Transformational Gratitude

Now may the God who gives perseverance and encouragement grant you to be of the same mind with one another according to Christ Jesus. (Romans 15:5)

A friend called me yesterday and began sharing with me his gratitude and praise for God while also telling me that his basement had been leaking in the last round of heavy rains. He had been reading about the way that God can oversee every event that comes into our lives and will only allow that which is for our ultimate good. So when God tells us to give thanks in everything He is telling us that everything can work for our good, for God would never ask us to give thanks for anything that is evil.

I was thankful that this friend was so full of encouragement and was sharing it with me. I know that he sometime struggles with discouragement and feels that he has almost no one to share his heart with or to encourage him. We have tried to stay in touch but at times it is long periods between contacts. At the same time I share his feelings of frustration at not having people in our lives who are willing to help bear our weaknesses as described in verse one.

As we continued to discuss together we talked about one of the problems that we typically run into with our attempts to live a life full of gratitude. There seems to be a habit we have that our praises for God usually revolve around supposed blessings, external “good” circumstances and material enhancements for our lives. We also look for things like unusual events where we were supernaturally protected from harm or gained advantage in some way that made us feel more important. It is not hard to listen to a session of typical praise and thanksgiving to hear things of this sort about 99% of the time.

But a very important lesson I heard a few years ago has really affected me and influenced my own thinking along these lines. While it is certainly not wrong to be appreciative of the “blessings” that we perceive as coming from God – and we usually fail to do that nearly enough – it comes with a great risk, a liability that can easily be exploited by Satan to cause us a great deal of discouragement many times.

If the reasons for our thanksgiving are based on the uncertain foundation of temporal blessings and good fortunes that come our way, then we are left with very little reason to entertain a spirit of gratitude whenever it appears that things are suddenly going wrong, that life appears to be falling apart, when trials and temptations surround us with darkness and fear. In those times it is very easy to start believing that God must be upset with us or has withdrawn from us in displeasure for some reason. In other words, we can easily allow Satan to control our perceptions about God and His attitude toward us through manipulation of our circumstances.

I have to say that this has been my experience for most of my life. I have a long history of resistance to gratitude to the point where I became known early on as a person who had very little appreciation for the kindnesses or gifts from others. I was sometimes rebuked for this lack of appreciation which only tended to reinforce my negative attitude and cause me to resent others more than appreciate them. It seemed to me that blessings and gifts always came with strings attached and that if I did not comply with unspoken demands to properly appreciate them that they would be withdrawn. In other words, blessings and love toward me were always conditional upon my proper reception and appreciation of them.

I still struggle with this life-long habit of thinking that is deeply embedded in my psyche from a very young age. But learning this important principle about gratitude has been a very big step in liberating me from this trap of legalistic mentality and self-centered discouragement. For I came to learn that it is far more important and transforming internally to focus the bulk of my attention on the character and motives of the heart behind the gifts instead of basing my gratitude on the gifts themselves. This takes the opportunity away from Satan to manipulate my feelings and opinions about God by yanking me around through constantly changing circumstances.

I give Satan a huge but unfair advantage over God in my life whenever I allow my praise and appreciation to rest only on circumstances or temporal blessings. For in doing so I will form my opinions about God and about how He feels about me based on my current circumstances instead of on His declarations about the true intentions of His heart. By doing this I become easy prey for being blinded by the lies and deceptions about God constantly promoted by Satan and the world around me, and living the life of a Christian becomes a constant chore and takes much more effort than God ever intended.

As I shared with my friend yesterday, and I myself need to me reminded of far more often, I believe that there is an overwhelming power, an enormous reservoir of emotional energy, hope and courage easily available to each one of us if we would learn to tap into the power inherent in true gratitude and praise. Satan and his agents are keenly aware of this great threat to their influence over us and are at work with intense frenzy to prevent us from being energized by this activity. To do this they work tirelessly to push entertainment, fear, stress, busyness and myriads of other distractions into our attention to try to prevent us from breathing this life-giving atmosphere of true praise that energizes all of heaven.

