Resistance and Forgiveness - 2

Forgiveness is letting go of resistance. Forgiveness is the opposite of the desire for revenge. When I am faced with the need to let go of my desire for vengeance I feel resistance to the idea of forgiving without first settling “the score”. But this very resistance is what keeps me away from the freedom that comes only through forgiveness.

As I look around in this passage in Romans 12 and 13, I notice a number of things that look very much like forgiveness.

Bless those who persecute you; bless and do not curse (12:14).

...do not be haughty in mind, but associate with the lowly. Do not be wise in your own estimation. Never pay back evil for evil to anyone (12:16-17).

Never take your own revenge, beloved, but leave room for the wrath of God... (12:19).

Owe nothing to anyone except to love one another; for he who loves his neighbor has fulfilled the law (13:8).

...Put on the Lord Jesus Christ, and make no provision for the flesh in regard to its lusts (13:14).

An accurate definition of the word lust is the intense desire to have it now! This certainly applies to that inward, gnawing desire for revenge when I am mistreated or abused or treated unjustly. The lust in my heart desires revenge, desires to pay back evil for evil, to curse those who mistreat my heart. But God demonstrates through the example of Jesus my Savior and Lord that the way of real freedom and the way God designed reality is for me to live in a constant state of forgiveness, not just to deal with things in the past. This state of mind and heart is also very evident in its complete absence of resistance. To forgive is to not resist and to resist is to not forgive – the two are apparently mutually exclusive.

Resistance is the barrier wall that I build around my own heart in my attempt to protect my feelings and hopefully prevent further damage to a sensitive, wounded heart. It builds callouses around my heart in order to keep people from knowing me very well so that they cannot take advantage of my vulnerabilities. But this very same barrier also hardens my heart inevitably and it prevents me from being able to receive true love from others and from God. Oh, I can enjoy the pleasures of friendships and attention and praise and gifts, but I become incapacitated to absorb real, selfless love and reflect it back to others who need it.

When God promised to remove my heart of stone in Ezekiel 36 and put within me a heart of flesh, He was talking about this very issue – the walls that I have built to protect myself from suffering and pain. But when I begin to realize that this is what He is talking about I may start to have second thoughts about allowing this new arrangement to take place. If my walls are removed my selfish, sinful flesh believes that there will be nothing left to keep people from just walking all over me, abusing me with impunity and causing untold damage to this new heart of very vulnerable soft “flesh”.

God is very respectful of my right to freedom of choice and will never go through with this heart transplant if He does not have my un-coerced, full permission for Him to do so. But for me to give Him that permission I have to have enough confidence in His motives and ability to believe that somehow in the long run it will be for my best good. Looking at the example of the immense suffering and pain that Jesus suffered at the hands of His abusers does not always give me great assurance in making my own choice to submit to anything similar. And hearing Him pray for His Father to forgive those people while they abused Him seems absolutely strange and bizarre to my logical, protective, selfish heart.

This struggle lies at the very center of my triggers with authorities. I am afraid to trust my Higher Authority to work things out for my good in the end as promised in Romans 8:28. I like the idea of having a heart transplant, a good shower to clean me of all my filth, a new spirit within me and empowerment to walk in all of God's ways and statutes (Eze. 36:25-27), but the vulnerability that appears to come along with this package deal is very frightening to my old heart and it is very much in protest against the danger of allowing others to see who I really am inside when I am not even sure myself what is in there.

But apparently this package deal as described in Ezekiel 36 and summarized in Romans 12:1, 2 is an all or nothing proposition. There is no way that I can pick and choose and mix part of God's offer with maintaining a certain amount of authority myself over my own life. Paul makes it pretty clear in verse one of chapter twelve that my service of worship involves the holy sacrifice of my body (which includes my mind and heart) to God. Since the word holy means exclusively dedicated to something or someone and a sacrifice means letting go of control and ownership, then if I want to enjoy the benefits of the kind of life God is offering me in salvation then I have to let go of all my resistance to whatever He chooses to do with my life. I am no longer in charge of it.

Choosing to go this route means that the God that I entrust with my whole life, my protection, my vulnerable new heart, my reputation and my future – this God is going to have to be big enough to finish and accomplish what He promises and good enough to be trusted with my heart and all that is in it. He cannot be two-faced or fickle in His ways. He is going to have to understand my fears and apprehensions, my desires and my doubts, without condemnation. And I need to know Him well enough that I can trust His heart to effectively nurture and care for my heart. This faith is not something I work up by sheer will-power or effort but is something that has to spring up spontaneously from exposure to One who is worthy of my trust and I need to see more clearly that worthiness.

This is precisely why I spend so much time each day immersing myself in the Word. It is not because I want to fill my mind with Scripture knowledge so I can be smarter than others or more pious – please! No, the primary reason is because I genuinely desire to know this God who promises to reveal Himself to me, both to my mind and my heart, on a very personal level. I believe that through this means He will induce saving faith within my heart that will grow both upward and also become deeply rooted inside as I foster an atmosphere of mutual intimacy with Him. What I am seeking far more than knowledge, as important as that may be, is a personal, heart-level encounter on a regular or even constant basis with this God who has been so dramatically changing my perceptions about Him over the past few years.

What I am finding is that He really is faithful to show up when I present my heart to Him in these times together. Writing has become a very useful and important tool in that process. I find many times that as I write it is almost as if a window opens in my mind and heart and I can hear His Spirit much more clearly. It is something of a dialog many times that I have come to crave and enjoy. But additionally, all throughout the day I also hear the quiet voice making little notations and observations or reminders that surprise and delight me. I also sense convictions and warnings that I do well to listen to and respond to quickly. It is at those points that I am instantly faced with this issue of resistance – whether or not I will maintain my own desires and opinions or whether I will let go of my resistance and embrace the thoughts of God that often are very uncomfortable or even sometimes repulsive to me.

