Paul as Priest

...to be a minister of Christ Jesus to the Gentiles, ministering as a priest the gospel of God, so that my offering of the Gentiles may become acceptable, sanctified by the Holy Spirit. (Romans 15:16)

This is the beginning of a whole section here in Romans 15 where Paul relates some of his own reasons and background for the work he is doing. As I read this verse a few questions came to my mind.

What does it mean to minister as a priest?

What is involved in his offering of the Gentiles?

Why is it important that this offering become acceptable?

What is meant by this offering being sanctified?

I'm not sure I have enough knowledge or education to fully answer the first question. However, I once heard a definition of the work of a priest that left a deep impression on me that I believe may give some important insight.

A priest is a person who's assignment is to convey the truths of God to other people. In addition, it is also his responsibility to take upon himself the burdens, problems and sins of the people that he ministers to and bring them to God. In so doing he is both mediating as well as training the people by example how they are to become free from the destructive influences of the sins that enslave them. So in essence, a priest is a very close friend of God and is to also be a very close friend of the people – very much like a Friend of the Bridegroom. However, his first loyalty is always to his God.

When I went to look up some of these words in the original I noticed that in the KJV this reference to priest is completely missing. However, when I looked up the Greek word for ministering the idea of priest is very clearly a central part of the meaning of this word. But for whatever reason those translators for King James decided to leave out any reference to priests here. But I think it has significant bearing on what Paul is trying to get across.

In the many functions that God ordained for priests, there was a lot of offering going on. Most of the time we generally only think of the blood offerings where a priest was to take an animal sacrifice that a person brought to the sanctuary and offer it up to God on the altar after the sinner killed the animal. This was to make it clear in the mind of the sinner the terribly and deadly effects that sin always has on our lives and the need for their reconciliation and reconnection with their only Source of life. The role of the priest was to offer up this sacrifice to God as a symbol of the atoning sacrifice that would happen in the death of Jesus on the cross.

But the sacrifice mentioned in this verse is not that kind of offering. I noticed in the original language that this offering was specifically mentioned as a bloodless offering. That is different than the blood offerings for sin in the sanctuary services. This was more along the line of offerings of food, grain, oil, etc. There were specific instructions for each of these offerings and the symbolic significance for each one is not so clear in most of our minds as the blood offerings. But one thing is clear – every offering brought to God was to be sanctified or made holy in order to be acceptable in God's presence.

This is noted later in this verse where Paul mentions his desire for his offering of the Gentiles to be made acceptable by the sanctification of the Holy Spirit. In fact, the Greek word for Holy, as in Holy Spirit, is almost identical to the word for sanctified. So in reality, whatever it is that needs to happen to make an offering acceptable will align it with the characteristic that is the very identity of the Spirit of God. (For more on the real meaning of the word holy, see my home-grown dictionary page.)

So, given the context of the work of a priest, what is in Paul's thinking when he talks about offering Gentiles to God?

In the first part of this verse he makes it clear that he was a minister of Christ Jesus to the Gentiles. Just like a priest was to be a representative for God to the people, Paul felt strongly that God's purpose for his life was specifically to be God's representative to people outside the Jewish culture and religion who knew little to nothing about the true God of heaven. This he elaborates on further in this chapter. So part of Paul's passion for reaching out to people who knew almost nothing about God was to enlighten their hearts and minds about God and attract them to become part of a sanctified offering to God themselves. Paul was simply an agent for Jesus Christ, a channel through which Jesus could accomplish His desires to draw all people unto Himself. Paul's part in this activity was partly to help organize this offering for God, to introduce people to God's heart by revealing the love and passion that God has for them which is the essence of the gospel, the good news.

But why is it important that the offering of Gentiles be made acceptable to God? What does that say about God?

This is precisely where a person's inherent biases about God will most likely surface. The reasoning behind our assumptions about what it means to prepare to meet God reveals what we really think God is like, whether He is angry, indifferent, moody, fickle, looking for excuses to punish, or whether He is consistently loving, kind, patient, just, fair, good and full of joy and peace. Generally our concept of God is a strange mixture of these things, an amalgamation of sorts that is derived from our childhood, our religious prejudices and assumptions and our life experiences. But our present beliefs about God will strongly influence what we are willing to consider seriously when new information comes our way.

I am at a point in my life where my internal picture of God has gone through radical transition. But there are a number of new (to me) understandings that are becoming firmly rooted in my mind and heart about what God is really like. These new understandings about God are in sharp contrast with much of what I was taught and mentored growing up, but I find them much more consistent with what I read from the Bible and even what seems fair and right in my own heart. So the answer that I sense to this question is very different now than the answer I would have supposed a number of years ago.

