Wrong Government

"If we let Him go on like this, all men will believe in Him, and the Romans will come and take away both our place and our nation." (John 11:48)

His kind of government just won't work around here. He is too weak to keep the Romans at bay so we have to employ whatever means necessary to maintain our national identity. Preserving our heritage as the chosen people of God is more important than the continued protection of some crazy man claiming ludicrous things about God that contradict clear teachings established over many years of research and calling into question the wisdom of the elders. After all, its up to us to please God by keeping order and peace around here and this man is certainly disturbing the peace and disrupting the established order.

Notice the foundation on which all these assumptions are based. Fear is behind everything these men are seeing and assuming.

• They are afraid of what will happen to their grasp on power if Jesus' way of relating begins to catch on even more.
• They are afraid people will begin to believe and act in love rather than be intimidated by fear, for then the leaders will lose all the handles they have been using to control everyone.
• They are afraid of the Romans who in turn have used force and fear to accomplish conquering the world, and the Jews are jealous of the Roman's power and success.
• They are afraid the Romans will not tolerate love and compassion as competition to their rule of force and will intervene by force to remove the last vestiges of authority these leaders have negotiated so long to occupy.

Their scenario thinking becomes the fact base upon which they are ready to make life and death decisions rather than to seek heaven's view of reality and what God might actually think about what constitutes security.

Competing Versions of God

Therefore the chief priests and the Pharisees convened a council, and were saying, "What are we doing? For this man is performing many signs. If we let Him go on like this, all men will believe in Him, and the Romans will come and take away both our place and our nation." (John 11:47-48)

I find this passage to be a telling revelation into the truth about the nature of evil versus good. It is so easy to become confused about the nature of unbelief and to become infected by it. But we all suffer from some level of unbelief because we all have been infected with lies about God that have influenced how we relate to Him and to each other.

The greatest resistance that Jesus encountered when He walked this earth came not from the open sinners or even from the pagan Romans. The people who had the most animosity toward Jesus and His revelations of the truth about God were the very people whom God had chosen as a people to represent Him on earth and particularly the religious leaders of those people. How ironic that the ones who claimed to know the truth about God the best turned out to be the most fierce opposer's to His ministry to save sinners and demonstrate the goodness and compassion of the Father.

Jesus had just finished demonstrating compellingly the reality that God really did care about hurting people far more than anyone had thought. He had also revealed that what seemed to be an impossible obstacle in the minds of humans was no problem at all for God. God is not stymied or thwarted by incidental problems like sickness or death; the greatest obstacles that God is up against is in the stubborn resistance to His love in the deceived hearts of people who think they know God better than His own Son knows Him.

I believe that today we are in a very similar situation. We are deeply deceived about the real truths about God, how He feels about us and how He wants to relate to us. Religion today is little different than the religions of the world in the times of Jesus really. We still build our constructs of reality and our views of God on human reasoning which is based on pride and selfishness rather than on trusting in the revelations He has provided in His Word and in His Son. Because we have the added testimony of the life and death of Jesus more beyond what the Jews had, we assume that we are not deceived like they were. But that only adds more layers to the deceptions that blind us because we still refuse to acknowledge the underlying truths about the real nature of God's goodness and kindness and forgiveness.

The problem we run into is that we either think God is obsessed with our behavior and rule-keeping and is constantly looking for mistakes for which to punish us, or He is passive and willing to ignore and excuse sin while we claim that the death of His Son allows us to let sin remain in our lives unchallenged. We tend to take this to one extreme or the other which is exactly what the devil intends for us to do. But in doing so our lives begin to reflect the same attitudes exposed in these verses where the religious leaders revealed their true allegiance. Their focus was not on the principles of God's kingdom but on the priorities of the world as embodied in the methods of Rome. The context in which they couched their statements was the reality and principles defined and practiced by the Roman empire rather than by God. They revealed in their words that their greatest fear was of losing power and influence and social status and that these things were the highest priorities in their lives.

