“Count it all joy, my brothers, when you meet trials of various kinds,”
James 1:2
“There is no circumstance, no trouble, no testing, that can ever touch me until, first of all, it has gone past God and past Christ, right through to me. If it has come that far, it has come with a great purpose.”
Alan Redpath
“All joy,” (verse 2) is a fantastic thought. It stresses a joy that becomes something very powerful and significant. “All joy,” surpasses “some joy” or even “occasional joy.” Instead it’s a joy that remains joy even when tired and weak. It will only shine brighter in the darkness.
Jewels, diamonds, and pearls are typically displayed on a black background.
The black only reveals their brilliance. In the same way darkness should only encourage us to be deliberately brighter than our surroundings. We must understand that we shine only because He makes us shine.
There is a divine incandescence that awaits every believer who feels the need or desire for more of God. When your difficulty is illuminated by grace, it will shine out and proclaim His glory. Perhaps this is what true holiness really is.
The signs surrounding God’s nearness are available to each believer. He is close to those who want Him, and there is nothing will stand in His way. The Lord cherishes and treasures the seeking heart. There is nothing that can detour the believer’s yearning after their Father.
Name your trial, and then tie it to God’s throne.
It’s not yours. Leave it alone and refuse to carry it any further. It’s now the Lord’s concern. Simply watch for the deliverance to come. When God sees your heart, He will lavish Himself out on you.
Our society has pretty much embraced the American cultural icon of the cowboy. We revere those who ride alone and hard. We are rugged individualists and hardened men making our own way. Our society reflects this in subdued ways. No matter what happens, we are fiercely free and independent. We are ‘desperadoes’–we do whatever we think is best.
John Wayne, the ‘Alamo,’ and the biker with his Harley-Davidson on Route 66 have been our inspiration. Each are distinctly heroic and carry our hopes and dreams.
We must understand that the Bible is not an American book.
A cowboy did not die for our sins (which are countless). The way of discipleship does not take us through Luckenbach, Texas. We’re not desperados. We are Jesus’ disciples.
His Words to us are bold and entirely challenging in an amazingly fresh and different direction. We are told to wash feet, to repeatedly turn the other cheek, to surrender all our rights, and then take the lowest place there is in every situation.
Our lives truly begin when we come under the Lordship of Jesus Christ.
Humility is to become the way we think and how we act, we have become slaves to righteousness. Our vaunted independence has been toppled. This selfish crown has slipped. My willfulness still wants to stand instead of kneeling. We discover this has been the truth all along. We have never ever been in control.
He has been the King since before time, and will always be, for an eternity.
“Many Christians have what we might call a “cultural holiness”. They adapt to the character and behavior pattern of Christians around them. As the Christian culture around them is more or less holy, so these Christians are more or less holy. But God has not called us to be like those around us.“
“He has called us to be like Himself. Holiness is nothing less than conformity to the character of God”.
Jerry Bridges
Our churches often struggle over our personal issues of pride and stubbornness.
I pose the following questions. Are we honestly in a condition of being weak? Can you serve with a basin and towel? Is your heart that of a child? Do we see the world through the ‘lens’ of a soft and broken spirit?
I write these things surveying my own life.
Self will and my hard heart fit ‘hand-and-glove’ with being that desperado. I ride alone, making my own way, and I don’t make any disciples. I jettison my cross— my cross of discipleship. I serve no one, unless it suits me. Am I His disciple, or am I a man of my own? Is He my Lord, or have I decided to claim that right for myself?
I only hope I have spoken the truth today. Forgive me if I offended.
“Lord, I am willing to receive what You give, to lack what You withhold, to relinquish what You take, to suffer what You inflict, to be what You require.” Amen.
I’ve put together a collection of quotes one of my favorite authors, Brennan Manning. I have found that when he writes, he penetrates. What he writes goes deep into the soul of losers: junkies, drunks, and mentally ill people–he tells us of God’s love like few have ever done.
To Manning, every person is redeemable, none are too far gone. Brennan Manning was a strong voice to the weak, the lame, the mentally challenged, and for the prodigal.
I blame him for the theme of this post–that brokenness is our path out of depression: Bipolar, Schizophrenia, OCD, PTSD, Schizoaffective disorder, and addictions.
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“There is a beautiful transparency to honest disciples who never wear a false face and do not pretend to be anything but who they are.”
“My deepest awareness of myself is that I am deeply loved by Jesus Christ and I have done nothing to earn it or deserve it.”
“To live by grace means to acknowledge my whole life story, the light side and the dark. In admitting my shadow side I learn who I am and what God’s grace means.”
“To be alive is to be broken; to be broken is to stand in need of grace.”
“Christianity doesn’t deny the reality of suffering and evil… Our hope… is not based on the idea that we are going to be free of pain and suffering. Rather, it is based on the conviction that we will triumph over suffering.”