What perked up my attention this morning was that this text in Romans is reinforcing this very truth. I have discovered at times the transforming power of focusing on the truth about God's character in times of intense fear or hopelessness and have felt the peace and rest that comes from choosing to thank God for the truths about what He is really like while consciously turning my attention away from the source of my fears. And while that is an important secret for me to learn, I also realize that this attitude of focusing on the heart of God needs to become the all-consuming passion and obsession of my whole life. This is the preparation for heaven that is truly effective and transformational for my heart and which is the only real preparation that effectively qualifies me for heaven.

As I read this text and the following ones this morning I was reminded that my perseverance and encouragement come from God, not from trying to work them up for myself. And as I allow my heart to warm to this truth – that God is the kind of being who wants to empower me to persevere and is always ready to encourage me – then I find that gratitude will spring up naturally and spontaneously; I don't have to work hard at dutifully giving thanks as I have often felt.

Moving over to this whole new way of thinking and reacting comes with a most powerful result within the body of Christ. For those who begin to live a life focused on the goodness and love of God instead of basing their praise and gratitude only on the externals which are only temporary, will find that their hearts began quickly bonding with each other and the unity that Jesus prayed for in John 17 will began to become obvious and irresistible.

I have seen many programs and attempts and calls for unity among Christians. This has led to all sorts of ideas as to how we should achieve this righteous goal set forth by Jesus. But the problem is often that we try to arrive at it by all sorts of means other than the only true way laid out by Jesus. For if we introduce any false elements into our efforts to achieve unity we have just contaminated the ingredients for His perfect cake and the results will always be a failure to rise and set properly when put in the heat.

Maybe coming to understand the true nature and motives for genuine thanksgiving and praise and getting our focus on seeking God's face and learning the real truth about Him is analogous to the secret ingredient that causes the cake to rise to greater heights that we ever thought imaginable. And as we join our hearts with others who are also discovering the secret power of praise and gratitude based on the right motivations we will discover an amazing family emerging from the present discord seen in religion today. And as we look at what is happening to us with our hearts strangely attracted to those we previously only resented, we will see that it is because it is God who is granting us to be of the same mind with one another according to Christ Jesus, so that with one accord you may with one voice glorify the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ. Therefore, accept one another, just as Christ also accepted us to the glory of God. (Romans 15:5-7)

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Three Weeks to Conquer

Whenever I come across things that seem a bit too obvious, pieces of information coming from completely different sources that strongly compliment each other, I am now more likely to suspect that it might be more than just coincidence or chance. I try to be open to the possibility that there may be an intelligent coordination going on to alert me about something for my instruction or benefit that I need to be willing to accept and integrate somehow into my life. While I try not to view such things with a heightened sense of superstition or put more weight on it than other more reliable sources of revelation from God, I do believe that God is ready to reveal important things on a regular basis to those who are learning to listen with an open and non-resistant spirit.

This morning seems to possibly be one of those occasions.

Each morning I have a habit of reading two devotional books designed for daily readings before I get into my exploration of the Word. The two books have nothing to do with each other and come from very different authors and perspectives. One is targeted for youth and has a wide variety of readings that appeal to the younger generation. The other book is more oriented toward thinking adults and is carefully going through each verse of the book of Revelation from a devotional perspective.

The first book I read this morning talked about the scientific discovery of how the brain forms habits. It explained that a surgeon noticed repeatedly that patients who had had limbs amputated often took exactly 21 days to quit feeling phantom pains in their missing limbs. After some research and testing it came to light that the brain takes just that long to form a habit effectively.

Well, that was interesting enough. So I turned to the second devotional book and began to read the passage for today from it. What peaked my interest was that he too chose to write about habits and relayed a story from his own experience about the difficulty people have breaking a bad habit permanently. He observed that people who smoked, when confronted with graphic pictures of diseased smoker's lungs, were easily frightened into quiting the habit almost immediately. But then he also observed that as he visited them over time that nearly every one of them started up the habit again about two weeks later.

As I pondered these two pieces of information that seemed to be meant for each other I wondered intently why they were so well coordinated for me this morning. Yes, they were very valuable insights that definitely complimented each other, but I wondered why I was receiving them just now. Was there something about to occur in my experience that would require this information as an important key to use for myself? Obviously I don't know that yet. But my curiosity was aroused and I asked God why this was given to me just now.