In the kingdom of fear and darkness that Jesus came to expose and displace with His new kingdom, force and shame and fear and intimidation have no place. In the kingdoms of fear, decisions are based on who has greater power to exercise force to get their way. Rome epitomized the use of force more than all the previous empires that had existed although they too relied on it heavily. Rome in Scriptures is a symbol of reliance on force to gain dominance, and even the great church that emerged from Rome is marked by this fundamental philosophy up to the very present. In Satan's kingdom force is considered not only a legitimate means of advancing one's agenda but it is claimed that God uses the same methods whenever it is useful and convenient for Him.

This is where all of the world is terribly deceived about the nature of God's kingdom and methods and character. God has been misrepresented more by religious people claiming to act in His name who utilize the methods of His enemy more effectively than any other group of people on this planet. When any of us indulge in the use of force and rely on fear to sway the minds of others to join our religion or conform to our demands, we are blaspheming the reputation of our God and are perpetuating the web of lies about Him that Satan has been circulating from the very beginning of sin.

Without a proper understanding of this greater context it is difficult to grasp why these leaders reacted the way that they did. It is important that we be more aware of the stark contrast between the kingdom of light and the kingdom of force and darkness. To allow our minds to remain infected with lies about God's methods and God's attitudes toward sin and sinners is to continue to misrepresent Him and ultimately to find ourselves in total opposition to Him. Ultimately we will find ourselves reacting just as these men reacted in fear and hostility toward the One who revealed the truth about God so plainly.

Logically, at least in a mind not too blinded by lies about God, it would seem that after Jesus had performed such a miracle of grace as raising a friend back to life from the dead, that anyone with any heart at all would respond in wonder and awe and appreciation for such a revelation of the goodness and love of God. How could people, especially those claiming to know God better than the average person, be so virulently hostile and angry about such an innocuous miracle as this? What fault did they see in Jesus bringing to life a man of the character of Lazarus? Did they hate Lazarus for something he had done or did they think he didn't deserve to be shown such favor?

Clearly the character and reputation of Lazarus or even of his sisters had little to do with this intense reaction of hostility on the part of the religious leaders. The underlying issue that rankled them so deeply was the fact that Jesus was openly promoting a picture of God as one who had far more compassion than any of those claiming to represent Him officially had, which made them look very bad by contrast. It was the fact that the picture of God revealed by Jesus was in such sharp contrast with the pictures of an austere, stern, condemning and controlling God promoted by the religious people that caused them to become so irritated. And ironically, in spite of all that Jesus did to show us the Father's heart religion still maintains the same lies about God that were so prevalent in the days of Christ.

I too struggle at the heart level to believe like I should in a God as good as what I am seeing in the life and practices and teachings of Jesus. The reason I have to keep coming back daily to immerse myself in the Word and meditate on the life of Christ is because my own heart is still so infected with deeply rooted false notions about what God is like. I am also surrounded by people who share similar lies or even worse some who feel compelled to impose their views of God on others to keep them living in fear. Yet the God that I have been discovering in my own examination of the Word is so different from the representations of Him by nearly all the religious people around me that I feel constant tension as these opposing views contend for dominance in my own life.

In these verses I catch a glimpse of the end results of not expelling from my heart the lies about God that Jesus came to expose. I see in the example of these stubborn men who were more interested in their own survival politically than in coming to know the truth about God, the end result of anyone who resists the revelation of what God is like in the life of Jesus. God will not utilize the tactics of His enemy to advance His kingdom, for to do so would be to legitimize the claims of Satan that force is necessary to operate the universe. But to force people against their will to make them believe truth totally destroys the very atmosphere necessary for love to exist; but God will not accept a universe where love is not the compelling power holding it together.

What I see emerging from this story is the basic issues in the struggle between the lies about God and the truth about what God is like. It is the titanic struggle for men's hearts and minds, the struggle to compel people to believe in a God who doesn't mind utilizing force and fear when it is to His advantage verses a God who refuses to indulge in the deceptive and diabolical methods of His opponents but rather relies on winning hearts only through demonstrations of love and freedom.

