Month: September 2012

NOW I KNOW BETTER

As obedient children, do not be conformed to the former lusts which were yours in your ignorance.  I Peter 1:14

            My mother and father are both in heaven.  Though it has been twenty-eight years since my mother died and ten years since my father passed away, it feels like yesterday in a way.  The closer I get to Jesus, the less I feel their absence.  I know He is with them and since I am close to Him, I am ‘almost’ with them.

            I am so thankful for the home they gave me.  I’m even thankful for their imperfect parenting because the deficits created within me a holy ache for God.  I never would have embarked on a relentless search for Abba Father unless I had felt the sting of some mild emotional deprivation from my parents.  What Satan plans for evil, God can always use for good.

            While I cherish the many good things in my heritage (my mother’s heart for the hurting and the poor, my father’s gentle way of teaching the Word for over sixty years), there are other things I reject. Continue reading “Now I Know Better” →

CORNERED

Jesus was walking in the temple, in the colonnade of Solomon.  So the Jews gathered around him and said to him, “How long will you keep us in suspense?  If you are the

Christ, tell us plainly.”  John 10:23-24

            The Jews ‘gathered round him.’  In the English vernacular, that sounds harmless enough.  This is something a group of friends does to hear a good story.  However, in the original language, ‘closed around him’ was the word picture.  The Jews surrounded Jesus, attempting to trap Him, hoping to hear Him incriminate Himself when attempting to answer their questions.

            I don’t know if you’ve ever been closed in, trapped, in order to have information coerced out of you.  If you have, you probably recall the feelings vividly.  You probably found it hard to breathe as the realization slowly dawned on you that you were about to be snared. Continue reading “Cornered” →

 

JESUS CHANGES THE SUBJECT

Jesus answered, “Very truly, I tell you, no one can see the kingdom of God without being born from above.”  John 3:3

Nicodemus came for a private teaching instruction from Jesus.  Instead of getting that, Jesus changed the topic entirely.  I can imagine Nicodemus was greatly confused.

He was one of the most brilliant of the Jewish religious leaders, schooled his entire life in the scriptures, yet here was Jesus speaking of things for which he had no knowledge or experience, something as elementary as being born into the kingdom.

What I perceive as my greatest spiritual need can be way off base.  Though I think I know myself, I never see myself as God sees me.  I think I need one thing; God would say that I need another.

Some years ago, Continue reading “Jesus Changes The Subject” →

“I CAN’T BELIEVE THAT!”

And the Scripture was fulfilled which says, “And Abraham believed God, and it was reckoned to him as righteousness,” and he was called the friend of God.  James 2:23

            There are few things more painful than not being believed.  When I decide to be vulnerable and share a story that is close to my heart, only to be met with a skeptical response, it is like a stab in the heart.  Today, many need to tell their life’s story to someone but are held back by the knowledge that they simply won’t be believed. Unbelief has eroded many a relationship and left one party in the prison of unspoken pain.

            I wonder if God often feels like the spurned storyteller.  He has given me the scriptures that offer me the keys to the kingdom and abundant life.  To partake, all I must do is believe and live in His truth.  Yet, I sift everything He says. Continue reading ““I Can’t Believe That!”” →

THE BEST LAID PLANS

You boast in your arrogance, all such boasting is evil.  James 4:16

            I’d love to have a count of how many planning meetings happen on Monday mornings; both in business and in ministry.  Those in leadership have, most likely, invested some critical thinking time on issues of strategy and implementation of their ideas.  How much of what will be proposed today has been conceived through prayer?  Little I suspect.  Sadly, that may also be the case when it comes to those who will meet together on behalf of their respective ministries.

            Anytime I make plans for the future and feel confident of my success without any sense of dependence on God, James is clear that I am living dangerously.  My independence is of the kingdom of darkness.  Who am I that I would think I have enough consummate wisdom in and of myself to write my future?  Am I naive enough to believe that my own skillfully formed plans aren’t capable of failing?   If so, then I am out of touch with the numberless casualties that may defeat my schemes. Continue reading “The Best Laid Plans” →

WHEN I REWRITE GOD’S LAW

Do not speak against one another, brethren.  He who speaks against a brother, or judges his brother, speaks against the law, and judges the law, but if you judge the law, you are not a doer of the law, but a judge of it.  James 4:11

            To speak against a brother is to slander, to become a talebearer that diminishes his character in the public eye, to destroy his reputation through false stories and to take his weakness and magnify it till it’s grossly disproportionate.