I am seeing that resistance and fear are very close companions. I resist directly because I am afraid. Fear lies at the root of all my protective maneuverings and to let go of resistance I also have to deal with the very deep-seated fears that compel me to resist. I sense that I must face them head-on, acknowledge them, expose them and hold them up to the light of God's presence. Only in the presence of the warmth of God's love and truth can the ice of fear begin to melt into the rain that maybe God uses to wash away the filth collected in my memories.

I continue to choose to pursue this friendship and submission to the God who insists that He loves me unconditionally and will restore me to the original design for joy and close-knit bonding with Him and His family. I accept His supreme authority in my life above all other authorities, and I trust Him to empower me to be in subjection to other authorities without fear or resentment. He is not finished with me yet, especially in this area, but He is also faithful to finish and accomplish in me what He asks me to do.

Lord, I again lay down my resistance. I know that is easy to say when I am sitting here in freedom and comfort with no obvious threats hanging over me at the moment. But I ask for grace and transformation of heart to prepare me for when I do encounter those situations so that You can demonstrate the power of Your love to completely reverse the effects of sin in my life. Continue to heal my deep roots of fear and bitterness that cause me to get angry and defensive. Fill my heart with total confidence in Your ability and desire to protect it even when everything seems to indicate I am abandoned and alone. Show me Your face much more clearly so that I can see Your emotions and feelings and desires. Jesus, I'm Yours – save me.

(next in series)

Another Look at Resistance - 2

A few weeks ago soon after I got into my study of Romans 13 I began to perceive that the real issue in this passage is the problem of resistance more than it is about authority. My resistant reactions to authority are simply trigger points that expose a much deeper problem that must be addressed in my heart. But like all triggers, these events are like warning signs that are really opportunities for me to face the deeper root issues inside and seek healing and repair so that I can live in genuine freedom. This is one of the important principles that I learned from Ed Smith, the founder of Theophostic Ministries.

This issue about resistance and how it shows up in my daily life has been on the back of my mind throughout the past few days and weeks with growing awareness. I believe that the Holy Spirit has been alerting me more and more to various aspects in which I resist. As I said, it is not only in the area of relating to authorities, but resistance shows up in a wide variety of circumstances and relationships. When I become aware that I am experiencing that familiar feeling or sensation of resistance, I am trying to train myself to do a mental inventory quickly to see if my resistance is something that God wants me to let go of and the appropriate way to go about doing that.

There is another interesting development that has emerged from this increased awareness of this life principle. I have noticed that when I discuss this topic with others who are interested in some of the things I have been contemplating about this topic that one of the surest things to come up in the discussion is a defense of resistance. This is quite understandable and it is something in which I share the same questions as others around me. We usually get into a discussion or analysis of the pros and cons of resistance and what the Bible really says about this topic. But what I am noticing is that there is an ingrown or deep-seated belief in most all of us that we might be left helpless or vulnerable if we were to give up clinging to this most familiar feeling of resistance.

I make no claim that I have the best Biblical answer on this question or that I have a really good grasp on God's will in this arena. It is definitely an area of my own life that is in process and my understanding and beliefs about the proper or improper place of resistance in a person's life is very much open to modification and instruction from heavenly influences. But I also strongly sense that this is an extremely important and crucial part of my learning to live in right relationship to God, the one who created me and designed me and is restoring me to live in harmony with true reality.

My recent radical shift in thinking about what goes on in hell has been a major factor in allowing me to see the eternal dangerous nature of resistance. It is becoming apparent that one of the greatest dangers we need to be aware of is not the evil that comes from the outside – and definitely not from God – but is the natural consequences of resistance itself which carries the potential to create immense damage in our own hearts and minds.

I just did a cursory word search in my Bible software to see what might come up with the word resist. With the initial results that I looked at I can see that I definitely want to do a much more in-depth study on this word and see what God is seeking to relay to me about this. One thing that so far has jumped out to my attention is that the only thing I see that we are instructed to resist is the devil himself. In stark contrast to that there are references to those who are true followers of God who clearly are not resistant and suffer at the hands of others as a consequence. Yet the heaven clearly views them as the better for it and we must learn to see things from heaven's perspective instead of using the “normal” filters we are used to using to determine what is right or wrong for us.

In my thinking it is starting to seem that resistance and unrighteousness seem to be almost synonymous. Therefore, I have been asking God in the language of 1 John 1:9 to cleanse me of all resistance. Part of this cleansing is my need to confess the resistance that comes to my attention. Now if I understand the true meaning of the word confess, that makes it really something very easy to do. For to confess simply means to agree with. When the Spirit convicts me that I have something internally that I am hanging onto and that is out of sync with the way God views things, out of sync with true reality as it is in heaven, then to confess simply means to choose to agree with the Holy Spirit's opinion about that thing or attitude and that is all there is to confession.

Of course, confession itself is not the end of the process, but it is a very important beginning. For if I do not first agree with God's viewpoint about something deep within me or some belief that I am clinging to, then trying to align the externals of my life to comply with God's requirements without resolving the roots that naturally produce the externals is terribly self-defeating and only leads to a lot of hypocrisy. Can two walk together, except they be agreed? (Amos 3:3 KJV) If I desire to have a fruitful and life-changing walk with God, then the very first prerequisite is that I begin to agree with His view of reality instead of always insisting that I know better.

And now that I think about it, this is precisely where a great deal of resistance shows up. Whenever I don't want to confess something that the Spirit is convicting me of, I am exercising resistance. Now I am not saying that I should agree quickly with what everyone else tries to convict me of. Job had some very demanding friends that were absolutely certain that they knew that Job needed to confess something in order to get back into God's graces. Most of the book of Job is a heated debate between Job's opinion about his character and his friend's determination to expose something in his life that was causing all of these judgments to fall on him from God. But in reality it was finally exposed that all of them were mistaken and we are given the privilege to see that none of the evil he experienced was from God at all.