I couldn't imagine how it might fit into my study of Romans. I couldn't remember anything I have looked at in the current passage under consideration that this might apply to but I decided to go ahead and open the Word and see what else God might have to say to me.

Well, the epiphany continues to grow. As soon as I opened my Bible to Romans 15 my eyes fell on the following verses that definitely can be enhanced by this information given to me just minutes earlier.

For whatever was written in earlier times was written for our instruction, so that through perseverance and the encouragement of the Scriptures we might have hope. Now may the God who gives perseverance and encouragement grant you to be of the same mind with one another according to Christ Jesus. (Romans 15:4-5)

One of the points brought out about attempting to break a bad habit through the motivation of fear is that fear, while a very powerful incentive at first tends to not have very much staying power when it comes to effectively changing the life long-term. This goes along closely with what I have been learning for years about how the brain functions and the two kinds of bonds that are used to hold people together. Fear bonds can be very strong but at the same time they are quite unstable and can be displaced rather easily by an even greater fear, or can simply loose their power from apathy over time. Evidently according to this report there might even be an inherent time limit associated with the use of a fear employed to change a life habit.

What I am seeing in this passage in Romans is a clear message of our need for perseverance. One of the greatest hindrances to changing the habits in our lives – habits in the way we think about God, about others, about ourselves which lie at the root of most of our behaviors and relationships – is our seeming inability to keep on pursuing a new way of thinking, to hang on to the original incentive that caused us to want to change. The word often used for this need to continue on is this word perseverance.

But what I likely would not have noticed in this passage had it not been for being alerted to the problems of trying to change habits that I read in both devotionals this morning, was the importance of having the right motivation for the perseverance that is needed. And this too, goes back to the most important element that needs to be addressed in our relationship with God – our opinion about how He motivates us.

If I believe, as I did for most of my life, that God primarily uses fear to motivate me to change my old habits; if I believe that God is in the business of frightening His children into obedience, then I will find that I might have great initial incentive at times to change my ways and try to abandon my old habits of acting and thinking – for a time. But if I believe that God's methods revolve around using fear to motivate my heart to follow Him and to unify with the body of Christ as addressed here in Romans, then I will be repeatedly frustrated in my inability to have the perseverance needed to effect long-lasting change in my life.

I might then come to believe that what I need is even more fear and I may look for even greater sources of fear and intimidation to get myself and others to change our ways, but if I continue to depend on the element of fear as my primary fuel for getting me to comply with God's requirements then I will find myself in a life of frustration, discouragement and repeated falling back into old habits of thinking and living. And I can certainly vouch for the truth of that last statement from long and personal experience.

What I see here in this passage sheds a lot of light on this aspect of perseverance. Verse four alerts me that I need this most important element in my life along with encouragement which I am told will come from the Scriptures. The result of these two important ingredients in my mind will produce hope in my life. That is wonderful, but if I don't continue on reading I might be tempted to jump to the conclusion that I must immerse myself deeper and deeper into the Word of God to pump myself up with lots of religious information in order to keep myself motivated to obey all the previous warnings and instructions of this passage.

But what I find in the very next verse is a wonderful insight into the way God wants to motivate me. And since God is the one who designed my brain to begin with it only makes sense that He would employ the right methods that are far more effective for lasting change in me than the false, counterfeit methods usually promoted for change. It says here that perseverance and encouragement come from God, not just studying the Bible. And this links closely with what Jesus said to the religious people when He was here.

You diligently study the Scriptures because you think that by them you possess eternal life. These are the Scriptures that testify about me, yet you refuse to come to me to have life. (John 5:39-40 NIV)

The important thing to point out that brings this full circle is the unavoidable fact that God is love. The Scriptures make it absolutely plain that the very essence of God is love and that Jesus came to this earth to reveal that love to everyone. So given that God is love Himself and that perseverance and encouragement come from God as noted here in Romans 15, then it would only follow that the motivation inherent in the perseverance needed to overcome old habits and establish new ones in my life will be based on love and not on fear.