In the Old Testament sanctuary services and instructions there was a lot of emphasis on things being done correctly and everything utilized in those services being sanctified for that use. At the initiation of the sanctuary in the wilderness, everything was sprinkled with blood to set it apart in everyone's minds from the other things of everyday life. It was set apart exclusively for service to God, which is what the word holy means. Likewise, the priest's were also set apart for God's service and as the service continued to operate for hundreds of years the offerings brought to the sanctuary were also sanctified or set apart before they could be properly offered up to God. If this was not done the consequences could be fatal which did happen at times. Think of the stories of Nadab and Abihu as well as Uzzah.

Many people would point to these stories as prime examples of the reality of an angry God who had no patience for people who made mistakes or worse yet who might be somewhat unpredictable or very demanding in His requirements. This causes many to believe that the God of the New Testament is very different than the God revealed in the Old. But contrary to these assumptions, I am now seeing much more clearly in these stories our need to understand properly the real danger of not becoming synchronized with the immense power of God's passion before coming close to His presence. God never changed. It is not a matter of anger or impatience on God's part but a matter of respecting the intense power inherent in His nature of passionate love and absolute purity.

We have little problem understanding our need to deeply respect the dangerous power of high-voltage lines that carry thousands of volts of electricity across our countrysides. We would consider it the height of stupidity for someone to think they could just touch these lines with impunity without regard for the laws of electricity. But when it comes to God's presence and the protocol that must be respected if we are to be united with the greatest Source of power in the whole universe, we seem to have an inherent reaction of rebellion and resistance to God's requirements. Of course, resistance is our greatest enemy when dealing with electricity and likewise I am learning that resistance is also our greatest danger when dealing with spiritual realities.

I believe that Paul had a much better grasp of all this than most people today, which is why he knew that his desire to bring Gentiles close to God would require that they be sanctified or made holy in order for his offering to be safe in God's presence. And the way to make something or someone safe to enter the presence of intense power, whether it be high-voltage electricity or the even higher voltage of God's presence is to align them properly, especially at the heart level, with the way God thinks and operates. For an offering to be safe in God's presence it most importantly must become disconnected from “ground”, from the world's way of thinking and reasoning and to become synchronized with heaven's way of thinking, the assumptions and attitudes that pervade the presence of the angels and all the unfallen beings throughout the entire universe.

What was startling to people in Paul's day was that he was so bold as to believe that Gentiles could participate in this presentment to God right alongside Jews, God's chosen people, who before this time were considered to be the only people “safe” enough to come into God's presence. God had chosen Paul as a special envoy to open up the narrow box that had so long restricted the thinking of religious people and show that anyone anywhere could be a part of God's true family if they were willing to become molded and re-formed in the image of God.

The distinction between Jew and Gentiles is almost a non-issue for most people today. But we have our own versions of prejudice in religion that is along the very same lines. The denomination we belong to or even the sub-group within that denomination can become a very important barrier in our thinking to the much grander plans of God for His children. Our nationalism can also be a means of prejudice in our hearts without our realizing it. It disturbs me many times when we ask for prayers for our troops but never even think of equally praying for our enemies troops with the very same fervor. But this betrays our failure to live in harmony with the teachings of Jesus that we claim to be following.

Lord, prepare me for encountering Your presence by cleansing me of all resistance to Your ways of thinking. Fill me with Your unconditional love and re-form my heart to be reflective of Your perfect ways. Write Your laws upon my heart and fill me with Your Spirit and Your perspective – for Your name's sake.

(next in series)

The Ruler

Again Isaiah says, "THERE SHALL COME THE ROOT OF JESSE, AND HE WHO ARISES TO RULE OVER THE GENTILES, IN HIM SHALL THE GENTILES HOPE." (Romans 15:12)

I want to go back to this verse and examine something that stirs a little discomfort inside of me. Whenever I feel some dissonance inside it alerts me that something is needing to be exposed and resolved and that I should not simply stuff it out of sight as I have most of my life. Getting things out into the light is the best way to heal and to grow.

The word that triggers me a little bit is this word rule. Of course, the discomfort comes from the typical associations that I have had with this word and my own experiences with people who are perceived as rulers. The very word conjures up for me ideas of abuse of power, exploitation and selfishness. Of course not all rulers have to be this way but it seems to be the trend among rulers. So when I see this word applied to a prophecy of Jesus it seems to be a contradiction with the very nature of what I have been learning about Him over the past few years.