It is very important to understand that just because people claim to be followers of God, that does not qualify them to bring conviction to anyone else around them. Conviction is strictly the work of the Holy Spirit alone and anytime we try to impose conviction on someone (and we tend to do it an awful lot) we are usurping the function of the Holy Spirit on this earth. That is not a very enviable position to find one's self in. We must leave the work of conviction up to God no matter how obvious someone's faults may appear to us. To do otherwise is to engage in counterfeit judgment. And Jesus clearly stated, For in the same way you judge others, you will be judged, and with the measure you use, it will be measured to you. (Matthew 7:2 NIV)

But we can and should come alongside others in love and compassion and cooperate with the Spirit to create an atmosphere of grace and truth in which they may feel safer to respond to the inner convictions of the Holy Spirit. While we must be exceedingly careful not to play God in other people's hearts and lives we should be the place where healing can take place without danger of further infection.

Resistance is not something we are to weed out of other people's lives but is something we each have to deal with on an individual basis for ourselves. I am seeing more and more clearly that the assembly process of the true body of Christ requires that each person let go of their own heart resistance that keeps them from bonding in love to the others that God is putting into the body around them. And this leads to another interesting observation that is emerging in my investigation into this issue of resistance.

I noticed in some of the verses about resistance in the Bible that healthy resistance is a natural event that occurs when people are love-bonded properly with each other. It is like the analogy of certain animals and their natural defense behaviors when facing danger from predators. Certain species tend to clump very tightly together placing the young and vulnerable in the center for protection and the larger and tougher animals ringed around the outside with their backs to the enemy, all facing in toward each other. There are variations on this natural behavior which include the stronger animals with horns ringing the herd with their horns all facing the enemy on the outside. But in either case, the most important aspect of this behavior for their protection is that they all stick tightly together and not one animal is left alone and vulnerable to easy attack by their predators.

I believe that God reveals many things about reality in the natural world, and important lessons for us are embedded in the observations we can make in nature. This illustration is an important principle of our need for love and being in closely bonded association with the rest of God's family so that we are not easy prey for Satan's attacks. This is the real deal of which typical resistance is the counterfeit. Instead of going out to fight the enemy or resisting convictions from God in our mistaken desires for self-preservation (Matt. 16:25), we need to turn our focus on being closely bonded with the heart of God which will always lead to close bonds with others who are seeking to do the same. This is the only real safe resistance that we should engage in.

I can see that there is a lot more to this than I have time or space for right now. This is a very fast growing topic for me right now and I want to remain open and unresistant to whatever the Spirit wants me to learn as I live my life in relationship to others. I definitely know that I need a lot of healing in this area, but as I am alerted to even the small ways in which I resist and let go of them, I find that I am not so frightened at the bigger problems and that I can begin to see myself as a different person in the future, one who is full of compassion and love and free of all resistance to God's plans and desires for me. And believing that something is possible is one of the first steps on the road to realizing and experiencing that possibility.

(next in series)

Time to Wake Up

Do this, knowing the time, that it is already the hour for you to awaken from sleep; for now salvation is nearer to us than when we believed. (Romans 13:11)

As I sit here early in the morning listening to the Spirit of God and waiting for whatever He wants to teach me, I think about the potential significance of these words. I had a very tiring day of work yesterday tearing off and putting down shingles on a roof, and though the breeze was good and the temperature rather pleasant the work still left me rather sore and tired. We had to work a couple extra hours to finish the job and so my body and mind was rather certain that a single nights sleep might not be enough to prepare me to get up early for another day without quite a bit of resistance.

But after a little food and a shower and somewhat fitful sleep, I woke up a half hour before my wife's alarm went off at 5 A.M. and felt the gentle urge that I should get up to have enough time to spend with God before this day got busy. I never really know what I will be facing in a day and whether my normal plans will play out or whether I will be faced with some unexpected trauma or challenge. But God is never caught by surprise and is faithful to offer me all of the preparation that I need if I am just willing to cooperate with Him. But I am free to choose whether or not I will be prepared or will prefer my own comfort and desires and suffer the consequences of being unprepared.

The idea or image of waking up from sleep has certain implications usually associated with it. In the Bible there were times when people missed out on important preparations because they allowed sleep to preempt more important activities that would have prepared them for what God knew was coming. The disciples could have had very different results and the story of their responses during the last hours of Jesus' life would have been dramatically different if they had resisted the urge to snooze in the garden and instead prayed for strength and wisdom and Jesus had instructed them to do.

Sleep is a very healthy activity that is extremely important to engage in on a regular basis, and we should not make the mistake of linking a sense of guilt to healthy sleeping. That is one of Satan's tricks to keep us from sleeping soundly and getting the refreshment that our body and mind needs. But there is a time for everything and just as there is a time to relax and allow our body to catch up and prepare us for another day of life, so there is a time to quit sleeping and move on to the next phase of our day and engage deliberately in the activities that God intends for us to do.

Problems arise when a person gets so emotionally addicted to sleep that they cannot embrace the duties of the morning cheerfully and transition into a day of positive activity. I know this from first-hand experience as well as observing it in many others. Sleep can easily become more than just an important time of repair and restoration for our body and mind; it can also become a place of escape from reality when life is such that we want to avoid or hide from it. Sleep can easily become something of a drug, a place in our mind where we can hide from difficult circumstances or hard choices. It seems so innocent to just close our eyes and doze off instead of having to face some pain or negotiate our way through some hard choices well outside of our comfort zone.

The importance of waking up at the proper time and transitioning into a day of activity is something that healthy people choose and is not to be easily manipulated by our feelings. It is often a sign of immaturity when a person has continued and great difficulty getting up each morning and preparing for a day of productive activity. It takes self-discipline to be able to get up on time dependably and is an important part of the training of children and youth. If they do not learn this lesson early and well it can become an issue and problem that may plague them for years and mar their lives in unexpected ways. It is also a sad mistake to leave them dependent on their parents to wake them up for years instead of allowing them to suffer some natural consequences of not learning this important life skill.

Failing to wake up on time sometimes results in tragic consequences and ruined lives. Unfortunately it is too often a part of our mindset that people who “have it good” never have to discipline themselves to get up early but somehow have the “freedom” to just sleep in whenever they feel like it and never have to exercise the effort it takes to get out of bed and move into a day of work. But this is a dangerous deception that needs to be overcome, for genuine living and healthy relationships depend on developing self-control and a balanced life so that we can live integrated lives with others around us.