To all of us under the pale of sin, it seems bizarre to think that love has enough power to win over the philosophy of force. Oh, we think love has a lot going for it alright, but we also don't hesitate to resort to forcing people and overriding their freedom to choose whenever it seems it might advance our agendas. I believe we are observing the delusional aftereffects of our ancestors eating from the tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil. We assume that mixing a little evil in with the good when necessary is acceptable. But in God's kingdom a little poison mixed in with the sweet is a deadly proposition and God will not tolerate that formula for it only leads to death.

These religious leaders found their control, prestige and influence over the minds of the people being so eroded by Jesus' revelations about a caring, loving God who values freedom and love more than conformance to arbitrary rules, that they reacted out of intense fear and desperation. But in this very desperation they were actually revealing the weakness of the kingdom of darkness. Far from being wimpy and weak and powerless in the face of force and fear and evil, true selfless love is the most powerful force in the universe. Jesus came to reveal the self-sacrificing nature of true love by demonstrating that a person did not need to rely on any of the false principles of Satan's kingdom to live. Jesus came to expose the fallacies of these false principles and to show us the love of the Father so we could be transformed back into the original function and joy for which we were designed.

These men had the freedom to choose and could have embraced the fresh revelations of God that were so graciously offered to them. But their selfishness caused them to reject the clear revelations about the Father and they chose instead to cling to lies about God that allowed them to keep their own agendas firmly in place. They chose to live their lives based on the principles of force and fear and rejected the Son of the very God they claimed to follow. In making that choice their lives become molded into the nature of the enemy of God and their hearts became so hardened through choosing darkness over light that their characters reflected the demonic principles of Satan himself. The same will happen for everyone who continues to resist the revelations of truth about God in any age.

The Man Who Had Died

The man who had died came forth, bound hand and foot with wrappings, and his face was wrapped around with a cloth. Jesus said to them, "Unbind him, and let him go." Therefore many of the Jews who came to Mary, and saw what He had done, believed in Him. (John 11:44-45)

The man who had unwittingly become the stumbling block for the faith of those who were watching, came out of his tomb removing their excuses for doubting Jesus. Of course it was no fault of his that he was a cause of doubt for others, but his death resulting from Jesus' delay to answer his sister's prayers had created opportunity for offense. Jesus had chosen to allow this state of affairs to test their faith, to press them beyond their comfort zone and to challenge them to grow in faith.

Indeed, they struggled between trusting in the One who had already done so much to prove His love for them and the strong temptation to feel He didn't care. Lazarus' death put them under tremendous pressure to question Jesus' care for them but they chose to cling to the evidence they already had in spite of current circumstances and insinuations by those seeking to discredit their faith. But that did not prevent their own emotions from causing depression as their faith began to waver and slip.

Jesus knew all of this and much more. He could see the true condition of the hearts of every person present that day which was part of the reason He was so deeply moved in His own spirit by a sense of heaviness and sadness. It was not for Lazarus that He wept as most thought, but it was for all those who were unwilling to trust the heart of God, who were clinging to lies of Satan about the Father and were spreading those lies to others. It was resistant unbelief despite evidence all around them in the form of blessings unnoticed and favors spurned that caused Jesus to groan so deeply in His spirit.

But in spite of all this darkness Jesus wanted to bring a glorious exhibition of light publicly before all so they would have even greater incentive to trust His heart. The whole purpose of raising Lazarus from the dead was not just for the sake of his sisters but intended as a stark revelation of how the Father feels about all of us. Jesus longs to bring life into all the places of death for God hates sin and all the death that it produces. Sinners are still God's children and He longs to reverse the curse brought into the human race by sin. He chose to resurrect Lazarus as a symbol of the life that He promises to bring into the experience of every person who is willing to turn away from their doubts and be transformed by trusting and believing in the real truth about God that Jesus came to demonstrate.

The man who was dead came forth – but he was no longer dead. I see a parallel here with a similar phrase in a previous story of healing. The man who had been born blind met amazing resistance from those who did not want to believe in the love of Jesus. Even his neighbors and friends found it difficult to change their perceptions of his identity and continued to view and label him by his past.