Now I realize that there are many better definitions of this word rule than what I have just mentioned and many would point that out. I agree. But what I am referring to here is the feelings and gut-level definitions that are inside of me, not my knowledge-based definitions that I try to believe from the head. And our gut-level beliefs are the ones that are much closer to what we really believe when the pressure is on. So every chance I get I need to bring those deeper beliefs to the light and have God address the truth or falseness of them so that I can move closer to what is really true.

So as I always like to do when I read something disturbing, I went back to the original language to look for clues as to what else it might be saying. In this case I found that very rewarding. Both the words translated rule and Gentiles have very interesting and different connotations than what they seem to convey in the English.

What I get from this sequence of words is quite interesting. It conveys the idea of someone standing up, raising up (from the word for arises) or even lifted up (think John 12:32) with the result that they will become the first in importance, in political rank or power, the most significant, to rule or reign over a race of foreigners (translated Gentiles).

With the background of what I have learned about the three false foundations that make up what we know today as civilization, I see something interesting in this passage that shows me how God is working to undo those counterfeits while at the same time addressing them within our context. One of the counterfeits is the whole idea of distinctions between people and the artificial values we assign to them. This includes the whole notion of hierarchy in politics and every other means of discrimination. It also creates the context for viewing races differently as more or less important than others. And it is inherent in the typical concepts of what it means to rule.

But this is all antagonistic to the real kingdom of heaven (which is not really like any kingdom we think of because of the connotations we have about what the word king means). But since we can generally only think in terms of earthly models and assumptions, God has to use our language and our logic to communicate with us until we grow enough in maturity to begin to think more along the lines of His logic and His assumptions. And that is what I detect a little bit in this verse.

If I read these verses from the context of what I have been learning about the true character of Jesus, I see something very different than a person who is seeking to rule or dominate others like we usually see in a ruler. God's system of governing relationships to our perception is almost always up-side-down and therefore makes very little sense. I believe the reason so much of the gospel sounds confusing to us is because we unconsciously intermingle our models with God's logic and come up with amalgamations that only corrupt the truth of the Word of God. We must be constantly seeking to have our assumptions challenged and updated so that as our whole library of internal definitions becomes more closely aligned with the thinking and attitudes of heaven that God's ways and thoughts will become more clear and more rooted in our hearts.

So instead of Jesus looking for power and influence to control others like we think of in the word ruler, Jesus is destined to become the most important person in the hearts of all those who choose to accept heaven's ways of thinking, which is living selflessly from the heart to bless others. In God's system of government, the ruler is there not to dictate to others as to what they should do, but to inspire by example and empowerment everyone who wants to imitate their spirit and life. What I see in this verse is that this Root of Jesse will arise to become the most important person in the hearts of all who once were foreigners. And foreigners is the description that includes every one of us including Jews, because every human being has become foreign to the ways that heaven operates and interacts.

I notice one more phrase that I don't know if it is intentional or just coincidence. But the words in Him remind me of the discourse that Jesus had with His disciples in the upper room just before He died. He spent considerable time instructing them about the extreme importance of abiding in Him. (see John 15) Whether or not this verse is alluding to that, I believe it is vitally important to understand for anyone who wants to be part of those who live under the reign of Jesus Christ in their hearts. Each person must have a much better understanding of what it really means to abide in Him and for Him to abide in us.

And as I look one last time at this verse I see that as I learn to abide in Him that the result will be hope growing in my heart and mind. This is the relationship that links me to this God of hope that wants to fill me with all joy and peace in believing. That is the kind of experience that I want for myself. That is the choice that I want to continue making every single day.

Father, fill me with hope, with all joy and peace, and place within me a believing heart. Fill me with Your Holy Spirit today and make me a more effective channel of Your selfless love and kindness to attract others to Your reign through my example and spirit. Thank-you for these words for my heart this morning. Thank-you for the power that comes through Your Word. Remind me of Your thoughts for me today.

(next in series)

Full of Goodness and All Knowledge

And concerning you, my brethren, I myself also am convinced that you yourselves are full of goodness, filled with all knowledge and able also to admonish one another. (Romans 15:14)

As I have noticed this verse coming up for several days now, my mind has kept raising an objection to what I read here. Something inside of me rankles at the assertion that those Paul was addressing could be said to be full of goodness and filled with all knowledge. Isn't that bordering on blasphemy? I mean, even Jesus stated clearly that only God was good. And to say that someone other than God is full of all knowledge seems to me to be a very serious overstatement at the least.

So when I found myself ready to explore this verse this morning I also found that it was time to ask God directly what He meant when He had this written. Just why does this say here that the recipients of this letter – which by implication includes Christians today – could be considered full of goodness and all knowledge.