The idea of not waking up at a proper time implies that we may miss something extremely important that will happen whether or not we are prepared for it. I know there have been times that our family needed to get up earlier than usual so that we could get to an airport in time to catch a plane for some trip we had planned. Overcoming the desire to sleep just a little longer either on our part or our children's would result in missing our plane when the time came and would include a lot of serious disharmony, accusations, blame and recriminations among us. But none of the blaming or shaming would undo the natural consequences of the choice to not begin the day by getting up at the proper time and engaging earnestly in the activities that needed to happen so that we could get out of the house on time to make it to our flight.

This verse seems to refer to a issue of time in salvation in its references to night and day and the use of the word nearer. There is certainly a time coming in God's plan of salvation that we need to be ready for in order to enjoy the benefits of participating in that salvation. Just believing that God loves us is not enough to save us, as wonderful and true as that is. There is a part for us to play in connecting and receiving the gifts and requirements needed in order for us to be transformed and prepared to live in the presence of God's fiery love and passion. God will not override our will to prepare us for His presence. He will provide everything we need to be prepared, healed and re-created in His image. But if we choose to sleep a little longer and give preference to our feelings or our mistaken ideas about Him instead of making difficult choices that are outside of our comfort zone, we will be terribly disappointed when we discover that we were too late in making the truly vital choices of life.

Jesus told a story of ten virgins who were planning to participate in a wedding. They were supposed to be waiting for the Bridegroom to appear to take them into the house where the wedding would move into a more intensive phase, but they all succumbed to falling asleep. They were all startled awake by a cry, “Behold the Bridegroom is coming!” Jesus says that the preparations they had made previous to this point made all the difference in whether they were able to fully engage with the joy and celebrations or they were left scurrying around trying to make up for poor choices and ending up missing out entirely in the end.

While God has certainly provided everything needed for our salvation, we must ourselves interact with His provisions fully both by cooperating with His instructions and by waking up at the proper time so that we can be in sync with what is really going on. This verse strongly implies that it is time for us to spiritually wake up out of the fatal sleep of complacency and ignorance that we have slumbered in for so long and enter into the experience of true love and transformation that God desires to work in us at the heart level.

For me to be able to love others in the ways described in the surrounding verses will definitely take a miracle of salvation to accomplish. But that cannot happen unless I am willing to quit sleeping in my own dream world of selfish reality and accept the discipline needed to train me to get up on time and interact with God for my own salvation. There is a time for everything, but there also comes a time when it is too late.

(next in series)

False Trinity and Sabbath

This morning I read a devotional about the story of Jesus dealing with the Pharisees over the Sabbath issue. This was not an infrequent encounter but was always very instructive. Actually, now that I think of it, the very fact that Jesus spent so much time trying to realign our thinking as to how to keep the Sabbath properly and get us to realize the true purpose of the Sabbath is strong evidence that He never intended for the Sabbath to be ignored after His resurrection but was preparing His believers to be empowered by it throughout future times.

I heard someone very recently point out something I had not noticed before about the Sabbath. There were times when Jesus healed people that He insisted that they keep quiet about their healing. Often it was to no avail and they couldn't seem to help themselves from running their mouth about what He had done for them. Sometimes this caused so much tension for Him in that area that He consequently had to leave and go elsewhere to minister for awhile.

But it was pointed out the whenever Jesus healed someone on the Sabbath – and He almost always seemed to do so very intentionally – he never told them to keep quiet about it but told them to broadcast it very publicly. It was almost as if He wanted to stir up trouble with the authorities, and that is certainly the affect that it had. The story used in today's reading was just one of those stories.

But as I went to my Bible to look at the story for myself I noticed something very interesting about this particular passage. It very clearly included all three of the false foundations that have been set up in what we call civilization and that we often take for granted as being part of God's government as well. Sometimes I have referred to them as the false trinity. I was alerted to them by a very insightful professor, Jean Sheldon who has helped me see some important aspects of the bigger picture of what is really going on in reality and has also helped dramatically improve my perceptions about God. I have written extensively on these issues in the past but I find it interesting that Jesus included them and even confronted them in this encounter with the Pharisees.

The three false foundations that were incorporated very early in the development of civilization were: Economics, Kingship (or what I sometimes prefer to call hierarchy) and Law. This comes as a surprise and even a shock to many people and at first it did to me as well. But the more I have considered this and pondered the enormous amount of evidence I am convinced of the truth that these are indeed counterfeits. God's government and ways of dealing with His creation is far superior and more loving than this counterfeit system ever allows. Take a look at these verses and see how Jesus addressed these issues.

But when the Pharisees saw this, they said to Him, "Look, Your disciples do what is not lawful to do on a Sabbath." (Matthew 12:2)

"But I say to you that something greater than the temple is here. "But if you had known what this means, 'I DESIRE COMPASSION, AND NOT A SACRIFICE,' you would not have condemned the innocent. "For the Son of Man is Lord of the Sabbath." (Matthew 12:6-8)

And He said to them, "What man is there among you who has a sheep, and if it falls into a pit on the Sabbath, will he not take hold of it and lift it out? "How much more valuable then is a man than a sheep! So then, it is lawful to do good on the Sabbath." (Matthew 12:11-12)

For rulers are not a cause of fear for good behavior, but for evil. Do you want to have no fear of authority? Do what is good and you will have praise from the same; (Romans 13:3)

This last verse is one that I have been looking at for some time now in my study of Romans. As I pointed out some time ago in my meditations on this verse, Jesus' relationship with the authorities in His day reveal a great deal of truth that can easily be obscured if we only use this passage in isolation. In fact this chapter has often been abusively used to try to force people to comply with evil agendas on the part of authorities. Christians are pressured to conform with popular movements through supposed obedience to Scripture. Many have felt the pressure of others to make them feel guilty for not obeying the “plain Word of God” to cooperate with “God-appointed authorities” when their conscience was directing them to do something different.