Therefore the neighbors, and those who previously saw him as a beggar, were saying, "Is not this the one who used to sit and beg?"

They brought to the Pharisees the man who was formerly blind.

The Jews then did not believe it of him, that he had been blind and had received sight, until they called the parents of the very one who had received his sight, and questioned them, saying, "Is this your son, who you say was born blind? Then how does he now see?" (John 9:8, 13, 18-19)

The spirit of unbelief is incredibly tenacious and will never give up looking for excuses to avoid admitting the truth. The spirit of doubt and unbelief is un-convertable and it is a total waste of time thinking it can be changed. The only way to escape the devastating, blinding damage of unbelief is to renounce it, repent of it and have it displaced by the Spirit of God that will fill our hearts with appreciation for the truth about God's heart of love for us. Unbelief cannot be transformed into belief; it must be replaced altogether with a new spirit full of love and appreciation inspired by revelations of the grace and truth that fills the heart of God.

This is itself a fresh revelation for my own heart. I am beginning to sense that I have spent far too much time trying to convince my spirit of unbelief to change its 'mind' when that is an impossibility. I will never get a spirit of unbelief to morph into saving faith; I must resolutely turn away from it, reject it, renounce it and expose it for what it really is and accept a new spirit from God to replace it. I have to be honest about the presence of unbelief in my own heart every time it rises up inside of me doubting God's love for me and bring it to the light of truth to be exposed and expelled. Like Martha I need to make public expressions of faith to strengthen my resistance to doubt and deepen my trust in Jesus.

The man who was dead came forth to confirm the obscured truth about how Jesus really felt about them. Lazarus came out of the tomb as overwhelming evidence of the compassion of Jesus that had been in doubt and to give incontrovertible evidence of the power of God to bring life into places of hopelessness and death. But this was not enough to convince those determined to believe the lies of Satan to change their hearts. Instead, the resurrection of Lazarus served only to polarize people's beliefs and cause them to move more quickly in the direction they were already headed.

Those who wanted to believe in Jesus' love for them found in this miracle powerful evidence to deepen and settle them in faith. But those who had been resisting repeatedly the evidences and teachings and demonstrations of the truth about the Father's heart in the life of Jesus found themselves moving further into unbelief and even becoming enraged that this evidence was impossible to deny. They became so angry that their opinions and lies and hypocrisy were being exposed that they not only wanted to kill Jesus but felt compelled to kill Lazarus as well.

Just as they had been determined to discount and discredit the miracle that blessed the life of the man born blind a few days earlier, they clung to their own blindness in the face of a living former dead man. They became even more irrational in their logic as they hardened their hearts to the point where they would kill the very God who had come to save them from their sins. This is the very essence of judgment. Judgment occurs naturally by polarizing people's opinions and beliefs when light exposes the secret things of the heart. The beliefs that we choose to cling to shape our characters for eternity.

As a result of Lazarus coming out of the grave alive John says that many of the Jews believed in Jesus. Those who had not chosen to harden their hearts in resistance to the truth about God found themselves drawn by this overwhelming evidence of love and compassion and grace. And even by allowing Lazarus to come out still bound about with restrictive leftovers from the grave and inviting others to help set him fully free, Jesus was demonstrating God's love by involving humanity to participate in the process of healing and liberation with each other.

While none of us can bring life into our places of death and we must depend solely on God to do that for us, God does ask us to be involved in the process of helping each other take the wrappings and baggage away from our hearts and lives that keep us from fully enjoying the new life God has gifted to us. All of us have a part to play in the plan of salvation in reaching out to cooperate with God in His work to liberate hearts from the realms of darkness. We can share in the joy of new life by coming alongside others to unbind them and let them go free. And in doing so our own faith is strengthened.

Religion Exposed

Therefore many of the Jews who came to Mary, and saw what He had done, believed in Him.

"If we let Him go on like this, all men will believe in Him, and the Romans will come and take away both our place and our nation." (John 11:45, 48)

Miracles do not produce belief; miracles produce judgment. Judgment exposes what we already believe at the deeper levels of our being. Whether they are true or counterfeit miracles they still have a similar effect. Miracles tend to harden people or accelerate them toward the direction they are already leaning.