James says that when I use my tongue to rip another person to shreds in public, I am rejecting God’s law and setting up my own law in its place.  I pronounce judgment and then set up others to do the same when God says He is the Father who should deal with His children in all aspects of their lives.  We don’t sit in His seat.

It’s a dangerous thing to do what God has prohibited.  I may believe that speaking against my brother is a small infraction.  I may rationalize that I’ve chosen to keep the rest of the law but only erred on this one point.   Continue reading “When I Re-write God’s Laws” →

HUMBLE YOURSELF!

Humble yourself in the sight of the Lord and He will lift you up.  James 4:10

            What would you do if someone thought you to be proud, then told you to ~  ‘Humble yourself!’  Let me share with you what I used to think it meant.  After feeling a profound sense of shame, I would set out to cast the pride out of my nature through self-condemning messages.  I would rehearse my past experiences with others whom I experienced as proud and ask myself if I really wanted to be like them.  The exercise would turn into a horizontal comparison game.

            At that point, would I be humble?  Absolutely not.  I would have adopted a language of humility and a posture of meekness.  Self-effort and corrective self-talk does not produce anything that results in Christlikeness.    Continue reading “Humble Yourself!” →

AM I THE RIGHT AUDIENCE?

Be miserable and mourn and weep; let your laughter be turned into mourning, and your joy into gloom.  James 4:9

            As a young child, I lived nervous and quiet most of the time.  In school, I was usually the one sitting with her hands folded at her desk.  If the majority of the class was misbehaving, I never had the courage to take part.  (Not that I wasn’t thinking about it, mind you!)  So when the teacher would lose her temper and yell at the whole class, I would assume she was also talking to me.  I would tremble in my seat and think, “I thought I was being good but I must not be wrong.  Look at her red face.”

‘Discerning the audience’ is still a problem for many who read the scriptures.  Those who are already walking in obedience often internalize God’s words of judgment.  Their overly sensitive guilt trigger causes them to soak in the wrath of God Continue reading “Am I The Right Audience?” →

CONDITIONS FOR A GREATER GRACE

But He gives a greater grace.  Therefore it says, “God is opposed to the proud but gives grace to the humble.”  James 4:6

            God is not just opposed to the idea of pride, but more specifically, to the proud person.  Pride is more than a blatant arrogance; the kind we associate with a person who is prideful; he loves attention, and is usually addicted to approval and respect.  Pride can be disguised in low self-esteem as well.  How?  I place my low opinion of myself above God’s opinion of me – in Christ.  He says I am cherished and miraculously created.  I say I am despised and nothing but a loser.  When I declare His truth null and void and cling to my own worthlessness, is this not pride as well?

For the child of God though, we live on a hunt for pride and rebellion and embrace a life of confession.  Each of us knows that God’s delight in us is a gift, not something that we have earned.  For the humble, God promises an even greater grace.  What is that?  Continue reading “Conditions For A Greater Grace” →

MEETING ME HALFWAY

Draw near to God and He will draw near to you.  James 4:8

            I grew up in a two-story Victorian house set high atop a hill in the Taconic mountains of upstate New York.  Just across the dirt road and down over a steep bank lived a Japanese-American family.  They had seven daughters and the oldest was my best friend.  Her name was Julie.  After school each day, I would run to the fence, look down into her yard and yell, “Meet me by the tree!”  The tree was really a tree stump that was exactly half way down the hill for me, and half way up the hill for her.  We would meet there with after-school snacks in tow.  Eager to meet and talk away an hour or two, I can still see her running toward me.  The sight is precious in my memory.

            This ‘running to meet each other’ is the context of today’s scripture.  God wants me to know that as I run toward Him, He will more than match my enthusiasm by running toward me in return.  A quickened pace.  Excitement in His eyes.  Delightful expectation of fellowship in His heart.

            For any who has yearned for a certain relationship, only to have the desire be terribly one-sided, this is a promise to embrace wholeheartedly.   Continue reading “Meeting Me Halfway” →