This has been a point of tension for thousands of years and continues to be. In fact, it will become a weapon against any who refuse to engage or cooperate with the manipulative system that rises out of the “false trinity”, the legal maneuverings of those in these last days who want control over others and use God's name to further their own objectives. This is very clearly spiritual abuse but it goes on all the time. It is not even restricted to Christians but is also easy to see in the practice of Islam which uses very similar tactics to control and intimidate millions of people.

The Pharisees were engaged in the same type of operation against Jesus. They were used to controlling the people under their influence with guilt, shame and fear to keep themselves in power. They had perverted the instructions and laws of the Old Testament to their advantage and had poisoned people's perceptions of God so terribly that the truth about God had almost been completely lost in the hearts of most people. That is the reason that Jesus came to this earth – to undo and reverse the tragic effects of the lies about God that have become all-pervasive.

The way that Jesus related to authorities is extremely enlightening for me as I struggle to absorb the real meaning and purpose of Romans 13. In this story I see that Jesus had zero tolerance for the abusive lies and manipulations of the leaders of His day and yet He still did not engage in improper resistance that is warned against in Romans 13. This is an amazing and sometimes confusing concept to me that I still have a great deal to learn about, especially at the heart level. I know that I have to have the Spirit of God within me or this will never be my own experience.

But I am now seeing that part of the confusion is the deep integration of the false assumptions inherent in these arguments presented by authorities for obedience to their multitude of rules and regulations. I see the very same logic used today to elicit compliance and conformity which is often billed as creating unity. But true unity is something that happens at the heart level and can never be accomplished by external regulation or the use of force. Fear and force are never the tools of God's governance but they are the central focus of Satan's

God's ways are centered around relationships and heart-bonding with genuine love flowing through each life connected to the heart of their Creator. Romans 12 describes the family-style relationship that is so close that it is described as something like a physical body it is so interdependent. The end of chapter 13 returns to this theme as it emphasizes that only with true, selfless love can this ever be accomplished in our lives. It is not something that can be imposed on us from the outside through the use of hierarchy and the power of force which is the basis of most earthly-type authorities. True authority is based on a relationship of the heart, not threats and intimidation and violence.

Jesus also addressed the issue of economics in this story and the baleful influence that it also has on our thinking and relationships. Economics has warped our thinking so badly that it is seen that we value things and objects of monetary worth more than we do our relationships with others. He put His finger directly on that sensitive fault when He exposed the Pharisee's preference for saving a sheep – a monetary object in that day – over blessing a person whom they viewed as not worthy of their attention.

Worst of all, these counterfeits were being promoted by people who claimed to be representing God to the world. In putting artificial values above relationships, legal codes and regulations above internal character qualities, and contrived positions of power and authority above integrity and maturity, they had successfully obscured the truth about God in the minds and hearts of nearly everyone on planet earth. And nothing has changed a great deal even today.

The more I have become aware of the pervasive presence of these counterfeits the more I see what the freedom of the gospel really offers. While God has been forced to relate to mankind for centuries within the context of these counterfeits, He does not intend to incorporate them into His own kingdom. God's ways are not man's ways and the counterfeit will someday have to give way to the real. The true purpose of the Sabbath was to protect and promote the intimacy that God desires to have with all of His children. That has never changed and never will. The Sabbath is the very heart of the 10 Words of God given on Mount Sinai which were simply a description of His own character.

The Sabbath is not an arbitrary command given by God to see if people are willing to be obedient by doing something that makes no sense as I have sometimes heard taught and preached. The Sabbath is the heart of the true gospel which is the restoration of the closeness and beautiful unity that God designed for us to live in with Him and with all of His children.

I want to understand and experience the reality and original purpose of the Sabbath much more. I know that doing so will enable me to draw much closer to the heart of God that is bursting with enormous passion to draw me into intimacy with Him. It will also connect me much closer to others who likewise are seeking to draw close to God, but it will also put me at odds more and more with those who choose to live in preference to external religion.

God, teach me much more about what You designed for me in the Sabbath. Teach and help me to let go of all resistance so that I can come much closer to you without discomfort. You have provided the Sabbath as the primary opportunity through which our relationship and intimacy can deepen and our hearts can be intertwined with love and permanent bonds of affection. All other options are counterfeits and I ask You to keep me from being deceived by them. Make me a channel of blessing and life today for Your name's sake.

(next in series)

Wearing Light

The night is almost gone, and the day is near. Therefore let us lay aside the deeds of darkness and put on the armor of light. (Romans 13:12)

I am always looking for the contextual meaning of the words used in a passage to pick up the broader and deeper implications and connections. Clearly here there is a lot of reference to night and day, darkness and light. As I look at the surrounding verses I see that Paul lists a number of activities associated with the night that we are to move away from as Christians. But in the previous verse he also gives the reason for this – that salvation is closer than it ever has been before.

The word salvation I have come to learn means much more than getting into heaven sometime in the future. It primarily has to do with the healing of the deepest malfunctions of the heart and soul, the lies and pain that motivate most of our sinful behavior. But in this verse I believe that Paul is using it more along the line of rescue which is also a meaning of the original word. Rescue is part of our healing process, for it is also important to get someone away from the hurtful environment that continues to damage the heart, mind and body as well as bring healing to those hurts and truth to those lies.

But God has chosen to begin and accomplish a portion of our healing process while leaving us in this world. It is part of His great wisdom and His strategy for resolving the sin crisis that Lucifer brought onto the whole universe. We may not agree with this strategy or like it, but when it is all over we will realize fully that it was the very best decision, and that it will enable God to assure that sin will never again enter the universe a second time while still preserving the perfect freedom of choice by every intelligent being.

But there is a major point of transition coming soon that will separate those who submit to God's healing process and accept His authority from those who insist on living independently from His authority. As I have observed over the past few years, the Second Coming of Jesus is not the great climax of all ages as many have taught in Christianity, but it is a major transition point and shift in the arrangement of things. It is the initiation of a 1,000-year period of time where all those who have chosen the Lordship of Christ in their heart (even if they never heard the name of Jesus) and have responded to His love in their conscience will be removed from the miasma of sin and suffering on this planet and be taken to an incubator at God's home and allowed to grow up fully to prepare them for the great climax of the Great Trial.