There is no fear in love; but perfect love casts out fear, because fear involves punishment, and the one who fears is not perfected in love. (1 John 4:18)

This now makes much more sense as to why it is so important to have love as the motivation for change rather than fear. While fear may appear to get more immediate or obvious results and is the preferred method used in nearly all religions (and pretty much everything else in the world today), fear is not how God runs His kingdom. Fear does not have the lasting endurance needed for real transformation of the heart (only 2 weeks worth of fear-based change at best?) but actually tends to isolate the heart and make it more brittle and withdrawn from others. Only perfect love has the power and effectiveness to accomplish real change in overcoming habits (more than 3 weeks of motivation) and rewiring the brain in the ways of God.

Love bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things. Love never fails.... (1 Corinthians 13:7-8)

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Reproach and Intercession

For even Christ did not please Himself; but as it is written, "THE REPROACHES OF THOSE WHO REPROACHED YOU FELL ON ME." (Romans 15:3)

This verse and the ones following this that enhance it remind me of a most important revision of a word that I learned not long ago. I heard someone explain from the Bible the true meaning of the word intercessor and it brought a great deal of light into my heart and wonderfully enhanced my growing, changing understanding of the truth about God.

Yesterday I took a look at the context in Psalms from which this quotation was lifted and saw that it describes an identification with God so closely that the insults and reproach directed at Him fall on anyone who identifies that closely with Him as well. I also saw that in applying this principle of identification, Paul is instructing us to treat others around us with such an attitude of acceptance that the reproaches directed at them will be shared by us even though we may not agree with their viewpoints. But in doing so we are following the example of Jesus who identified Himself with all of humanity so closely that we could sense that He really cares about us.

The active ingredient that makes this so powerful is the element of joy. Based on the understanding that joy is the description of what we feel whenever someone is genuinely glad to be with us, Jesus is the perfect demonstration of how to live in the most joy. In Hebrews we are told that Jesus endured the cross and despised the shame for the sake of the joy that was set before Him. That joy was discussed at length in the last hours with His disciples before Jesus was taken away from them to die on the cross. It was the thing He focused on obsessively because it is the part of the human brain that is most important for successfully enduring trauma of every kind.

But what does this all have to do with the concept of an intercessor?

What amazed me the most in my update on the true function of an intercessor was the purpose of intercession and who it benefits and who it is designed to change. I grew up assuming like nearly everyone I know that Jesus was our intercessor for the purpose of convincing God to allow sinners to be saved in Paradise. I was not quite sure how it was all supposed to work, but from what I was taught I came to believe that basically Jesus was running interference for us to give us time to improve our lives with God's help to the point that heaven would approve of us and finally relent to allow us to join the rest of those in heaven.

This assumed belief system or some close variation on it is the basis for what is known as perfectionism and also for legalism. I am very well acquainted with these lifestyles though I have absolutely no desire to be involved with them again. The weight of fear and guilt and obsession with focusing on ferreting out every little supposed sin in one's own life is very debilitating, and the greatest danger in that way of life is the lack of joy and peace which are the most important preparations needed to endure hardship. Those caught up in this kind of fear-based philosophy tend to cultivate to a fine art the practice of fault-finding whether it be faults in their own life or in other's.

One of the biggest problems with fault-finding is that the principle of assimilation cannot be avoided in the process. This principle states that you become like what you dwell upon. So if I spend time focusing on the faults of those around me or even if I am obsessing about finding any little sin within my own heart in order to satisfy the demands of a perfect God in heaven, the undesired results will be that my own heart becomes more and more infected with the very things I am attempting to eliminate.

As a result, the people who follow the plan of perfecting themselves in order to get to heaven by working to eliminate what they believe is sin in their life end up adopting one or two means of making “progress”. They either work hard enough at this to blind themselves to their real shortcomings and end up in a self-deception that is extremely dangerous in the light of heaven and believe that they are far more righteous that how God sees them, or they become very discouraged and depression takes over their soul and spirit as they realize that they can never accomplish the task of becoming perfect. Either way their heart becomes hardened and they fail to grasp the real truth about God's attitude toward them.