It is important to keep in mind the true definition of judgment. The concept of judgment as the Bible uses it is an arrangement of circumstances that forces into the open the secret things of the heart. Interestingly the secret things of the heart are also directly connected with true belief.

Jesus is always more interested in the heart belief rather than just our head beliefs. The Jews had spent so many years focusing on head beliefs that they had largely lost their ability to even be aware of their real beliefs at the heart level. Like many of us today caught up in the externals of religion, more concerned with keeping up appearances than with the true condition of our hearts, the Jews assumed that doctrines and behavior were the most important things to keep pure while they ignored the inner condition of their spirit.

This has been one of the most effective schemes of Satan to keep people caught in a trap of professional religion while denying the power of it. God spoke of this in the Old Testament when He pointed out the real center of strength. 'Not by might nor by power, but by My Spirit,' says the LORD of hosts. (Zechariah 4:6) But the spirit manifested by these stubbornly unbelieving Jews was not the Spirit identified in this verse. Their spirit was focused on clinging to their political power and their prestige derived from their ability to control the people of their nation along with the advantages they had been able to gain by compromise with the Romans.

Rome was the ruling power of the world in that day. Rome more than any other empire up to that time relied heavily on raw power and cruel suppression to accomplish and maintain their control over the world. Because of Rome's success in forcing so many countries under submission to their control, the leaders of Israel had also become addicted to their desires to rely on similar methods. Instead of turning to the God of their fathers who taught a very different approach to life, these Jews had adopted the ways and tactics and spirit of the enemy of God and thus indulged in a governing style incompatible with the ways and methods of God.

When Jesus showed up in their midst acting and relating to people like the true God rather than the false ideas about God that were so popular, the very men who claimed to know God most found themselves totally at odds with Him and out of harmony with His spirit and ways. They were constantly irritated and even enraged at His methods, His attitudes, His way of relating to sinners because it made them look bad by contrast. They refused to believe that God had grace and love like that displayed by this meek and gentle Jesus. They refused to accept that God was not a harsh, demanding, condemning deity waiting to severely punish all who strayed from His strict rules.

He who believes in Him is not judged; he who does not believe has been judged already, because he has not believed in the name of the only begotten Son of God. This is the judgment, that the Light has come into the world, and men loved the darkness rather than the Light, for their deeds were evil. (John 3:18-19)

It at first seems very strange that religious, pious 'men of God' would rely on such arguments as what are expressed here. But the very nature of judgment is to expose the true nature of the underlying motives lurking deep in the heart. By this incredible display of love and divine power over death, Jesus brought intense light to bear on all those who witnessed this amazing miracle and that light of the real truth about God could not help but to expose the things hidden in darkness up to that point. The hidden motives of selfishness and pride and greed began to come out into the open as these men coalesced into a united front of evil bent on terminating the witness of Jesus about the truth about God.

The same is always true. When people today begin to catch a glimpse of the real God of heaven and discover that His agenda and His Spirit and His methods are in stark contrast to what we are accustomed to using, then judgment and polarization begins to take place. The true motives of selfishness and pride in our hearts began to be seen in all their ugliness and we are faced with a choice of either repenting and seeking God's grace to be transformed into a new person or we dig in our heels and try harder to resist and resort to Satan's methods to silence all those who make us feel so uncomfortable.

The sad thing about this is that the greatest resistance usually emerges from those who have been the most prominent leaders in religion, those who claim the most to represent God and to know His ways. This creates a real dilemma for all those who have followed them and trusted them to lead them to a saving knowledge of God. This is why it is so vital that each one of us pursues a personal experience and a person education in the things of God rather than relying so much on religious teachers to do our thinking for us.