It is this transition point of rescue that I believe Paul is referring to in this verse. It is certainly a hope that we can cling to with eagerness and pray for with passion when we are assaulted with fear and discouragement. In this verse Paul is telling us that the reason we need to release ourselves from the dysfunctional behaviors that flow from unrepaired inner problems is that we need to focus our attention more on God's plan to rescue us than on our desires to mask our pain with selfish, sin-based tranquilizers.

I find the list of things that Paul considers deeds of darkness to be interesting when I look them up in the Greek. But I will save that for another time. What is clear is that the causes of these external behaviors is an internal emptiness of the heart that drives a person to seek ways of numbing their deep pain and attempting to fill the inner void they cannot escape. But that parallels the very nature of darkness itself.

I received an email forward about a month or two ago that I found very enlightening. I usually have little interest in forwards as they are generally mindless and either useless or very biased in some way. But this one, though I doubt it may have really happened the way it was constructed, had a very important point that I found helpful for better perspective. It told of a classroom where an atheist teacher was being very confrontational about God and religion in his attempt to shame and discredit any Christians who might be in his classroom. He managed to outsmart one student who attempted to answer his challenging logic and smugly took on the second. But the second student gave some very compelling answers that completely undermined all the logic that the professor relied on to discredit the existence of God and the problem of evil.

The main point that the student presented was that many things don't really exist as we often assume they do. We simply give them names and even give them a great deal of power in our minds, but in reality they are simply vacuums of something that we were designed to need.

He pointed out that cold is really only the absence of heat. It does not really exist in and of itself.

Darkness is simply the absence of light.

Just because something cannot be seen or proven scientifically does not mean that it does not exist or is not true. Science is not the arbiter of reality. Faith is required to believe in things that we cannot see – even the fact that we have a brain within our own cranium.

And finally he pointed out that in just the same way, evil is not an entity of itself but is just the absence of God who is love.

All of the deeds of evil are simply symptoms of a vacuum in our hearts that has not received the needed life and peace that it was designed to thrive on. We cannot escape that our hearts and minds were created to interact and depend on God our Creator with deepest intimacy. We can deny it, fight it, resist it and run from it; but our hearts were created for love and will never rest until we return to the only Source of love that exists.

So the metaphor of darkness and light that is used in this passage is very powerful. The resistance and the deeds of darkness spoken of in the surrounding verses are symptoms of an emptiness of soul that needs to be filled with the presence and life of the One who designed it. The deeds of darkness are our attempts to substitute other sources and activities to fill the emptiness in our hearts, but they will never accomplish what sin suggests they can do for us. They only tend to numb us to the pain temporarily while making the hole in our heart even bigger and more painful in the end.

What I find fascinating at the end of this verse and in conjunction with verse 14 is the imagery of putting on, or clothing ourselves, with armor of light/the Lord Jesus Christ. The Greek word translated for put on literally means to “sink into a garment”. I like that imagery. It carries with it the idea of rest, of relaxing and falling into the safety and protection and comfort of nice clothes that fit well.

We are created in the image of God. When we put on, or clothe ourselves with Jesus Christ we are amazed to discover that He is a perfect fit. But that is no surprise really for He is the mold from which we were created. We find that when we return to our original source we finally find real fulfillment and all that we were designed to enjoy. Only by abiding in Christ and resting in Him will we ever find the peace and joy and vibrancy that our heart craves for and refuses to rest without.

(next in series)

Two Ways of Fulfilling the Law

What does it really mean to fulfill the law? What goes off in our minds when we hear those words?

I know for me that typically the reaction that I have is from a human legal perspective. Fulfilling a law means to satisfy the demands or requirements of a regulation so that punishment can be avoided. But now I realize that this is based solidly on the counterfeit sense of the interpretation of the word law and is not viewing it in the more accurate sense of law being descriptive of the principles of reality. To view the idea of fulfillment primarily from a legal perspective is to limit too much my understanding of the real issues involved, for I am not saved by keeping the law and thereby satisfying the requirements of holiness. At the same time, I cannot be saved if I am out of harmony with the law.

This gets into the most argued aspect of Christianity that likely has ever existed. Billions have been led to believe that Christ took away the need for us to obey the law by taking the punishment of disobedience upon Himself in our behalf. This line of thinking leads many to believe that they are free to disobey the law without fear of punishment because Jesus stands between them and the “wrath of God” so they no longer need be afraid of punishment and are not longer obligated to keep the law.

But inherent in this logic is a fatal flaw embedded there by the master fabricator of lies himself. Because we mistakenly view the law in the context of the counterfeit legal model that we live in on this earth, we limit our concept of our relationship to law based on the flawed ways in which arbitrary, prescriptive rules are set up and enforced here. Using human reasoning and human faulty legal posturing we create a legal loophole that we think will shield us from any consequences of ignoring God's words to us in His laws.

But Jesus did not come to satisfy the legal demands for justice by the law based on human counterfeit legal models, although in our very limited thinking it would often appear that way. Jesus was primarily operating in the true realm of reality where God's laws are in actuality simply descriptions of the principles of reality and how things function. To claim that Jesus' death shields me from the natural consequences of suffering ill effects from me ignoring the law of gravity is the same kind of illogic that is applied in much of Christianity today. Jesus did not live and die to take away the effects of natural consequences but to demonstrate them so that we would no longer believe Satan's lies.

So in reality, Jesus fulfilled the law in two opposite respects. Because He mysteriously was able to take upon Himself all of the guilt of the whole human race, He suffered the natural consequences that are inevitable from violation of the principles of reality outlined in the Law of God. But He suffered those consequences, not because He earned them from any violations of His own but because He took full responsibility for all of our violations and then demonstrated what happens as a result. This in no way prevents us from suffering the same consequences if we do not relate properly to the demonstration that He gave in His suffering and death. If we refuse to believe the real truth about God's passionate love and about the principles of reality and consequences so graphically displayed on Calvary, we will not be prevented from repeating the suffering and death demonstrated by the perfect Son of God. For that demonstration does not take the place of our suffering the same fate if we refuse to be brought into alignment with the principles of reality in our own life and thinking.