Am I asserting that a person can never become righteous in the sight of God? Well, that depends on the definition a person is using for the word righteous. But what I have begun to see more and more clearly is that our real problem is the direction from which we view all of these elements of Christianity, religion, righteousness and salvation. What I have come to see so much more clearly is that for most of my life I have been taught nearly everything backwards, and trying to achieve righteousness or live as a Christian by doing it backwards will never produce real righteousness.

What is most liberating for all of this confusion about how to get right with God and find peace for my soul is to understand the true role and purpose of an intercessor. While it is very true that an intercessor lives for the purpose of changing someone's mind about another person, the problem most of us have with correctly understanding the part Jesus plays in this is knowing who it is that He is working to change or convince.

You see, if I think for a moment that God is the one whom Jesus is working to change in His attitude about me, then by extension I also am assuming that God is the problem that has to be fixed in order for me to get into heaven. It is assumed that if Jesus can do whatever it takes to change God's mind about me effectively enough then I have a shot at being saved under the merits of Jesus' intercession. But is that the real purpose of Jesus as my intercessor? Is He really running interference for me before the presence of God until I am good enough to impress God with my level of absorbed or achieved righteousness?

Putting it this way begins to expose the real fallacy of this kind of thinking. Jesus stated unequivocally that He and the Father had identical attitudes about us. So if that is the case then there is absolutely nothing that Jesus could do to change the Father's mind or else He would be denying that they already felt the same about us. Jesus came to reveal to us how passionately the Father and the Son both love us, not for Him to get tuned into understanding our predicament better so that He could go back and explain things more convincingly before the Father's throne.

So what is the real truth about intercession? First of all we must realize that the one's with all the misunderstanding are humans, not God. The antagonism in this relationship is all on our side with none of it on God's side. There is not one particle of bitterness, resentment, anger or misunderstanding in the heart of God toward us. (Yes He is very angry about sin, but not because He hates us but because sin is the lies that keeps us from believing the truth about His love for us and keeps us away from Him.) Any belief to the contrary comes straight from the father of lies, Satan himself who is known as the accuser. The sooner we divest ourselves of these false beliefs about how God feels about us the sooner we will be reconciled to His heart that is yearning for us to be united in total intimacy with Him.

And that is the whole reason and function of the intercessory work of Jesus. Jesus came for one purpose only – to change our minds about God by any means possible no matter how costly it was to Him personally. We are the ones holding on to myriads of lies about God, not God holding grudges against us that need to be resolved. We are the ones in all the need of intellectual and emotional adjustment by exposure to the real truth about God's constant and irrevocable love and forgiveness for us. And as we begin to accept this truth about reality and begin to believe the truth as it is in Jesus, we will also begin to experience this thing called joy. For joy is the experience that fills our heart as we begin to sense that both Jesus and God are always intently glad to be with us no matter how we feel or even how much we misunderstand or even hate them.

In these verses are described more accurately the role of Jesus as our intercessor. The reproaches and insults and lies that we have believed and directed toward God all of our lives have landed on Jesus, the one who is totally identified with God in spirit and heart. But Jesus gladly accepts all of this in hope and faith that it will open our minds and hearts to see the real truth about Him and His Father and that we will begin to change our minds about how they feel toward us. Intercession is 100% directed toward changing our minds about God and not at all about changing God's mind about us.

The more this truth sinks into my own heart – and I have to say I need to understand it much more clearly than I yet do – the more sense my mind can make of the real reason that Jesus came to live and die on this earth. I am still praying for a much clearer revelation of this truth, but what little I have grasped so far has produced moments of intense joy and amazement for me. It has also discounted nearly everything taught by religious people which continues to be a source of confusion for my heart. But the more focused I am on listening to the voice of God through His Word and His Spirit to my heart, the more all of this makes sense and more importantly the more my heart is warmed and drawn to love Him in return.

I am the object of Jesus' intercession in heaven. I am the one that needs my mind and heart transformed in my opinions about how God feels about me. I am the one with all the lies and hostilities toward God that need exposure and healing. And I pray that Jesus will continue to completion His work of intercession in my own life so that I too can enter into His joy and embrace His love for me unreservedly. Maranatha!