“I am what I am in the sight of Jesus and nothing more. It is His approval that counts.”
“[Be] daring enough to be different, humble enough to make mistakes, wild enough to be burnt in the fire of love, real enough to make others see how phony [you] are.”
“The blood of the Lamb points to the truth of grace: what we cannot do for ourselves, God has done for us. On the cross, somehow, someway, Christ bore our sins, took our place, died for us. At the cross, Jesus unmasks the sinner not only as a beggar but as a criminal before God.”
“Do the truth quietly without display.”
“It is for the inconsistent, the unsteady disciples whose cheese is falling off their cracker.”
“The dominant characteristic of an authentic spiritual life is the gratitude that flows from trust—not only for all the gifts that I receive from God, but gratitude for all the suffering. Because in that purifying experience, suffering has often been the shortest path to intimacy with God.”
“The greatest single cause of atheism in the world today is Christians, who acknowledge Jesus with their lips and walk out the door and deny him with their life style. That is what an unbelieving world simply finds unbelievable.”
“The saved sinner is prostrate in adoration, lost in wonder and praise. He knows repentance is not what we do in order to earn forgiveness; it is what we do because we have been forgiven. It serves as an expression of gratitude rather than an effort to earn forgiveness.”
“In essence, there is only one thing God asks of us–that we be men and women of prayer, people who live close to God, people for whom God is everything and for whom God is enough. That is the root of peace.”
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I really hope some of these quotes have connected. Brennan Manning has authored several books all of which I can heartily recommend.
When I first started writing this post in my head, before I had posted it on my blog, Linda Kruschke’s Blog, back in 2009, in my head the title was “Love Is an Action Verb.” But as I thought more about it I realized there is more than one kind of love, and that love AS as an action verb was just one – and in my opinion the best – form of love.
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Four Kinds of Love
In our impoverished English language, we use the word love in many different ways. I love my spouse, I love my dog, I love chocolate, I love my new shoes, I loved that movie I watched last night, and I love God.
Surely we don’t have the same feelings about all of these things, yet we use the same word. In the parts of the Bible that were originally written in Greek, there are four different Greek words that we translate as love:
Storge – refers to the love that is felt between family members and close relatives.
Philia – refers to the love that is between friends.
Eros – refers to deep emotion or passion that is felt between lovers and spouses.
Agape – refers to the kind of love that God has for us and is what I mean by love as an action verb.
Agape is a kind of love that is about giving, not about getting.
God showed us what agape is by His incarnation as Jesus Christ and by His death on the cross to pay for our sins. Agape is not just a feeling, it is what God is. He acts towards us in the way that He does not because of how He feels about us, but because of who He is; because He chooses to love us with agape love.
Agape is a type of love that we can, if we choose, combine with any one of the other three kinds of love. We can go beyond how we feel about others and truly love them in the way that God loves us. C.S. Lewis put it this way in his wonderful book Mere Christianity:
“The rule for all of us is perfectly simple. Do not waste time bothering whether you love your neighbor; act as if you did. As soon as we do this we find out one of the great secrets. When you are behaving as if you loved someone, you will presently come to love him.”
Agape and Philia
A couple of years ago, I went to the beach with some old friends and had an opportunity to practice agape with someone towards whom I feel philia. Before I left home for the weekend, I received an email from one of my friends saying it would be really great if the house we were renting was all warmed up, with the water turned on and 7-layer bars baking in the oven, when they arrived. These friends had a much longer drive than I did, and she knew I would arrive at the house several hours before they did.
I can tell you that I did not feel like driving by myself at night in the pouring rain to Cannon Beach, I did not feel like hunting around outside in the wind and rain for the water valve to turn on the water, and I really did not feel like baking cookies in the gas oven in a kitchen I am unfamiliar with. But I chose to do all of those things anyway because I love my friends and wanted to make them happy. I combined the philia I felt with agape I have learned from God and received blessings in return.
Agape and Eros
In our society today a high percentage of marriages end in divorce. Often the reason cited is that one spouse doesn’t love the other anymore; that feeling they had when they met is gone. The type of love that can disappear in a relationship is eros.
Now eros is important for couples to be attracted to each other and get married, but it cannot, by itself, sustain a lifelong commitment. To create a lasting marriage, a couple must combine eros with agape. Each spouse must act as if they love the other even when they don’t feel like it or are angry or annoyed by the other spouse. A simple text to say “I love you,” a special dinner that your spouse likes, doing housework to lighten the other’s load, a hug and a kiss at the beginning and end of each day – all of these actions are examples of agape.
Who do you need to love (agape) today?
Each day we need to make a conscious effort to incorporate agape love into our interactions with those around us. Who is God calling you to love today? Don’t feel like it? As Nike would say, “Just do it.” After all, love as an action verb can be a blessing to others that is returned to you in an even greater measure than you give.
“Love one another with brotherly affection. Outdo one another in showing honor.”
Broken Believers 