So in one sense, Jesus fulfilled the Law by allowing the natural wages of sin to be realized in His own flesh and soul as a human being. But there is the opposite truth that was also demonstrated during those days and throughout all of His life in which He fulfilled the Law of God. And this sense is the most important sense in which Jesus fulfilled the Law and the sense that has inherent saving, transforming power to align any one of us with the principles of reality which is the law if we allow it to have its effect in our thinking and beliefs at the deepest level of our being.

Owe nothing to anyone except to love one another; for he who loves his neighbor has fulfilled the law. (Romans 13:8)

Love does no wrong to a neighbor; therefore love is the fulfillment of the law. (Romans 13:10)

Paul says twice here that it is love that fulfills the Law of God. And all throughout the writings of John it is repeatedly emphasized that God is love. Love itself is the very essence of all the principles of true reality as set up throughout all the universe because everything was created by the God who is love Himself. So what becomes clear here when all of these issues are viewed from a higher perspective outside of our counterfeit system of artificial law, is that to be out of harmony with love is to suffer and experience death like that which happened to Jesus.

But Jesus did not suffer what He did because He was not in harmony with love but because He took on the dysfunction and disharmony of all those who were out of harmony with love. Isaiah makes this perfectly clear in chapter 53. It was not for anything He did wrong that He suffered but it was on our behalf. But just because He illustrated very graphically the consequences of disharmony with love does not exempt any of us somehow from reality and to continue to live out of sync with the principles of love as outlined and detailed in all of the basic laws that God has put into place.

Love is certainly the fulfillment of the Law, but love does not take us out of reality. Reality as God created it still remains the same and disharmony with the principles of reality still have the same consequences as they did before the death of Jesus. Jesus did not come to change or nullify the Law of God but to change and nullify our twisted ideas about reality and our false opinions about how God feels about us. Jesus came to demonstrate more perfectly in His life and teaching what real love looks and feels like so that we would be drawn by attraction into becoming aligned with that love. For it is only as we become realigned with the principles of love that we will be safe to be exposed to the immense and dangerous power and passion of the Source of all holiness and love, God Himself.

So it becomes much more clear that Jesus fulfilled the Law of God, the very principles of reality itself, in both respects. He fulfilled the Law in demonstrating the consequences of being out of harmony with it (even though He did not live out of harmony Himself) as well as demonstrating the power of love to overcome those consequences in the face of all evil. Jesus exhibited a constant spirit of love in the face of all hatred, abuse and unspeakable evil, not to prove that He was better or more powerful than everyone else but that love itself was stronger that any amount of fear, intimidation and lies that could be invented by the propagator of evil himself. He demonstrated that love, the very foundation of all the principles of reality which make up all the laws that govern all the universe, is superior to any of the propositions and alternatives that Lucifer put forth as a better alternatives to the ways of God.

Satan's kingdom and system of governance is based on force, fear and deception to hold its counterfeit reality together. All of the kingdoms of this world are based on His counterfeit foundations of economics, hierarchy and artificial laws. He has had thousands of years to refine and perfect his system and in these last days will do everything imaginable to bring it to what he considers perfection. But his system is fatally flawed from the very beginning because it refuses real, selfless love and the truth about our need for dependence on God. And if we continue to believe in his lies about reality we will be sucked into the consequences that are inevitable in the realm of the true reality.

According to what I have been learning here in Romans thirteen and all throughout Romans is that resistance is somehow opposite to love. Legalism and dependence on my own obedience is not in harmony with the foundational motive of real love and so keeps me outside the satisfaction of the requirements of the Law. No amount of external conformance to rules will align me with the far higher requirements of perfect, selfless love, for all of these external requirements and performances fail to align my heart with the pulse of God's heart who is the essence of selfless service for others. If I have any resistance in my heart to perfect humility and selfless love and passion to bless others, I will inevitably suffer the fire of “wrath” in the heat that I feel internally as a result of my own resistance to love.

Selfishness is actually trying to change the direction of the current flow of life in all the universe. Selfishness tries to appropriate and suck life into itself in preference to being a channel of life for others. Selfishness is thinking of myself before thinking of others. Selfishness by nature is self-preservation and is the very essence of the theory of evolution. So to claim that I do not believe in evolution while at the same time living in selfishness is really hypocrisy. My sinful flesh believes in the principle of the survival of the fittest and I make my choices based on that principle until I am transformed by the far superior principle demonstrated in the life of Jesus – the principle of real love on which the rest of the universe is founded.

Only by embracing the truth about love and being embraced by the God of pure love will I ever be able to come into alignment with the descriptions of love as outlined in the Laws of God. But only those who choose to allow this transformation to be accomplished in their hearts by the grace of God and the convicting of His Holy Spirit will become aligned properly with the principles of reality and be safe to be filled with the electric dynamos power from the Heart of the universe. Jesus never desired to exempt us from the requirements of the Law but to attract us to be filled with the love that underlies that Law. And only love received from the heart of God will empower us to fulfill the law in the same way that Jesus fulfilled it and demonstrated it throughout all of His life.

As I allow His grace to fill my heart and allow His truths to integrate my intellect with the love that I receive from Him into my heart, my life will become more and more like the perfect demonstration of love. Like Jesus, I will be empowered to love my enemies, to subject myself to authority without fear or resentment and will overcome evil with true goodness. But this can never happen by my own efforts or accomplishments. I must first receive real love before I can have it flow out of me. I am not a source of light but I can be a reflector of light. God, this is what I desire deeply and ask You to do in me!