Well, I realize that for a skeptic this is material for criticism of the Word of God. But that is not the direction I care to go. But at the same time I want to be open and honest about any questions that come up from deep within because I have learned that God is never put off or upset about honest questions. In fact it is highly important that we feel safe to ask tough questions or we will quickly come to hide our real feelings and questions for fear of being shamed or discounted. That happens all too often in the religious world today but it is not the way God treats us.

So I sat here wondering what answers God might have to my question about this issue of humans full of goodness. And then my eyes wandered up to the previous verse and I noticed a very strong clue to follow that gave good promise of finding the answer. May the God of hope fill you....

Of course! If the Word says that I am full of something then it would be logical to also explain how that came to be. It is the Source of all goodness that naturally would be the one who would fill me with that same goodness, especially when I come to believe in His goodness. In fact, it is my very believing in the goodness of God that opens the door that same goodness to flow into my life and begin to be reflected from me.

And the very same applies to this issue of knowledge. It is totally absurd to even consider that anyone of us might be full of goodness or knowledge by any other means. Mirrors do not inherently contain anything that you might see when looking into the mirror. But a clean, properly formed mirror will be able to pass along the same beauty, colors, brilliancy and information that is in its line of sight.

So now I see very clearly here that the reason anyone might be full of goodness and all knowledge is because they have chosen to believe that the Source they are believing in is full of goodness and all knowledge. And because they are believing and reflecting and focusing on that Source they are empowered, just like a mirror, to become brilliant reflections of all that goodness and knowledge and as such are also able to pass that information on gently to others who need it.

And that is the meaning of this word admonish. In the original it means to put in mind, (by implication) to caution or reprove gently. That is very consistent with the way God relates to us when we understand the truth about His character. God never uses force to accomplish His work of transforming our hearts. He uses gentleness, kindness and attraction. I realize that this sounds like heresy to many and they are quick to point to many stories in the Bible where it appears God engages in violence to get His way. I firmly believed that myself for most of my life. But these conclusions are arrived at without careful consideration of the filters we bring to our reading of these stories. And all of us always have filters over our minds about everything we perceive, and the filters are far more important to analyze and challenge than the facts or details of the stories under consideration. (I have a whole web site that partly relates to this issue.)

So, as we choose to believe the truths about God as revealed in Jesus' life and death, the God of hope fills us with – what? Well, I see here that I can be filled with joy and peace and hope and the power of the Holy Spirit (v. 13). And at the same time I will also be filled with the goodness of God and have access to all the knowledge of God – whatever knowledge I need in the moment to help me reflect His character to others in gentle nudgings to encourage them to believe more in God also.

One more thing in this context needs to be included in the assembly of these things into our lives. The next verse refers to Paul's own motivation for doing this very thing – admonishing in this letter he has written. Paul says that he could be bold in his admonishing because of the grace that was given him from God. If we review the background and history of Paul's life it becomes very clear that Paul was not speaking from a self-righteous attitude. Hardly! That was the original mindset from which he had been delivered when he was confronted by Jesus Christ on the road to Damascus. After that Paul was in the school of humility and his motivation was to share the passion of God with others that had so transformed his own perspective and heart.

Because of grace Paul was full of God's passion to reflect God's goodness and His true knowledge and to mentor others into becoming the same kind of reflectors as he had become. For that is what true admonishing is really all about.

(next in series)

Believing

Now may the God of hope fill you with all joy and peace in believing, so that you will abound in hope by the power of the Holy Spirit. (Romans 15:13)

There is just so much to learn and assimilate in this one verse that I can't do it in just one or two days. What I want to ponder and listen about now is this idea of believing and the implications that it has on the surrounding elements in this passage.

What I have been learning and reinforcing in my mind and heart over this last week is the surprising truths about God's forgiveness and salvation that were never so clear to me before. When I realize from various texts in the Bible the unconditional nature of these things that God has revealed to us through Jesus and His sacrifice for us, I begin to experience the kind of amazement that draws me into that salvation. At the same time I become more disillusioned with the false teachings that I grew up with that makes us the centerpiece of salvation and the focal point of the universe. While we are certainly an important part of the issue, the great war does not really revolve around us like we have so long supposed. The real center of all the commotion is the accusations against the real truths about God Himself.

God is the center of all attention in this trial for everyone who knows anything about what is really going on in this war. God's character reputation has been maligned, distorted, blasphemed, and displaced with lies and insinuations by His archenemy who used to be His closest created comrade and friend. The part that us humans have in this battle of the titans is only as witnesses to testify in His trial. And our testimony that is required and that every person will give whether they claim to know God or not is this, Can God accomplish in the hearts and lives of fallen sinners what He claims He can do or is it all a ruse?