While it can be very beneficial to learn many important things from teachers and preachers, it is extremely dangerous to rely on them too much to do our thinking and reasoning in our place. The world teaches that we should rely on experts who have spent years training in a particular field of thought and not to question their conclusions. After all, they are the experts and we should not argue with them for they know far more than we might ever come to know their subject of expertise. But therein lies a very subtle danger, for when it comes to our salvation there is no substitute for personal investigation and a personal encounter with the primary Source of life and truth. Only an individual education in the things of God and a personal tutoring by the Spirit of God can bring us into a saving knowledge of the truth. Others may be able to assist us in that direction, but only a personal accountability to our Creator will give us an authentic education in the things of heaven.

In raising Lazarus from the dead and confounding the insinuations of those who were seeking to spread unbelief and doubts about Jesus, God flooded them with greater light that exposed the evil and selfish motives of the religious leaders and threatened their credibility with the people. Strangely their reasons for wanting to silence the witness of Jesus seem at first bizarre and almost irrelevant. But upon closer examination they can begin to look uncomfortably familiar.

Our deepest drives at the heart level are to feel valued and important. However, the directions that we choose to look to from which to derive our sense of value and importance will determine ultimately where we will spend eternity. If we choose the accept the world's paradigms about how to achieve peace and happiness and a sense of value, we will turn to any number of false sources upon which we will depend to gain our sense of worth. We will rely on the counterfeit principles of Satan to seek worth but in the end will come to realize that every false method only ends in emptiness and death.

On the other hand, if we accept the testimony of Jesus Christ who came to reveal the real truth about how God feels toward us, our value in His eyes and accept His prognosis of our condition, we can turn to Him for hope, for grace, for redemption and forgiveness and come to see that God is far better than any have ever dared to dream. We will come to discover that God's reputation has been terribly maligned and lied about and misrepresented by Christians and unbelievers alike. As the Spirit draws us closer and closer to the light we will begin to catch a glimpse of the true glory of God that is in stark contrast with the dark pictures of God we previously believed and we will be challenged to lay aside all our preconceived opinions and fears and shallow religious pettiness and embrace the grand truth that God truly is one who can be trusted in every way. The deepest longings of our hearts will resonate with the emerging truths about Him as the Spirit leads us closer and deeper into His glory.

Only by denying our previous opinions and fears and perceptions of God and allowing Him to reveal Himself to our hearts will we ever be able to avoid the tragic mistakes of these religious people who ended up killing the very Son of God. Religion is not safe enough to rely on to come to know God. Only a personal pursuit of Him through the testimony of His Word and especially in the testimony of Jesus His Son can we ever hope to come to enjoy the real destiny for which we were created.

Father, keep teaching me and expanding my capacity to know the real truth about you. Keep me from the subtle deceptions and blindness that obscured your beauty from the hearts of these religious people. Put your Spirit in my heart and breath life into all the dead places deep inside of me as you continue to transform me from dark views about you into transcendent joy and peace in your presence.

Finishing God's Miracles

The man who had died came forth, bound hand and foot with wrappings, and his face was wrapped around with a cloth. Jesus said to them, "Unbind him, and let him go." (John 11:44)

I find these words both instructive and compelling. They seem to me a parallel to Jesus' command to roll away the stone. What I see here is a need for us to be much more aware of the obstacles that we need to deal with blocking our freedom and also our responsibility for helping others around us.

Jesus had access to all power in heaven and on earth. Yet He did not step in to miraculously move the stone away from the tomb. He let those standing around know that it was their job to cooperate with Him to prepare the way for what only He could do for them. Likewise, Jesus could have had the wrappings fall off or disintegrate or some other means to set Lazarus completely free before he emerged from the tomb. After all, when Jesus Himself was resurrected not long after this story no human assisted Him in removing similar bindings from His body. Somehow He was set free from the tomb and from His grave-clothes without help from others. Quite possibly the angels may have provided that service, but in this instance Jesus asked those standing around to take the responsibility.

Just as the stone in front of the tomb represented a major obstacle in the way of Jesus intervening in behalf of Martha and Mary, so too the bindings around the body of Lazarus represented yet more obstacles that needed to be dealt with. Note that Lazarus was helpless to set himself free just about as much as he was helpless to bring himself to life from the dead. Lazarus was dependent on others to come to his aid both in removing the stone as well as removing the bonds restricting his freedom of movement.

