individual, only for itself.

The creation story tells us right from the beginning that we lost. We were defeated in the garden, when perfection was our ally. Since then we have NO hope of defeating the evil one in our own characters, or using our own human wisdom and strength. The lost, require a defender, a champion, a hero. Those who are beaten require someone else to do the fighting and the winning, in order to reclaim them. In short, fallen man requires a Savior to be saved from the evil that infects our souls, and warps our nature. What was revealed to Adam and Eve in the garden has yet to sink in to the thoughts of modern Christians. Adam and Eve would be sent a promised Messiah … “to take away the sins of the world.” In short, to remove the sins we carry and commit from our very natures. To lift the burden of our genetic codes. To reroute the passages in our brains undoing the years of chemical neglect. The mission of our Messiah was not simply to perform the awaited sacrifice for our sins in atonement, but to free man from his bondage to those very desires to sin.

This is the Creation Revelation; that Christ can create us over again from the inside out. He does not need to wait till we walk through golden gates in a perfect city of His design. He can do it on the street corners we walk, in drug infested houses where we take refuge, in the gutters in which we live. He can meet us anywhere and begin the process of healing the pain we have so long heaped upon ourselves. The man in the mirror, can be transformed from enemy of the Lord, to humble servant of our King. I do not have to be destined to serve only me, and my desire to please only me. My desires can be rewritten. My wants and “needs” can be re-created anew back into His image. This is the hope that Genesis extended to Adam and Eve, and has seen its fulfillment in the ministry of Christ so long ago. We are not bound to our history of doom, but free to live in His Kingdom right now, changed through the power of His gift, and our submission to His will.