The ninth commandment given on Mount Sinai is the requirement that we are not to witness falsely against our neighbor. But I believe that even more importantly we must experience God's transformation in our hearts so thoroughly that we will not falsely witness in God's trial about His desire to work in our lives.

We can present a false testimony in God's trial in different modes. We may claim outwardly and intellectually that God is good and kind and powerful but not allow those truths to transform our hearts. Then it will be our spirit and influence and symptomatic behavior that will be testifying against the claims of God contrary to our professed claims.

But even more common is the embracing and teaching of some or many of the lies about God that have so long been assumed to be true. This clearly becomes an endorsement of the false charges against God that Satan insists are true. But no matter how many centuries these lies have been accepted and promoted by millions they are still lies and will never stand the test of full exposure to the light of real truth.

The problem for us is that we were born in this sea of lies as well as taught many of these lies about God and therefore have little frame of reference to even know that they are false. The very nature of deception is that one does not usually even know they are deceived. The things they believe are in their mind completely true and they are simply embracing what they have assumed all their lives to be the path of integrity while not realizing they are promoting insinuations about God that inhibit them and others from coming to Him for life. And the fact of the matter is that every single one of us finds ourself in this condition to start with.

For many years I was mystified by Jesus' repeated statements about our urgent need to believe. John seemed to pick up this theme particularly and amplified it in his other epistles. But what I could not figure out for a very long time was just what it was that we are supposed to believe. Sometimes He would say that we were to believe on the Son of Man. Other times it was to believe that Jesus came from the Father. Sometimes He simply said that we were to believe with seemingly little hint as to what that meant, at least from what I could tell from the context and my perspective.

This used to greatly frustrate me and even fed into my secret suspicion that maybe it was another scheme by God to keep me from being saved. (Yes, that kind of picture of God was a very real part of my life growing up, sadly to say.) I wondered for years why God did not make it more explicit just what it was that I was supposed to believe so that I could fulfill this additional requirement so as to get “saved”, whatever that meant.

But a few years ago when God began introducing Himself to me personally and began to seriously challenge my many fears and false assumptions about Him with the truth of His goodness, kindness, compassion and all the other unconditional truths about His character, it began to dawn on me that what Jesus was really saying to people was this: I want you to believe that what you see Me doing and how I relate to you and treat you is the same as the way the Father feels about you. My kindness, gentleness, unconditional forgiveness and my passion to lift you up, heal you and love you is exactly the truth about both Me and the Father that has been hidden from you by all the lies you have believed.

I am sad to admit that this process of changing my opinions about what God is like has been extremely slow and full of resistance due to the lies about Him that are so deeply rooted in my psyche. These lies appeal for justification to the continued belief of them by most people in the church and by misreadings of the Scriptures and other inspired writings. These lying spirits are irreconcilable with the Spirit of God and the only way I can relate to them effectively is to expel them forcefully from my heart and mind as they come to my attention in the light. There can be no compromise with them. There can be no shared mind space between the real truth of God and the poisonous counterfeits that are dedicated to drawing my heart away from Him.

But a very interesting aspect of this thing called believing is the element of free choice. While it is amazingly true that God's forgiveness is permanent and has been in place since eternity (it is a description of what God's heart is like), and His salvation is also a permanent fixture and has been gifted to every human being whether they know it or not, it is completely up to each one of us as to whether we will experience all the benefits of engaging or synchronizing with these unchangeable facts of reality. It is very much like two gears that are near each other, one with power in it and the other in need of power. It is only as the powerless gear chooses to move close enough to the powered gear to engage its teeth with the stronger gear that any power can be transferred into itself and it can begin to turn.

What I see in this verse right now is something along the line of this analogy. The teeth of the gears could be likened to these two important descriptions in this verse: joy and peace. It just so happens that those who have been studying the brain recently have discovered that these two things are the most important experiences that the brain needs in order to grow and thrive and mature and bond with other minds. These two experiences form a cycle that is crucial for the mental health of every individual. We need to experience joy together with others followed by times of peaceful togetherness and quietness, which is then followed by more experiences of the more active experience of joyful togetherness which is followed....

So I find it quite compelling that in the heart of this verse describing in essence the process we experience in salvation that the two most important ingredients for mental health are the same things that our God of hope wants to fill us with when we choose to believe in Him. So what is it that constitutes our choice to believe? What is it that we can choose to believe that will allow God to fill us with this energizing, life-giving joy-peace cycle?