God had restored life to the rotting corpse of Lazarus and likely had miraculously restored it back to pristine health and vitality. However, God did not miraculously remove the encumbrances that still severely restricted the ability of Lazarus to function normally. It was up to others to come alongside him to cooperate with God in restoring Lazarus to full freedom and wholeness and functionality.

I believe there is great significance and meaning and instruction in this miracle for us to learn. How many times does God intervene in someone's life miraculously only to have that person become discouraged as old baggage continues to weigh them down and restrict their freedoms. Too often others around them are reluctant to come to their aid and may even feel confused about why there are still problems. We too often assume that after a rebirth experience that a person should not have so many problems. But just because God has miraculously brought life into our lives after being dead in our sins does not mean that there will be no baggage from the past that must be dealt with.

Furthermore, a person encumbered by baggage from their past, both emotional, spiritual and/or physical, often does not have the capacity to deal with all those problems alone. It is the duty of the body of believers to not only celebrate the new condition of a person brought to life by Jesus but to come close to them for as long as it takes to assist in unwrapping them gently in love and helping them be completely free, not just alive in Christ.

How many people have become discouraged and may even have given up on their new life in Christ because they discovered that there were still many problems hemming them in restricting their ability to live freely and joyfully? Many are confused and baffled after accepting Jesus and receiving new life from Him to discover that there is still a lot of baggage from their past still causing problems and tripping them up. But woe be to fellow believers if they fail to come to the aid of such and sympathetically work with them for as long as necessary to assist them, protect them and help deliver them from the lies, the pain, the leftover residue of their past life until they are totally free in Jesus. It is our duty to remember that all of us have similar problems, that all of us have residual wrappings that continue to hamper our freedom and peace and joy in Christ and that we are all responsible to help each other in the process of being set free from the baggage and restrictive bonds of our previous life of sin.

It is not a sign of failure or lack of conversion to discover that we have things that continue to bind us and hamper our freedom in Christ. Just as Lazarus was fully alive inside the bindings but outward appearances didn't make that so obvious, so too we must be extremely careful not to criticize and condemn born-again siblings who are still trapped inside baggage from their past and in need of further deliverance. What is needed as much today as it was with Lazarus are loving friends who will see past the ugly outward appearances wreaking of the smell of death, to joyfully come to their side and help release them in the name of Jesus so they can enjoy fuller freedom. Rather than stand around in a daze wondering what we should do or questioning why some still have so many problems, Jesus tells us we should go to them to offer our assistance, to bless them, to love them and to help set them free in His name.

Gratitude and Faith

So they removed the stone. Then Jesus raised His eyes, and said, "Father, I thank You that You have heard Me." (John 11:41)

Jesus is our example. One of the reasons that He came to this earth was to live life as a human being to show us how we were originally designed to live, except that He was doing it in the context of pervasive sin all around Him as we now have to live. In this story Jesus was surrounded by an oppressive atmosphere of unbelief and doubt that made the situation even more intense. And in the middle of all of this He modeled what it looks like to have simple and total faith in God when everything is going wrong.

After raising His eyes to turn away from the depressing circumstances around Him, Jesus begins His prayer to His Father with gratitude. Thankfulness and praise to God is the most powerful weapon at our disposal that Satan is terrified we will learn about and utilize in our lives. Far too often it seems to us that gratitude and praise are side issues and the real problems that consume our focus require petitioning God or working harder to get our problems straightened out. But gratitude is one of the most essential ingredients of the atmosphere of heaven and Jesus practiced it regularly.

Another common mistake that we make in reference to gratitude is the assumption that we need something tangible to be grateful about before we are ready to express it. I know that most of my life I have operated with this subconscious assumption so when people talked about expressing more gratitude and praise I secretly resented their urging because I could see very little to be grateful for and much for which to complain. Thus this mistaken assumption has molded my mental wiring to gravitate me toward fault-finding than toward appreciation. I now have a great deal of remedial work to occur in my heart and mind to be restored to the design God has for me.