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Bearing Weaknesses, Carrying Burdens

Now we who are strong ought to bear the weaknesses of those without strength and not just please ourselves. Each of us is to please his neighbor for his good, to his edification. For even Christ did not please Himself; but as it is written, "the reproaches of those who reproached You fell on me." (Romans 15:1-3)

"Come to me, all you that are weary and are carrying heavy burdens, and I will give you rest. Take my yoke upon you, and learn from me; for I am gentle and humble in heart, and you will find rest for your souls. For my yoke is easy, and my burden is light." (Matthew 11:28-30 NRSV)

I am wondering what these verses mean for me personally. There is so much here and almost none of it is going to happen in my life by my own efforts naturally unless the Spirit does His work in me. But how am I to relate to and perceive the application of these words to my own experience in the context of what I have been learning over the past few days and weeks?

I see in the words of Jesus here how He fulfills the description of what Paul talks about. And it seems clear enough that the example of Jesus and how He relates to me (and that requires ongoing updates of my perceptions about the real truth about how God relates to me) is the demonstration of how He desires me to relate to and treat others. That is implicit in the words, take my yoke upon you, and learn from me....

It is obvious that Jesus is stronger than any of us. From that place of strength He bears my weaknesses and puts my needs ahead of pleasing Himself. That too is implicit in the words, for I am gentle and humble in heart.... But it is not quite so clear just how I am to follow His example in my relationship with others.

I reckon that a good starting place would be to learn to reflect the gentleness and humility of Jesus in my own spirit. I am tempted to say that this is a very difficult task for me but then I notice the last words in this verse, my yoke is easy and my burden is light. That alerts me to the fact that if I think it is hard then I must still not be in right relationship with Jesus or I am still very confused about what He is really like and is desiring for me to emulate.

I am reminded of a term that carries a great deal of meaning that I have heard in the past – wounded healers. It conveys the idea that those ministering to others are themselves in constant need of healing but at the same time are likely ahead in their healing process of those they in turn are ministering to. Though at times it seems illogical, I must remember that I cannot wait until I am fully healed before I am willing to pass along the grace to someone else that is working to transform my own wounds.

But just how does this process of bearing weaknesses take place? How does Jesus relieve me of my heavy burdens? This all sounds very appealing and attractive in many ways but at the same time it seems obscure a little bit, sort of mysterious or mystical. I have had this question swirling around in my heart for most of my life whenever I hear these words quoted from Jesus. It's great to say that I should just come to Him whenever I feel weighed down in my spirit and find rest, but in actuality what does that really involve? And not only how can I understand it well enough to experience it deeply myself, how can I be able to explain it to someone else and how am I to copy that example for them as well?

I am not so sure I want to attempt to satisfy all of these questions in a hurry. Quick answers to deep heart questions are almost always disappointing at best and these are the kinds of emotional questions that I prefer to leave on the table for God to address more thoroughly in His timing. But at the same time I have also found it very helpful, instructive and often inviting for God to spend some time dwelling on the words and seeing the various ways they apply and the many different implications that can be discovered in the context. As I allow my mind to consider many different possibilities I am usually moved at a deeper level by confirmations, insights from the outside and convictions by the Spirit of God that bring me peace, rest and – yes, joy as I allow myself exposure to the presence of God in my meditation.

One thing that seems striking to me is the parallel nature of these two passages. In Romans Paul is addressing those he says are stronger than those they should be helping and in Matthew there is no question that Jesus is speaking from a position of greater strength than those He invites to come to Him. I also sense that there is similarity in the reasons or objectives of the activities described here. In Romans one of the main reasons for bearing other's weaknesses is for their edification, to help them integrate into the edifice of the temple of God. In Jesus' words the emphasis of the objective is much more relational in nature, though the purpose of the instructions in Romans is also relational.

I am running out of time right now to pursue this further this morning but I am going to be listening today to what the Spirit has to say on this as I work and travel and live life. I invite you to also open your heart and mind to listen to what God desires to share with you about this. And I would be thrilled to hear what you might receive as you listen for His voice in your heart about this. For if you are reading this you are likely being drawn into the same body, the same temple of God that I am being integrated into and we have something to share with each other for our edification.

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