I believe that what we need to choose to believe is in the surrounding context of this verse. We are to recognize and believe the truth about Jesus and His servant spirit (v. 8). We can glorify God for His mercy and praise Him in our joy and singing (v. 9). We can rejoice together with His people (part of the actual definition of the word joy – v.10). We can believe that God is the kind of God that will inspire hope in our hearts and instead of motivating us through fear (v. 12, 13).

Any amount of resistance to believing in any of these things betrays hidden lies and false spirits still lurking within my heart. And it is that resistance that is trying to prevent me from making the choice to believe. But choosing to believe is the permission that God must have in order for Him to enter into my heart and accomplish all that the power of His Holy Spirit is waiting to do in me.

If I choose to believe and keep choosing to believe, then God is given the permission that He needs to expel these lying spirits from my heart, to expose the secret fears and apprehensions I have harbored all of my life in the light of His love so that I can release them and become even more free from my slavery to fear. It is this point of belief that is the most crucial and pivotal point for each one of us in our role as witnesses in God's trial. For if we choose to believe the truths about Him as He reveals them to us instead of resisting them, our lives can bear a truthful testimony that God's word is true and that He indeed can do what He says He can do in us. And according to Romans 4:1-5 when we believe that God can do what He says He can do it is credited to us as righteousness.

I choose to believe the real truths about God and what He is like that He has been progressively revealing to me over the past few years. I know that there is much more that I need to know about Him and even more that my heart needs to embrace. But I am so glad that He is the one in charge of this process of transformation and lie exposure. I am coming to actually appreciate the fact that I come under conviction on a regular basis because that indicates that God is at work in my heart. I want to have the lies about him exposed that have hidden inside of me all of my life, because they have been the roots that have produced so much bitterness, dysfunction and sin in my life and my relationships. I want the God of hope to fill me with joy and peace in believing. So I choose to believe and keep on choosing that option, because I know that my choice to believe in the goodness of God is the door that allows Him to continue His work in my transformation. And the real purpose for my transformation is so that in His trial I will be able to give a truthful testimony about His character.

I know that I will be called upon to give a character reference for God in His great trial in the day of His judgment. But I also realize that I am daily called upon to testify about what He is really like. So I choose to believe the truth about Him as He continues to reveal it to me so that He can reproduce that same truth about His character in His image that He created me to be. (Gen. 1:26, 27)

(next in series)

Good News of Hope

Now may the God of hope fill you with all joy and peace in believing, so that you will abound in hope by the power of the Holy Spirit. (Romans 15:13)

For the past several days I have been listening and re-listening to a short series of sermons that I downloaded off the web site of a young pastor that I consider the best presenter of the true Gospel and the real truth about God that I have ever heard. I have a number of his series that I have greatly enjoyed over the past several years, but this 4-sermon collection is the most direct, challenging and clear presentation that continues to flush out deeply embedded lies about God that still remain in my heart. I find myself disturbed, amazed, exhilarated and in tears as the real truth about God overwhelms me again and again. It is a very powerful antidote to the perpetual negative news that surrounds me in this world and gives me refreshing access to the true news, the genuine good news that all of us so desperately need to know and experience.

There are so many things in this series that bring God's goodness into sharp relief and clarify confusing beliefs about God in my mind. I am reminded again that the truth about God is such good news that most people find it nearly impossible to believe, and sometimes this includes even me. We fall back on that old adage that if it sounds too good to be true it probably is. The real problem is, that may be true in relation to all the deceptions presented to us from this world, but when we use it in relation to the good news of the gospel it becomes an excuse for unbelief and resistance.

Once again, I want to point out that it is very important to know the real meaning of the words being used. When I talk about the gospel here I am not referring to the nebulous collections of doctrines, assertions and teachings muddled together called the gospel by most religious people. I am talking about something far more compelling and life-changing that I am still only coming to understand myself, and what I have been listening to here is bringing intense clarity to that process.

What I want to simply share this morning is a report of my own experience of being filled with joy and peace by this God of hope who is once again applying healing truth to my confused and damaged heart. And knowing the universal principle or law of the mind that what we dwell on we become, I am choosing to fill my mind more and more with all the truth about God that I can find so that as I become more and more enchanted with His beauty, His patience, His kindness and tolerance and humility, that my own spirit will begin to more and more reflect to others the way He relates to me.

I find myself often bemoaning the many faults and weaknesses within myself that I see in my attitudes toward others. I see the bitterness that poisons my feelings toward others and the pride that seems lurking behind every turn. I get so frustrated in wanting to be able to view others differently and to love them unconditionally no matter how hypocritical, repulsive, obnoxious or evil they are to me. But I simply cannot find it within me to produce the kind of love that I know I am supposed to show.