What I have been learning over recent years is that my praise and thankfulness must be primarily based not on what God has done for me or even necessarily what I hope will happen but must be rooted solidly on who God is irregardless of what circumstances may suggest about Him. I have been coming to focus my attention far more on choosing to believe the truth about what God is really like from what He has been showing me in His Word rather than basing my opinions and feelings about Him on how things are going in my life. As I have done this it has become more apparent that this issue is one of the most effective areas that the enemy has used to keep me in doubt and unbelief about God.

If I allow my gratitude to rest more on what God does for me instead of on the real truth about Him irregardless of what happens, then simply by manipulating circumstances around me the devil can jerk my feelings about God around to keep me from living in freedom, rest and trust. I become a puppet subject to the whims of circumstances that influence and shape my views about God rather than depending on the Word of God about Himself alone.

Jesus throughout His ministry consistently demonstrated the importance of basing faith on the Word of God instead of on feelings or on miracles or any subjective foundation. When He was severely tempted in the wilderness experiencing extreme hunger He relied solely on the Word of God as His defense against the subtle suggestions of the enemy rather than depending His own authority as God incarnate. All through His ministry He urged people to remember what was written in the Scriptures and even after His resurrection when He joined two of His disciples who were terribly discouraged, He did not rely on personal revelation or authority by revealing Himself to them immediately but rather spent time carefully explaining to them from Scripture the foundation that their faith needed to rest on before confirming it by allowing them to realize who He really was.

In His discussion with Martha Jesus led her to keep her faith rooted in what she already knew from Scripture without trying to move her away from that to trusting only in His current words to her. He did encourage her to think beyond what she already understood so that she might be open to an expanded understanding, but He wanted her to connect what she knew about Scripture already with the fresh revelations about Himself from what she was learning about Him.

I say all this because what I see in this story is Jesus thanking God before there is any spectacular physical evidence of God's power or intervention in the situation. Jesus is demonstrating what He wants each of us to do, to base our gratitude and praise to God on the reality that God always hears us whether we can see any evidence of it or not. Jesus did not wait to see if Lazarus might come back to life before thanking God but confidently and publicly declared His appreciation for God's interest in their situation before any thing else was mentioned. Then after laying down a foundation of praise to God and expressing openly His complete confidence that God was intimately interested in every detail of life, Jesus was ready to act on the reality of how God viewed the situation and moved forward in harmony with the promptings of God's Spirit.

The core issue of doubt in this story was whether God was paying attention to people's problems and whether He cared about them or not. In His public prayer Jesus addressed head-on these core questions by stating unequivocally that God always hears no matter what circumstances may suggest. This is the stark difference between belief and unbelief. Faith is not something we have to muster up, an intense attempt to believe that God will answer some prayer while trying to eliminate every feeling of doubt in an atmosphere of fear. The kind of faith that Jesus demonstrates here is a spontaneous expression of gratitude and confidence that God is genuinely and seriously interested in our circumstances no matter what our feelings may be telling us. This kind of saving faith is always rooted in a choice to believe the Word of God over our feelings and often against the conclusions we are tempted to draw from surrounding circumstances.

In the book of Revelation which was recorded by the same author that wrote this book, the people who are shown to be saved in the end are described as having the 'faith of Jesus'. In this story I catch a glimpse of the faith of Jesus in His confident expression of gratitude to His Father that no matter what is going on around or within Him God can be trusted to care. The faith of Jesus chooses to express gratitude and praise to God irregardless of what is going on or the seeming lack of evidence of God's intervention in our situation. The faith of Jesus is believing that God cares and hears because that is what God is like and who He is, not based on whether He comes through for me the way I want Him to. The faith of Jesus relies on God's superior wisdom and defers everything to His will while trusting that God always has my best interest at heart.

I want to have much more of that kind of faith. I want this story to soak into my psyche and permeate my thinking and alter my reactions under difficult circumstances. I want to be transformed through spending more time meditating on how Jesus related to difficult situations so that my own reactions will began to reflect the faith that I see Him exercise even as He dwells within me.