(next in series)

Awaken from Sleep

Do this, knowing the time, that it is already the hour for you to awaken from sleep; for now salvation is nearer to us than when we believed. (Romans 13:11)

I would like to know what Paul was thinking when he placed this phrase into this passage. I decided to look up other references throughout the Bible that have to do with waking up from sleep and found some very interesting connections and implications. The following passage seems a little lengthy but I include much of it because the context is so important to perceiving the meaning of the highlighted verse. In this passage Joshua is representative of the people seeking to follow God – us. It also has interesting allusions to authority which is also the context of Romans thirteen.

And the angel of the LORD admonished Joshua, saying, "Thus says the LORD of hosts, 'If you will walk in My ways and if you will perform My service, then you will also govern My house and also have charge of My courts, and I will grant you free access among these who are standing here. 'Now listen, Joshua the high priest, you and your friends who are sitting in front of you--indeed they are men who are a symbol, for behold, I am going to bring in My servant the Branch. 'For behold, the stone that I have set before Joshua; on one stone are seven eyes. Behold, I will engrave an inscription on it,' declares the LORD of hosts, 'and I will remove the iniquity of that land in one day. 'In that day,' declares the LORD of hosts, 'every one of you will invite his neighbor to sit under his vine and under his fig tree.'" Then the angel who was speaking with me returned and roused me, as a man who is awakened from his sleep. He said to me, "What do you see?" And I said, "I see, and behold, a lampstand all of gold with its bowl on the top of it, and its seven lamps on it with seven spouts belonging to each of the lamps which are on the top of it; also two olive trees by it, one on the right side of the bowl and the other on its left side." (Zechariah 3:6 – 4:3)

Isn't it interesting that even though Zechariah was seeing profound things in vision about our relationship with God and about salvation that just then he transitioned to another whole level of reality. I believe that when we grasp the real truth about how God feels about us and treats us as demonstrated in this vision about Joshua that we too will suddenly find ourselves transitioning into a far more intense sense of reality that seems like waking up out of a dream. Then it will also be much easier to really see what is true reality.

Some eight days after these sayings, He took along Peter and John and James, and went up on the mountain to pray. And while He was praying, the appearance of His face became different, and His clothing became white and gleaming. And behold, two men were talking with Him; and they were Moses and Elijah, who, appearing in glory, were speaking of His departure which He was about to accomplish at Jerusalem. Now Peter and his companions had been overcome with sleep; but when they were fully awake, they saw His glory and the two men standing with Him. (Luke 9:28-32)

I see repeatedly throughout the stories of the Bible and particularly with these disciples that sleep seems to interfere with their ability to stay synchronized with the reality that Jesus lived within. In my own experience I have noticed many times that often when God is about to reveal something very important to me that I will feel a very strong sense of sleepiness overcoming me. It may be during a sermon or when I am meditating or some other time. But I sometimes realize that this sleepiness is not necessarily from physical tiredness as I am led to suppose but is somehow supernatural in that it is trying to prevent me from receiving a powerful blessing waiting for me. From the examples of the disciples I know that I need to resist this “overcoming” feeling and do whatever it takes to wake up and activate my mind and heart to be able to receive whatever it is God is waiting to impart to me.

This is not to say that every time I feel sleepy that I should fight it. God wants me to take care of my physical body properly and that includes getting healthy amounts of sleep. Too often our sleep is deprived because of poor choices we make in other areas of our life that keep us from resting enough. It may be choosing to be entertained late into the night or to allow worry to prevent us from resting. It may be failure to obey the laws of health in the ways we eat and so depriving our bodies of needed rest and nourishment. But sleep is also sometimes a tool of the enemy to block us from enjoying the privileges and opportunities for growth that God has in store for us at various times.

But all things become visible when they are exposed by the light, for everything that becomes visible is light. For this reason it says, "Awake, sleeper, And arise from the dead, And Christ will shine on you." (Ephesians 5:13-14)

There is so much in these various verses about sleep and being awake that I could not begin to unpack them. But I find it fascinating to put some of them together to see what kind of light begins to shine out of them in reference to the first verse listed from Romans. In this passage the element of light is introduced as contrasted with sleep. In fact, in several of these verses as well as the one from Romans, the idea of sleep is connected with darkness and night and something we need to get beyond in our spiritual experience. Growing effectively as a Christian means to move more and more into light of truth about God and about ourselves. To escape the problems of darkness we must introduce more light.

As the pregnant woman approaches the time to give birth, she writhes and cries out in her labor pains, Thus were we before You, O LORD. We were pregnant, we writhed in labor, we gave birth, as it seems, only to wind. We could not accomplish deliverance for the earth, nor were inhabitants of the world born. Your dead will live; their corpses will rise. You who lie in the dust, awake and shout for joy, for your dew is as the dew of the dawn, and the earth will give birth to the departed spirits. Come, my people, enter into your rooms and close your doors behind you; hide for a little while until indignation runs its course. For behold, the LORD is about to come out from His place to punish the inhabitants of the earth for their iniquity; and the earth will reveal her bloodshed and will no longer cover her slain. (Isaiah 26:17-21)

There is tremendous truths in these verses that is very important for us a God's people to assimilate. Our efforts and programs and determination to evangelize and save the world are exposed here as trying to give birth only to produce a lot of hot air. In essence, we are like the bones in Ezekiel's vision in Ezekiel 37 waiting to be reassembled and restored to life by the breath of God. When we receive that life from God we will then be empowered to be an unstoppable army that awakes and shouts for joy.

Arise, shine; for your light has come, and the glory of the LORD has risen upon you. For behold, darkness will cover the earth and deep darkness the peoples; but the LORD will rise upon you and His glory will appear upon you. Nations will come to your light, and kings to the brightness of your rising. Lift up your eyes round about and see; they all gather together, they come to you. Your sons will come from afar, and your daughters will be carried in the arms. Then you will see and be radiant, and your heart will thrill and rejoice; because the abundance of the sea will be turned to you, the wealth of the nations will come to you. A multitude of camels will cover you, the young camels of Midian and Ephah; all those from Sheba will come; they will bring gold and frankincense, and will bear good news of the praises of the LORD. (Isaiah 60:1-6)

(next in series)