But then I sense in my spirit that trying to love other people who hurt and offend me is not something that is possible by working on it directly as I have supposed for most of my life. Irregardless of the many years of insistent instruction given by religious people of all occupations to the contrary, my heart will never be able to love before it learns to believe and receive love first. I simply cannot give what I don't both believe and have experienced. So if I want to reflect the amazing gentleness of Jesus that has the divine power to transform lives through the presence of His Spirit, then my only hope is to focus all my attention on allowing my picture of God to be corrected so that my reflection to others is not filled with distortions.

Those distortions in my beliefs about what God is like and how He feels about me are so infiltrated throughout all of my thinking that it takes a supernatural power to expose them and replace them with truths. But that sounds all too much like an intellectual project whereas most of the lies are residing at my heart level much more than in my logical thinking. And for my heart to change its assumptions about God I have to emotionally experience those truths first-hand in my own experience. It is simply not effective for changing my heart to acknowledge the true facts about God's character as helpful as that is for a beginning. Sure, wrong facts held in my mind will certainly create obstacles for my heart to change. But what I really need is a complete overhaul of both sides of my brain and especially the experiential beliefs that reside in my fundamental control center that is activated anytime I come under pressure. And that is all primarily located on the right side of my brain which is linked to my heart.

As I have been listening to these presentations over the past few days I can sense my heart coming alive and reaching out in deep hunger for what it inherently knows it was created to experience. I find myself crying out to God, confessing my own unbelief and pleading for cleansing from all my resistance to these radical, fresh revelations of the real truth about Him. I am tired of living my life in the lowlands of depressing and confused views of God's character and attitudes towards me. I can see more clearly that the Word of God confirms all the these wonderful truths that I have missed for so long which only helps to reinforce their impact on my heart. As I take a fresh look at all of the Bible in the light of these “new” truths it comes alive even more in startling ways, sort of like taking ultraviolet light and shining it on objects to reveal unexpected beauties that could not be seen before.

I want to point out here that I am not trying to draw more attention to a messenger of truth than I am to the One he is talking about. I know of others who are also presenting similar themes and they have been and still are wonderful resources for deepening my appreciation and love for the real God. And I also realize that different people are used at different times to target specific areas that need exposing or revising and that it is the Holy Spirit that coordinates all of this effectively. But I also know that when a person has caught the passion of God's heart and allows it to flow through them in ways that are undiluted by their old mistaken views of God, that the power of their message takes on new energy and God is able to work through their ministry in far more effective ways to reach hungry, hurting hearts.

I plan to continue to listen to these talks several more times and allow the Spirit to impress me with the wonderful revelations about God's heart even more deeply. I copied them onto a disc so that I could play them in my van to and from work. I have had them in my computer for about a week or so now and have been listening to them while I eat breakfast or after I get home during supper. I find it so much more energizing and inspiring than the typical fare from the radio and I believe that we are currently entering a time in this world where our daily choices about our mental diet are going to determine the condition and reactions of our spirit very directly and quickly.

I choose to engage as a direct recipient with my God of hope who has promised to fill me with all joy and peace in believing, so that I may abound in hope. I also pray that He will help me let go of all my resistance and fears so that my believing will be genuine, deep and firmly rooted within my heart, replacing all the lies and fears and apprehensions that still cling to my heart like leeches and parasites. I also know that this can only happen through the power of the Holy Spirit who has been commissioned to cause me to abound in this hope.

Maranatha.

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God of Hope

Now may the God of hope fill you with all joy and peace in believing, so that you will abound in hope by the power of the Holy Spirit. (Romans 15:13)

I like to take time to make sure that I have the best mental grasp of the words I am reading in order to have a better context for the message embedded in the passage and for it to be most effective. I again looked up this word hope to make sure I understood what it meant and it still inspires me to be reminded. It means to look forward expectantly and with pleasure to something in the future and it also involves faith.

This verse says that my God is a God of hope. That tells me something very important about God that I want to have permeate every cell of my brain. God is just the kind of being that can cause me to look forward with intense pleasure to what He has planned for my life and my future. I do not have to know exactly what that is, for to know something fully is no longer hope. Part of the meaning of hope is the incompleteness of one's awareness of the fulfillment. But faith, which hope inspires, trusts the heart of the One who is the source of that hope more than the supposition about what might be coming.

When I think about what hope is I also try to imagine what the opposite of hope is. Comparing something with its opposite can bring added insight and depth to the meaning of something. In my view, I think the opposite of hope might be dread, which I have all too much experience with. In fact, when I am honest with myself I have to admit that my imagination tends to dwell on low-level dread much of the time. Sometimes this is called negative thinking or scenario thinking. I began to realize sometime back that my imagination has been hijacked by the enemy for many years tied up creating scenarios of dreadful things that might happen to me in the future and how I might relate to them.

Now that I think about this more clearly I suddenly realize that I was carefully trained to think this way from a very young age. The very same method is typically used in many religious circles in mistaken attempts to motivate people to “get ready” for Jesus to come. All sorts of frightening scenarios are created in the imagination as to what might happen in the last days – persecutions, threats, torture, pressure to change our minds about our doctrines – all sorts of scenarios calculated to induce fear and dread in supposition that these fears will somehow motivate me to stiffen my resolutions and entrench me more firmly in my beliefs so that I can make it through the trials ahead.

Yes, dread has been an all too familiar companion and still is in my mind. And that is likely why hope is something that almost has the sense of being a foreigner to me. Fear and dread I can explain and experience at a moments notice, but hope is something that I have to stop and analyze and grope through my intellectual mind to explain. This is a very sad state of affairs but not at all surprising considering the planet I was born on. I suspect I am not alone in this condition which is why Paul has written this passage for all of us who are so devoid of hope.

Hope and joy – particularly joy – are words that seemed almost distant and mysterious to me for most of my life. I can distinctly remember trying to wrap my mind around what joy might feel like or what the word was referring to when I was young but realized that, given the descriptions I read about it, that I must not have any idea of what it meant or felt like. To a lesser extent I still feel that way now, though I have a much better intellectual understanding of what joy should feel like. And I do have certain events or incidents in my experience that I have to confess were filled with intense encounters with real joy, though that joy involved no sense of happiness or euphoria.

For those who know me better or have read much of what I have written they will know that when I say joy I am talking about the nervous system's definition of joy which has been discovered by scientists recently studying how the brain functions. Joy, according to the brain's most basic function and craving, is the sense I experience when someone is glad to be with me, when I am the sparkle in their eye. This may be in spite of whatever emotions I may be experiencing at the time or despite circumstances I may find myself in. I may be buried in shame, in fear, even in anger – but if someone insists on wanting to be with me and love me and cherish me no matter what I do or how I feel or even how I treat them, I am in a position to know first hand the true experience of joy.

So what does joy have to do with hope? Well, because right here in this verse I am told that the God of hope will fill me with all joy and peace in believing. As I was writing the above paragraph about joy I remembered a particularly painful, shameful day in our life where another couple refused to leave us alone. They stayed until the wee hours of the morning during a catastrophic experience we were going through, and then took us into their small apartment to comfort and care for our bodies and our hearts. The effect on our emotions and psyche was unforgettable and intense under those circumstances and I have since told and retold this story – usually without being able to contain my intense emotions in the process – as one of the best examples of real joy. It is also a classic illustration of how joy is distinctly unique from the feeling of happiness.

But as I again revisited my feelings during that horrible experience and the effect of this young couple's choice to stay close to us through it all and their ministry to our hearts at the end of that day, I also am aware of the peace that we experienced as a result of the joy they created for us. As we lay down that night to go to sleep I remember commenting to my wife that I could not imagine the emptiness and sense of hopelessness we would be experiencing right then if this couple had not laid aside their own interests and comfort to put our needs first and to be very sensitive to our emotional pain. So what I see is that there is a very strong natural link between joy and peace.

What I also see here in this verse is that the source of all joy and peace is from the heart of this God, our Father in heaven who is called the God of hope. And according to the previous verses in this passage He can become our God of hope even more effectively as we allow Him to rule over us and as we engage in praise to Him.

What is becoming more starkly clear to me is the contrast between the assumptions of my past about how to prepare for end-times and for Jesus' coming by whipping up ever-increasing levels of dread and fear and this verse which tells me that God is the source of hope and joy and peace. To me those two ways of viewing God are simply incompatible. Hope is not inspired in the heart by inducing dread and fear. Love cannot be created in the heart by inducing dread and fear. And by extension, true obedience which can only be produced from a heart of love and devotion to God cannot be elicited in the life by inducing dread and fear.

It would be very easy at this point to move into a spirit of blame against all those who have hobbled me and handicapped me all of my life using these methods. But I also have to remember that they too were equally handicapped in their lives by others previously who passed it on to them and the cycle goes back all the way to Adam. It is sin that is the root cause and it is Satan who keeps the problem going and intensifying. My only hope is to focus on the God who is my God of hope. And as I believe this truth about Him my belief in His heart of faithful love for me will displace the dread and fears that are all too familiar to me and replace them with the freshness and freedom of hope, joy and peace.

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